The word ‘demand’ can certainly raise some emotions in people. I have been using it liberally lately in my writing and presentations and I’m finding that there is a little bit of knee-jerk, if not deliberate, misinterpretation of the term.

Let’s start with my quote, recently uploaded to Dyslexia Support Australia and Dyslexia Victoria Support on Facebook. It comes from my next book, Reading for Life:

“If you want to make a difference in your school, demand decodable readers and campaign to have levelled reading systems and predictable readers eradicated.”

If you wanted, you could choose the following OED definition:

“Demand

ask authoritatively or brusquely:

[with direct speech]: ‘Where is she?’ he demanded

[with clause]:the police demanded he give them names.’

Contrast that with the definition that actually fits the context, and was, of course, the one intended, as anyone who doesn’t want to set up a straw man can see:

“Demand

[with object] insist on having: an outraged public demanded retribution”

So, when I say ‘demand’, I don’t mean march into the principal’s office, brandishing swords and flaming pitchforks. I don’t mean be unreasonable, brash, rude, arrogant, selfish or aggressive. I simply mean insist on having better resources, better quality teacher training and a better deal for everyone.

Demand has a direct effect on supply. If you do not make your demand known, then suppliers of low quality resources are free to keep supplying them.

Because what is the alternative? A quiet request? A suggestion? These too have their place, but we have huge ideological, economic  and political barriers to overcome if we are to achieve reading success for all. Unless we as parents and educators take a forceful stance, we will have little or no impact on the quality of supply. It requires demand. According to the OED:

“[mass noun] the desire of consumers, clients, employers, etc. for a particular commodity, service, or other item: a recent slump in demand”

You can demand a better deal by doing one or all of the following things:

Sign the petition for decodable readers in Victorian schools or start one in your state/country. Support and advance non-profit organisations like LDA, SPELD and Code Read Dyslexia Network. Offer research-supported strategies on your child’s Individual Learning/Education Plan as an alternative to guessing, multi-cueing and other balanced literacy methods. Team up with other parents to increase the power of your voice (see the rope below).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And don’t be afraid of the word. Demand and diplomacy are not antonyms.

“In real science, one is eventually influenced by the evidence.” Keith Stanovich (2000)

 

In response to some absurd notions floating about on social media this month in the wake of the #PhonicsDebate, I have published this article. It is actually an expunged chapter from my next book, Reading for Life: How to demand and supply high quality literacy instruction for all.

I never really thought I’d have the problem of having to cut whole chapters from a book, but there is so much to say about the subject that I found myself going 15,000 words above my agreed-upon limit. It also serves to answer my recent Twitter detractors one at a time, most of whom are muted due to being in one or all of the categories below:

Shrill (but still wrong) Illogical Abusive

I’d also like to thank whoever it was who published my teacher training workshop prices from my website on Twitter. This publicly available information does need to be disseminated, and as a result, enquiries and bookings have increased this week.

The flat Earth

Once upon a time, it was widely believed that the Earth was flat. Many ancient cultures portrayed the world as being a flat surface and this belief survived until Pythagoras and the like started proving otherwise in the 6thcentury BC.

Through the cumulative efforts of cosmologists, philosophers, mathematicians and astronomers, to name but a few, a vast body of knowledge about the shape of the Earth has developed. The competing view has taken something of a back seat due to the sheer weight of evidence against it.

There is however, even in this day and age, a group of people who cling dogmatically to the flat Earth ideal and they are called, surprisingly enough, Flat Earthers. Many are influenced by religious literalism and strong suspicion of the government, and most are mocked or ignored by the rest of the world.

If only the science of reading had similar clear divisions between itself and what has come to be a pseudoscience of reading. Reading science doesn’t lack a weight of evidence, and yet false theories continue to exist.

Flat Earthers do very little harm, although indoctrinating children is somewhat abusive, especially if that indoctrination causes them to reject science. Pseudoscience in reading, however, has racked up an extensive list of casualties, not least an incarcerated/disenfranchised underclass in every English speaking country.

A brief history of reading science

Back in the old days, when functional brain scans and the internet didn’t exist, three major theories about how children learn to read emerged. These were known broadly as phonics, whole language and whole word.

Phonics can be regarded as a bottom-up approach, starting with the smallest units, i.e. letters and sounds, and building up towards words, phrases and sentences. Whole language and whole word are top-down approaches, in that they start with larger units such as meaning and whole words, and work their way down to the smaller building blocks of language incidentally, if at all.

The three major theories of reading

 

Scientists in numerous fields have spent the best part of the last century testing the theories. Some started off supporting one theory, and found that they had to change their mind about their notions of learning to read.

Keith Stanovich talks about this in his highly acclaimed book Progress in Understanding Reading: Scientific Foundations and New Frontiers. He says:

“We did start out with a theoretical bias, one consistent with the top-down view. But in real science one is eventually influenced by the evidence, regardless of one’s initial bias, and the consistency of our findings finally led us away from the top-down view.”

This kind of hypothesis-testing is how we concluded that he brain was, in fact, not the organ we pushed blood around our bodies with. It’s how we found out that the heart wasn’t the seat of thought. It’s how we came up with useful ideas that stuck, like hand-washing before and after performing surgery.

The act of testing is called research. The result of testing is called evidence. These are very important terms to understand when selecting teaching methods. The words research and evidence are thrown around a little too much in the education arena without being properly defined.

Testing and re-testing, over time, by different scientists and coming up with predictable results produces a theory. When various scientists agree on a theory, we have what is called scientific consensus. When scientists from various fields come to the similar conclusions, this is known as convergence. Psychologists, linguists, educators and speech-language professionals have done so on the subject of reading.

A century of testing and evaluating evidence has resulted in a consensus and a convergent understanding of the processes involved in achieving skilled reading and writing. Here is the conclusion:

Systematic synthetic phonics is currently the most effective method of initial reading instruction. Systematic synthetic phonics is a necessary step in the process of literacy acquisition, but is not sufficient on its own to guarantee literacy for all. Timely and appropriate instruction in phonological awareness, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension is also necessary to ensure literacy for the largest possible population. Reading is not a psycholinguistic guessing game. Learning an alphabetic language by memorising whole words in the absence of blending and segmenting their parts is ultimately impossible for most people.

The problem is, claims that children can learn to read using context and whole words, like the claim that the Earth is flat, are not so absurd that anyone can dismiss them out of hand. There are enough instances of children learning to read in spite of poor instruction and there are enough examples of the Earth being seemingly flat to give these theories some weight.

Why are whole language and whole word methods like the flat Earth?

Whole language and whole word are very seductive theories, and still enjoy enormous popularity worldwide. They tie in with the trendy, but ultimately empty idea that children’s creativity, personal interests and individual sparkle should be at the forefront of all teaching.

Now I’m all for individualistic and sparkly children, but nothing loses a sparkle quicker than a child entering their third year of schooling still unable to read/write/count. No one enters my practice to get help with their creativity, collaborative abilities, critical thinking or play-based skills. They want to learn to read, write and count as a result of not being well taught at school.

The casualties of top-down ideas are everywhere. The remnants of whole language are deeply and firmly entrenched in the collective educational psyche.

Words are not independent objects to be learned by sight like people’s faces or the flags of the world’s nations. They contain a limited set of parts that can be combined and recombined to form many and varied wholes.

Methods which ignore this truth have been shown repeatedly to be less effective, but, like the flat Earth theory, they don’t seem to go away.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that when whole language and whole word started to gain popularity, like the Flat Earthers, their proponents didn’t have the research to verify their claims, but either did anyone else.

And so the three camps became ever more distinct from one another and rivalry, bitterness and vitriol ensued. But there’s one very important point that often gets missed, and that is that whole language and whole word proponents failed to advance their theories. Most of their time was spent furiously defending their position or trying to merge with the other two.

Not so the majority of phonics proponents. Theorists, researchers and practitioners in this field continued to refine and build upon phonics. They realised that phonics is necessary but not sufficient for fluent reading with comprehension.

The most effective practitioners use appropriate and timely instruction in the keys to literacy. Systematic synthetic phonics should feature most heavily within the framework of those keys, especially in the early years. This is widely acknowledged by authors, publishers and teachers who understand the evidence base. But more has to be done to get children reading and writing competently.

One of the greatest problems faced by people who understand this is that there is no standard name for this set of principles. They are denigrated by whole language and whole word proponents, despite vindication by science. Their work is referred to only as ‘phonics’. I myself have even been, hilariously, accused of being a ‘phonicator’ or ‘phombie’ for supporting and advancing the notion that systematic synthetic phonics is important.

Name-calling and misrepresentation of this set of principles implies that those who support systematic synthetic phonics are basing their stance on philosophy. Therefore, if it’s philosophical, the competing view must be equally valid. Research evidence is ignored.

A further problem emerges because reading scientists are just that: scientists. They tend not to use their energy to create user-friendly explanations of complex processes. They are generally busy conducting and publishing actual research. So we have a vacuum, and into that vacuum creeps the philosophical brigade, whose time isn’t spent in the lab, and so they are free to spread disinformation in order to cling to comforting falsehoods.

A grudging recognition of the importance of phonics has started to seep into some corners of education and a new beast has arrived on the scene called balanced literacy. It is touted as a mixture of low-pace, analytic phonics, whole language and whole word; the worst of all possible worlds, in fact.

Top-down proponents say that children should be taught to read using the following strategies:

Being read to Guessing at unknown words Using context to guess unknown words Using picture cues to guess unknown words Learning ‘sight words’ by memorizing their shape or visual features Looking at the first letter of a word and moving to the next word (this is the balanced phonics part)

These methods fail to serve a large number of children and have indeed been shown in laboratory conditions to be the strategies employed by poor readers who have not yet mastered the alphabetic code.

Yet balanced literacy and whole word proponents maintain an illogical attachment to these methods instead of advancing the field by admitting they were wrong. To admit that would be painful and challenging. It would require the author/teacher to face that they have made a mistake that has likely done a disservice to many children.

Top-down methods sound plausible and are often strongly argued. Politicians, education bureaucrats and the general public do not, and often cannot, understand the data put forth in the research. Therefore they are swayed by the most emotive, strongest argument.

Unfortunately, whole language, and to a lesser degree, whole word proponents are far more advanced and well organized than Flat Earthers. We would laugh them out of the geography lecture theatre if they tried to put their views forward in a tertiary setting. And yet I don’t hear anyone laughing at teacher training colleges when the psycholinguistic guessing games or sight word lists spring up.

If you are a teacher or a teacher in training, your acceptance of flat Earth reading theory could make the difference between literacy and illiteracy for countless children. This open letter to student teachers might provide some insight as to how to demand better training.

References

Stanovich, K.E. (2000). Progress in Understanding Reading: Scientific foundations and new frontiers. New York: Guilford.

Why an over-focus on “blends” could be slowing reading and spelling progress.

Working 1:1 with primary school children allows me to monitor teaching trends in my local area. This micro-sample is often an indicator of general tendencies in teaching on a larger scale and I try to confirm, as much as possible, the extent of what I’ve observed.

In the early years of this millennium I started noticing my students incorporating the letter y into their lists of known vowels. I also saw a rise in simplistic but no less positive sayings like ‘every word needs a vowel’ and ‘every sentence needs a verb’.

These are pleasing trends and give me much hope that linguistics is making some headway in schools. On the downside, however, there is quite a bit of false information and teaching trends which negatively impact students. Because I work with children who struggle as a result of these trends, I am especially aware of the damage they do. The children who come to me are like educational bellwethers, since they are the most affected both by good, and more frequently, bad teaching.

Recently I’ve been noticing an upswing in what I call unwelcome intruders and missing persons. To clarify, unwelcome intruders are sounds a student makes when reading a word, even though the grapheme for that sound is absent, e.g. reading ‘blend’ for bend. Missing persons is the opposite, when students omit a grapheme in spelling, even though they say it, e.g. ‘bend’ for blend.

I work with a population whose phonological awareness (PA) is typically low, so these two phenomena are relatively common, but I’m seeing it more frequently and in a wider group containing children whose PA scores are average or above.

I have a suspicion about the origins of this change. Of course, it’s a theory at this stage, but I’d like to get to the bottom of it nonetheless. It concerns the teaching of blends.

A blend can be defined as two or more adjacent consonant (C) graphemes before or after a vowel (V) in a single syllable. A blend can be represented thus:

C C V C  for example:

S T O P

C V C C for example:

G I F T

C C V C C for example:

S T A M P

The phonemes in a simple syllable are relatively easy to segment, perceive and represent. A consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) pattern, like bat or mug presents no significant difficulty in reading or spelling, especially if the phonemes can be represented with one letter.

But as soon as a little bit of complexity is added, all hell breaks loose.

Take a CCVC pattern for instance, e.g. stop, fled, or trip. Much greater effort and skill is required to perceive and represent that pattern.

One of the reasons for this is that sounds change a little bit when they appear in clusters. Their edges adapt to the sounds around them so that they can be said in a continuous stream. This is why clusters of consonants are referred to as blends, like blended coffee beans or blends of wine. The difference between consonants, coffee and wine though, is that consonant blends can be pulled apart again.

This pulling apart, or segmenting, is as important as blending and yet seems to get short shrift. By the way, shrift is an example of a relatively uncommon CCVCC pattern.

Teaching blending in the absence of segmenting is like teaching addition without subtraction. And yet I see it all the time.

Children and parents are increasingly reporting to me that their school is placing emphasis on blend work. One boy recently told me that first thing, every morning, his teacher plays a slideshow from a commercial reading program that shows a series of blends in isolation (e.g. bl-, cl-, dr- etc.) and the class has to recite each blend rapidly as one continuous sound.

Many of my other students are seeing the same thing. I asked if they were also taught to segment and they said they weren’t.

Now, many children will learn to read and spell independent of the quality of the method used to teach them. This is fine. But many won’t. Many rely on expert, explicit, systematic teaching of the structure of words to help establish a foundation for fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. This is referred to as systematic synthetic phonics. Teaching blends as one sound is not this.

Here is what I am seeing as a result of this blend teaching:

Missing persons: My students (most with some form of developmental language disorder) are increasingly prone to pronouncing a two-phoneme consonant cluster as one continuous sound, e.g. /b/ + /r/ as a rushed and indistinct ”br”. When they come to spell b-r words, they say the two phonemes but represent them with the initial grapheme only. This results in words like bring  spelled as “bing”. Unwelcome intruders: When reading CVC words, my students have started to insert consonants that aren’t there. For instance, twice last term not one but two of my students said “black” for back in a paragraph they were reading. There was a distinct increase in this behaviour last year, especially among my newer students. Teachers handing out worksheets use the term blend, diphthong and digraph (often referred to as “diagraph”) interchangeably or erroneously, e.g. “The blend ch is followed by the diphthong /oi/ and then the diagraph ‘ce’ in the word choice”.

So how do we tackle this problem?

Teacher knowledge is the key. Blend training is done with the best intentions, but when the evidence base is lacking, the vulnerable suffer. There is no research evidence, as far as I’m aware, that teaching a blend as one sound is good for students, and a study here has shown no additional increase in word-reading speed when poor readers are taught blends.

Firstly, let’s untangle the definitions commonly used interchangeably:

blend – two or more adjacent consonants, either written or heard before or after a vowel diphthong – a vowel sound (not a symbol) made using two places of articulation but requiring only one impulse of the voice, e.g. /oy/ begins with round lips and ends with lips stretched back digraph – a written symbol, which uses two letters but represents one sound, e.g. sh, ch, ph

Secondly, let’s make sure we’re giving children plenty of practice in segmenting the sounds in words as well as blending them. Presenting ready-made blends and blend worksheets is folly. There is no evidence to show that this increases reading ability or speed, and I’m seeing the fallout on an all too regular basis.

Instead, have students generate their own blend sheets by systematically taking each consonant of the alphabet and figuring out which consonant goes with which other consonants. Have you noticed the pattern? When you and your students do notice the pattern, can you figure out why this is the case? This is so much more productive and generalizable than serving random blends up on a plate and treating them as one sound.

I’d love to hear from other practitioners about their experience with this phenomenon. I’d also like to hear from teachers about what they do in the classroom concerning blends.

I love music. I always have. I especially like punk and Indiepop from the 80s. My obsession with The Smiths and Morrissey led me into worlds of art and literature I would otherwise never have entered. Punk taught me about politics and animal and human rights. I can honestly say I’ve benefited from my love of music and my life is good because of it.

My messy Morrissey and Marr corner

If you don’t like music, you obviously have a worse life than me.

 

Or perhaps I’m being silly. If you happen to be indifferent to music, as many people are, how would you feel if I sincerely made statements like that?

 

Is it condescending of me to assume that I lead a better life than you because of my hobbies and interests?

 

How about I express pity at your music-empty life and tell you, with concern, that I hope you find a song that hooks you one day? Would you welcome my pity?

 

So why are statements like the one below accepted?

 

“If children develop a love of reading, they will have better lives.”

 

I recently had a small Twitter spat with a librarian who proudly quoted this as her ‘why’ (whatever that means). The source of this quote is a disgraced education pundit called Rafe Esquith.

 

I know many people who don’t read. I have two children who have not developed a love of reading. How dare anyone comment on the quality of their lives? In response to the quote, I wrote:

 

“My literate but non-literary daughter would beg to differ. She lives a rich and full life but does not enjoy reading.”

 

The librarian misunderstood my statement and continued to press the preposterous point by saying:

 

“Does she ‘read with her ears’ audiobooks? Does she enjoy being read to? Maybe she will fall in love with reading later.”

 

The fact is, she has a developmental language disorder, known as dyslexia. Reading is laborious, time-consuming, unpleasant and effortful for her. She can do it. She’s a fluent reader with excellent comprehension, but it takes gargantuan effort.

 

My response:

 

“Nope. She likes sport, films, music. Of course she’ll listen when I read books aloud, but my point is, why should she HAVE to love reading?”

 

At this juncture, another librarian chimed in (I had no idea they hunted in packs):

 

“She doesn’t. I think you’re misunderstanding the quote. Studies show readers vote at higher rates, volunteer more, more involved civically.”

 

Yes, I’m sure those who can read are more likely to vote etc. This has nothing to do with loving reading. So I asked for some sources:

 

“Could you point me to the studies which show actual causation between a love of reading and those attributes? Again, my daughter would deny.”

 

I’m still waiting for those studies. In the meantime, the second librarian had more to say:

 

“The quote doesn’t mean the inverse is true. I hope she finds her ‘hook book’ someday.”

 

I replied:

 

“She feels patronised and condescended to by such a hope. As do I.”

 

I may have hit a nerve, as the next response attests to:

 

“I don’t understand your negativity. I can also say: children who develop a love of exercise will have better lives. Would you object? Peace.”

 

Yes I bleeding-well would object actually. I hate exercise. So does my youngest (the bookworm). We like dancing and tennis and swimming in the sea. These activities give us exercise, but we don’t do them for their exercise value. I have to force myself to go to the gym because I know it’s good for me, but there isn’t a personal trainer in this universe who would be able to make me love exercise.

 

You know that feeling you have when you’re doing something and you think, “This. This is the purpose of my life. This is what I was born for.” That’s the feeling I don’t get when I do housework. I hate housework. It puts me in a very very bad mood. My two younger children know not to ask me for favours if there’s a laundry basket or a broom in my hand. As infants they had extensive vocabularies but when I once showed them an iron, neither of them had a word for it.

 

So, I can do exercise and housework, but there are six million other things in the world I’d rather be doing. Would you really call your life better than mine because my house is messy and I can’t touch my toes? I would call vapid smugness if you dared. So I said:

 

“Actually, the negativity stems from false pity of those who don’t share your love of reading.”

 

The original librarian decided she wanted the last word by saying all she was trying to do was share her passion for inspiring children to love books.

 

This is a noble passion. I love books too. I work with children to help them become readers and writers and if they become readers for pleasure, I’m very happy for them. But I wouldn’t dream of sharing my passion for books through condescension. This would be very uninspiring indeed.

 

I’m perfectly happy with my daughter’s stance on reading for pleasure. She is literate. She gets good marks in all her subjects at school. She chats away on social media, shops online and does all the other things a literate person does. She just doesn’t like books. She, like many people in this world, simply prefers other things to reading.

 

I did a quick Facebook survey of my friends and received many interesting replies. The survey said:

 

How many of you are prepared to come out of the closet as non-bookworms? How do you view statements like: “Children who develop a love of reading have better lives”?

 

Here is a list of other people from that survey who don’t like reading:

 

Illustrator – “I get bored easily when I read, I lose focus and can’t follow the story.”

 

Chemical engineer (a very successful, senior chemical engineer)- “I never read as a child or even a teen and I think I’m doing okay.”

 

Mum of a very bright pair of twins – “One of my daughters doesn’t like to read, I have one book worm twin and one non book worm twin. It won’t stop her from doing well, she just prefers to learn from doing not from reading.”

 

Photographer and disability care worker – “I no longer read fiction. After growing up in a family of bookworms and being one myself until my mid 30s, I often found myself reading until the wee hours of the morning, even when I had to get up for work early. I finally made the decision that I simply don’t have enough time to spend hours of each day in other people’s fantasies. I read fiction to my children for half an hour most evenings but my personal reading is focused entirely on text books and factual information.”

 

When I asked him if his early immersion in fiction gave him a better life he replied that it didn’t, though it did help him escape some horrible reality for a while. We all have means of escape: films, hobbies, friends. It doesn’t have to be books.

 

Another photographer (with, might I say, one of the most enviable lifestyles I know) – “I’m such a non-reader!! I plan on staying that way, so happily. Yep that comment is as stupid as my opinion that children who horse ride live happier lives….oh hang on…no that one is true!”

 

Mum of very bright ex-student of mine – “He reads to learn about the things he’s interested in, he can follow diagrams and instructions that baffle me. He has an organised, sequential approach to putting complex machines together.”

 

Mum of an accountancy student – “She rarely reads, doesn’t enjoy it and finds it a real struggle. She only got diagnosed as dyslexic last year though, which kind of explains it. She has an awesome life, she’s studying accountancy and loves maths! She is also a brilliant artist and rides her mountainbike really fast! People who ride bikes have better lives than those who don’t! FACT!”

 

Translator at the European Commission – “For the record, I’m still far from being an avid reader as an adult. There are other things vying for my attention and by the time I do pick up a book in the late evening I rarely get through more than a page before I fall asleep. This doesn’t make my life any better or worse than anyone else’s.”

 

Graphic designer – “Non reader and my life is frickin’ awesome! I was married to an author for nearly 10 years, so books were a huge part of our lives. I read a lot for a while there, probably because I thought I should. I loved those books, but it never made me thirsty for more… one crappy chapter and I was gone…”

 

Disability support worker (yep, I know a few) – “I hate reading. Give me pictures any day.”

 

I know many more people who don’t love reading, including a screenwriter, a hedge-fund manager and several successful business people. I’m sure we all do.

 

One comment did pluck at my heartstrings though, from the mother of a little boy:

 

“I guess it makes me feel slightly anxious as he doesn’t enjoy reading at all and me and his dad absolutely love it. It was the background to both our childhoods.”

 

It’s that sort of fear and anxiety that makes me cross with the ‘better lives’ statement. Make no mistake, being literate is an essential part of being able to function in a complex society. But a love of reading is a personal thing, not a quality of life deal-breaker. Parents all over the globe fret about their children reading for pleasure because of this fallacy. For goodness sake, relax. Literacy and love of literature are two completely different things. The former is essential and the latter is personal.

 

I do think, though, that you should give Hatful of Hollow (second down on the left of my picture) at least three listens, and if that doesn’t change your life for the better, then you might very well be dead inside.