This is the Reading Instruction Show.
I'm your host as always, Dr. Andy Johnson.
Topic of today's podcast is debunking the three queuing systems.
I've again read the comment online.
The three queuing systems have been debunked.
And I've seen this quite a bit.
It's been debunked.
They shout proudly displaying their ignorance for all to see.
Now, if you're one of those people running around saying the three queuing systems has
been debunked, you might as well get one of those hello stickers and write, hello, I'm
ignorant on it.
Then stick it right in the middle of your forehead because that's what you're saying
to the world.
Hello, world.
I'm ignorant.
Well, hello ignorant.
How are you doing?
I'm not doing well because it's been debunked.
The three queuing systems has been debunked.
Everybody knows this.
It's been debunked.
It's debunked.
I see.
I say, well, what does it mean to be debunked?
It means it's not true and it's been proven not to be true and everybody knows it because
it's been debunked.
That's what debunked means.
Now let me get this straight.
If it's debunked, it's not true and it's not true because it's been debunked.
Is that right?
Exactly.
That's because it's been debunked.
Hello, it's been debunked.
The three queuing systems have been debunked.
What does it take to debunk something?
Is there a special debunking priest that sprinkles holy water on you and says, spirit of bunkery,
I debunk you?
Or perhaps there's a debunking commissioner.
As the debunking commissioner, I hereby debunk you.
You've been debunked.
You are once bunked and now you're debunked.
Can anybody debunk?
Or do you have to have special training?
Where does someone go to get debunker training?
And can't just anybody debunk things?
If so, I'd like to debunk the theory of gravity.
Oh, gravity, you great theory, I hereby debunk you.
And there, the theory of gravity has been debunked and now I can float on up to the
ceiling.
The three queuing systems has been debunked.
Oh, I say, how do you know?
Everybody knows this.
Well, I don't know it, but it has.
It's been debunked.
I heard somebody say it.
I read it online.
Everybody all you have to do is hear someone say it and then it's debunked or you just
have to read it someplace and it's debunked.
You don't have to understand it.
You don't even have to know exactly what you're talking about.
You just have to hear that somebody says that something is debunked and there it is, all
debunked.
That way you don't have to think.
But here's what I would say to those who say the three queuing system have been debunked.
I debunk you.
I debunked the rabid debunkerators.
There now you're debunked.
And that's the way it works.
You see, it happened with whole language.
People who had no clue what whole language is, who never read a book or article about
whole language or by Ken Goodman or others, they describe this cartoon version of what
they think whole language is.
And they use the full powers of their ignorance to misrepresent whole language.
And then they run around shouting to the world that whole language has been debunked.
It's been debunked.
Listen everybody.
It's been debunked.
What do I ask?
What's been debunked?
What's been done with whole language, they say?
What exactly do you think whole language is, I ask.
And that's a fair question.
Well, you know, they say.
No, I don't.
Tell me.
What is whole language?
Well, it's all that whole language stuff, they say, all that debunked stuff.
I see.
It's teaching children to guess at words, they whine.
Well that is in whole language.
Nobody teaches children to guess at words.
And they don't teach phonics.
Whole language teachers don't teach phonics.
That's what whole language is.
Whole language teachers teach phonics.
I tell them very patiently.
They teach it very directly and very explicitly.
Well it teaches children to use the three queuing systems.
And that's been debunked.
Hello, my name is ignorant.
Meet my cousins on taught, unknowledgeable, really silly,
and foolishly misinformed.
Now if you're going to claim something's been debunked,
you should at the very least know what that something is.
And ignorant means you have no knowledge about what you speak.
To say the three queuing systems has been debunked
shouts to the literacy world that you have no knowledge
of reading, reading instruction, how the brain creates meaning
with print, the research process, and reading research.
The three queuing systems has been debunked.
And I'm sorry I don't mean to offend you or hurt your feelings.
But with all due respect, you're very, very ignorant.
You're without knowledge, unknowing, in the dark,
verbal flatuance.
And there's no polite way of saying this,
but you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Excuse my salty language.
Saying something more doesn't make that something more true.
It just makes you look more silly.
Now, earlier this year, I was at the Minnesota State Capitol,
and state legislators were up there talking about the read act
and the science of reading.
They were squawking and squeaking like a bunch of overcaffeinated penguins
about the three queuing systems.
They were waving their little flipper arms in the area,
in the air.
They're little flipper arms waving in the air,
and they were saying they're teaching the three queuing systems.
They're teaching a three queuing systems.
What about the children?
Who is going to protect the children?
And I've explained this before, but apparently I need to do it one more time.
I'll try to use little words this time and go a little more slowly.
Reading is not sounding out words.
It's not just responding to visual stimuli
like a trained rat in a skinner box.
That understanding is called the simple view of reading.
The simple view of reading is for very simple people
who use very simple thinking to create their very simple world.
They seek simplistic solutions to the complex problems
because they can't understand the problem.
But they can certainly understand a simplistic solution,
even if that solution simply doesn't work.
It's simple, they say, teach more phonics.
The simple view of reading states that reading is decoding
mixed with verbal comprehension.
In other words, you sound out words
and then listen to the sounding out words in your head.
What could be more simple than that?
It's built on the bottom-up theory of reading.
This is a weak theory in that it leaves a great deal of data
unaccounted for.
And the data that can't be explained by the bottom-up theory
of reading is just kind of ignored.
The phonological processing model then
is used to demonstrate how the bottom-up theory works
in reality.
Here, the reader encounters words on the page,
letter clues are used to sound them out,
and the information flows from the page, which
is the bottom, up to the thalamus,
the relay station in our brain, to the top,
which is the cortex.
It's a bottom-up theory.
You just sound out the words.
That's what you do.
Just sound them out.
And reading instruction then should
be a bunch of sounding out word instructions.
And if children are having trouble reading,
it's because they haven't had enough sounding out
word instruction.
And if a kid doesn't know what a word is,
you just say, sound it out.
Sound it out, as if they hadn't thought of that before.
The attraction of the simple view is simple answers.
More phonics, of course.
But reading is not sounding out words.
That's what the ignorant penguins simply don't understand.
They don't understand because they rely on I thinkisms
and anecdotal evidence to understand phenomena.
I think reading is sounding out words.
Therefore, reading is sounding out words.
I think there's a reading crisis.
Therefore, there's a reading crisis.
I think the reading crisis is caused
by a lack of sounding out word instruction.
Therefore, it is.
Why do I struggle and read her?
One of the penguins told me at the state capital,
she couldn't read.
Therefore, there's a reading crisis.
My children can't read well.
Therefore, there's a reading crisis
in the state of Minnesota.
A research study showed that sounding out word instruction
showed an increase in sounding out word measures.
Therefore, all children in Minnesota
need lots of sounding out word instruction.
Sounding out word instruction worked for some students.
Therefore, sounding out word instruction
must work for all students.
I saw some numbers once showing there was a reading crisis.
That the three queuing systems has been debunked.
And that whole language doesn't work.
Therefore, these things are true.
They said to me, the penguins, the light
in swimming in deep pools of ignorance,
splashing about in utter anti-intellectualism.
But a bit of clarification here.
Why can't some children read the words on the page?
And technically, we don't read words, by the way.
We recognize them, identify them, and decode them.
These three terms are often used interchangeably
and incorrectly by the penguins.
And that's what makes them penguins.
They don't know the difference between recognizing words,
identifying words, and decoding words.
With the penguins, a lack of knowledge
has never gotten in the way of their coming
to conclusions about things.
And two of the lead penguins are Emily Hanford and Louisa
Maltz.
They're out there earning lots of fish with their penguinery.
So don't expect them to change any time soon.
So recognizing words.
That's what we do during the act of reading.
When we perceive a word, it's in our lexicon,
and we automatically know what it is.
We recognize it.
No process of any kind is needed.
Identifying words.
Sometimes we encounter a word.
It's in our lexicon.
That's the dictionary in your head.
But we don't recognize it.
We don't know what it is.
So here we need to consciously apply some strategy
in order to recognize it.
We need to identify it.
There are four word identification strategies
that can be consciously employed to identify words.
First, do you use context?
What word makes sense in the context of the sentence?
Second, you can use word parts or analogies.
Sometimes that's called large unit phonics.
What parts of the word do you recognize?
Does it look like other words?
Third, you can use morphemic analysis.
Morpheme is a unit of meaning.
You can look at root words, prefixes, suffixes,
to give you clues to use in identifying that word.
And fourth, you can use phonics.
You can use letters and sound clues.
Now a strategy is a cognitive operation
that you consciously apply.
Strategies are used to identify words.
But over time, these strategies become autonomized.
We teach the strategy to develop the skill.
Word recognition is a skill.
Word identification is a strategy.
And decoding is when you use letters and sounds
to identify a word.
The alphabet is called a code.
Each word is designated by an arrangement of letters.
Sometimes the letters make sense.
Other times not so much.
To decode is to use the letters and the sounds assigned to them.
You put a sound to each letter.
You put the letters together.
Then you create words by using the smashed up letter sounds.
That's decoding.
It's using phonics, putting sounds to letters
and putting letters together.
So do you read words?
What technically you recognize, identify, and decode words?
So let's look at the interactive theory of reading.
As we're reading, what's in our head
interacts with what's on the page.
This is called the interactive theory of reading.
This is a robust theory in that it connects a lot of data dots
and helps us to fully understand phenomena related to reading
and supports a broad understanding of reading.
The neurocognitive model of reading
is used to help us understand how this theory works in reality.
So here's how it works.
During the process of reading,
our eyes perceive the squiggly shapes on the page.
This visual information, excuse me,
flows from the page to our visual sense organs,
our eyes up to the thalamus,
which is the relay center to the brain,
but at the same time,
information is flowing down from the cortex to the thalamus.
As a matter of fact,
almost 10 times more information
is flowing from the cortex down than from the thalamus up.
This is a two-way flow of information.
The information on the page interacts
with all the background information in our head
to create meaning.
And if we have a lot of information in our head
about what we're reading,
creating meaning is easy and effortless.
If we have very little information in our head
about what we're reading,
creating meaning is difficult and cumbersome.
And in the process of this information flow,
there are three interconnected,
interacting, interdependent systems
used to recognize words.
The graphophonological system,
this is letter clues or phonics.
The semantic system,
this is context or meaning.
And the syntactical system,
which is grammar in word order.
These are systems,
interconnected, interacting,
interdependent neural networks.
They don't operate separately,
they work together.
And this enables our brain to work more efficiently
than if just one were used.
We have more thinking space available
to focus on meaning.
We're not just responding to letter stimuli
like some mouse in a skinner box,
we're creating meaning.
That's what human beings do.
Now, the three queuing system
is a recognition of these three interacting systems.
It is not a strategy that is taught.
You don't teach children to use queuing systems.
Instead, you include activities
to develop all three queuing systems.
You include maze and close activities
to develop the semantic system.
You include writing activities
to develop the syntactic system.
And you include synthetic, analytic,
and large unit phonics to develop
the graphophonological system.
And here's the joy of things.
You can use close maze and writing activities
to teach and reinforce letter sound
and patterns at the same time.
It's not either or it's all.
So, for those Minnesota state legislators
who voted for the READ Act,
and for those who are trying to force letters
training on teachers
that impose science of reading mandates on schools,
and for the for-profit
Grubbing International Dyslexia Association
who think the Orton-Gillianan boondoggle
is the answer to all reading problems,
I would politely and respectively
invite you to pull your heads out of your collective asses.
What you've done, what you're doing
is going to negatively impact the lives of real students.
And it's already driving master teachers
out of the classroom.
It's going to cost millions of dollars
and countless hours.
And in five years, when you find out
all this garbage doesn't work,
just like the reading first initiative
of the early 2000s and the back-to-the-basics movement
of the 80s, when it doesn't work,
you make up another crisis
and find another shiny new for-profit object
to beat teachers over the head with.
So, let's be honest.
What is the ultimate goal here?
It's the empowerment of teachers
and the elimination of the public education system.
Let's be honest.
This is the Reading Instruction Show.
I'm your host, Dr. Andy Johnson.