All right, we're back after a brief hiatus with conversations with Dave and Andy.
That's Dave over there.
I'm Andy over here.
So today we are going to just, a lot of the confusion and a lot of the misspeaking and
yelling and back and forth has to do with confusion of terms.
So today we're going to try to define or examine some of these terms and see if we can come
to some common ground on that.
So Mr. David, what term would you like to start with?
Well, we can start with, let's start with phonemic awareness.
Okay.
So give me a cut on what you think phonemic awareness means.
Well, what do you think phonemic awareness means?
For me, I make a, what I think is very important distinction between the kind of attention
that the brain is, the kind of attention that we are giving to differentiating the sound
components in the oral language stream.
So when you say your name or I say my name or we say chair behind you or desk behind
you or whatever it is, right?
There's all kinds of little sound parts in that that our brain's paying attention to
that make the difference between Andrew and David, between bat and cat and between dad
and bat and between ball and call, right?
So for example, between ball and call, there's a very small little window, very small little
slice in the sound stream that makes a difference between ball and call, the B and the C and
the beginning of sound.
So that difference in sound that makes a difference in recognizing a word and all that goes with
it is phonemic awareness.
But the kind of phonemic awareness that's required in order for us to learn to speak
and listen to a language like we're doing now and the kind of phonemic awareness that's
associated with reading are two different things.
The phonemic awareness associated with reading has to do with making distinctions in sound
that correspond or map to the print to the alphabet in a way that we don't have to make
when we're speaking and listening.
So I always make a difference between natural phonemic awareness and artificial phonemic
awareness.
The whole name is sound, awareness is consciousness of so phonemic awareness is consciousness
of sounds within words.
Now I don't think you have to be aware of any mapping in your brain.
You just need to know the basics of sounds.
Phonemic awareness activity is manipulating sounds within words, sounds and parts of words.
Now everyone believes that phonemic awareness should be part of early reading instruction
emergent preschool kindergarten, maybe first grade.
The research on this is correlational, not causal.
So there should not be too much emphasis on phonemic awareness activities.
A lot of things such as rhyming, a lot of incidental difference between this word and
that word.
There is listening activity and technically there should not be any alphabet involved
in it if it's a pure phonemic awareness.
There's phonics phonemic hybrid.
The research is correlational.
They found that students with high scores on phonemic awareness scored better in reading
achievement a couple of years down the line.
But phonemic awareness is a result of being exposed to books, being exposed to language
and having parents talk with you.
So that's why it's correlational, not causal.
Was that more than you wanted?
I don't know about exposed to books except in so far as somebody is reading to you, you're
getting more language exposure and getting more illiterate language exposure, which might
be more exercising of phonemic differentiations.
Yeah, I mean, yeah.
Exposed to books means being read to at a young age where we differ is the idea of mapping
in your head to words.
You know, I think that's a great theory.
I don't think it could be a basic theory.
I don't think it has application in real life because in our head, when we hear the word
cat, we do not associate it with short a words or words that start with C.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, my pushback on that wasn't so much to say that I'm an advocate of I make a distinction
between the phonemic awareness that's discussed in reading circles, which I think is through
the lens of reading and phonemic awareness that an illiterate person or a person never
exposed to literacy still has a certain level of phonemic awareness that's implicit in their
ability to recognize words.
So I'm making a distinction and have made a distinction for decades in that point that
there's a difference between what kind of attention to sound differences are involved
in oral language processing and what kind of a difference to sound differences are involved
in reading.
That's all.
Now from a reading instruction point of view, one misuse of phonemic awareness activities
is in students reading in grades three and above.
There was a high school reading class special ed classroom severely struggling readers
and the high school teacher was doing phonemic awareness activities that is inappropriate
at that age.
They generally should cease when students are reading at the first grade level.
Yeah, I mean, all of those are generalizations, right, about where somebody is developmentally
on the trajectory towards becoming proficient with language and reading.
So they're, you know, they're all arbitrary.
I think the like the heart-risley study would show that kids that are growing up in a really
complexly rich language environment have got the kind of verbal musculature and exercise
in making differentiations in the soundscape that gives them advantages when they take
off in reading and kids that don't have greater trouble because their kind of language infrastructure
isn't as well developed.
But you know, whether that's first grade or third grade or whatever, that's educational,
structural, convenience stuff, not necessarily a comment on somebody developmentally.
I would say it's applied research, meaning that and that's what our good friend, Mr.
Dr. Shanahan, calls the type of research that you do with actual students in a learning
situation.
What is effective and impactful?
Students reading above the first grade level, there's no study showing that phonemic awareness
is effective in enhancing their reading.
Yeah, again, inside an educational institutional structure.
I mean, kids that are going through homeschool, kids that have got, that are off the developmental
track for some other way.
I mean, saying there's a difference between kind of where you put the microscope and trying
to observe this stuff.
Ultimately somebody that was really slow in language development might benefit from phonemic
awareness exercises later in their calendar, in their age progression than others, depending
upon their personal history, right?
So there's a difference between what's convenient and effective in kind of crop yield analysis
in an educational setting and what's right or appropriate developmentally, psychologically
to any one particular individual.
Right.
But I don't think that's a big thing for us to kick around.
I mean, let's go on it because we are existing in a school structure.
So I am talking about school structure and reading instruction.
All right.
What's another word that you want to look at?
Well, no, you pick one.
Okay.
How about all this?
I was going to go reading.
Would that get us too far off defining?
No, it's fine.
I mean, I'm game to do that.
We've done that before.
And let's agree not to go too far with this because we both go crazy.
But reading is creating meaning with print.
We use both a combination of letter clues and context clues and syntax and grammar clues
and even at the youngest age picture clues.
But if you're not creating meaning, technically, you are not reading.
And I know what you're going to say.
You're going to make, well, go ahead and say it.
Yeah, let me say it.
Come on.
I don't know the company.
So in my, in my world, reading is an artificially inseminated language experience.
In other words, it's a virtual language experience, one that's not happening in the real external
world between human beings, and it's a production of the brain, this virtual internal experience,
according to the instructions and information contained in a code, that is to say the writing
system, the code that we're reading while we're reading.
And so it's an artificially inseminated language experience constructed according to the information
and instructions contained in a human artifact, this writing system, this English orthography.
Or orthography of whatever kind.
And my difference is that it's no more artificial than learning tennis or learning anything
or learning to speak.
Learning to speak is an artificial thing if you want to take it to its furthest extreme.
So we learned learning, learning to read requires paying attention to and referencing the disambiguation
of confusion to an external set of technologically invented conventions, codes, and modes of
interpretation that are not natural, they're human invented, whereas the other things that
you mentioned are live on the living learning edge, getting feedback from what you're doing
as a basis for tuning in.
So the reference for learning is different.
And again, disambiguation.
It's artificial.
It's disambiguation.
You know, on a theoretical level, I guess I could understand where you're coming there
from, but on a practical level, humans learn.
Language is a human construct.
Justice reading is a human construct.
So I've actually interviewed the person who wrote the numbers of people who are experts
in the science of how language emerged in humanity.
And the kind of tongue-in-cheek argument is that humans didn't invent language.
Language invented humans in the sense that the kind of consciousness we are is a consciousness
produced on the other side of becoming language users.
So language is deeply fused with becoming human as we understand it today.
It's not something that we invented in some abstract, mechanical way like we did writing.
Oh, I agree with you that language is what makes us human.
It enables us to think.
The ability to communicate is a natural thing.
Language is a human invention.
I don't care how many people write how many books, you know, language, they're all on
the theoretical plane.
I exist in the practical plane of classrooms and observing.
All right.
Go cultural anthropologists or go neuroanthropologists and talk about the Fox gene that says 250,000
years or the anthropological evidence that says 100,000 years with respect to jaws and
tongues and the articulatory physical structures involved in speaking language.
Humans have existed for some 7 million years depending upon your, you know, their particular
anthropological studies that you're talking about humans have only been speaking for 250,000
to 100,000 years.
So it's a relatively new phenomena.
It's changed everything about what it means to be human.
And it was an eco evolution.
In other words, today a human that's born with half a brain will still learn to speak.
It's got such evolutionary importance to us.
But it's not an invention in any way analogous to the invention of a writing system, which
is 3,000, 3,500 years old.
In the case of the English writing system, 500 years old, that is an entirely different
kind of convoluted intentional structural technological invention than language.
They can't be compared.
You know, I disagree.
I agree with you that they are different.
They're not the same.
Absolutely not.
And I agree with you that our brains have evolved.
Language is a tool of thought as by God's key has said, our brains have evolved and probably
our jaws have evolved as a result of this.
But language is a human construct.
We created language, language and created us at the same time.
So language created us as much as we created language.
All right, let's not go down that rabbit hole.
All right, because we would spend 20 minutes and we bore everybody.
So if it is okay with you, should we go to another one?
Sure.
All right, you get to pick the one this term time.
Um, you coding.
Oh, no, no, no, word identification.
Ah, great one.
Go ahead.
Go for it.
No, no, no, I want you to go with this.
This is important to you.
So and if we pick the words, the other guy should start with the definition.
Word identification is different than word recognition.
Word identification, as you see a word in print, it is in your lexicon, which is the
dictionary in your head.
You don't recognize it.
You automatically know what it is.
So you have to use a strategy.
What strategy should I use?
I should use phonics, phonemical or morphemic analysis, semantics or analogy.
Those are the four word identification strategies.
And a strategy word identification is a strategy.
It's something you consciously apply through the use of specific and direct instruction
in the four strategies.
They become automatic, automaticize so that you began to recognize words automatically.
Boom.
Ping pong back to you.
That's how I would define word identification.
Let's slow down and go back into that a little bit.
You said it's in your lexicon.
It's in your lexicon.
Yep.
You identify it because it's in your lexicon, but you don't recognize it.
Yep.
So when you say that, you don't, identification seems to suggest that I've identified it,
but if I don't recognize it, how can I identify it?
It's a confusing way of using those terms.
I mean, it's not the way that identification or recognition are used outside of the specialty
bubble that we're talking about.
So when we talk about identifying something, it usually implies a recognition.
You're suggesting there's an implicit capacity for recognition because it's in your lexicon,
but you haven't recognized it.
In the world of reading, to recognize a word is to perceive it and you automatically know
what it is.
So we're talking not about recognition and identification.
We're talking about word recognition and word identification.
Word recognition, you perceive the word, you automatically know what it is and you keep
moving on.
So how would you define word identification?
I wouldn't.
I don't know that I would use that term.
I mean, even if it's implicit that, I mean, I understand there's a value in making a distinction
between a word that I know, but I can't recognize it in print.
Right?
There's that.
And then there's a word that I recognize in print.
So there's a word that I haven't yet learned that I've recognized in print as a mode of
learning it.
So I've recognized that I've identified this word, I've recognized this word.
And because of the context that's unfloing, I'm now, or that I'm flowing through when
I encounter it, I've now learned that word.
So those are the cases are that I know the word orally.
It's in my oral vocabulary.
I'm familiar with the word.
But when I see it in print, I can't, it doesn't connect.
I can't recognize it.
Then there's the case where I recognize it and I know it.
And there's another case where I recognize it in the sense that I can sound it out and
I know I've heard it before, but I don't know what it means.
So there's all these different classes that could be put together there.
I just don't see the word.
The way that you've used word identification has implied a, it's, it's created the notion
of an implication that I would recognize it, but I haven't yet recognized it.
So I don't know the value of the term that way.
I don't get.
Let's go back.
This distinction is incredibly important when you're teaching reading to recognize a word
means to perceive it.
And what do you do?
What types of activities do you do to help children recognize words automatically?
You use phonics instruction.
Hey, I know that look, that's, that's a whole, that's the big ballgame there is how do you
get to a word recognition of a word you don't recognize?
And I get the distinction between it's a word I could recognize because I know it and it
is a word that I don't yet know that I'm working to learn as I recognize.
I get the distinctions.
I just don't get the word identification value that you're putting as I was about to explain
and knowing a word, I'm a little uncomfortable with your use of that term, knowing the word
to recognize a word the brain uses three interacting systems, interacting interdependently.
They use them together.
They use the phonological system.
They use the syntactic system grammar and word order and they use the semantic system,
which is meaning or context clues.
These three are working together, both as we hear and as we see words in print, we have
activities to develop that so it becomes automatic.
Now to know a word, yes, to know a word is to know the meaning of the word.
I think that's where we're at.
But there are words that are in our lexicon.
If it's in our lexicon, that means we know what that word means, but we don't recognize
it as we're reading.
So we need to use some strategy.
Now, often teachers say, as students is reading, comes to a word, stop.
We say, sound it out.
But if they could do that, they wouldn't have stopped, would they?
That's why we need to have four strategies that you consciously apply as a dog.
Leading now.
Okay.
I get all that.
My only thing was is that the instruction, I'm trying to get you to be more specific
about what you think is the conceptual slash instructional value of the distinction called
word identification.
Because you teach these strategies specifically, you break them down.
But the strategies are all about recognition, not identification.
The strategies are, you use an identification strategy to recognize the word.
There is a difference.
Word identification is a strategy you consciously apply.
The difference between a skill and a strategy in the reading.
The way that you originally started off, you talked about word identification being a word
that I've identified.
Again, I can't even identify it.
If I don't recognize the word, then it's an unrecognized word.
I don't get the value of saying that there's a distinction called word identification that's
different from word recognition at the conceptual level of understanding the challenge of reading.
The identification is the strategy you use to recognize the word.
Sounding out the word is one strategy.
Yeah, I get that.
I get that.
I don't know what we're having trouble with.
If we could rewind the tape and play the part where you just said what word identification
was, that's the part by itself as if it's an isolated phenomena.
Word identification is a subcomponent and one of multiple strategies for getting to recognition.
That's what I'm hearing you now say.
I said all along word identification is a strategy used to recognize a word.
You see a word, you don't automatically know what it is, you don't recognize it, but it's
in your lexicon.
If you could just recognize it, you could connect it to the dictionary page in your
head.
So you need to use a strategy.
So in a way, what you're describing is word identification is that part of word recognition
strategies that have to do with recognizing a word that's in your lexicon.
Recognition is something we do automatically.
So I think you're getting there.
Word identification is a strategy used to recognize a word.
In a teaching environment, you do it differently.
You teach the steps specifically to identify words, step one, step two, step three.
You do different things to develop students' ability to recognize words automatically.
That is differently.
It's a skill.
The thing is strategies become automatic.
Once they become automatic, they are a skill.
So you automatically begin to use context and word parts and morphology.
Yeah.
The conversation about how to recognize, again, when I encounter a word, it's either it's
one of a series of conditions.
One condition is it's a word that I'd know if I could read it, meaning that it's
something I've already heard.
I already know the word.
I know the meaning of the word.
I recognize it if I heard it.
I just don't recognize it when I see it.
So that's one set of conditions.
And another condition is I've never heard this word.
I don't know anything about this word.
So in addition to the recognition issue, I've got the learning what it means issue.
And then there's another one where I've heard the word, but I don't understand what it
means.
So I've heard other people use the word so I could recognize it if I could decode it
so to speak so that I got it sound.
But I still wouldn't know what it means.
So there's these different kinds of uncertainty layers associated with my interaction with
a word.
Right?
And I'm just having difficulty mapping the way that you guys put terminology to that,
to the way that I would put terminology.
You're straining into the world of vocabulary knowledge, the different levels of word knowledge.
You can use a word.
There's different levels of word knowledge and you just kind of alluded to it.
You absolutely don't know that word.
You haven't seen it at all.
You have heard the word.
You kind of know what it means.
You can understand it.
You see the word, but you know what it means, but you couldn't define it.
And the deepest level, you know what it is.
You can define it.
You use it all the time.
These are different levels.
Word identification assumes at some level, you know the word and know what it means.
Doesn't mean you know it at the deepest level, but you know kind of what that word.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
I wasn't necessarily going to the deepest level either.
I was just talking about grossly different levels of interaction or uncertainty surrounding
an encounter with a word.
And technically to identify a word, it has to be in your lexicon.
Has to be there.
Technically, depending on the way you use the word, recognition, re-cognize.
Identify a word.
Yeah.
It has to be in here to identify.
All right.
Are you ready to go to the next one?
Sure.
All right.
You get to start and then I'll do my shot first.
Decoding.
Decoding is using is one type of word identification strategy.
It is using the code of the letter codes to sound out the word.
Yeah, I agree with that.
Although I do that.
The one thing I would add is that, and I think this is an important distinction for all those
that are attached to the word decoding is that I love that mug is that it's not the
challenge of learning to read in English isn't so much decoding in the sense that it's technically
used as a term and for example, computer science.
It's more a case of disambiguating.
What I mean by that is that our code is not simply decodable.
It's got a very confusing messy correspondence between letters and sounds that can't be completely
determined by the code itself.
It takes an interpretive, a secondary layer of interpretation to map on the letters and
sounds to get to some kind of word recognition through decoding.
Decoding to me has always been a misleading term because you could say that their decoding
existed in the days of the Greeks or the Romans or to some degree in Italian and Spanish today
where there's a really simple correspondence.
But today, for example, when we talk about a decoder in the software world like a way
a modem works, there's a really hard structural correspondence between the decoding system
and the code itself that there's no ambiguity that it's trying to work out.
There's errors that might have error correction software to deal with, but there's nothing
fundamentally confusing in the relationship between the elements and the code that the
decoder has to deal with like there is in our system.
So I think decoding is a loaded term that's got a lot of, it's been made to seem more
simplistic than it is to the disadvantage of the way we think about reading.
I'm playing a drinking game every time you say disambiguate.
Good for you.
It's a very popular and powerful and important term when you're talking about getting through
confusion to a coherent whole meaning.
I love you and I love that definition.
We must disambiguate the difference between word identification, word recognition and
decoding.
Exactly, exactly, exactly.
And they are used synonymously by people who don't understand literacy.
That's why I was pressing the point because I think that there's some confusion in the
way those terms are used.
And that's why we're doing this.
Excellent.
Are we good with that one?
Yep.
Okay.
Here's one for you.
Professional development.
And we'll put it in the context of teaching.
Yeah.
I don't like the term as much as like professional learning.
And we've talked about this before.
In my view, I think the most important part of being a teacher, because we just grounded
it that way, is that they are, before they can be good stewards of the healthy attentional
participation of the learners that they are, quote, teaching, they need to be good stewards
of the health of their own learning.
They need to be having the kind of internal conversations and dialogues and first person
learning, journeying that you and I are doing and trying to explore and understand this rather
than being wrote robotic extensions of protocols of this is what this means and this is what
I'm supposed to do now and so forth and so on.
So for me, professional development is a way of informed or professional learning is a
way of informing teachers about different dimensions that they should be considering while their
first person learning their way into teaching.
I'm okay with the word learning.
I use the word development because it assumes there are stages in a case of teaching, the
development never ends.
Now we've got teachers for three semesters, three semesters in student teaching.
There's no way we can even complete a partial finished product.
We get them ready to begin the journey.
Teachers need continue professional development and this is research based.
Master teachers have knowledge in four areas.
First is content knowledge, knowledge of what they're teaching.
That's kind of tough for an elementary.
They have to know a lot of stuff.
Pedagogical knowledge.
These are general teaching strategies.
Pedagogical content knowledge, how to teach a specific area, how to teach reading, how
to teach writing, how to teach math, how to teach science.
Knowledge of learners and learning, how human beings develop, how human beings best learn.
To create master teachers, it is a simple thing.
We must continue to promote learning, to promote more knowledge, gathering more knowledge in
each of those four areas.
And the master teachers I have encountered are learning up until the day they retire and
beyond.
Don't have any problem with that.
Again, I think there's so much that teachers can benefit from learning and nothing in particular
is more important than them staying on the learning edge of their own practice and of
their meeting the learners in the challenges that they're facilitating.
So important to have a lot of background, but that background should never automate what
they're doing.
And we've had this conversation before.
It's never, and people think if teachers just have these skills, they apply these skills
and teaching is much more complex.
So how should we address professional learning or development in our schools?
Is that going off?
Is that another conversation?
Because teachers are the most important variable.
The most significant variable in determining how much learning goes off.
Yeah, I mean, it brings up some of the interesting thoughts that were triggered by the documents
that you shared with me earlier from the various research on teacher effectiveness and what
happened.
And the tension that exists between a system that this kind of veers off into a tangent.
So I don't know that we want to spend that much time on it, but basically my understanding
is that things like No Child Left Behind and the government kind of generalizing its leadership
of education and how certain things are done are based on decades of research into teaching
practices that suggested they needed to do that.
That teachers weren't capable without some kind of a superstructure guiding them to do
that.
And that's where all kinds of problems have come into the system between what should teachers
know and how much should we press them to know and perform in certain ways in order to be
accountable to some larger system that's assessing them.
And what's the downside of that in terms of disincenting their first person learning and
their first person quality of participation when they feel so roboticized?
And that is probably a subject for another conversation.
Yeah, I think that's a whole big thing in itself.
Because the government has not identified what's most effective.
They've identified what's most profitable.
All right, you get to choose.
Yeah, I don't disagree with that.
Dyslexia.
Ah, an inability to learn to read witches of unknown origin.
It impacts usually, depending on the researcher, three to five percent of the population.
Yeah, I actually like that.
Unfortunately, the general because because it's become such a big thing politically and
profitably, they push that three to five percent, which I kind of agree with, almost 15 to 20
percent, because there's a whole lot more opportunity to intervene at that level.
I've had some pretty deep dive conversations with people like Shewitz and others that are
on the neuroscience side of trying to identify dyslexia.
And they can't point to anything that's higher than the three to five percent that you're
referring to, that they can say for sure is innately neurobiologically structurally
ordained as opposed to or as distinct from a consequence of early learning environment
trajectory differences.
In other words, how much dyslexia, what we call or think of dyslexia is learned and how
much of dyslexia is innate.
The couldn't be otherwise in the bio structural development of a child is a big fuzzy and that
unfortunately, because of our lack of criticality about those distinctions, and because so many
people are having so many kids are having difficulty with learning to read, it's become
this fuzzy deep end of the pool that has become a rallying cry that's been also been fused
with the whole phonics conversation.
So the dyslexia thing is a big, messy, amorphous, multi-ordinal term.
Well, the International Dyslexia Association presses a certain definition and they exist
to sell product to make money.
How much does it cost to get trained in Orton-Gillian?
A program that has no research based and it does not work.
Yet people do it.
Shewitz is not a reading instructor, a reading expert.
She's a neurologist.
She's a medical person.
And she has a research where she takes one or two kids into the laboratory and they look
at parts of their brain that do light up and don't light up.
And Stephen Strauss says, okay, once you give a kid adequate instruction, the dyslexic,
use that term in quote, who's part of the brain didn't light up, does light up.
So it's not a brain-based disorder.
However, students in that three to 5% tend to have trouble processing letter sounds,
tend to have trouble processing phonics, but not always.
Where Shewitz in the International Dyslexia Association gets up to 20%, well, that students
who have trouble with spelling, based on that, I have a mild form of dyslexia.
I was a horrible speller growing up and I use the computer today.
So they have defined dyslexia not in a way that helps kids, but in a way that helps them
make money.
Yeah, I wouldn't quite be so dark about it.
I think there's really generally good intentions, like we've talked about many times before,
in where people are coming from.
But I do agree that it has become financially convenient for both the International Dyslexia
Association and all of the decoding dyslexia groups that have popped up around the country.
But what glues them together is a ferocity of passion about not wanting kids to get harmed
by the sustained lack of success with reading and what it does to their lives.
I think they're coming from a good place and like anything else, it gets all kinds of predatory
hijackers that jump on the bandwagon to try to monetize it.
That said, the other thing I would say is that from talks with people that are on the
phonological, pure oral language side of neuroscience, there's a direct correspondence
from their perspective between what's classically called dyslexia and obviously structural neurological
issues in the brain that have to do with processing oral language.
So that they see dyslexia as primarily an oral language problem that barely shows up
in oral language, but shows up greater in written language because it's a virtual overlay
that depends on the oral language engine.
I think we're fair with where we left it.
I think we are as well.
You know, the idea of good intentions, there's intention and then there's impact.
I agree that some people within the dyslexia movement that I know that's a generalization
have good intent.
But listen, you could download my videos for free or you could pay $4,000 for an Orton
Gillingham training when you're charging that much, you are a money making organization,
not a helping kids organization.
So I just want to vomit in my mouth when I hear these groups saying they're there to
help kids pay me $1,500 letters, pay me $4,000 to $5,000 or Orton Gillingham.
All right.
Yeah.
Look, I've got a few hundred videos that are all free and I've never charged for two.
So, you know, I get that.
All right.
Are you ready for a new word?
Yep.
Balanced literacy.
I'm smiling because I'm watching your eyeballs go back and forth.
Yeah.
I mean, it's one of those terms.
It's multi-ordinal.
I mean, lots of things to me, what it means is that it's an on-ramp to becoming literacy
proficient that it's multi-ordinal, meaning that it's not dependent on any one particular
strategy, but that it's using a balanced, a number of different strategies in concert
to support the process of learning to become, to come up to speed and be proficient in the
flow of literacy.
Balanced literacy.
There's a balance between pure skills and meaning-based experiences and you go back
and forth on the continuum.
Some people need more skills, some people need less, but there's a balance between skills
and authentic reading and writing activities.
Everyone believes in phonics instruction.
It is just how much, when, where.
Yeah.
I think, you know, that also came up in my research, in my reading of some of the things
that you sent me, is that that's a, I would say it's a new phenomena, but in the history
of the conflict between the code-based and whole word or what became whole language-based,
there's been a movement from the whole language folks towards phonics in a way there hasn't
been a movement from the phonics folks towards whole language.
Or putting it another way and more consistent with what you put, the way that you just described.
There's always this tension between, well, in order to get the meaning, I have to recognize
the word and in order to recognize the word, it's really helpful to be tracking in the
flow of a meaning that will help inform the process of recognizing the word.
So there's this back and forth going on between the whole and the part and the part and the
whole.
And the phonics people have been, it's pretty bottoms up only from the phonics side and
the whole language have been, well, you know, like many of the arguments that the papers
you put were pushing back on about as negatives to the whole language movement was this notion
that by just structuring the text around just highly readable words and being really
personally engaging and so forth and so on, that kids would be gravitating to the meaning
and they would somehow imbibe unconsciously pick up all the skills that are necessary
to recognize unfamiliar words.
Like there's this tension between the two and balance literacy, it has become a kind
of phrase for, you know, trying to integrate those two in a way that the two camps in the
past didn't.
And one of the things that the code based or the skills based do is they'll pull a term
like balanced literacy, they'll misidentify it, misuse it, and then they'll demonize the
word and balance literacy is one of those.
Most people that I hear demonizing balanced literacy have no idea what it means.
There's a balance between skills instruction and using those skills in authentic reading
and writing contexts.
So this idea of this camp versus that camp, whole language has always believed, and by
the way, whole language has continued to evolve.
Everything evolves.
But those are kind of a contradictory statement, always believed and continued to evolve.
I mean, that they're continuing to evolve has become more embracing of what's now considered
balanced literacy in terms of being more inclusive of phonics than my understanding.
And from what I read in the things that you sent me, the understanding of people that
study this space has been that they've been more at loggerheads in the past than they
are now.
And that that's largely in part because of the shift from whole word to whole language
to meaning making.
Whole language has always included phonics instruction.
Whole word is that stuff back in the 60s that you and I grew up with.
It's the Dick and Jane that didn't include any phonics.
Whole language is teaching phonics in a meaning based context to the greatest extent.
But is it not an adaptation that grew out of that polarity that was whole word, became
whole language and became inclusive of phonics over time?
No, they both have the word whole in them, but that's where the similarities end.
Hmm, OK, that's that's that's news from what I read that there wasn't more continuity in
that.
But that's not a big deal one way or the other.
In any event, we're talking about in the past 50 or 60 years, this pendulum switch between
being kind of meaning centric and whole centric to being part and, you know, bottoms up with
the code.
That's where the tensions lie, which go all the way back to our beginning conversation
about identification and recognition that, you know, ultimately what we're talking about
is the how those two different.
Tracks relate to informing the process of recognizing words.
There's been three big stepbacks in the last 60 years.
There was the back to the basics movement in the 80s.
There was the no child left behind reading first initiative movement of the early odds.
And now there's the science of reading movement, all that have caused us to move backwards
in our ability to help children learn to read.
Yeah, and because of the way that you guys have failed to learn together.
And I think that's all parties have to be are complicit in that.
You know, their perspective is the exact mirror opposite of what you just described, which
is to say that the only reason that they've become so hard and religious and dogmatic
about pushing the code up, you know, point of view, the decoding centric code centric
view of reading instruction is the failures of all other approaches.
Right.
So you discount their research, they discount your research, you know, and there's this
finger pointing rather than learning together, which presumably balanced literacy is an attempt
to do.
Right.
Balance literacy is pretty much what what whole language is or has evolved to I would
see now.
I know you're going to jump which is why which which is why the decoding folks don't want
anything to do with it.
Because they don't know what it is.
You mentioned something that I thought was good.
You and I having this conversation is really important.
I wish we disagreed on more, but it's the ability, the inability to listen and to hear
where people are coming from.
And I've tried to engage people online and in other places.
I've tried to engage people at my university, but there's this tendency to want to not
communicate with someone who has a different idea than you.
And just in the months that we've been having these conversations, you know, I think differently
about some things.
I've had to strengthen my view on other things.
It's the importance of listening to people who disagree with you without calling them
names or without the straw person argument where you say where you misidentify balanced
literacy.
Right.
Well, that has to do with it to some degree in remembering that we are good.
There are underneath all this.
Yes, there's a predatory overlay to the whole decoding dyslexia and IDA and reading for
all of that stuff.
There's just like there is over anything that becomes instantiated into the infrastructure
of education.
There's a predatory, you know, monetization that's going to swoop in to try to make the
best of it.
There's going to reinforce it in ways that are antithetical to actual learning.
And the same would be true if your side was dominant right now.
There'd be people rushing to make products that do this, that would be kind of insular
and attacking those that didn't.
And that's an unfortunate thing.
But underneath it all, I really believe that all the camps, there's this shared thing that
they love and care for children and the suffering children go through because of their difficulty
with reading.
And that that's what motivates everybody.
And it's a really unfortunate, I think, that we can't use that as a basis for having a
dialogue.
And I agree with you.
Unfortunately, once people for psychological reasons or for income reasons get associated
with a particular way to do something, then it becomes very difficult for them to back
up from it because it implies that they were wrong, which hurts their reputation, potentially
hurts their income.
It's what I call paradigm inertia.
And it's a huge problem all over the world in every dimension and particularly here.
But I think there's a great opportunity that we're just scratching the surface of you and
I, right?
Of getting to, you know, what's the underlying core challenge?
And how can we think differently about that in a way that integrates the best of everybody's
thinking instead of having to stay true to something for ideological or economic or psychological
reasons?
I mean, there's just too much at stake.
And you know, when the various camps as research says this and research says that understanding
what research and educational research is, is important.
There is no single study that proves anything in the social sciences.
That's not how science works.
And when someone says research shows this, I say, well, show me the research so I can
analyze it.
It proves this is effective for this person used in this way for that level.
You know, there's no single study.
You have to look at the wide variety.
Now when I look at the science of reading, there's show the claim is that there's this
reading crisis and we've gone through this before.
And again, we want to say, well, show us some valid data.
Reading scores are about the same as they always have been.
Which, by the way, is what makes it the crisis for me.
It's not that there's some, you know, worsening.
It's that it's always been worse than it should be.
That's the crisis.
That's what we get from the term.
We can always do better, but when you compare us to other countries, we stack up rather
well.
When you compare like populations, which is very hard to do, by the way, it's very hard
to do.
I think that's what else stuff is.
It's very hard to find like populations.
But when you look at people like Emily Hanford, who misidentified the crisis, but even if
there were a crisis, she has identified the problem and the solution.
If there were a crisis, she has said, oh, it's because of phonics.
So that is not scientific thinking to use I thinkisms and anecdotal evidence to identify
a problem and a solution.
But look, like I have pushed back hard on Hanford.
And so I disagree with, again, I appreciate the spirit of what she's trying to do, just
like I do all of the parents and that join up in the Dekoting Dislexia groups or the
various online groups that are out there, trampinning, reading, instructional reform,
et cetera.
I think they're coming from a good place.
But to me, it comes back to the mental models.
The mental model that you all share is the one that ultimately I want to challenge, which
is that at the point of interaction between a reader and a word that they're trying to
recognize, they're trying to identify, to use your term, that the word is static and
can't help them.
And that's what we'll get to when another episode down the road.
We want to help children develop their full literacy potential.
I agree that many, probably most, do have good intent.
But when I look at someone like Emily Hanford, I say, what is her intent?
Is it to make her career and make money?
Why does she not involve real literacy experts?
Why doesn't she read some research?
Because the experts that she does involve are so adamant against including you.
Like I told you, I once had the Secretary of Education tell the Assistant Secretary of
Education to tell me not to talk to people like Allington and otherwise.
Or they would, you know, like, I've been threatened myself by powers that are for crossing the
line from the code-centric part to the whole language part in my own inquiries.
So you know, I get the pressure that somebody like that's under.
And the fact that from their perspective, the preponderance of science says, we've got
to teach, you know, and again, it comes down to that population is not a monolith.
It's not like every kid's got the same brain with the same level of readiness, with the
same vocabulary, with the same, you know, phonemic differentiation skills, implicit
skills, the same word attack or recognition skills, with the same knowledge of the world.
And as a back, all these kids are different.
So it's when you look at the kids that are struggling the most and what is it they're
weak at?
And given the majority of the population that is struggling and inside that population,
the majority of those that have particular kinds of weaknesses, what instructional strategy
will work with that?
And it's big generalizations thrown on big generalizations.
That's exactly what technology can change in the future.
You're starting to sound like a balanced literacy instructor, because one size of instruction
does not fit all.
And that's the problem with the Hanford's of the world that want to have one type of
instruction for all kids.
All right.
Yeah, I think the problem's at a different place, but that's another other day.
I think it's your turn for a word.
Is it?
Yeah, I did balance literacy and that led to...
Well, maybe we should talk a bit about orthography.
What is orthography?
Orthography is using the arrangement of letters to identify a word.
And as you pointed out, and I agree, the English language is not very predictable.
There are more predictable language.
But the human brain is a pattern recognition thing.
It learns to recognize patterns.
That's how it has evolved and survived.
Orthography, how would you define it?
Orthography is a broad umbrella term that talks about the correspondence between letters,
sounds, and spelling patterns, and how they combine to, in this case, in a particular
written language, in our case, the English or orthography, obviously, the English language.
So it's a system of relations between letters, sounds, patterns, and spelling patterns as
a whole.
And whereas I agree that the human brain evolved to become a great pattern recognition system,
and it does that in nature in many different ways.
The kind of patterns that are in this are entirely different than anything that exists
in nature.
So learning to read via our orthography is a kind of challenge that no human being in
the entire history of the planet, in the entire evolutionary history of humanity ever did,
except for a few hundred years ago, began a few hundred years ago.
Okay, don't agree with all of that, but good, I agree with some of that.
All right, you have your choice.
You can do scientifically based reading instruction, or you can do systematic phonics instruction,
scientifically based reading research, I'm sorry, or systematic phonics instruction.
Which one would you like to chew on?
Doesn't matter, you pick one.
It's your turn, isn't it?
All right, I'll go ahead and pick the last piece.
Yeah, yeah, all right, let's do systematic phonics instruction, because that's what we've
been talking about.
Systematic phonics instruction.
Well, I have to start by saying I disagree with that, but it has to do with training
reflexive patterns of response to the recognition of phonical patterns in the code.
So the bizarre rules of phonics, learning to recognize which of the letters are to be
interpreted through these bizarre rules to get to the right sound pattern as a basis
of word recognition.
And I would define it as, and I agree with you, there's no defined scope and sequence
of letters and letter patterns that you build up to get you to a finished reading product.
Like phonics instruction is learning to put letters to sounds.
That's what phonics is.
Systematic means there's some system, some way of organizing.
When you teach and what you teach, and when students master and what they master, there's
a system in place.
That's how I would define systematic phonics instruction.
Which implies that there's a systematic relationship between letters and sounds, and there's not.
There is not.
But there are some basics.
So there are systematic relationships between letters and sounds that can be arrived at
through a highly abstract conceptual intellectual overview.
But there's not one that can be intuitively grasped by a struggling reader or beginning
reader.
So this is what it would look like in kindergarten and first grade.
I would need to teach the letter sounds.
I would use some system to record when I taught the 27 letters and their letter sounds.
And I would use another system to record when students have mastered that systematic.
We need to teach the letter sounds, whether we agree with them or not.
Yeah, but that's where the problem comes in, right?
I mean, when you say teach the letter sounds, it's not, this is one of the things that we
didn't talk about, the alphabetic principle, which would be, let's say that's the next
term, it's okay with you.
Let's bleed right from here into the alphabetic principle, because a lot of phonics instruction
kind of implies the alphabetic principle or that there is such a thing as an alphabetic
principle.
Now, at one level, you could say, yeah, there's a correspondence between letters and sounds,
and that's the principle to get.
That's fine.
I don't have a problem with that.
But the idea that letters have a simple relationship to sounds is itself crazy making to kids.
In my view, right?
Because the majority of times, if you take the alphabet, a letter name sound, you teach
that, or you take the common sound, the most common sounding, you teach that.
In the 500 most commonly used words of kindergarten, those two default strategies, trying to assign
a letter name or common sound to a letter, will be wrong half the time in the most common
words used in kindergarten vocabulary.
So the point is that those 26 letters, 27 letters, if you want to put it that way, correspond
to the 44 sounds of English in 120 ways, even in kindergarten language.
We all agree that it's not logical, but we must teach these basic letter sounds as a
basis.
There's 44 phonemes in the English language, 27 letters, that were 18 short.
Absolutely.
Everyone agrees with that.
Does that mean we don't teach letter sounds?
By the way, we teach sight words as well, a word that you recognize automatically.
Those are the 100 most frequent or dole or zine or whatever.
We use the same thing to document when they're introduced and when they're mastered.
But are you saying then, since they're not 100% reliable that we shouldn't teach letter
sounds?
I don't think you're saying that, or letter patterns?
No, no, no, no, no.
But I would teach, I would help kids understand that there's more to the way a letter can
sound than the simple letter sounds we teach them, because they set them up for being
wrong in ways they can't understand later.
By teaching them a simple set of letter sounds in the hopes that we're going to bootstrap
them, and then they encounter numerous words in which those sounds that they've been taught
to associate with letters no longer work in the words they encounter, it causes them
to be wrong in ways they can't understand why they're wrong, which sabotages the process.
I think the way we teach letter sounds is wrong.
I'm not saying we shouldn't teach letter sounds, I think we should teach them differently.
And that's why we teach students to recognize words using three queuing systems.
So they're not relying just on letter patterns, but syntax and semantics as well.
Which you're doing because they can't rely on letter patterns?
Not 100%, but we must teach letters.
Again, if kids could look at a word in it, it was intuitively decodable, meaning that
they could just look at the letters and boom, word popped into their mind, the sound of
the word was there, it was immediately there, then we wouldn't be trying to teach them all
these extraneous ways to get the word recognition.
Word identification, you mean?
To identify a word.
There's a difference.
All right, you want it to go with the alphabetic principle?
We kind of just talked about that.
I saw that referenced in your documents.
I pushed back on people throughout the Children of the Code days whenever people would use
that in that the alphabetic principle is a kind of no-brainer, necessary but insufficient
baby step along the process.
It gets a lot more attention and suggestion of import than it has.
Because the problem isn't that there's a principle to get the letters correspond to
sound, I think every little kid in the world gets that pretty easily.
It's the complexity of the relationship between letters and sounds where the problem is.
The alphabetic principle is just a misleading term in the sequence of importances on the
learning to read process to me.
I think I'm partway there with you.
As I understand the alphabetic principle as applied to a preschool kindergarten, first
grade, this is the alphabet.
These are symbols.
Symbols have sounds.
Sounds aren't always reliable, but these are sounds.
Some of the research actually suggests that once kids get the alphabetic principle, that's
the ballgame.
That's the big step.
To me, that's a really simple, obvious no-brainer first baby step.
It's the correspondence between letters and sounds where the bog is.
I wonder if we should wrap it up here.
I think we should wrap it up.
I think we've done enough for this reconnect.
We've got a set of terms that we can identify, an index that people can dive into them as
individuals, et cetera.
We can think about this more intentionally between now and the next time and figure out
what are the other terms that we haven't talked about and let's make a list together and
kind of negotiate it and then be systematic.
Very good.
Next time.
All right.
For our listeners out there, this has been another hour and 15 minutes of the Dave and
Andy conversation.