1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:02,720 This is the Reading Instruction Show. 2 00:00:02,720 --> 00:00:05,800 I'm the host as always, Dr. Andy Johnson. 3 00:00:05,800 --> 00:00:11,240 The title of today's podcast is Making Sense Out of Nonsense. 4 00:00:11,240 --> 00:00:13,000 Full colon. 5 00:00:13,000 --> 00:00:16,120 Statements about reading and whole language. 6 00:00:16,120 --> 00:00:25,200 Now, saying something nonsensical over and over and over again doesn't make it sensible 7 00:00:25,200 --> 00:00:28,080 and it doesn't make it less nonsensical. 8 00:00:28,080 --> 00:00:36,600 Yes, this is the fourth in a series of podcasts looking at the undebunkerated of a whole bunch 9 00:00:36,600 --> 00:00:42,640 of whole language stuff that illiterate penguins seem to be spreading all over the internet 10 00:00:42,640 --> 00:00:45,800 like stale peanut butter. 11 00:00:45,800 --> 00:00:51,800 Much of the debunkerated peanut butter is filled with nonsensical statements. 12 00:00:51,800 --> 00:00:53,280 So let's take a look at it. 13 00:00:53,280 --> 00:00:56,160 Let's unpack these nonsensical statements. 14 00:00:56,160 --> 00:01:02,400 Number one, first bit of undebunkerating is debunking the statement that whole language 15 00:01:02,400 --> 00:01:05,160 has been debunked. 16 00:01:05,160 --> 00:01:09,120 This is a nonsensical statement. 17 00:01:09,120 --> 00:01:13,640 Whole language has not been debunked. 18 00:01:13,640 --> 00:01:19,000 If I'm wrong, send me some debunkerating research. 19 00:01:19,000 --> 00:01:20,560 Debunk me. 20 00:01:20,560 --> 00:01:21,560 Please. 21 00:01:21,560 --> 00:01:27,240 Now, don't send me a quote of a famous person citing research. 22 00:01:27,240 --> 00:01:31,280 Don't send me a book or a website or tell me what someone has said. 23 00:01:31,280 --> 00:01:33,960 That's not debunkerating. 24 00:01:33,960 --> 00:01:42,040 If whole language has actually been debunked, a very strong declarative statement, one should 25 00:01:42,040 --> 00:01:49,240 be able to come up with at least one research study supporting this supposition. 26 00:01:49,240 --> 00:01:52,040 So again, debunk me. 27 00:01:52,040 --> 00:01:59,160 Please send me a bit of research published in a peer review journal showing me that whole 28 00:01:59,160 --> 00:02:02,800 language has been debunked. 29 00:02:02,800 --> 00:02:07,280 You'll not only debunk me, but you'll shut me up. 30 00:02:07,280 --> 00:02:15,920 And my next podcast will be titled, I Have Been Debunked and I'll Beg Your Forgiveness. 31 00:02:15,920 --> 00:02:17,560 Is there research to support? 32 00:02:17,560 --> 00:02:19,520 It hasn't been debunked. 33 00:02:19,520 --> 00:02:22,640 Is it in fact fully bunked? 34 00:02:22,640 --> 00:02:27,720 I could certainly line up and a plethora of studies for you showing that good whole language 35 00:02:27,720 --> 00:02:31,960 instruction is effective in helping all children become literate. 36 00:02:31,960 --> 00:02:34,520 Yes, I could. 37 00:02:34,520 --> 00:02:37,480 But I didn't make that first statement, did I? 38 00:02:37,480 --> 00:02:41,920 And you're asking me to disprove a negative. 39 00:02:41,920 --> 00:02:50,240 However, unlike the debunkerators, I do cite all my strongly worded declarative statements, 40 00:02:50,240 --> 00:02:54,040 not in my podcast, but in my books and articles. 41 00:02:54,040 --> 00:03:01,640 You can go to my website, www.teaching-reading.com. 42 00:03:01,640 --> 00:03:08,320 That's teaching-reading.com. 43 00:03:08,320 --> 00:03:16,240 Nonsenseical statement number two, phonics is more effective than whole language. 44 00:03:16,240 --> 00:03:20,320 I hear this bit of nonsense quite often online. 45 00:03:20,320 --> 00:03:24,040 Actually, I read it online. 46 00:03:24,040 --> 00:03:31,760 This nonsensical statement is as silly as saying, field goals are more effective than 47 00:03:31,760 --> 00:03:33,440 football. 48 00:03:33,440 --> 00:03:44,240 Analogy, field goals is to football as phonics is to whole language instruction. 49 00:03:44,240 --> 00:03:51,720 Just as field goals is an important part of playing football, phonics instruction is an 50 00:03:51,720 --> 00:03:57,280 important part of whole language literacy instruction. 51 00:03:57,280 --> 00:04:03,840 The nonsensical statement that whole language teachers don't teach phonics gets repeated 52 00:04:03,840 --> 00:04:09,120 by the penguins over and over and over. 53 00:04:09,120 --> 00:04:15,600 They flap their little wings and say, phonics is more effective than whole language. 54 00:04:15,600 --> 00:04:21,160 After a time, the little penguins hear this and begin flapping their little wings and repeating 55 00:04:21,160 --> 00:04:26,240 what the big penguins said, prefaced by everybody knows that. 56 00:04:26,240 --> 00:04:30,440 Everybody knows that phonics is more effective than whole language. 57 00:04:30,440 --> 00:04:33,560 But everybody doesn't know that. 58 00:04:33,560 --> 00:04:39,240 A lot of penguins have convinced themselves of this, however, but thinking something is 59 00:04:39,240 --> 00:04:43,280 so doesn't make it so. 60 00:04:43,280 --> 00:04:46,880 But this is something that everybody knows. 61 00:04:46,880 --> 00:04:49,960 Phonics instruction is effective for teaching phonics. 62 00:04:49,960 --> 00:04:52,240 Yes, everyone knows that. 63 00:04:52,240 --> 00:04:57,760 Again, phonics instruction is effective for teaching phonics. 64 00:04:57,760 --> 00:05:05,160 That's something that everyone can agree with or agree upon. 65 00:05:05,160 --> 00:05:07,760 Nonsensical statement number three. 66 00:05:07,760 --> 00:05:12,680 Whole language teachers don't teach phonics. 67 00:05:12,680 --> 00:05:19,360 Now I'm sure there may have been a whole language teacher somewhere along the line who didn't 68 00:05:19,360 --> 00:05:27,440 advocate to teach you not phonics, but in the whole language world, these would be outliers. 69 00:05:27,440 --> 00:05:32,720 And as a matter of fact, I've never encountered such a mythical creature. 70 00:05:32,720 --> 00:05:38,880 But just like Bigfoot, this does not mean they don't exist. 71 00:05:38,880 --> 00:05:45,560 Now this may cause some penguins to have to do some serious re-thinkerating. 72 00:05:45,560 --> 00:05:49,240 But here is a non-nonsensical statement. 73 00:05:49,240 --> 00:05:55,760 Good whole language instruction incorporates phonics instruction. 74 00:05:55,760 --> 00:06:00,920 Traumatic pause blows your mind. 75 00:06:00,920 --> 00:06:02,920 Yes. 76 00:06:02,920 --> 00:06:11,440 Good whole language teachers teach letter patterns and letter sound relationships. 77 00:06:11,440 --> 00:06:17,200 This is an important part of good whole language instruction. 78 00:06:17,200 --> 00:06:25,360 Now I am the holiest of whole language teachers and I strongly recommend that very direct 79 00:06:25,360 --> 00:06:33,600 and very explicit phonics instruction be included in beginning reading instruction. 80 00:06:33,600 --> 00:06:36,960 It's not the what of phonics instruction. 81 00:06:36,960 --> 00:06:39,040 That's in question. 82 00:06:39,040 --> 00:06:45,040 It's the how and the how much of phonics instruction. 83 00:06:45,040 --> 00:06:54,520 And that yet there are many who still insist that whole language doesn't involve phonics 84 00:06:54,520 --> 00:06:56,160 instruction. 85 00:06:56,160 --> 00:06:59,880 They insist on such a thing. 86 00:06:59,880 --> 00:07:06,400 What can we deduce from such oft-repeated penguin-based poppycock? 87 00:07:06,400 --> 00:07:11,880 This tells me that there is a lot of illiteracy going on in penguin world regarding reading 88 00:07:11,880 --> 00:07:15,000 instruction. 89 00:07:15,000 --> 00:07:22,040 Teachers simply have not spent sufficient time investigating a wide range of research 90 00:07:22,040 --> 00:07:27,880 and scholarly work related to literacy instruction. 91 00:07:27,880 --> 00:07:33,640 Now a wide range does not mean looking at a whole bunch of the same kinds of stuff about 92 00:07:33,640 --> 00:07:37,720 the same sorts of things over and over again. 93 00:07:37,720 --> 00:07:43,600 And it doesn't mean cherry picking only those articles and research studies that support 94 00:07:43,600 --> 00:07:47,520 your pre-determined belief. 95 00:07:47,520 --> 00:07:53,680 When you cherry pick research focusing only on a narrow range of research questions and 96 00:07:53,680 --> 00:08:00,720 insist only controlled experimental research can be used to determine causality, you are 97 00:08:00,720 --> 00:08:05,840 essentially using your beliefs to determine reality. 98 00:08:05,840 --> 00:08:11,840 Instead of using reality to determine what it is you believe. 99 00:08:11,840 --> 00:08:16,800 Not perhaps when reading books and articles, those in penguins world, when they read books 100 00:08:16,800 --> 00:08:24,160 and articles about whole language, the penguins may be simply just sounding out the words. 101 00:08:24,160 --> 00:08:30,080 This is what happens when sounding out instruction is over-emphasized. 102 00:08:30,080 --> 00:08:36,440 And when you focus overly much on sounding out words, short term memory doesn't have 103 00:08:36,440 --> 00:08:45,360 the capacity to do the higher level thinking needed to comprehend more complex material. 104 00:08:45,360 --> 00:08:50,840 Perhaps they're trying to sound out the words instead of understanding the ideas. 105 00:08:50,840 --> 00:08:52,120 That must be it. 106 00:08:52,120 --> 00:08:58,960 That's the only reason why I can think of why nonsensical statement number three keeps 107 00:08:58,960 --> 00:09:02,480 getting repeated. 108 00:09:02,480 --> 00:09:14,920 Nonsensical statement number four, whole language teachers teach children to guess at words. 109 00:09:14,920 --> 00:09:21,720 Some teachers will say to me, well, I teach reading, not guessing at words. 110 00:09:21,720 --> 00:09:27,200 Penguins say this to me all the time with the self-righteous smugness of a street corner 111 00:09:27,200 --> 00:09:28,200 preacher. 112 00:09:28,200 --> 00:09:32,720 I teach my children to read, not to guess at words. 113 00:09:32,720 --> 00:09:39,600 Oh, really, I say to them, do you really think that there's a horde of whole language 114 00:09:39,600 --> 00:09:46,080 teachers using direct and explicit instruction teaching the steps to guessing out words? 115 00:09:46,080 --> 00:09:48,760 Is that what you really think? 116 00:09:48,760 --> 00:09:54,800 Do you really think in my literacy methods courses that I have a lecture related to how 117 00:09:54,800 --> 00:09:59,440 to teach children to guess at words? 118 00:09:59,440 --> 00:10:03,360 I'm going to repeat here what I said in an earlier podcast. 119 00:10:03,360 --> 00:10:10,480 In 1967, Ken Goodman published an article in Reading Research Quarterly with the title 120 00:10:10,480 --> 00:10:16,680 Reading Folkolon, a psycholinguistic guessing game. 121 00:10:16,680 --> 00:10:23,800 This was a way to refer to the fact that during the process of reading, our brain has a good 122 00:10:23,800 --> 00:10:29,520 sense of what the next word is before encountering it. 123 00:10:29,520 --> 00:10:37,400 This is because we're not merely responding like rats in the skinner box to visual stimuli. 124 00:10:37,400 --> 00:10:46,360 Rather, we're using a lot of different types of data to create meeting with print. 125 00:10:46,360 --> 00:10:54,240 These types of data include the information in our head, the information within the sentence 126 00:10:54,240 --> 00:11:02,920 and paragraph that's called semantic clues, grammar in word order that's called syntactic 127 00:11:02,920 --> 00:11:11,160 clues, the pragmatic elements of the reading situation and the purpose for reading, and 128 00:11:11,160 --> 00:11:19,320 letter clues that's called phonological information or graphyl phonological information. 129 00:11:19,320 --> 00:11:24,800 This multi data hot dish enables our brain to operate quickly and efficiently during 130 00:11:24,800 --> 00:11:26,800 reading. 131 00:11:26,800 --> 00:11:31,400 Eventually, a herd of angry penguins would get hold of this article with their little 132 00:11:31,400 --> 00:11:33,080 penguin hands. 133 00:11:33,080 --> 00:11:36,800 They would sound out the words in the title. 134 00:11:36,800 --> 00:11:44,000 From this title, they would select two words to project onto like a Rorschach ink block 135 00:11:44,000 --> 00:11:48,760 test, reading and guessing. 136 00:11:48,760 --> 00:11:54,280 They would then repeat the phrase over and over and over, guessing at words, guessing 137 00:11:54,280 --> 00:11:56,640 at words, guessing at words. 138 00:11:56,640 --> 00:12:01,280 They do this for the next 55 years. 139 00:12:01,280 --> 00:12:06,880 Now I wish Kenneth Goodman wouldn't have used the phrase, psycholinguistic guessing 140 00:12:06,880 --> 00:12:07,880 game. 141 00:12:07,880 --> 00:12:13,800 Instead, I wish he would have used the phrase, psycholinguistic filling in the blanks with 142 00:12:13,800 --> 00:12:17,840 multiple kinds of data before encountering the word game. 143 00:12:17,840 --> 00:12:23,840 But he had no idea back then that hordes of ill-informed penguins would be so easily whipped 144 00:12:23,840 --> 00:12:28,760 into a frenzy by politicians and profiteers. 145 00:12:28,760 --> 00:12:34,520 So the four nonsensical statements. 146 00:12:34,520 --> 00:12:38,240 Number one, whole language has been debunked. 147 00:12:38,240 --> 00:12:40,280 It hasn't. 148 00:12:40,280 --> 00:12:43,440 Saying it so doesn't make it so. 149 00:12:43,440 --> 00:12:51,000 If it's been debunked, please debunk me by sending me the related debunkerating research. 150 00:12:51,000 --> 00:12:56,040 And by the way, data is not research. 151 00:12:56,040 --> 00:13:01,520 Research is not research unless and until it has been subjected to blind peer review. 152 00:13:01,520 --> 00:13:07,080 So collecting a bunch of data is not research. 153 00:13:07,080 --> 00:13:14,040 Nonsensical statement number two, phonics is more effective than whole language. 154 00:13:14,040 --> 00:13:19,200 That's like saying long division is more effective than mathematics. 155 00:13:19,200 --> 00:13:22,280 Phonics is something that's taught. 156 00:13:22,280 --> 00:13:26,440 It's not a method or an approach. 157 00:13:26,440 --> 00:13:32,200 Whole language is an understanding of the reading process and how the brain creates 158 00:13:32,200 --> 00:13:35,280 meaning with print. 159 00:13:35,280 --> 00:13:41,720 Whole language teachers approach literacy in certain ways, but these are all different. 160 00:13:41,720 --> 00:13:46,760 There's no single unified whole language approach or method. 161 00:13:46,760 --> 00:13:52,040 You can't put whole language in a box and market it and sell it. 162 00:13:52,040 --> 00:13:59,600 But maybe that's why the profiteers are so intent on making it go away. 163 00:13:59,600 --> 00:14:04,800 Nonsensical statement number three, whole language teachers don't teach phonics. 164 00:14:04,800 --> 00:14:05,800 They do. 165 00:14:05,800 --> 00:14:11,440 Again, it's not the what, but the how and the how much of phonics in which we differ 166 00:14:11,440 --> 00:14:15,680 from our stills first brothers and sisters. 167 00:14:15,680 --> 00:14:21,320 And number four, whole language teachers teach children to guess at words. 168 00:14:21,320 --> 00:14:22,720 Wrong. 169 00:14:22,720 --> 00:14:24,720 They do not. 170 00:14:24,720 --> 00:14:32,200 Developing students ability to use semantics, grammar and word order, background information 171 00:14:32,200 --> 00:14:41,040 along with letter clues does not mean that we teach children to guess at words. 172 00:14:41,040 --> 00:14:44,320 I'll explore this a bit more in part five. 173 00:14:44,320 --> 00:14:50,360 This misconception here will look more specifically at the three queuing systems the brain uses 174 00:14:50,360 --> 00:14:53,640 to recognize words during reading. 175 00:14:53,640 --> 00:14:59,720 But whole language teachers do not teach children to guess at words. 176 00:14:59,720 --> 00:15:05,200 So have I put an end to the nonsensical statements related to whole language? 177 00:15:05,200 --> 00:15:07,160 Of course not. 178 00:15:07,160 --> 00:15:11,600 Will people still call me names or engage in demeaning comments when I try to engage 179 00:15:11,600 --> 00:15:17,200 them in honest, respectful academic discourse related to reading instruction? 180 00:15:17,200 --> 00:15:19,760 Indubitably. 181 00:15:19,760 --> 00:15:25,160 Will people still insist that struggling readers struggle because they haven't been given 182 00:15:25,160 --> 00:15:29,240 the right kind of sounding out word instruction? 183 00:15:29,240 --> 00:15:32,120 Undeniably. 184 00:15:32,120 --> 00:15:38,760 Will profiteers continue to distort and misread research to serve their profiteering ends? 185 00:15:38,760 --> 00:15:42,760 I would expect nothing less. 186 00:15:42,760 --> 00:15:45,920 But here's a big idea to take with you. 187 00:15:45,920 --> 00:15:49,080 This isn't a game. 188 00:15:49,080 --> 00:15:53,680 Nothing to read is a social social justice issue. 189 00:15:53,680 --> 00:16:04,560 What we do and do not know what we do and do not do impacts the lives of real children. 190 00:16:04,560 --> 00:16:11,440 So we have to stop letting the profiteers and politicians make decisions about reading 191 00:16:11,440 --> 00:16:13,560 instruction. 192 00:16:13,560 --> 00:16:21,360 The profiteers and politicians don't have a very good track record of things, do they? 193 00:16:21,360 --> 00:16:23,680 This has been the reading instruction show. 194 00:16:23,680 --> 00:16:43,360 I'm your host, Dr. Andy Johnson.