This is the Reading Instruction Show.
I'm the host as always, Dr. Andy Johnson.
The title of today's podcast is Making Sense Out of Nonsense.
Full colon.
Statements about reading and whole language.
Now, saying something nonsensical over and over and over again doesn't make it sensible
and it doesn't make it less nonsensical.
Yes, this is the fourth in a series of podcasts looking at the undebunkerated of a whole bunch
of whole language stuff that illiterate penguins seem to be spreading all over the internet
like stale peanut butter.
Much of the debunkerated peanut butter is filled with nonsensical statements.
So let's take a look at it.
Let's unpack these nonsensical statements.
Number one, first bit of undebunkerating is debunking the statement that whole language
has been debunked.
This is a nonsensical statement.
Whole language has not been debunked.
If I'm wrong, send me some debunkerating research.
Debunk me.
Please.
Now, don't send me a quote of a famous person citing research.
Don't send me a book or a website or tell me what someone has said.
That's not debunkerating.
If whole language has actually been debunked, a very strong declarative statement, one should
be able to come up with at least one research study supporting this supposition.
So again, debunk me.
Please send me a bit of research published in a peer review journal showing me that whole
language has been debunked.
You'll not only debunk me, but you'll shut me up.
And my next podcast will be titled, I Have Been Debunked and I'll Beg Your Forgiveness.
Is there research to support?
It hasn't been debunked.
Is it in fact fully bunked?
I could certainly line up and a plethora of studies for you showing that good whole language
instruction is effective in helping all children become literate.
Yes, I could.
But I didn't make that first statement, did I?
And you're asking me to disprove a negative.
However, unlike the debunkerators, I do cite all my strongly worded declarative statements,
not in my podcast, but in my books and articles.
You can go to my website, www.teaching-reading.com.
That's teaching-reading.com.
Nonsenseical statement number two, phonics is more effective than whole language.
I hear this bit of nonsense quite often online.
Actually, I read it online.
This nonsensical statement is as silly as saying, field goals are more effective than
football.
Analogy, field goals is to football as phonics is to whole language instruction.
Just as field goals is an important part of playing football, phonics instruction is an
important part of whole language literacy instruction.
The nonsensical statement that whole language teachers don't teach phonics gets repeated
by the penguins over and over and over.
They flap their little wings and say, phonics is more effective than whole language.
After a time, the little penguins hear this and begin flapping their little wings and repeating
what the big penguins said, prefaced by everybody knows that.
Everybody knows that phonics is more effective than whole language.
But everybody doesn't know that.
A lot of penguins have convinced themselves of this, however, but thinking something is
so doesn't make it so.
But this is something that everybody knows.
Phonics instruction is effective for teaching phonics.
Yes, everyone knows that.
Again, phonics instruction is effective for teaching phonics.
That's something that everyone can agree with or agree upon.
Nonsensical statement number three.
Whole language teachers don't teach phonics.
Now I'm sure there may have been a whole language teacher somewhere along the line who didn't
advocate to teach you not phonics, but in the whole language world, these would be outliers.
And as a matter of fact, I've never encountered such a mythical creature.
But just like Bigfoot, this does not mean they don't exist.
Now this may cause some penguins to have to do some serious re-thinkerating.
But here is a non-nonsensical statement.
Good whole language instruction incorporates phonics instruction.
Traumatic pause blows your mind.
Yes.
Good whole language teachers teach letter patterns and letter sound relationships.
This is an important part of good whole language instruction.
Now I am the holiest of whole language teachers and I strongly recommend that very direct
and very explicit phonics instruction be included in beginning reading instruction.
It's not the what of phonics instruction.
That's in question.
It's the how and the how much of phonics instruction.
And that yet there are many who still insist that whole language doesn't involve phonics
instruction.
They insist on such a thing.
What can we deduce from such oft-repeated penguin-based poppycock?
This tells me that there is a lot of illiteracy going on in penguin world regarding reading
instruction.
Teachers simply have not spent sufficient time investigating a wide range of research
and scholarly work related to literacy instruction.
Now a wide range does not mean looking at a whole bunch of the same kinds of stuff about
the same sorts of things over and over again.
And it doesn't mean cherry picking only those articles and research studies that support
your pre-determined belief.
When you cherry pick research focusing only on a narrow range of research questions and
insist only controlled experimental research can be used to determine causality, you are
essentially using your beliefs to determine reality.
Instead of using reality to determine what it is you believe.
Not perhaps when reading books and articles, those in penguins world, when they read books
and articles about whole language, the penguins may be simply just sounding out the words.
This is what happens when sounding out instruction is over-emphasized.
And when you focus overly much on sounding out words, short term memory doesn't have
the capacity to do the higher level thinking needed to comprehend more complex material.
Perhaps they're trying to sound out the words instead of understanding the ideas.
That must be it.
That's the only reason why I can think of why nonsensical statement number three keeps
getting repeated.
Nonsensical statement number four, whole language teachers teach children to guess at words.
Some teachers will say to me, well, I teach reading, not guessing at words.
Penguins say this to me all the time with the self-righteous smugness of a street corner
preacher.
I teach my children to read, not to guess at words.
Oh, really, I say to them, do you really think that there's a horde of whole language
teachers using direct and explicit instruction teaching the steps to guessing out words?
Is that what you really think?
Do you really think in my literacy methods courses that I have a lecture related to how
to teach children to guess at words?
I'm going to repeat here what I said in an earlier podcast.
In 1967, Ken Goodman published an article in Reading Research Quarterly with the title
Reading Folkolon, a psycholinguistic guessing game.
This was a way to refer to the fact that during the process of reading, our brain has a good
sense of what the next word is before encountering it.
This is because we're not merely responding like rats in the skinner box to visual stimuli.
Rather, we're using a lot of different types of data to create meeting with print.
These types of data include the information in our head, the information within the sentence
and paragraph that's called semantic clues, grammar in word order that's called syntactic
clues, the pragmatic elements of the reading situation and the purpose for reading, and
letter clues that's called phonological information or graphyl phonological information.
This multi data hot dish enables our brain to operate quickly and efficiently during
reading.
Eventually, a herd of angry penguins would get hold of this article with their little
penguin hands.
They would sound out the words in the title.
From this title, they would select two words to project onto like a Rorschach ink block
test, reading and guessing.
They would then repeat the phrase over and over and over, guessing at words, guessing
at words, guessing at words.
They do this for the next 55 years.
Now I wish Kenneth Goodman wouldn't have used the phrase, psycholinguistic guessing
game.
Instead, I wish he would have used the phrase, psycholinguistic filling in the blanks with
multiple kinds of data before encountering the word game.
But he had no idea back then that hordes of ill-informed penguins would be so easily whipped
into a frenzy by politicians and profiteers.
So the four nonsensical statements.
Number one, whole language has been debunked.
It hasn't.
Saying it so doesn't make it so.
If it's been debunked, please debunk me by sending me the related debunkerating research.
And by the way, data is not research.
Research is not research unless and until it has been subjected to blind peer review.
So collecting a bunch of data is not research.
Nonsensical statement number two, phonics is more effective than whole language.
That's like saying long division is more effective than mathematics.
Phonics is something that's taught.
It's not a method or an approach.
Whole language is an understanding of the reading process and how the brain creates
meaning with print.
Whole language teachers approach literacy in certain ways, but these are all different.
There's no single unified whole language approach or method.
You can't put whole language in a box and market it and sell it.
But maybe that's why the profiteers are so intent on making it go away.
Nonsensical statement number three, whole language teachers don't teach phonics.
They do.
Again, it's not the what, but the how and the how much of phonics in which we differ
from our stills first brothers and sisters.
And number four, whole language teachers teach children to guess at words.
Wrong.
They do not.
Developing students ability to use semantics, grammar and word order, background information
along with letter clues does not mean that we teach children to guess at words.
I'll explore this a bit more in part five.
This misconception here will look more specifically at the three queuing systems the brain uses
to recognize words during reading.
But whole language teachers do not teach children to guess at words.
So have I put an end to the nonsensical statements related to whole language?
Of course not.
Will people still call me names or engage in demeaning comments when I try to engage
them in honest, respectful academic discourse related to reading instruction?
Indubitably.
Will people still insist that struggling readers struggle because they haven't been given
the right kind of sounding out word instruction?
Undeniably.
Will profiteers continue to distort and misread research to serve their profiteering ends?
I would expect nothing less.
But here's a big idea to take with you.
This isn't a game.
Nothing to read is a social social justice issue.
What we do and do not know what we do and do not do impacts the lives of real children.
So we have to stop letting the profiteers and politicians make decisions about reading
instruction.
The profiteers and politicians don't have a very good track record of things, do they?
This has been the reading instruction show.
I'm your host, Dr. Andy Johnson.