Dyslexia and the Reading Wars
Sometimes the axonal highways almost seem to pave themselves. My daughter, Laura, started reading suddenly, the summer before kindergarten. (“It’s hard to believe ‘knock’ starts with ‘k,'” she said, while reading him a bedtime story about Amanda Pig.) But even she hasn’t become a full-fledged reader. All children need to learn the relationships between letters and meaningful sounds. For some it is more difficult than for others. “Maybe instead of four lanes, you have two,” Gaab said, “or instead of one smooth surface, you have a bumpy one.” Caroline had an extensive vocabulary and was read to as often as Laura, at home and at school, and there were just as many colorful plastic alphabet magnets stuck to her kitchen refrigerator. But she needed teachers who understand that literacy doesn’t come naturally, especially for children with dyslexia.
Ten years ago, Emily Hanford, senior correspondent at American Public Media, was researching remedial reading courses at the college level. She became interested in dyslexia, then literacy in general, and in 2022 she produced a hugely influential podcast series, “Sold a Story”, about reading instruction in American schools. The central argument is that teachers across the country employ teaching methods and materials that have long been proven not only ineffective, but counterproductive. Such methods, Hanford demonstrated, rely on a fundamental misunderstanding of how children learn to read. They challenge beginning readers to look for clues in the illustrations and make inferences based on context, word length, plot, and other clues, relying only accidentally on the sounds represented by the letters. The idea is that as children become adept at deducing, the mechanical side will actually take care of itself.
Competent reading has many elements. A popular metaphor is the “reading rope,” created by psychologist Hollis Scarborough in 2001. It represents eight “strands” that readers weave together as they become proficient. The strands include not only an understanding of the sounds represented by letters and letter combinations, but also elements of language comprehension such as vocabulary, grammar, reasoning, and background knowledge. All strands are necessary. According to Hanford, those related to word recognition, including phonological awareness and decoding, have often been overlooked. This harms many students and is a disaster for children with dyslexia.
Antipathy toward phonetic decoding is sometimes attributed to the 19th-century American educator Horace Mann, who described the letters of the alphabet as “skeleton-like, bloodless, ghostly apparitions” and advocated teaching children to recognize words as discrete units. A later, more powerful influence was that of Marie Clay, a teacher and researcher in New Zealand, who studied schoolchildren learning to read and concluded in the 1960s that understanding the relationships between letters and sounds was not essential. Hanford, in the second episode of “Sold a Story”, says: “His basic idea was that good readers are good problem solvers. They are like detectives, looking for clues.” According to Clay, the best clues were things like context and sentence structure. Frank Smith, a British psycholinguist, came to the same conclusion. He asserted that, for a good reader, a printed word was like an ideogram. “The worst readers are those who try to pronounce unknown words according to the rules of phonetics,” he wrote in 1992.
There have always been opposing voices. In 1955, Rudolf Flesch published “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” a brutal indictment of “whole word” methods. “If they had what they wanted, our teachers Never tell children that there are letters and that each letter represents a sound,” Flesch writes. To illustrate the problem, he tells the story, told by a literacy researcher, of a boy who could read the word “children” on a flash card but not in a book. (The boy explained that he recognized the flash card because someone had smudged it.) Flesch’s book remained on the best-seller lists for months, but teaching methods like those which he had apparently destroyed remained in wide use.
“We only walk to the other end of the cage.”
Cartoon by Lynn Hsu
Today, two of the most popular reading instruction programs are Units of Study, whose lead author is Lucy Calkins, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, and Fountas & Pinnell Classroom, by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. Both date back to the work of people like Clay and Smith, and both are sold by the same educational publisher. They remained anchored in school systems even though scientific studies showed that their theoretical foundations were flawed. Technology that allows researchers to track people’s eye movements as they read has demonstrated, for example, that good readers actually decode words by looking carefully, albeit quickly, at letters and letter combinations. Dehaene writes that “‘eight’ and ‘EIGHT‘, which are composed of distinct visual features, are initially encoded by different neurons in the primary visual area, but are gradually recoded until they become virtually indistinguishable. If fluent readers are able to read familiar words in a way that makes it appear as if they recognize ideographs, it is because they have analyzed them phonetically in previous encounters, prompting their brains to create permanent neural pathways linking spelling, sound, and meaning.
