Education Week - September 11, 2019 - 14

OPINION

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Rules of
Engagement
In the New
Reading Wars
By Mia Hood
HOOD is the director of
middle school literacy for
KIPP NYC and an adjunct
lecturer at Teachers College,
Columbia University and the
City University of New York.

We must start
by defining terms

ver the past three decades,
the so-called "reading wars"
have raged on among educators, scholars, and policymakers. In one camp are those
who advocate for reading
instruction centered around
phonics instruction, the explicit teaching of soundletter relationships. In the other camp are proponents
of whole language, an approach that prioritizes immersing young children in authentic literature.
Over the past year, the conflict between these
two factions has been renewed by Emily Hanford's
ongoing reporting for American Public Media and
her op-ed in The New York Times. Hanford argues
that reading instruction in American schools doesn't
incorporate enough phonics instruction and so does
not reflect "what scientists have discovered about
how people actually learn."
The recent skirmishes between phonics and wholelanguage advocates reflect several major problems
with how the "reading wars" have been waged. The
first problem is that phonics advocates rarely start
where all of us who wish to enter into honest debate
must: by defining our terms. In this case, what do we
mean by reading?
Often, the unstated and unexamined assumption
in arguments in favor of phonics instruction is that
reading is no more than a process of decoding
printed words-seeing words printed on a page
and then uttering those words. If we accept this
assumption, it's easy to accept claims about the
primacy of phonics instruction. After all, phonics
help young readers associate letters with sounds,
which, in turn, helps them decode printed words.
But all of us who read-whether to stay informed
of current events, to learn about our history, to
encounter faraway minds in great essays or faraway
worlds in great novels, or to conduct scientific
research-must do much more than decode printed
words. Literacy scholars in the whole-language
tradition understand reading as a process of sensemaking-one we engage in not for its own sake but
for bigger real-world purposes.

14 | EDUCATION WEEK | September 11, 2019 | www.edweek.org/go/opinion

Of course, we must be able to decode printed text to
achieve our purposes for reading. That's why there's
broad consensus that phonics is an indispensable part
of early-reading instruction. But if all we can do is
decode printed text, then what sense have we made?
Comprehension is not a given. The capacity to read
in a way that allows us to take in new ideas and apply
them to our work and our lives is not a given. Young
readers have a right to instruction that supports them
both in decoding texts and in comprehending and
using them. We can't afford to wait until middle or
high school to teach our children how to make sense
of texts. They have a right to this instruction from the
very beginning.
On both sides of the reading wars, we have failed
not only to come to a shared understanding of reading
but also to fairly characterize opposing points of view
and the research bases that support them. In her New
York Times op-ed, for example, Hanford derides

All of us must be at
least as careful about
how we argue as we are
about what we argue."
practices "rooted in the idea that children learn to
read by reading rather than by direct instruction in
the relationship between sounds and letters." These
practices, as Hanford describes them, include giving
children books with letter patterns they haven't yet
been taught, encouraging students to guess at words
they don't know based on context and pictures, and
decorating classrooms with alphabetical word walls.
The books that contain letter patterns that haven't
been taught are the books in which children can
practice the challenging intellectual work of making
sense of rich ideas and information. Should children's
earliest reading experiences be confined to texts
that make use of a small set of words whose spelling
patterns have been taught-confined, in other words,
to commercially produced booklets that are almost by
definition meaningless?

And "guessing" at words is what proficient readers
of all ages do. We use a combination of the letters
we see and the thread of meaning we're following to
identify unknown words. The most successful phonics
instruction is self-extending, after all. Once children
begin to learn letter patterns, they can pick up similar
patterns when they encounter them in a meaningful
context. It's a good thing, because if we were to teach
every letter pattern under the sun, there wouldn't be
time left in the school day for much else.
In the same op-ed, Hanford writes that
alphabetical word walls, a fixture in many
elementary classrooms, "rest on the idea that
learning to read is a visual memory process." They
simply do not. Word walls, when they're used
well, support students with decoding words that
do not follow the letter patterns they have learned
explicitly. They also are an important part of what
researchers call print-rich environments, which
provide more opportunities for children to interact
with printed text, stir up children's curiosity about
letters and words, and provide visual resources that
increase children's facility with the very sound-letter
relationships that are taught in phonics lessons.
To say that children "learn to read by reading" isn't
to say that they don't need any sort of instruction. It
is instead to say that, as in most worthy endeavors,
children need a high volume of practice in reading to
develop proficiency.
Of course, what we mean by practice depends on
what we mean by reading. Children need decoding
practice, but they also need practice comprehending
texts, which includes, yes, "guessing" at words and
also determining what's most important in a text,
following narrative logic, relating ideas to each other,
and so on.
These misconceptions about the whole-language
approach certainly warrant clarification and critique.
But the broader point is this: All of us must be at least
as careful about how we argue as we are about what
we argue.
A proper debate about reading, one that serves
our children well, must proceed with an attention to
the lineages of research that have produced these
bodies of knowledge. Most of all, it must begin with
a discussion of what we mean by reading in the first
place, of why we teach reading in schools, of what we
envision our children will do with the texts they read
across their lifetimes. n

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Education Week - September 11, 2019

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