WP: Upper Grades, Lower Reading Skills

[DeepModem Mom]

Upper Grades, Lower Reading Skills
Middle, High Schools Find They Must Expand Programs for Older Students
By Lori Aratani
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 13, 2006; Page B01

Teaching reading has long been considered the job of primary grade teachers. But some educators are calling for more attention to be paid to the reading needs of middle and high school students, many of whom are struggling to master this critical skill.

The Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington-based education policy research and advocacy group, estimates that as many as 6 million middle and high school students can't read at acceptable levels. It's an issue for students well above the bottom of the class. A report released in March that looked at the reading skills of college-bound students who took the ACT college entrance exam found that only 51 percent were prepared for college-level reading.

"That is what is the most startling and troubling," said Cyndie Schmeiser, ACT's senior vice president of research and development. "The literacy problem affects all groups -- not exactly in the same ways, but it's affecting all groups regardless of gender, income or race."

Though struggling students might be able to read words on paper, experts said, they lack the ability to explain or analyze what the words mean.

In the past two years, at least a half-dozen major education associations have released reports on adolescent literacy, including the National Association of Secondary School Principals and the National Association of State Boards of Education. State and national test scores also paint a troubling picture of the reading skills of older students....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/12/AR2006071201825.html

[Viva_La_Revolution]

1. It's because they stopped teaching phonics!!

I couldn't believe it when I went into my son's first grade teacher/parent meeting and she said the curriculum had changed. This was 13 years ago, and now those kids are all in high school. I told her it was a mistake then, and she agreed, but could do nothing about it. They have to teach with what they are given.

edit: good article I just found...

Phonics vs. the Whole Language - Who's The Winner, Really?
http://www.chiefengineer.org/content/content_display.cfm/seqnumber_content/2025.htm

[joemurphy]

2. Thoze morans! Lotz uv us rede gud!

[pnwmom]

5. Phonics would appear to be of little use in this particular case.

The students apparently can decode words (which is what phonics teaches) but they're not able to analyze meaning or draw inferences.

"Though struggling students might be able to read words on paper, experts said, they lack the ability to explain or analyze what the words mean."

Phonics doesn't help with explaining or logic.

[Demeter]

8. It's Called Critical Thinking

and in the age of Marketing and Television and NeoCon GOP, it is actively suppressed.

[megatherium]

11. Actually, the schools are all about teaching critical thinking, and

strategies for thinking about what you're reading. But a book I'm reading argues that this doesn't work--American schools are great at teaching decoding in the earlier grades but not so good at teaching reading comprehension (which is what NCLB tests test)--because the schools do not teach background knowledge (history, science, etc). You don't understand what you're reading unless you know something about the context. The book I'm referring to is the Knowledge Deficit by E. D. Hirsch (he's the guy who wrote "Cultural Literacy" twenty years ago).

My own experience, as a college mathematics professor, is that undergraduates (recent products of American secondary education) are dumb as a stone. E.g., the biology major (and a decent student) who doesn't know what decade the US fought in World War II. I am not making this up.

[Demeter]

12. No Argument There!

They are ignorant. My own darling Mensan daughter is amazingly so, in spite of a worldly childhood and constant exposure to knowledge, analysis, and synthesis. It is hard to go up against this culture. Some days I even wonder if there is any point in trying.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

14. Yes, when I taught Japanese, I always had to make sure that

the students knew where Japan is. I had one student who kept referring to it as "down there." (I should have asked him where he thought it was--in the Caribbean, maybe?)

[Igel]

19. Hirsch had a rocky reception back in the '80s.

But his data track, and the explanation seem reasonable, without reviewing the counterarguments. And his ideas confirm my experience in learning Russian and other languages.

Even just knowing the words in Russian didn't help. Newspapers were more accessible than literature. But newspapers frequently refer to facts that an English-speaking American would know; literature refers to more culture-based facts and attitudes.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

9. I don't agree

after watching all 3 of my boys struggle with reading as it was being taught now, and remembering back to how I was taught, there was just such a huge difference. The problem is, after a few years of struggling it was very hard to get them to go back to the beginning and re-learn how to read. 2 of them are now doing well, but one still has a very hard time and has become discouraged.

“You can teach children more efficiently and effectively if you use phonics. If you don’t know how the alphabet works, you can’t learn how to use an alphabetic language."

"we were taught how each letter should sound. Then, using the sounds of the letters, we were able to “sound out” words. That’s what phonics is all about. But under the new system, children were shown the entire word and told to guess what it is based upon the contents of the entire sentence."


when you learn to sound words out, they get broken down into fragments. Punc-tu-a-tion. Stag-na-tion. In-fla-tion. After learning each letter, you learn what bits of words mean, so when you come across a new one, you can break it down. Of course, how it's used in the sentence is also a clue to the meaning. But kids aren't being taught to figure it out, they are being taught rote memorization which is far less effective.

[Demeter]

13. Learning Disabilities Are another Issue

and a serious one. My other daughter is developmentally disabled with a number of deficits. We found that Vision Training to teach the small muscles in the eyes to track was invaluable; after 2 months, she was reading! It's still difficult, as her vision is a severe and worsening problem, but her spirit is strong and she persists.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

15. my youngest has very slight ADHD

the other two have no disability, it was the way they were being taught.

Congrats to your girl!

[pnwmom]

21. But the issue isn't decoding the meaning of words -- it's understanding

whole sentences, whole paragraphs, and whole essays. It's being able to state the subject of a piece; to summarize the main points; to draw inferences, to compare with other written pieces, etc.

The writer of this article is saying NOT that students can't decode individual WORDS, but they can't draw the correct meaning from reading PASSAGES.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

24. I get what the writer of this article is saying

I just don't agree with it.

[raccoon]

16. I agree, the school should teach phonics.

They didn't, though, when I was a kid.

When I started school, in the glory days of the US, late '50's, that is, we learned using what I've learned is called the "look-say" method. Which is essentially memorizing the word, as you would a character if you were learning Chinese.

I think teaching students that way did a great disservice to untold numbers of students.

We also used the Dick-Jane-and-Sally readers. :puke:

They didn't turn me off to reading--I doubt anything could have--but I could see how such readers would turn off many students.

[Odin2005]

28. Interesting you Bring up Chinese...

I have read that the Whole-Word method is better for English because the conservative seplling has made many words sound different then how they are spelled, making English words comparable to languages that use logograms (like chinese).

[kestrel91316]

3. I just shake my head over this. I realize I might have been a little

unusual as a child, but in the third grade I was reading at college level. THIRD GRADE. With no exceptional effort on my or anyone else's part.

People who can't read well by the time they graduate from HS frustrate and annoy the hell out of me. Even if it's not entirely their fault. I can't help it.

[pnwmom]

6. I'm annoyed with people who, smug in their own good fortune,

express annoyment who others who are challenged by disabilities.

Dyslexia is never the fault of the student's. It is a different wiring in the brain and often comes with unusual ability in other areas. For example, there is a higher percentage of dyslexia among people with engineering and math backgrounds -- who often have exceptional spatial skills.

[kestrel91316]

17. Dyslexics don't bother me in the least. Please don't put words in other

people's mouths.

I am annoyed by the near-illiteracy of perfectly normal, but LAZY, people who have no excuse. You learn to read by READING, and LOTS OF IT. Most folks these days are WAAAYYYYYY too busy watching TV and listening to iPods to bother with reading anything.

Spelling edit. Note to self: Read before posting.

[pnwmom]

20. Glad to hear that, but I didn't put any words in your mouth.

"People who can't read well by the time they graduate from HS" includes a large number of dyslexics.

Another group consists of recent immigrants.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

10. how were you taught?

phonics or no?

I'm wondering, because I was a fast reader too, by 5th grade I was at a college level. Of course, I lived in a little town where there wasn't much else to do with my time, so I got a lot of practice. My boys are just as smart as I am, but they had such a tough time of it.

[kestrel91316]

18. I learned by the "look over big sister's shoulder while she's practicing

reading Dick, Jane, and Sally" method when I was 4. From there I moved on to reading our Little Golden Books by myself, and then our family's large accumulation of National Geographics. Then I started kindergarten, which was rather dull by comparison.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

22. My parents had both been elementary school teachers at one time

and the year I was in kindergarten, I had so many illnesses that I actually spent only two months in the kindergarten classroom.

In order to keep me busy, my parents taught me how to sound out words and gave me a pile of books.

Before that, they had read to us regularly. My mother the kindergarten teacher has always maintained that for five-year-olds, the important thing is not learning to read, but developing a desire to read. When she taught, they worked on things like identifying shapes, putting pictures into a story sequence, memory development ("I went to the store and I bought ice cream." "I went to the store and I bought ice cream and hot dogs." "I went to the store and I bought ice cream and hot dogs and pizza.") and hearing books read aloud. There was no instruction in reading or writing till the last month, when she taught the kids the alphabet and how to write their names.

But she made an exception in my case, because I was always asking "What does that say?" "What does that say?"

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. Becoming a good reader requires practice in reading stuff that's just

a little bit beyond your competence. It helps if the material is involving in itself, perhaps a factual article about a topic you're interested in or an exciting story.

Neither the "whole word" method nor straight phonics do that. If all the students do is drill phonics, or if they can't figure out a new word because it's not on their vocabulary list, they're not going to learn to make the connections. There's a lot of competition for what used to be kids' reading time, too: video games, TV, DVDs, and endless hours of organized sports practice.

I used to tutor street kids for the GEDs. I never found one who couldn't sound out words, but they seemed unable to make inferences from what they read, or sometimes even retell what they had read in their own words.

The reading materials given to kids are considerably dumbed down and made "inoffensive." So many of the stories in the textbooks donated to the tutoring program seemed preachy, simplistic, and frankly, dry and predictable. Supplementary materials, such as the Scholastic magazines, were noticeably dumbed down from when I was in school. Senior Scholastic, containing celebrity interviews and grooming tips in rather large print, is a lot dumber than Junior Scholastic was when I was in sixth and seventh grade. I recall Junior Scholastic as having articles about current events, such as an explanation of the Common Market (the forerunner of the EU) or the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the print was about the same size you'd see in Time or Newsweek.

It's real interesting to look at schoolbooks from the 1920s, which is when my mother was in grade school. For example, her fourth grade textbook had only slightly edited excerpts from Gulliver's Travels, The King of the Golden River, and Black Beauty, as well as poems by Longfellow, Whittier, and other American poets. It thus featured interesting, rather complex stories for developing the children's reading abilities AND gave them some cultural literacy.

In education, as in everything else, you get what you pay for, and in this case, I'm not talking about money, but about how students in the classroom spend their time.

[pnwmom]

7. A related issue is how they dumb down test materials.

In New York, for example, authors have been protesting the excerpts that test makers draw from their writings -- because so much MEANING is lost when the texts are "sanitized" (that is, made politically correct) for test-taking purposes.

[shrike]

23. Marva Collins was (is) a controversial educator

But she told one story that sort of proves your point:

She had one little recalcitrant student who would not read. So she gave him Moby Dick (stay with me here) and told him that all he had to do by the end of the semester was tell her what it was about.

According to her, in a few days he was proud of the fact that he was lugging this big book about. Took it everywhere with him. At the end of the semester he told her it was about "a big fish" and she decided that was enough. The next book she gave him was closer to his reading level and he read it, willingly.

[IrateCitizen]

25. The only way to become a proficient reader is to READ

I have read through all the posts on this board, especially those extolling the virtues of phonics. Personally, I believe that phonics is a load of horseshit -- at least as a method of learning to read. Children acquire the ability to read written language in much the same manner that they acquire spoken language -- through the recognition of patterns, categories, and most of all, through practice.

The problem with phonics is that when we are dealing with English, we are talking about a language in which exceptions are often more prevalent than the rules in actual practice. Furthermore, concentrating on the sounding out of words tends to reinforce the idea of focusing on the individual words themselves, rather than getting to the essence of reading, which is actually making predictions.

While I realize that I was by no means "typical" in this regard, I thank my lucky stars that I learned to read BEFORE I entered elementary school. I never learned through "phonics" or anything like that -- I was just surrounded by books and learned to recognize the patterns in language as I went through those books. As one of my professors said, a good example of how reading is learned is presented by the small child who wants you to read the same book to them over and over again. At some point, the child crosses over from having the book read TO them to actually reading the book themselves. It's hard to pinpoint when this takes place, but one thing is clear -- the crossover point is not the result of the child learning to sound out every single word, but rather their learning to predict what the next word is going to be by learning patterns.

When viewed this way, it becomes clear that there is no easy fix for making students better readers, other than finding ways to encourage them to read much more than they do now. During the 19th century, we had an extremely literate society -- yet we did not have compulsory schooling as we do today. The question then begs to be asked, how was that possible, when the average child was receiving only about 100 hours of instruction time on reading in the home? I would surmise that it was because the basic building blocks of reading really take very little time for anybody to learn -- it is the reinforcement through practice, and gaining the ability to predict while reading instead of reading every word individually, that makes one a proficient reader.

For an alternative view to the "standard reading curriculum", I would recommend Frank Smith's Essays Into Literacy. It can be a little high-falutin' and presumptuous at times, but it goes a long way toward shattering the misconceptions surrounding the teaching of reading.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

26. I agree that reading is the best way to learn to read, but

I have run into college students who don't know how to sound out an unfamiliar word, actually a useful skill, since it's the "big" words that follow the rules most closely ("antidisestablishmentarianism" :-) ) and the little, common everyday words that deviate ("rough," "cough," "through," "though," for instance).

[IrateCitizen]

30. I think my focus is more on reading for understanding...

... than for pronunciation. Most times when I encounter a word I don't know, I just skip over it and then try to figure it out contextually. If I still can't do that, I just skip it if it doesn't affect my ability to understand the passage. Only if it affects my ability to understand the material will I stop to look it up in a dictionary. As for pronunciation -- chances are usually if you are going to need to pronounce the word, you'll hear someone else pronounce it first. In the rare case this does not occur, you can either rely upon your own familiarity with the English language, or use the dictionary.

The key, I believe, is to get students to the point where they can just read and understand what they're reading. Filling them with rules turns reading into a mechanical act, rather than allow it to exist in its true state -- which is a free-flowing form of communication. Same for a focus on reading aloud accompanied by instant correction of mistakes. Both of these common practices turn reading into a chore. Reading shouldn't be a chore. It should be a gateway to other worlds that did not previously exist in our own minds. By experiencing those worlds, we can use what we find to create and recreate our own worlds in the process.

By the term "world," I mean the sum of one's life experience and understanding that shapes individual perspective.

Every time we try to teach reading through drills and mechanics, we kill a child's desire to read. That helps close those gateways to other "worlds" -- and limits their understanding their own world. As a soon-to-be history (and possibly mathematics) teacher, I feel that my time with my future students will be completely worthwhile and successful if I can get them to buy into just one idea: that reading is not the chore they have been taught to think it is, and that through reading they can grow as individuals and members of society.

Kids don't have trouble with sounding out words because they haven't learned any drills for doing so. Rather, they have trouble because of a lack of familiarity with the English language, a common trait among those who read very little, which happens because they are conditioned to see reading as a chore rather than something that can be both entertaining and enlightening.

[distantearlywarning]

27. I also learned to read prior to entering elementary school.

I learned just in the way you describe in your post. By the time they got around to phonics in 1st grade, I was reading at a 7th grade level, and nobody made me do them (thank God!) I would have been very unhappy if I had ever had to do phonics. It's boring to do phonics, and they don't really teach you to UNDERSTAND what you are reading. I feel the same way about diagramming sentences and all that other useless rubbish they teach in HS English. To this day, I can't tell you what a dangling participle is, or diagram anything. However, I am a Ph.D. student in a highly competitive field, and have been told by my instructors that I am one of the better technical writers in the program. I read at a rate of over 1000 words per minute, and read 10-20 books per week for entertainment. I don't know all the "rules" of writing. I just know what sounds and looks right, because I've had so much exposure to the written word, and it makes me very proficient at language usage.

I teach writing to college juniors and seniors, and it makes me really sad that many of them can't even write a complete sentence. They took the same HS English classes I did, and at some point in their lives they could probably diagram a sentence or sound out words, or answer multiple choice questions about grammar. But that doesn't mean they can read journal articles and make sense of them, or write a simple 10 page paper that makes sense to the reader and uses language properly. I think, as you do, that it's because they just don't read, not even for fun. You can't write well unless you have a lot of exposure to written language and absorb how it works. Memorizing all of the "rules" in the world and knowing how to sound out unfamiliar words won't help you when you have a paper due in 2 days and you can't even understand what the authors of your reference materials are talking about.

[Odin2005]

29. I think the problem is the TV.

I have head the term "post-lilterate society" used to describe our situation. Joe Six-Pack gets his news and entertainment from TV, not newspapers and novels. People had a better grasp of reading 50 years ago because they HAD to.