Whole-Language High Jinks: When "Scientifically-Based Reading Instruction" Isn't - Louisa Moats

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Our IFERI organisation strives to inform about evidence-based teaching practices and programmes - and to warn about practices and programmes that go under the guise of being evidence-informed but are seriously worrying on close scrutiny.

It is so important with regard to reading instruction in the English language (because of its particularly complex and challenging 'alphabetic code') that people in the position of educating others (be they teacher-trainers, teachers, tutors, parents) are equipped to know and understand the findings of an extensive body of international research conducted over many years. It is also fundamentally important that education policy shapers and curriculum writers also take on board fully the research findings to guide educators in their provision.

Equipped with accurate information, policy makers and educators are therefore more informed and forearmed to be able to review, evaluate and compare programmes, practices and training provision advisedly.

Dr Louisa Moats, member of IFERI's Advisory Group, has worked exceptionally hard over many years to equip others with the kind of information they need to make decisions about 'which' content and material to use to support them in their quest to educate the next generation.

See: http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED498005

Whole-Language High Jinks: How to Tell When "Scientifically-Based Reading Instruction" Isn't

Moats, Louisa

Thomas B. Fordham Institute

In this practitioners' guide, a recognized reading expert explains how educators, parents, and concerned citizens can spot ineffective reading programs that may hide under the "scientifically-based" banner. Although the term "whole language" is not commonly used today, programs based on its premises remain popular. These approaches may pay lip service to reading science, but they fail to incorporate the content and instructional methods proven to work best with students learning to read. Some districts openly shun research-based practices, while others fail to provide clear, consistent leadership for principals and teachers, who are left to reinvent reading instruction, school by school. The purpose of this guide is to help educators and parents spot programs that truly are research based -- and those that are not. Moats exposes scientifically untenable practices in reading instruction, including: (1) use of memorization, picture cues, and contextual guessing for teaching word recognition instead of direct, systematic teaching of decoding and comprehension skills; (2) substitution of teacher modeling and reading aloud for explicit, organized instruction; (3) rejection of systematic and explicit phonics, spelling, or grammar instruction; (4) confusion of phonemic awareness with phonics; (5) reliance on leveled and trade books to organize instruction; and (6) use of whole-language approaches for English language learners. The author suggests ways of separating good from poor programs and explains that good reading programs: (1) use valid screening measures to find children who are at risk and provide them with effective, early instruction in phonology and oral language; in word recognition and reading fluency; and in comprehension and writing skills; (2) interweave several components of language (such as speech sounds, word structure, word meaning, and sentence structure) into the same lessons; (3) build fluency in both underlying reading skills and text reading, using direct methods such as repeated readings of the same text; (4) incorporate phonemic awareness into all reading instruction, rather than treating it as an isolated element; (5) go beyond the notion of phonics as the simple relationship between letters and sounds to include lessons on word structure and origins; (6) build vocabulary from the earliest levels by exposing students to a broad, rich curriculum; and (7) support reading comprehension by focusing on a deep understanding of topic and theme rather than just a set of strategies and gimmicks. Document includes a foreword by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Martin A. Davis, Jr. (Contains 50 endnotes and 1 table.)

Thomas B. Fordham Foundation & Institute. 1701 K Street NW Suite 1000, Washington, DC 20006. Tel: 202-223-5452; Fax: 202-223-9226; e-mail: backtalk@edexcellence.net; Web site: http://www.edexcellence.net/foundation/ ... /index.cfm

The question that should concern us all is what is the state of play regarding official policies, teacher-training, teaching provision and published educational material and guidance wherever the English language is taught whether as the main or additional language.

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

An example of materials that have caused particular concern in America includes the work of Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell - proponents of methods underpinning the Reading Recovery programme.

Reading Recovery is the most well-known intervention programme used widely internationally - often entrenched in leading universities and often paid for by some form of public funding. We have numerous threads and references to IFERI's worries about the continued popularity and use of the Reading Recovery programme.

Molly de Lemos, IFERI committee member, kindly flagged up the following information about Fountas and Pinnell taken from Louisa Moats' paper Whole Language Lives On: The Illusion of Balanced Reading Instruction, at http://www.ldonline.org/article/6394/

Whole-language incarnations, such as Reading Recovery, covertly embody whole-language ideas.

The success and persistence of Reading Recovery (RR) exemplifies the power of ideology over evidence. RR is an expensive, first grade, one-on-one tutorial intervention approach that is compatible with whole-language ideas. It is promoted by a parent institute in Ohio that was founded to disseminate the ideas of Marie Clay, a New Zealand educator. Within a structured lesson format, RR embraces many whole-language premises.50 The leaders of RR in the United States, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, are popular proponents of "guided reading" approaches and other classroom extensions of RR. In a 1999 newsletter from their institute, they describe a typical lesson, claiming that it is designed to build the competencies endorsed by the National Research Council's 1998 report on preventing reading difficulties in young children.51 In the same piece, Fountas and Pinnell endorse running records, predictable texts, incidental phonics instruction, teaching children to guess at words from context and initial letter, the importance of cueing systems, and decoding by analogy. They argue that there should be no predetermined sequence for decoding instruction; decoding should be taught as students compose their own sentences and stories.

New Zealand Professor William Tunmer and his colleagues have been carefully critical of RR for a decade, producing one study after another that illuminates the flaws of the Reading Recovery approach. Tunmer's group most recently conducted research commissioned by the New Zealand Ministry of Education and presented at the American Educational Research Association.52They asked basic questions that have never been systematically investigated by the promoters who profit from the program: Who succeeds with RR? Who does not? Are there short-term or long-term benefits? Will other approaches be more effective? Is the expense justified? What happens to the students who do not succeed?

Their findings, obtained under controlled and well-designed conditions of scientific investigation, were consistent with previous studies. Success in RR was a function of students' entering phonological abilities. Participation in the program did not eliminate or reduce phonological deficiencies. Students with phonological difficulties did poorly. The program did not produce accelerated reading performance. One year later, the children's reading was about one year below age-appropriate levels, even though they had progressed through the sequence of books used in the RR program. Children who had not progressed well showed declines in reading self-concept after RR, more negative perceptions of their reading and spelling ability, and problems with academic self-concept a year later. They also had more classroom behavior problems. In conjunction with previous studies, Tunmer's group concluded that RR may be more effective if greater emphasis is placed on development and use of word-level skills and strategies involving phonological information. Tunmer has reported several times that direct, systematic instruction in sound-symbol decoding is more effective than the incidental instruction used by RR. In one study, the RR approach was 37 percent less efficient than the direct, systematic approach because letter-to-phoneme knowledge is primarily responsible for driving the development of word-recognition skills.
53
Have these reports caused RR's promoters or consumers to change their rationale, methodology, student-assessment practices, or requirements for teacher training? Evidently not. Although individuals and training sites may differ, the official line from RR leaders remains virtually the same as it has been for two decades. The institute continues to teach a flawed conception of reading psychology and a methodology that would be significantly improved if it were aligned with the results of research. Regrettably, this has not happened. The resistance to change is difficult to understand, but it may simply reflect the expectation by RR leaders that consumers will not care about the research. So far, they have been right.

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

On the topic of the nature and content of some published material of Fountas and Pinnell, blogger Alison Clarke of Spelfabet had this to say in her review. Interestingly, although Alison does not have personal experience of using the books she reviews, nevertheless equipped with a deep understanding of the research findings plus many years of experience of working with children with literacy difficulties, Alison has been able to evaluate the usefulness, and the basis, of the Fountas and Pinnell reading books, see here (plus, do read the readers's comments as they reveal much about reading instruction practices too!):

http://www.spelfabet.com.au/2014/12/fou ... ervention/

Fountas and Pinnell Leveled Literacy Intervention

30 Replies

A few people have asked me what I think of Fountas and Pinnell’s Leveled Literacy Intervention, as this program seems to now be widely used in my local schools.

I haven’t used it myself, but had a brief browse through some of its readers for absolute beginners the other day, and here’s what I found:

Reading by memorising and picture-guessing

Book 1 from Level A of Leveled Literacy Intervention is called “Waking up”.

This blog post originally included photos of some of the pages in this book, but the publisher wrote to me on 2 April 2015 asking me to take both text and pictures down for copyright reasons. Without them, it will be a little harder to make sense of this blog post, but I will paraphrase the text and you can imagine the pictures:

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Whilst we are looking at some of Louisa Moats' and Alison Clarke's contribution to bring information to the public domain, see Alison's update blog posting about Reading Recovery - and how the literacy results in schools can change substantially on changes of programmes and practice - here:

http://www.spelfabet.com.au/2015/03/rea ... revisited/

Reading Recovery revisited

Two years ago I wrote a blog post about Reading Recovery, after two children in their fourth year of schooling were referred to me with the reading and spelling skills of the average six-year-old.

Both had done Reading Recovery, but it obviously hadn't worked.

When I read about what Reading Recovery entails, it was obvious why not.

Only five minutes of each half-hour daily Reading Recovery session involves work on sounds (phonemes) and spellings (graphemes), the areas in which these students (and most young strugglers) needed most help, just to be able to get words off and onto the page.

The rest of the session involves activities that are unlikely to be of much benefit to such learners. Some of the strategies encouraged, like guessing from pictures, context or first letters, are counter-productive.

I kept thinking about these students this week while listening to US literacy expert Louisa Moats talking about the need to improve literacy instruction in schools, and make sure children like these don't fall through the cracks.

Do read the full post and see the results in a school from a change of provision to evidence-informed practice!


And for your convenience, here is another review by Alison via her blog, this time for the well-known PM Readers - also designed on the basis of the discredited multi-cueing reading strategies which involve so much guessing new and unknown words rather than decoding the new and unknown words on the page:

http://www.spelfabet.com.au/2016/02/lev ... d-reading/

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

For your convenience, I'm linking this thread to other threads featuring the use of Reading Recovery and the Book Bands cataloguing system for levelling school reading books:

http://www.iferi.org/iferi_forum/viewto ... ?f=2&t=410

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

I'm linking to another thread which is directly related to this one - which starts with comments from Dick Schutz and includes research summaries and references supplied by Kerry Hempenstall:


http://www.iferi.org/iferi_forum/viewto ... ?f=2&t=669