[Reading-hall-of-fame] Re: ILA on phonics
Jan Dole
jan.dole at utah.edu
Mon Jul 22 04:58:08 BST 2019
Hi All,
I was a waitress at Brighams in Harvard Square, a college student studying psychology, in the late 1960s and would have been unaware had I served Jeanne Chall who was working in the halls of Harvard across the away. As I was waitressing and studying in school, Chall was teaching and writing her now classic and prescient text, Learning to Read: The Great Debate, published in 1967. Nineteen sixty-seven.
Chall’s book came out of a scholar’s brilliant analysis of a pedagogical issue that had generated decades of frustration, angst, indeed perturbation among parents and teachers in schools (see, for example, Flesch’s 1950’s Why Johnny Can’t Read). Following Chall’s book, in 1985, Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, and Wilkinson’s Becoming a Nation of Readers called for a balanced approach to beginning reading instruction that included phonics as part of it. Anderson et al.’s book was especially useful as it presented the research but also dealt with more complex issues related to classroom instruction. Then, in 1991, Marilyn Adams’ now classic Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print shed further theoretical and empirical light on the issue, followed a decade later with the National Reading Panel’s meticulous and seminal report of the evidence-base. More recently, books by the educational psychologists Dehaene (2009), Seidenberg (2017), and Willingham (2017) have confirmed, expanded and elaborated on what Chall reported so long ago.
And, here we are over 50 years later, still in the muck.
It seems to me that the important questions that remain around phonics instruction are procedural and conditional in nature, not declarative. I honestly have no interest in reading more about the Reading Wars. For me, and I know for other members of the RHF, this issue is settled.
Please understand that I report my views here in a respectful manner. It’s just that repeating the Reading Wars, accompanied by ideas about the seemingly nefarious motives of others, seems like a waste of time.
Jan, current secretary of the RHF
On Jul 21, 2019, at 4:35 PM, P Pearson <ppearson at berkeley.edu<mailto:ppearson at berkeley.edu>> wrote:
To be clear about where I think I stand:
I am not objecting to the content. In fact I agree with a lot of it (85%) in terms of the evidence base as I know it from NRP, BNR, the Adams BtoR book (which I liked at the time and continue to like) and the earlier European reports that Greg Brooks shared with us. I just don't understand 2 things:
1. How this becomes a policy document of the LRP/IRA without some official act of endorsement, and
2. Who speaks on behalf of ILA and LRP (since it appears to be endorsed by them) on matters of polic--and especially who speaks to the press.
In short, I worry about the process by which a position becomes policy and how it gets represented in the press.
I will stop sharing this with RHF and move my complaint to ILA, which is the organization about which I hold these concerns.
pdp
On Sun, Jul 21, 2019 at 6:17 PM Diane Lapp <lapp at sdsu.edu<mailto:lapp at sdsu.edu>> wrote:
Hello,
Let me clear up the process for being invited to write a Brief. As the chair of the LRP I survey the Board and the Panel asking for topics for Briefs and authors to write them. I also survey What’s Hot topics. I then compile a list of topics and possible authors and again submit the list to the Board and the Panel. They revise or change the topics and possible authors. Once finalized I send invitations.
Authors do not have to be members of the Panel. This is not a new process. I believe this process must have been established from the onset of the LRP because this is how it was suggested to me by the previous Panel chair.
Wiley Blevins, who I believe studied with Linnea Ehri, has written and spoken quite a bit about phonics instruction and he was highly recommended by both groups to write this Brief.
Please let me restate what Moody McKeown said regarding the Brief.
“ Please consider:
* The report is not intended as a broad overview on developing reading ability. It is a Brief (as per the title) and its purpose was to communicate on phonics because the questions of whether and which phonics instruction should occur have come to the fore (again).
* Second, the report does not ignore other aspects of reading, including for example:
* “Of course, equal amounts of time need to be spent on teaching the meanings of these words,”
* Citing the need for “application to authentic reading and writing experiences.”
* “The goal of phonics instruction is to develop students’ ability to read connected text independently.”
I understand the frustration of not seeing a full representation of literacy portrayed, but that is not the purpose of this ILA communication."
I hope this adds light to the process, intent,and author's qualification.
Please send to me any topics and possible author names for future ILA Briefs that you believe need to be written. I will be happy to add them to a new list to share with the Board and the Panel.
Best regards,
Diane Lapp
On Jul 20, 2019, at 3:46 PM, P Pearson <ppearson at berkeley.edu<mailto:ppearson at berkeley.edu>> wrote:
Different issue...
Just so I know... the last page of this brief lists the members of the LRP. Am I to conclude that the content of the brief has been reviewed and endorsed by the LRP?
David
On Sat, Jul 20, 2019 at 6:42 PM Shanahan, Timothy E <shanahan at uic.edu<mailto:shanahan at uic.edu>> wrote:
Judith—
I only skimmed your letter, but I noticed that you failed to mention morphology, epistemology, motivation, evolutionary language studies, neurology, phrenology, text structure, epidemiology, morality, or any of the dozens of other topics that could have been mentioned.
Given this highly revealing failure, I don’t see how anyone could take this criticism seriously given its lack of proper contextualization. Obviously, there is no way that anyone can ever abstract a single idea and focus on it for a few pages profitably, so writing anything on literacy (including this kind of criticism) is reductionist and misleading.
I don’t think your letter gave enough weight to the empirical research that has been done with beginning readers—and can’t imagine how teaching them to decode text will prevent them in any way from a lifetime of event learning within or across disciplines. Can’t wait to read your next ethnography on that.
tim
Timothy Shanahan.
Distinguished Professor Emeritus
University of Illinois at Chicago
shanahan at uic.edu<mailto:shanahan at uic.edu>
208 W Washington St #711
Chicago, IL 60606
(312) 933-2835
www.shanahanonliteracy.com<http://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/>
From: <reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>> on behalf of Judith Green <judithlgreen at me.com<mailto:judithlgreen at me.com>>
Date: Saturday, July 20, 2019 at 4:51 PM
To: Thomas Sticht <tgsticht at gmail.com<mailto:tgsticht at gmail.com>>
Cc: "Reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:Reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>" <Reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:Reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>>
Subject: [Reading-hall-of-fame] Re: ILA on phonics
Hi Tom,
Thank you for sharing this. I skimmed it and it is scary and re-inforces my 6 decades of understanding that ILA (then IRA) did not understand how children learning language, how to analyze reading processes and practices, or how to trace developing literacy processes across time and opportunities for learning. This does not situate phonics in the more complex understandings of meaning construction, prediction of meanings from text or how literary text shape us to be particular kids of readers. This could lead those who seek phonics as the center to dismiss once again the complex nature of engaging authors in the text and learning to engage with texts.
Really does not reflect what we know about what constitutes a reading process or language processes or event learning with and through texts within and across disciplines, educational contexts or social worlds. Scares me as it seems to ligitimize one approach as READING.
Just sharing,
Judith
On Jul 20, 2019, at 2:33 PM, Thomas Sticht <tgsticht at gmail.com<mailto:tgsticht at gmail.com>> wrote:
Folks: Regarding discussions on phonics, the ILA has put out a report calling for explicit and systematic phonics instruction:
https://www.literacyworldwide.org/docs/default-source/where-we-stand/ila-meeting-challenges-early-literacy-phonics-instruction.pdf
Tom Sticht
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Graduate School of Education
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email: ppearson at berkeley.edu<mailto:ppearson at berkeley.edu>
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