Reading in the Twentieth Century[1]
P. David Pearson
Michigan State University/CIERA
This is an account of reading instruction in the twentieth century. It will end, as do most essays written in the final year of any century, with predictions about the future. My hope is to provide an account of the past and present of reading instruction that will render predictions about the future transparent. Thus I begin with a tour of the historical pathways that have led us, at century's end, to the rocky and highly contested terrain we currently occupy in reading pedagogy. After unfolding my version of a map of that terrain, I will speculate about pedagogical journeys that lie ahead of us in a new century and a new millennium.
Even though the focus of this essay is reading pedagogy, it is my hope to connect the pedagogy to the broader scholarly ideas of each period. Two factors render this task easier for the first two-thirds of the century than for the last third. First, the sheer explosion in the number of educational ideas and movements in the last thirty years makes these connections more difficult. Second, because I have lived through this last third as a member of the reading profession, I am too close to examine current practices with the critical eye of historical distance. That realization, of course, compels me to work harder at the contextualization and to be as open and as comprehensive as possible in considering alternative explanations of recent events in the history of reading instruction.
The developments in reading pedagogy over the last century suggested that it is most useful to divide the century into thirds, roughly 1900––1935, 1935–––1970, and 1970 2000. This division yields two periods of enormous intellectual and curricular activity (the first and third) and a relatively quiet period at mid-century.
To guide us in constructing our map of past and present, we will need a legend, a common set of criteria for examining ideas and practices in each period. Several candidates suggest themselves. Surely, the dominant materials used by teachers in each period will be relevant, as will the dominant pedagogical practices. Both materials and pedagogy are relatively easy to witness because they lie on the surface of instruction where they are easy to see. Other important points of comparison, such as the role of the teacher and the learner in the process of learning to read, lie beneath the instructional surface and require deeper inferences, greater interpretation, and more unpacking for observation and analysis. Finally, for each set of practices, the most difficult task will be to understand the underlying assumptions about the nature of reading and learning to read that motivate dominant practices in each period.
The rhetoric of the reformers of the mid and late nineteenth century, intellectual giants such as Horace Mann and Colonel Francis Parker,[2] would lead us to conclude that the demons of drill and practice on isolated sounds and letters had been driven out of our pedagogical temples by the year 1900. So strong was their indictment, so appealing their alternative methods of reason and meaning, that one could hardly imagine the continuation of a method as painful to both student and teacher alike as was the alphabetic approach. Yet in spite of the wonderful accounts of innovative language experience activities and integrated curriculum in the laboratory schools at Columbia and the University of Chicago,[3] alphabetic approaches still dominated the educational landscape in the United States at least through World War I. These were classic synthetic phonics approaches (learn the parts before the whole) in which, at least in the earliest stages of learning to read, students encountered, in rapid succession, letter names, then letter sounds, then syllable blending activities that were organized into tight drill and practice sequences. The synthetic phonics traditions established much earlier in the century by Noah Webster's Blue Back Speller and McGuffey's Eclectic Readers were still strongly in evidence.[4] Once the code had been cracked, students were expected to move right into works of literature, most of which were written for adults rather than children. Drill and practice continued after the primer level, but moved from letter names and sounds into other aspects of the language arts, including grammar, rhetoric, and elocution.
The role of the learner in this period was to receive the curriculum provided by the teacher and dutifully complete the drills provided. The role of the teacher was to provide the proper kinds of drill and practice. In this period being able to read meant being able to pronounce the words on the page accurately, fluently, and, for older students, eloquently.[5] The prevailing view of reading as a cognitive process was what we have come to call the simple view of reading. In the simple view, reading comprehension is thought of as the product of decoding and listening comprehension (RC = Dec * LC), and the major task of instruction is to ensure that students master the code so that comprehension can proceed more or less by listening to what you read.[6]
From 1900 to 1935 many new ideas emerged in the psychology and pedagogy of reading. These ideas had important and long-lasting consequences for reading instruction; many, in fact, are still with us on the cusp of a new century. I review several of these ideas in some detail because they provide a useful framework for understanding the reforms of later periods.
Words to letters. Several types of reform emerged (re-emerged may be a more accurate term for there are earlier iterations of each in the historical literature) to counter the evils of what most educators regarded as the mindless drill and practice of the alphabetic approach to beginning reading instruction. Despite the flurry of reform attempts, only two gathered enough momentum to survive. The first, dubbed the words-to-letters approach by Mitford Mathews,[7] introduced words in the very earliest stages and, for each word introduced, immediately asked children to decompose it into component letters.[8] Words-to-letters is the obverse of the alphabetic, or letters-to-words, approach. However, with the alphabetic approach, it shares the goal of ensuring that children learn the sound correspondences for each letter and the same set of underlying assumptions about the nature of teaching, learning, and reading. Today we would call it analytic (whole to part) phonics.
Words to reading. The second reform, which Mathews dubbed words-to-reading, later came to be known as the look-say or whole word method of teaching reading. Here, no attempt was made to analyze words into letter-sounds until a sizeable corpus of words were learned as sight words. Contrary to popular opinion, which would have us believe that phonics was never taught in the look-say approach,[9] some form of analytic phonics (a modified version of words-to-letters) usually kicked in after a corpus of a hundred or so sight words had been learned. It was different from a strict word-to-letters approach, though, because the strict requirement for decomposing each word into its component letters was dropped in favor of what might be called focused analysis. For example a teacher might group several words that start with the letter f (e.g., farm, fun, family, fine, and first) and ask students to note the similarity between the initial sounds and letters in each word. As it turned out, this approach (a combination of look-say with analytic phonics) persevered to become the "conventional wisdom" from 1930-1970.
A potpourri. Beyond these, there were a host of specialized programs described by various scholars at the turn of the century.[10] For example, no less than six specialized alphabets appeared in this period, each designed to make the task of learning to read easier by employing a temporary alphabet that created a one-to-one letter-sound match for young readers. George Farnham designed what may have been the first truly meaning-based approach to beginning reading; it was a whole sentence approach in which a series of single pictures were matched directly to a sentence describing its content (e.g., There are three eggs on the table). Finally, numerous examples of the use of group-composed language experience stories as young readers' first texts appeared, though this approach did not gather much momentum until after World War II.[11]
Testing and the scientific movement. Reading was influenced by a host of developments during this period. For example, reading performance, like most other educational phenomena, became the object of scientific examination and systematic testing relatively early in the twentieth century.[12] Starting with the work of Edward L. Thorndike and William S. Gray, the period from roughly the first to the second World War witnessed the development of numerous reading assessments.[13] The first published reading assessment, circa 1914, was an oral reading assessment created by Gray (who eventually became a pre-eminent scholar in the reading field and the senior author of the country's most widely used reading series). However, most reading assessments developed in the first third of this century focused on the relatively new construct of silent reading. Unlike oral reading, which had to be tested individually and required that teachers judge the quality of responses, silent reading comprehension and rate could be tested in group settings and scored without recourse to professional judgment, (only stop watches and multiple choice questions were needed). Thus it fit the demands for efficiency and scientific objectivity, themes that were part of the emerging scientism of the period. Significant developments in reading comprehension would occur in the second third of the century, but assessment would remain a psychometric rather than a cognitive construct until the cognitive revolution of the early 1970s. When comprehension was implemented in school curricula, the same infrastructure of tasks used to create test items was used to create instructional and practice materials—finding main ideas, noting important details, determining sequence of events, cause-effect relations, comparing and contrasting, and drawing conclusions.[14]
Text difficulty and readability. Text difficulty, codified as readability, emerged as an important research area and curricular concept in the first half of this century. Unlike the developments in testing, readability was grounded in child-centered views of pedagogy dating back to theorists such as Pestalozzi, Froebel, and Herbart and championed by the developmental psychology emerging in the 1920s and 30s.[15] The motive in developing readability formulas was to present children with texts that matched their interests and developmental capacities rather than to baffle them with abridged versions of adult texts. The first readability formula, created to gauge the grade placement of texts, appeared in 1923, and it was followed by some 80 additional formulas over the next forty years until the enterprise drew to a close in the late 1960s.[16] Irrespective of particular twists in individual formulas, each more or less boiled down to a sentence difficulty factor, typically instantiated as average sentence length, and a word factor, typically codified as word frequency. These formulas were critical in the production of commercial reading materials from the 1920s through the 1980s. For reasons that will become apparent later in this chapter, readability formulas did not survive the cognitive revolution in reading instruction in the 1970s and 1980s, although there are signs of their recovery in the 1990s.
Readiness. The third important curricular construct to emerge in the first third of the century was readiness. Like readability, it was grounded in developmental psychology rather than the scientific movement in education.[17] In research, the readiness movement was a search for the behavioral precursors to beginning reading acquisition: What skills or capacities must be in place before reading instruction can begin in earnest? What skills predict early reading success? The typical candidates for readiness skills were alphabet knowledge, auditory discrimination, visual discrimination, color and shape discrimination, following directions, language development, and, from time to time, kinesthetic and motor activities.[18] Despite the inclusion of a wide array of cognitive, perceptual, and linguistic variables in elaborate predictive studies, time and again knowledge of the names of the letters of the alphabet emerged as the best predictor of later reading achievement.[19] Scholars conducted studies with titles like "When Should Children Begin to Read?" and "The Necessary Mental Age for Beginning Reading."[20] Even though there was considerable controversy between those who wanted to delay formal instruction until maturation had a chance to do its work and those wanted to nudge it along with specific and explicit skills instruction, both sides shared the assumption that a formal stage of readiness preceded the acquisition of reading.
Reading skills. A fourth key curricular construct was the "reading skill" that discrete unit of the curriculum which ought to be learned by students and taught by teachers. An important related construct was the notion of a scope and sequence of skills, a linear outline of skills that if taught properly ought to lead to skilled reading. While skills have always been a part of reading instruction (witness all the bits and pieces of letter sounds and syllables in the alphabetic approach), the skill as a fundamental unit of curriculum and the scope and sequence chart as a way of organizing skills that extend across the elementary grades are twentieth century phenomena, nurtured, I would add, by the rapid expansion of commercial basal reading programs and standardized reading tests.[21]
The basal experience with skills led quite directly to two additional curriculum mainstays—the teachers manual and the workbook. Throughout the nineteenth century and at least up through the first three decades of the twentieth century, basal programs consisted almost entirely of a set of student books. Teachers relied on experience, or perhaps normal school education, to supply the pedagogy used to teach lessons with the materials. Occasionally, for students who had progressed beyond the primer to one of the more advanced readers, questions were provided to test understanding of the stories in the readers. In the early 1900s, publishers of basals began to include supplementary teaching suggestions, typically a separate section at the front or back of each book with a page or two of suggestions to accompany each selection. In one common practice of the period, publishers provided a model lesson plan for two or three stories; for later stories, they referred the teacher back to one of the models with the suggestion that they adapt it for the new story. By the 1930s, the teachers' manuals had expanded to several pages per selection.[22] The other significant development in the 1930s was the workbook, often marketed with titles like My Think and Do Book or Work Play Books.[23]
Both of these developments were symptomatic of the expansion of scope and sequence efforts: the more skills included, the more complicated the instructional routines and the greater the need for explicit directives to teachers and opportunities for students to practice the skills. From the 1930s until at least the 1980s, this approach to skills development has increased in intensity and scope. It was gradually extended beyond phonics to include comprehension, vocabulary, and study skills.[24] As I indicated earlier, the comprehension skills that made their way into basal workbooks and scope and sequence charts were virtually identical to those used to create comprehension tests. Each expansion resulted in heftier and more complex teachers' manuals and workbooks, another trend that has continued virtually unchecked since it began in the 1930s.
Remediation. Strictly speaking, remediation is a medical or psychological construct rather than a curricular construct. I have elevated it to the status of a curricular construct in this essay for the simple reason that it has exerted such a powerful influence on reading pedagogy over the past century. Beginning in the waning days of the nineteenth century and reaching its peak in the 1960s, the medical model has been a dominant force in our quest to meet the needs of those who struggle to learn to read. The hope is, and always was, that if we could just find the peaks and valleys in each child’s profile of reading skills, we could offer focused instruction that would remedy the weaknesses and bring him or her (mostly hims, as our actuarial data suggest)[25] into a kind of skill equilibrium that would enable normal reading. It was, until recently, our sole approach to meeting individual needs.
Even in the classroom, the medical model, with its emphasis on diagnosis and prescription, has been the backbone of much of our instruction. After all, if filling in the valleys in children's instructional profiles works for those most in need, why wouldn't it work just as well for those less needy of instructional intervention? Don't all children deserve this sort of attention to individual needs? Note also that this diagnostic-prescriptive approach was a comfortable, maybe even a perfect, fit with the increasing emphasis on skills and scope and sequence charts in each succeeding edition of basals of this period; it is, after all, in the various skills that the performance peaks and valleys show up.
That Colonel Parker and Horace Mann felt the need to rationalize their child-centered approaches with rhetoric detailing the evils of the dreaded alphabetic approach suggests that debate was alive and well at the beginning of the century. My account of developments in the first third of the century implies a level of consensus that is not justified. Even though most scholars accepted the new emphasis on silent reading and comprehension without much debate, they found less agreement on matters of early reading. The ubiquity of the words-to-reading approach notwithstanding, a vocal phonics lobby, complete with their own published materials, remained active throughout this period. And the concept of readiness was hotly debated, with maturationists and interventionists lining up on opposite sides.[26] That said, it must be acknowledged that the rhetoric of this period was no match for what was to come later on; the metaphor of a smoldering fire seems an apt description of the recurring curricular debate during this period.
The period that spans roughly 1935 to 1965 is best viewed as a time in which we engaged in fine-tuning and elaboration of instructional models that were born in the first third of the century. Most important, the words-to-reading approach that had started its ascendancy at the turn of the century gained increasing momentum throughout the century until, as has been documented in survey research conducted in the 1960s, over 90 percent of the students in the country were taught to read using one commercial variation of this approach or another.[27] So common was this approach that Jeanne Chall, in her classic 1967 book, Learning to Read: The Great Debate, felt comfortable describing the then prevailing approach as a set of principles, which can be roughly paraphrased as follows:[28]
- The goals of reading, from the start in grade one, should include comprehension, interpretation, and application as well as word recognition.
– Instruction should begin with meaningful silent reading of stories that are grounded in children’s experiences and interests.
– After a corpus of sight words is learned (somewhere between 50 and 100), analytic phonics instruction should begin. Phonics should be regarded as one of many cueing systems, including context and picture cues, available to children to unlock new words.
– Phonics instruction should be spread out over several years rather than concentrated in the early grades.
– Phonics instruction should be contextualized rather than isolated from real words and texts.
– The words in the early texts (grades 1–3) should be carefully controlled for frequency of use and repeated often to ensure mastery.
– Children should get off to a slow and easy start, probably through a readiness program; those not judged to be ready for formal reading instruction should experience an even longer readiness period.
– Children should be instructed in small groups.
While a few elements in her list are new, such as the early emphasis on comprehension and interpretation and the contextualization of phonics instruction, virtually all of the elements introduced in the early part of the century were included in her description of the conventional wisdom of the 1960s. A few things are missing when one compares Chall's list of principles underlying the conventional wisdom with our earlier account of the key developments through 1935. One is the role of skills in commercial reading programs. While skills did not make it onto her list of principles, it is clear from several chapters (specifically, chapters 7 and 8) in her 1967 book that she was mindful of their importance and curricular ubiquity. By the 1960s, skills lessons in the teachers' manual, accompanied by workbooks allowing students to practice the skills, were much more elaborate than in the 30s, 40s, or 50s. The other missing piece is the elaborate development of the teachers' manual. Earlier, I implied that they got bigger with each succeeding edition of the series. By the middle 1960s, that small teachers' guide section in the back of the children's book we found in the 20s and 30s had expanded to the point where the number of pages devoted to the teachers' guide equaled the number of student text pages in the upper grades and exceeded it in the primary grades.[29]
The materials of the 1960s were not fundamentally different from the materials available in the early part of the century. Students read stories and practiced skills. Text difficulty was carefully controlled in the basal reading materials published between the 1930s and the 1960s. In the earliest readers (pre-primer through first reader at least), vocabulary was sequenced in order of decreasing frequency of word usage in everyday written and oral language. Since many of the most frequent words are not regularly spelled (the, of, what, where, etc.), this frequency principle provided a good fit with the whole-word or look-say emphasis characteristic of the words-to-reading approach so dominant during this period.
Students were still the recipients, and teachers still the mediators, of the received curriculum. Meaning and silent reading were more important in the 1960s version of reading curriculum than in 1900 or 1935, as evidenced by a steady increase in the amount of time and teachers' manual space devoted to comprehension activities, but it was still not at the core of the look-say approach. When all is said and done, the underlying model of reading in the 1960s was still a pretty straightforward perceptual process; the simple view–that comprehension is the product of decoding and listening comprehension(RC = LC * Dec)–still prevailed. Readers still accomplished the reading task by translating graphic symbols (letters) on a printed page into an oral code (sounds corresponding to those letters) which was then treated by the brain as oral language. In both the look-say approach to learning sight vocabulary and its analytic approach to phonics, whether the unit of focus is a word or a letter, the basic task for the student is to translate from the written to the oral code. This view of reading was quite consistent with the prevailing instructional emphasis on skills. If sight words and phonics knowledge was what children needed to learn in order to perform the translation process, then decomposing phonics into separable bits of knowledge (letter-to-sound, or in the case of spelling, sound-to-letter, correspondences), each of which could be presented, practiced, and tested independently, was the route to helping them acquire that knowledge.
In beginning reading, the decade of the 1960s was a period of fervent activity. In the early 1960s, in an effort to settle the debate about the best way to teach beginning reading once and for all (this time with the tools of empirical scholarship rather than rhetoric), the Cooperative Research Branch of the United States Office of Education funded an elaborate collection of "First Grade Studies," loosely coupled forays into the highly charged arena of preferred approaches to beginning reading instruction.[30] While each of the studies differed from one another in the particular emphasis, most of them involved a comparison of different methods of teaching beginning reading. They were published in a brand new journal, Reading Research Quarterly, in 1966. Jeanne Chall completed her magnum opus, Learning to Read: The Great Debate, in 1967. It too had been funded in order to put the debate behind us, but Chall would use different scholarly tools to accomplish her goals. She would employ critical review procedures to examine our empirical research base, the content of our basal readers, and exemplary classroom practices. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson's Elementary and Secondary Education Act, one key plank in his Great Society platform, brought new resources for compensatory education to schools through a program dubbed Title I. And Commissioner of Education James Allen would, at decade's end, establish the national Right to Read program as a way of guaranteeing that right to each child in America. The country was clearly focused on early reading, and many were optimistic that we would find answers to the questions about teaching reading that had vexed us for decades, even centuries.
Chall's book and the First Grade Studies had an enormous impact on beginning reading instruction and indirectly on reading pedagogy more generally. One message of the First Grade Studies was that just about any alternative, when compared to the business-as-usual basals (which served as a common control in each of 20+ separate quasi-experimental studies), elicited equal or greater performance on the part of first graders (and, as it turned out, second graders).[31] It did not seem to matter much what the alternative was-language experience, a highly synthetic phonics approach, a linguistic approach (control the text so that young readers are exposed early on only to easily decodable words grouped together in word families, such as the -an family, the -at family, the -ig family, etc.), a special alphabet (i.e., the Initial Teaching Alphabet), or a even basals infused with a heavier-than-usual dose of phonics right up front–they were all the equal or the better of the ubiquitous basal. A second message, one that was both sent and received, was that the racehorse mentality of studies that compare one method against another had probably run its course. By accepting this message, the reading research community was free to turn its efforts to other, allegedly more fruitful, issues and questions–the importance of the teacher quite irrespective of method, the significance of site, and the press of other aspects of the curriculum such as comprehension and writing.[32] With the notable exception of the Follow-Through Studies in the 1970s, which are only marginally related to reading, it would take another twenty-five years for large-scale experiments to return to center stage in reading.[33]
In spite of a host of other important recommendations, most of which had some short term effect, the ultimate legacy of Chall's book reduces to just one–that early attention to the code in some way, shape, or form must be reinfused into early reading instruction. For the record, Chall recommended five broad changes: (a) make a necessary change in method (to an early emphasis on phonics of some sort), (b) re-examine current ideas about content (focus on the enduring themes in folk tales), (c) re-evaluate grade levels (increase the challenge at every grade level), (d) develop new tests (both single component tests and absolute measures with scores that are independent of the population taking the test), and (e) improve reading research (including its accessibility). Each of these recommendations will be discussed later.
The look-say basals that had experienced virtually uninterrupted progress from 1930 to 1965 never quite recovered from the one-two punch delivered by Chall's book and the First Grade Studies in 1967. Given the critical sacking they took from Chall and the empirical thrashing they took from the First Grade Studies, one might have expected one of the pretenders to the early reading throne, documented so carefully in the First Grade Studies, to assume the mantle of the new conventional wisdom in the years that followed. Ironically, it was the basals themselves, albeit in a radically altered form, that captured the marketplace of the 1970s and 1980s. They accomplished this feat by overhauling themselves to adapt to a changing market shaped by these two important scholarly efforts. Basal programs that debuted in the five years after Chall's book appeared were radically different from their predecessors. Most notably, phonics that had been relegated to a skill to be taught contextually after a hefty bank of sight words had been committed to memory, was back–from day one of grade one–in the series that hit the market in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Surprisingly, it was not the highly synthetic alphabetic approach of the previous century or the remedial clinics of the 1930s (which one might have expected from a reading of Chall's book). It is better described as an intensification and repositioning (to grade one) of the analytic phonics that had been taught in the latter part of grade 1 and in grades 2 to 4 in the look-say basals of the 1960s.[34] Equally significant, there was a change in content, at least in grade one. Dick and Jane and all their assorted pairs of competing cousins–Tom and Susan, Alice and Jerry, Jack and Janet–were retired from the first grade curriculum and replaced by a wider array of stories and characters; by the early 1970s, more of the selections were adaptations of children's literature rather than stories written to conform to a vocabulary restriction or a readability formula..
It is hard to determine how seriously educators and publishers took Chall's other three recommendations. For example, in the basals that came out after Chall, the grade 1 books (the preprimers, primers, and readers) were considerably more challenging than their immediate predecessors, mainly by virtue of a much more challenging grade 1 vocabulary–more words introduced much earlier in the grade 1 program.[35] One series even divided its new vocabulary words into words that ought to be explicitly introduced as sight words and those words, which they dubbed decodable, that should be recognized by the students by applying the phonics skills they had been taught up to that point in the program.[36] Beyond grade 1, however, changes in difficulty were much less visible, and no appreciable increase in the readability scores of these later levels occurred.
In testing, a major change toward single component tests did occur, although it is difficult to attribute this change solely to Chall’s recommendation. Beginning in the early 70s and running through at least the late 80s, each successive edition of basal programs brought an increase in the number of single component tests–tests for each phonics skill (all the beginning, middle and final consonant sounds, vowel patterns, and syllabication), tests for each comprehension skill (main idea, finding details, drawing conclusions, and determining cause-effect relations) at every grade level, tests for alphabetical order and using the encyclopedia, and just about any other skill one might think of.
But other events and movements of the period also pointed toward single component tests. For one, owing to the intellectual contributions of Benjamin Bloom and John Carroll, the mastery learning movement[37] was gathering its own momentum during the late 1960s. According to proponents of mastery learning, if a complex domain could be decomposed into manageable subcomponents, each of which could be taught and learned to some predetermined level of mastery, then most, if not all, students should be able to master the knowledge and skills in the domain. Second, criterion-referenced tests were spawned during this same period.[38] The logic of criterion-referenced assessment was that some predetermined level of mastery (say 80% correct), not the average for a group of students in a given grade level, ought to be the reference point for determining how well a student was doing on a test. A third construct from this period, curriculum-embedded assessment,[39] held that students should be held to account for precisely what was needed to march successfully through a particular curriculum–no less, no more. If one could specify the scope and sequence of knowledge and skills in the curriculum and develop assessments for each, then it should be possible to guide all students through the curriculum, even if some needed more practice and support than others. One can imagine a high degree of compatibility among all three of these powerful constructs–mastery learning, criterion-referenced assessment, and curriculum-embedded assessment. All three provide comfortable homes for single component assessments of the sort Chall was advocating.
With powerful evidence from mastery learning's application to college students,[40] publishers of basal programs and some niche publishers began to create and implement what came to be called skills management systems.[41] In their most meticulous application, these systems became the reading program. Students took a battery of mastery tests, practiced those skills they had not mastered (usually by completing worksheets that looked remarkably like the tests), took tests again, and continued through this cycle until they had mastered all the skills assigned to the grade level (or until the year ended). Unsurprisingly, the inclusion of these highly specific skill tests had the effect of increasing the salience of workbooks, worksheets, and other skill materials that students could practice on in anticipation of (and as a consequence of) mastery tests. Thus the basals of this period were comprised of two parallel systems: (1) the graded series of anthologies filled with stories and short non-fiction pieces for oral and silent reading and discussion, and (2) an embedded skills management system to guide the development of phonics, comprehension, vocabulary, and study skills.
Chall's last recommendation was to improve reading research. Research had been too inaccessible (to the very audience of practitioners who most needed it), too narrow in scope, and too dismissive of its past. All that needed to change, she argued. As I will detail in the next section, reading research changed dramatically, but not necessarily in a direction Chall envisioned.
One other change in basal reading programs in this period worth noting was the technology to place reduced facsimiles of student text pages onto a page where it could be surrounded by teaching suggestions and questions for guided reading. This was hailed as a major advance in the utility of manuals because teachers did not have to turn back and forth from student text to the teacher's section in order to guide the reading of a story.
This was the scene, then, in the early 1970s, just as the reading field was about to embark on a new curricular trek that continues even today. If the middle third of the century was characterized by a steady, unwavering march toward the ever-increasing prominence of a particular philosophy and set of curricular practices encapsulated in ubiquitous basals that championed a look-say approach,[42] the early 1970s brought major challenges in philosophy and pedagogy–harder texts, more phonics, and a skill development program unlike anything seen before.[43]
But even with some alterations in the materials available and some new pedagogical twists, the pedagogy of the early 1970s revealed little fundamental change in the underlying assumptions about the role of the teacher and learner or the nature of reading and writing. Teachers, armed with their basal manuals, controlled the learning situation as never before, and students continued to play the role of passive recipient of the knowledge and skills mediated by the teacher. Most important, reading was still a fundamentally perceptual process of translating letters into sounds. If anything, the perceptual nature of reading was made more salient than in the 1950s and 1960s by the return of phonics to center stage.
Somewhere during this period–the exact point of departure is hard to fix–we began a journey that would take us through many new twists and turns on the way to different landscapes than we had visited before. Along the way we confronted fundamental shifts in our views of reading and writing and started to create a variety of serious curricular alternatives to the conventional wisdom of the 1970s. Just beyond the horizon lay even more unfamiliar and rockier territory–the conceptual revolutions in cognition, sociolinguistics, and philosophy that would have such far-reaching consequences for reading curriculum and pedagogy of the 1980s and 1990s.
Reading became an ecumenical scholarly commodity; it was embraced by scholars from many different fields of inquiry. The first to take reading under their wing were the linguists, who wanted to convince us that reading was a language process closely allied to its sibling language processes of writing, speaking, and listening. Then came the psycholinguists and the cognitive psychologists, followed soon by the sociolinguists, the philosophers, the literary critics, and the critical theorists. It is not altogether clear why reading has attracted such interest from scholars in so many other fields. One explanation is that reading is considered by so many to be a key to success in other endeavors in and out of school; this is often revealed in comments like, "Well if you don't learn to read, you can't learn other things for yourself." Another is that scholars in these other disciplines thought that the educationists had got it all wrong, and it was time for another group to have their say. Whatever the reasons, the influence of these other scholarly traditions on reading pedagogy is significant; in fact, the pedagogy of the 1980s and 1990s cannot be understood without a firm grounding in the changes in world view that these perspectives spawned.
Linguistics. In 1962, Charles Fries published a book entitled Linguistics and Reading. In it, he outlined what he thought the teaching of reading would look like if it were viewed from the perspective of linguistics. In the same decade, several other important books and articles appeared, each carrying essentially the same message: The perspective of the modern science of linguistics, we were told, would privilege different models and methods of teaching reading. It would tell us, for example, that some things do not need to be taught explicitly because the oral language takes care of them more or less automatically. For example, the three different pronunciations of –ed, (as in nabbed, capped, and jaded), need not be taught as a reading skill because our oral language conventions determine the pronunciation almost perfectly. English in its oral form demands the voiced alternative /d/ after a voiced consonant such as /b/. It demands the unvoiced alternative /t/ after an unvoiced consonant, such as /p/, and it requires the syllabic version /¶d/ after either /d/ or /t/. To teach these rules, which are very complex, would likely make things more confusing than simply allowing the oral language to do its work without fanfare.
Another linguistic insight came to us from the transformational generative grammars that replaced conventional structural linguistics as the dominant paradigm within the field during the 60s and 70s. Noam Chomsky published two revolutionary treatises during this period—Syntactic Structures in 1957 and Aspects of a Theory of Syntax in 1965. With these books Chomsky revolutionized the field of linguistics and paved the way, theoretically, for equally dramatic changes in the way that psychologists thought about and studied the processes of language comprehension and language acquisition.
Chomsky also provided the basis for a nativist view about language acquisition—a view that holds that humans come to the world "wired" to acquire the language of the community into which they are born. He and others drew this inference from two basic and contrasting facts about language: (a) language is incredibly complex and (b) language is acquired quite easily and naturally by children living in an environment in which they are simply exposed to (rather than taught!) the language of their community well before they experience school. Only a view that children are equipped with some special cognitive apparatus for inferring complex rules could explain this remarkable feat.
Because our prevailing views of both reading comprehension and reading acquisition were derived from the same behavioristic assumptions that Chomsky and his peers had attacked, reading scholars began to wonder whether those assumptions would hold up when we applied similar perspectives and criticisms to analyses of written language comprehension and acquisition.[45]
Psycholinguistics. During the decade after the publication of Syntactic Structures, a new field of inquiry, psycholinguistics, evolved. In its first several years of existence, the field devoted itself to determining whether the views of linguistic competence and language acquisition that had been set forth by Chomsky and his colleagues could serve as psychological models of language performance. While the effort to develop a simple mapping from Chomsky to models of language performance waned after a few unsatisfactory attempts, the field of psycholinguistics and the disposition of psychologists to study language with complex theoretical tools had been firmly established.
Particularly influential on our thinking about reading were scholars of language acquisition[46] who established the rule-governed basis of language learning. In contrast to earlier views, these psycholinguists found that children did not imitate written language; rather, as members of a language community, they were participants in language and invented for themselves rules about how oral language worked. This insight allowed researchers to explain such constructions as "I eated my dinner" and "I gots two foots." Roger Brown and his colleagues showed conclusively that children were active learners who inferred rules and tested them out. Much as Kenneth Goodman would later show with written language, "mistakes," especially overgeneralizations, in oral language could be used to understand the rule systems that children were inventing for themselves.
The analogy with oral language development was too tempting for reading educators to resist. Several adopted something like a nativist framework in studying the acquisition of reading, asking what the teaching of reading and writing would look like if we assumed that children can learn to read and write in much the same way as they learn to talk—that is, naturally. What would happen if we assumed that children were members of a community in which reading and writing are valued activities that serve important communication functions? What if we assumed that the most important factors in learning to read and write were having genuine reasons for communicating in these media and having access to a data base in which there was so much print and talk about print that students could discover the patterns and regularities on their own, much as they do when they discover the patterns and regularities of oral language? While the seminal work involved in putting these assumptions to empirical tests would wait for a couple of decades, the seeds of doubt about our perceptually based views of reading acquisition were firmly planted by the middle 1960s.
Two influential individuals, Kenneth Goodman and Frank Smith, led the reading field in addressing these kinds of questions. In 1965, Goodman demonstrated that the errors children made while reading orally were better viewed as windows into the inner workings of their comprehension processes than as mistakes to be eradicated. He found that the mistakes that children made while reading in context revealed that they were trying to make sense of what they read. In another seminal 1967 piece, Reading: A Psycholinguistic Guessing Game, Goodman laid out the elements of language that he thought that readers employed as they constructed meaning for the texts they encountered. In reading, he conjectured, readers use three cue systems to make sense of text: syntactic cues, semantic cues, and grapho-phonemic cues. By attending to all of these cue sources, Goodman contended, readers could reduce their uncertainty about unknown words or meanings, thus rendering both the word identification and comprehension processes more manageable.[47]
Smith's revolutionary ideas were first presented in 1971 in a book entitled, Understanding Reading.[48] In this seminal text, Smith argued that reading was not something one was taught, but rather was something one learned to do. Smith believed that there were no special prerequisites to learning to read, indeed, that reading was simply making sense of one particular type of information in our environment. As such, reading was what one learned to do as a consequence of belonging to a literate society. One learned to read from reading. The implication, which Smith made explicit, was that the "function of teachers is not so much to teach reading as to help children read" (pg. 3). This certainly challenged the notion of the teacher as the individual who meted out knowledge and skills to passively waiting students. For Smith, all knowing and all learning were constructive processes; individuals made sense of what they encountered based on what they already knew. [49] Even perception, he contended, was a decision-making, predictive process based on prior knowledge.
Smith also argued that reading was only incidentally visual. By that, Smith meant that being able to see was necessary but not sufficient to achieve understanding. He identified four sources of information: orthographic, syntactic, semantic, and visual, all of which he claimed were somewhat redundant, and argued that skilled readers made use of the three sources that were a part of their prior knowledge (the orthographic, syntactic, and semantic) in order to minimize their reliance on visual information. In fact, the danger in relying too heavily on visual information is that readers might lose sight of meaning.
The psycholinguistic perspective had a number of influences on reading pedagogy. First, it valued literacy experiences that focused on making meaning. This meant that many classroom activities, particularly worksheets and games, which focused on enabling skills such as specific letter-sound correspondences, syllabication activities, structural analysis skills, specific comprehension activities, or study skills were devalued. Second, it helped us to value texts for beginning readers, such as example 1 (see Table 1), in which authors relied on natural language patterns, thus making it possible for emerging readers to use their knowledge of language to predict words and meanings. This meant that texts that relied on high-frequency words in short, choppy sentences (what we have come to call basalese), as in example 2, or those based upon the systematic application of some phonics element (i.e., a decodable text), as in example 3, were correspondingly devalued.
1.Red Fox, Red Fox, what do
you see?
I see a blue bird looking at me.
Blue Bird, Blue Bird, what do you see?
I see a green frog looking at me.
Anon, anon.
2.Run, John, run.
Run to Dad.
Dad will run.
Run, Dad.
Run, John.
See them run.
3.Nat can bat.
Nat can bat with the fat bat.
The cat has the fat bat.
The rat has the fat bat.
Nat has the fat bat.
Bat the bat, Nat.
Third, the psycholinguistic perspective helped us understand the reading process and appreciate children's efforts as readers. Errors were no longer things to be corrected; instead they were windows into the workings of the child's mind, allowing both the teacher and the child to understand more about the reading process and reading strategies. Understanding miscues also helped educators focus on comprehension and appreciate risk-taking.
Fourth, psycholinguists gave us a means (miscue analysis) and a theory (reading as a constructive process) that was remarkably distinct from previous ideas about reading. The perspective made explicit links between oral and written language acquisition and helped us view reading as language rather than simply perception or behavior. In a sense, psycholinguistics continued the changes and traditions begun by the linguistic perspective; however, within the reading field, its influence was deeper and broader than its academic predecessor.
Most important, psycholinguistics affected our views of teaching and learning in a fundamental way. Reading scholars began to rethink ideas about what needed to be taught, as well as the relation between teaching and learning. So, instead of asking, "What can I teach this child so that she will eventually become a reader?", we began to ask, "What can I do to help this child as a reader?" Some teachers began to welcome all children into what Smith referred to as "The Literacy Club" as an alternative to teaching children so-called prerequisite skills.[50]
Cognitive psychology. If psycholinguistics enabled psychologists to reexamine their assumptions about language learning and understanding by placing greater emphasis on the active, intentional role of language users, cognitive psychology allowed psychologists to extend constructs such as human purpose, intention, and motivation to a greater range of psychological phenomena, including perception, attention, comprehension, learning, memory, and executive control of all cognitive process. All of these would have important consequences in reading pedagogy.
I cannot emphasize too strongly the dramatic nature of the paradigm shift that occurred within those branches of psychology concerned with human intellectual processes. The previous half-century, from roughly the teens through the fifties, had been dominated by a behaviorist perspective in psychology that shunned speculation about the inner workings of the mind. Just show us the surface-level outcomes of the processes, as indexed by overt, observable behaviors. Leave the speculation to the philosophers. That was the contextual background against which both psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology served as dialectical antagonists when they appeared on the scene in the late 60s and early 70s.
The most notable change within psychology was that it became fashionable for psychologists, perhaps for the first time since the early part of the century, to study reading.[51] And in the decade of the 1970s works by psychologists flooded the literature on basic processes in reading. One group focused on text comprehension by trying to ferret out how it is that readers come to understand the underlying structure of texts. We were offered story grammars—structural accounts of the nature of narratives, complete with predictions about how those structures impede and enhance human story comprehension. Others chose to focus on the expository tradition in text.[52] Like their colleagues interested in story comprehension, they believed that structural accounts of the nature of expository (informational) texts would provide valid and useful models for human text comprehension. And in a sense, both of these efforts worked. Story grammars did account for story comprehension. Analyses of the structural relations among ideas in an informational piece did account for text comprehension. But what neither text-analysis tradition really tackled was the relationship between the knowledge of the world that readers bring to text and comprehension of those texts. In other words, by focusing on structural rather than the ideational, or content, characteristics of texts, they failed to get to the heart of comprehension. That task, as it turned out, fell to one of the most popular and influential movements of the 70s, schema theory.
Schema theory[53] is a theory about the structure of human knowledge as it is represented in memory. In our memory, schemata are like little containers into which we deposit particular experiences that we have. So, if we see a chair, we store that visual experience in our chair schema. If we go to a restaurant, we store that experience in our restaurant schema, if we attend a party, our party schema, and so on. Clearly schema theory is linked to Piaget’s theories of development and his two types of learning, assimilation and accommodation. When we assimilate new information, we store it in an existing schema; when we accommodate new information, we modify the structure of our schemata to fit the new data. The modern iteration of schema theory also owes a debt to Frederic Bartlett, who, writing in the 1930s, used the construct of schema to explain culturally driven interpretations of stories. For Bartlett, cultural schemata for stories were so strong that they prevented listeners, whether European or native Alaskan in background, from adopting the story schema of the other culture to understand its stories. Bartlett’s account predates the current “constructivist models of cognition and learning by sixty years; and his view is as inherently constructive as those who have succeeded him. In essence, Bartlett was saying exactly what modern constructivists say—that readers and listeners actively construct meanings for texts they encounter rather than simple “receiving” meaning from the texts.[54]
Schema theory also provides a credible account of reading comprehension, which probably, more than any of its other features, accounted for its popularity within the reading field in the 1970s and 80s.[55] It is not hard to see why schema theory was so appealing to theoreticians, researchers, and practitioners when it arrived on the scene in the 1970s. First, it provides a rich and detailed theoretical account of the everyday intuition that we understand and learn what is new in terms of what we already know. Second, it also accounts for another everyday intuition about why we, as humans, so often disagree about our interpretation of an event, a story, an article, a movie, or a TV show—we disagree with one another because we approach the phenomenon with very different background experiences and knowledge. Third, it accounts for a third everyday intuition that might be called an "it's-all-Greek-to-me" experience: Sometimes we just don't have enough background knowledge to understand a new experience or text.
While these insights may not sound earthshaking after the fact, for the field of reading, and for education more generally, they were daunting challenges to our conventional wisdom. Examined in light of existing practices in the 1970s, they continued the revolutionary spirit of the linguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives. Schema theory encouraged us to ask:
What is it that my children already know? And how can I use that to help them deal with these new ideas that I would like them to know?
rather than,
What is it that they do not know? And how can I get that into their heads?
More specifically, with respect to reading comprehension, schema theory encouraged us to examine texts from the perspective of the knowledge and cultural backgrounds of our students in order to evaluate the likely connections that they would be able to make between ideas that are in the text and the schema that they would bring to the reading task. Schema theory, like the psycholinguistic perspective, also promoted a constructivist view of comprehension; all readers must, at every moment in the reading process, construct a coherent model of reading for the texts they read. The most important consequence of this constructivist perspective is that there is inherent ambiguity about where meaning resides. Does it reside in the text? In the author's mind as she set pen to paper? In the mind of each reader as she builds a model of meaning unique to her experience and reading? In the interaction between reader and text?
Sociolinguistics. Sociolinguistics as a discipline developed in parallel with psycholinguistics. Beginning with the work of William Labov, and Joan Baratz and Roger Shuy, sociolinguists had important lessons for reading scholars.[56] Mainly these lessons focused on issues of dialect and reading. Sociolinguists were finding that dialects were not ill- or half-formed variations of standard English. Instead, each dialect constituted a well-developed linguistic system in its own right, complete with rules for variations from standard English and a path of language development for its speakers. Speakers of dialects expressed linguistic differences not linguistic deficits. The goal of schooling was not, and should not be, to eradicate the dialect in the process of making each individual a speaker of standard English. Instead, sociolinguists stressed the need to find ways to accommodate children's use of their dialect while they are learning to read and write. Several proposals for achieving this accommodation were tried and evaluated. The first was to write special readers for dialect speakers. In the early 1960s, several examples of Black dialect readers appeared and, almost as rapidly, disappeared from major urban districts. They failed primarily because African-American parents did not want their children learning with "special" materials; they wanted their children to be exposed to mainstream materials used by other children.[57] The second equally unsuccessful strategy was to delay instruction in reading and writing until the oral language became more standardized. Teachers who tried this technique soon found out just how resistant and persistent early language learning can be. The third, and most successful, approach to dialect accommodation involved nothing more than recognizing that a child who translates a standard English text into a dialect is performing a remarkable feat of translation rather than making reading errors. So, an African-American child who says /pos/ when he sees post is simply applying a rule of Black English which requires a consonant cluster in ending position to be reduced to the sound of the first consonant. Unfortunately for children who speak a dialect, we, as a field, did not take the early lessons of the sociolinguists to heart. We continue to find schools in which children are scolded for using the oral language that they have spent their whole lives learning. We also continue to find children whose dialect translations are treated as if they were oral reading errors.
Prior to the advent of the sociolinguistic perspective, when educators talked about "context" in reading, they typically meant the print that surrounded particular words on a page. In the 1980's, and primarily because of the work of sociolinguists, the meaning of the word context expanded to include not only what was on the page, but what Bloome and Green referred to as the instructional, non-instructional, and home and community contexts of literacy.[58] From a sociolinguistic perspective, reading always occurred in a context, a context that was shaped by the literacy event at the same time as it shaped the event. The sociolinguistic versions of knowledge and language as socially and culturally constructed processes moved the constructivist metaphor to another plane, incorporating not only readers’ prior knowledge in the form of schemata, but also the meanings constructed by peers and by one’s cultural ancestors.
The most significant legacy of the sociolinguistic perspective was our heightened consciousness about language as a social and therefore cultural construction. Suddenly, reading was a part of a bigger and more complex world. Sociolinguists examined the role of language in school settings. For example, they pointed out that often success in reading was not so much an indication of reading "ability" per se, but of the success the individual experienced in learning how to use language appropriately in educational settings. Thus success, according to a sociolinguistic analysis, was more an index of how well children learned to "do school" than how well they could read. They contrasted the functions that language serves in school with the functions it serves outside of school and helped us rethink the role of language within the classroom. By studying the community outside of school, sociolinguists made us conscious of social, political, and cultural differences; as a result, we began to rethink our judgments of language and behavior. We saw that any judgment call we made, rather than reflecting the "right" way, simply reflected "our" way—the way we as teachers thought and talked and behaved because of the cultural situation in which we lived outside as well as inside school. By focusing on the role of community in learning, they caused many educators to rethink the competitive atmosphere of classrooms and of school labels and recommended changes within schools so that children could learn from and with each other. With these contributions from sociolinguists, it was becoming more and more apparent that reading was not only not context-free but that it was embedded in multiple contexts.
Literary theory perspective. One cannot understand the pedagogical changes in practice that occurred in the elementary reading curriculum in the 1980s without understanding the impact of literary theory, particularly reader response theory. In our secondary schools, the various traditions of literary criticism have always had a voice in the curriculum, especially in guiding discussions of classic literary works. Until the middle 1980s, the “new criticism” that had emerged in the post World War II era had dominated for several decades, and it had sent teachers and students on a search for the one “true” meaning in each text they encountered. With the emergence (some would argue the re-emergence) of reader response theories, all of which gave as much, if not more, authority to the reader than to either the text or the author, the picture, along with our practices, changed dramatically. While there are many modern versions of reader response available, the work of Louise Rosenblatt has been most influential among elementary teachers and reading educators. In the 1980s, many educators re-read (or more likely read for the first time) Rosenblatt's 1976 edition of her 1938 text, Literature as Exploration, and The Reader, the Text, The poem, which appeared in 1978. Rosenblatt argues that meaning is something that resides neither in the head of the reader (as some had previously argued) nor on the printed page (as others had argued).[59] Instead, Rosenblatt contends, meaning is created in the transaction between reader and document. This meaning, which she refers to as the poem, resides above the reader-text interaction. Meaning is therefore neither subject nor object nor the interaction of the two. Instead it is transaction, something new and different from any of its inputs and influences.[60]
While the post-Chall basal tradition continued well into the decade of the 1980s, new perspectives, and practices began to show up in classrooms, journal articles, and basal lessons in the early 1980s.
Comprehension on center stage. Comprehension, especially as a workbook activity and a follow-up to story reading, was not a stranger to the reading classrooms of the 30s through the 70s. As indicated earlier, it entered the curriculum as a story discussion tool and as a way of assessing reading competence in the first third of this century.[61] Developments during mid-century were highlighted in an earlier NSSE yearbook devoted to reading;[62] by mid-century, the infrastructure of comprehension had been elaborated extensively and infused into the guided reading and workbook task. It was a staple of basal programs when Chall conducted her famous study of early reading, and had she emphasized reading instruction in the intermediate grades rather than grade one, it would undoubtedly have been more prominent in her account.
During the late 1970s and through the decade of the 1980s comprehension found its way to center stage in reading pedagogy. Just as a nationally sponsored set of research activities (i.e., the First Grade Studies and Chall’s book) focused energy on reforms in beginning reading in the late 1960s, it was the federally funded Center for the Study of Reading, initiated in 1976, that focused national attention on comprehension. Although the Center’s legacy is undoubtedly bringing schema theory and the knowledge-comprehension relationship into our national conversation, it also supported much research on comprehension instruction, [63] including research that attempted to help students develop a repertoire of strategies for improving their comprehension.[64] This research was not limited to the Center; indeed many other scholars were equally involved in developing instructional strategies and routines during this period, including emphases on monitoring comprehension,[65] transactional strategies instruction,[66] KWL graphic organizers,[67] and, more recently, questioning the author.[68] Many of these new strategies found their way into the basals of the 1980s, which demonstrated substantially more emphasis on comprehension at all levels, including grade one.[69]
Literature-based reading. Even though selections from both classical and contemporary children’s literature have always been a staple of basal selections dating back to the nineteenth century (especially after grade 2 when the need for strict vocabulary control diminished), literature virtually exploded into the curriculum in the late 1980s. A short burst in literary content occurred after Chall’s critical account of the type of selections and the challenge of basal content; more excerpts from authentic literature appeared, even in the grade one readers. But these selections had two characteristics that had always offended those who champion the use of genuine literature—excerpting and adaptation. Rarely were whole books included; instead, whole chapters or important slices were excerpted for inclusion. And even when a whole chapter was included, it was usually adapted to (a) reduce vocabulary difficulty, (b) reduce the grammatical complexity of sentences, or (c) excise words (e.g., mild profanity) or themes that might offend important segments of the market.
Beyond basals, children’s literature played an important supplementary role in the classrooms of teachers who believed that they must engage their students in a strong parallel independent reading program. Often this took the form of each child selecting books to be read individually and later discussed with the teacher in a weekly one-on-one conference. And even as far back as the 1960s, there were a few programs which turned this individualized reading component into the main reading program.[70]
But in the late 1980s, literature was dramatically repositioned. Several factors converged to pave the way for a groundswell in the role of literature in elementary reading. Surely the resurgence of reader response theory as presented by Rosenblatt was important, as was the compatibility of the reader response theory and its emphasis on interpretation with the constructivism that characterized both cognitive and sociolinguistic perspectives. Research also played a role; in 1985, for example, in the watershed publication of the Center for the Study of Reading, Becoming a Nation of Readers, Richard Anderson and his colleagues documented the importance of “just plain reading” as a critical component of any and all elementary reading programs.[71] This is also a period that witnessed an unprecedented expansion in the number of new children’s books published annually. Finally, a few pieces of scholarship exerted enormous influence on teachers and teacher educators. Perhaps most influential was Nancie Atwell’s, In the Middle. In her account she laid out her story, as a middle school teacher, of how she invited readers, some of whom were quite reluctant, into a world of books and reading. The credibility of her experience and the power of her prose were persuasive in convincing thousands of classroom teachers that they could use existing literature and “reading workshops” to accomplish anything that a basal program could accomplish in skill development while gaining remarkable advantages in students’ literary experience.[72]
In terms of policy and curriculum, the most significant event in promoting literature-based reading was the 1988 California Reading Framework. The framework called for reading materials which contained much more challenging texts at all levels. More important, it mandated the use of genuine literature, not the dumbed-down adaptations and excerpts from children’s literature that had been the staple of basal programs for decades. Publishers responded to the call of California’s framework and produced a remarkably different product in the late 1980s and early 1990s than had ever appeared before on the basal market. [73] Gone were excerpts and adaptations, and with them almost any traces of vocabulary control. Skills that had been front and center in the basals of the 70s and 80s were relegated to appendix-like status. Comprehension questions were replaced by more interpretive, impressionistic response to literature activities. All this was done in the name of providing children with authentic literature and authentic activities to accompany it. The logic was that if we could provide students with real literature and real motivations for reading it, much of what is arduous about skill teaching and learning will take care of itself.
Book Clubs and literature circles are the most visible instantiations of the literature based reading movement.[74] The underlying logic of Book Clubs is the need to engage children in the reading of literature in the same way as adults engage one another in voluntary reading circles. Such voluntary structures are likely to elicit greater participation, motivation, appreciation, and understanding on the part of students. Teachers are encouraged to establish a set of “cultural practices” (ways of interacting and supporting one another) in their classrooms to support students as they make their way into the world of children’s literature. These cultural practices offer students both the opportunity to engage in literature and the skills to ensure that they can negotiate and avail themselves of that opportunity.
Process writing. In the middle 1980s, writing achieved a stronghold in the elementary language arts curriculum that it had never before held. Exactly why and how it achieved that position of prominence is not altogether clear, but certain explanations are plausible. Key understandings from the scholarship of the 70s and 80s paved the way. Functionality associated with the sociolinguistic perspective, process writing approaches encouraged teachers to ask students to write for genuine audiences and purposes. The psycholinguistic notion of “error” as a window into children’s thinking allowed us to worry less about perfect spelling and grammar and more about the quality of the thinking and problem solving children were producing. The general acceptance of constructivist epistemologies disposed us to embrace writing as the most transparently constructive of all pedagogical activities. All of these constructs allowed us as a profession to take a different developmental view on writing, one consistent with the emergent literacy perspective that was gaining strength in early childhood literacy. We came to view all attempts to make sense by setting pen to paper, however deviant from adult models, as legitimate and revealing in their own right if examined through the eyes of the child writer. Led by Donald Graves and Lucy Calkins, we revolutionized our views of early writing development.[75] Finally, we began to see reading and writing as inherently intertwined, each supporting the other.
Integrated instruction. It is impossible to document the history of reading instruction in the twentieth century without mentioning the ways in which we have attempted to integrate reading with other curricular phenomena. Two stances have dominated our thinking about how to integrate reading into other curricula—integration of reading with the other language arts (writing, speaking, and listening) and integration across subject matter boundaries (with mathematics, science, social studies, art, and music). Like literature-based reading, both senses of integration have long been a part of the thinking about elementary reading curriculum.[76] In fact, a look back to the progressivism of Dewey and other scholars in the first part of this century reveals substantial rhetoric about teaching and learning across curricular boundaries.[77] From that early spurt of energy until the late 1980s, however, integrations assumed a minor role in American reading instruction. In basal manuals, for example, integration was portrayed almost as an afterthought until the late 1980s; it appeared in the part of the lesson that follows the guided reading and skills instruction sections, signaling that these are things that a teacher can get to “if time permits.” Things changed in the late 1980s. For one, integrated curriculum fit the sociolinguistic emphasis on language in use—the idea that language, including reading, is best taught and learned when it is put to work in the service of other purposes, activities, and learning efforts. Similarly, with the increase in importance of writing, especially early writing of the sort discussed by Graves and his colleagues,[78] it was tempting to champion the idea of integrated language arts instruction. In fact, the constructivist metaphor is nowhere played out as vividly and transparently as in writing, leading many scholars to use writing as a model for the sort of constructive approach they wanted to promote in readers. The notion was that we needed to help students learn to “read like a writer.”[79] Also influential in supporting the move toward integrated instruction was the work of Donald Holdaway, who, in concert with many teacher colleagues, had been implementing an integrated language arts approach in Australia for a few decades.[80]
Whole language. Important as they are, comprehension, literature-based reading, process writing, and integrated instruction pale in comparison to the impact of whole language, which is regarded as the most significant movement in reading curriculum in the last thirty years.[81] In fact, one might plausibly argue that whole language co-opted all four of these allied phenomena—comprehension, literature-based reading, integrated instruction and process writing—by incorporating them, problems along with strengths, into its fundamental set of principles and practices. Whole language is grounded in child-centered pedagogy reminiscent of the progressive education movement (the individual child is the most important curriculum informant).[82] Philosophically it is biased toward radical constructivist epistemology (all readers must construct their own meanings for the texts they encounter). Curricularly, it is committed to authentic activity (real, not specially constructed, texts and tasks) and integration (both within the language arts and between the language arts and other subject matters). Politically, it is suspicious of all attempts to mandate and control curricular decisions beyond the classroom level; as such, it places great faith and hope in the wisdom of teachers to exercise professional prerogative in making decisions about the children in their care. Whole language owes its essential character and key principles to the insights of linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, sociolinguistics, and literary theory detailed earlier. It owes its remarkable—if brief—appearance in the national limelight of reading instruction to its committed leaders and a veritable army of committed teachers who instantiated it in their classrooms, each with his or her own unique signature.[83]
When whole language emerged as a movement in the 80s, it challenged the conventional wisdom of basals and questioned the unqualified support for early code emphases that had grown between 1967 and the early 1980s.[84] One of the great ironies of whole language is that its ascendancy into curricular prominence is best documented by its influence on the one curricular tool it has most consistently and most vehemently opposed, the basal reader.[85] As suggested earlier, basals changed dramatically in the early 1990s, largely, I conjecture, in response to the groundswell of support within the teaching profession for whole language and its close curricular allies, literature-based reading and process writing.
Vocabulary control, already weakened during the 1970s in response to Chall’s admonitions, was virtually abandoned in the early 1990s in deference to attempts to incorporate more literature, this time in unexpurgated form (i.e., without the practices of adaptation and excerpting that had characterized the basals of the 70s and 80s) into the grade 1 program.[86] Phonics, along with other skills, was backgrounded, and literature moved to center stage.
Basal programs appropriated or, as some whole language advocates have argued, “basalized” the activities and tools of whole language. Thus in the basals of the early 1990s, each unit might have a writing process component in which the rhetoric if not the reality of some version of process writing was presented to teachers and students. In the 1980s, comprehension questions, probably following a story line, might have sufficed for the guided reading section of the manual (the part that advises teachers on how to read and discuss the story), but in the 1990s, questions and tasks that supported deep probes into students’ response to literature became more prevalent. Another concession to literature-based reading was the creation and marketing of classroom libraries—boxed sets of books, usually thematically related to each unit, that teachers could use to extend their lessons and units “horizontally” and enrich children’s literary opportunities.
Basals also repositioned their “integrated language arts” and “integrated curriculum” strands. Dating back even to the 1920s and 1930s, basals had provided at least a “token” section in which teachers were encouraged to extend the themes or skills of the basal story into related writing (e.g., rewriting stories), oral language (e.g., transforming a story into a play and dramatizing it), or cross-curricular activities (e.g., conducting community surveys, tallying the results, and reporting them), but these forays were regarded as peripheral rather than core. In the basals of the early 1990s, as skills moved into the background,[87] these integrated language arts activities were featured more prominently as core lesson components.[88]
These changes can, I believe, be traced to the prominent position of whole language as a curricular force during this period.[89] Publishers of basals accomplished this feat of appropriation not by ridding their programs of the skills of previous eras, but by subtle repositioning—foregrounding one component while backgrounding another, creating optional components or modules (e.g., an intensive phonics kit or a set of literature books) that could be added to give the program one or another spin. Unsurprisingly, this created bulkier teachers' manuals and more complex programs.
Acceptance of whole language was not universal. To the contrary, there was considerable resistance to whole language and literature-based reading throughout the country.[90] In many places, whole language never really gained a foothold. In others what was implemented in the name of whole language was not consistent with the philosophical and curricular principles of the movement; California, whole language advocates would argue, is a case in point. Whole language got conflated with whole class instruction and was interpreted to mean that all kids should get the same literature, even if teachers had to read it to them.[91]
Nor was there a single voice within the whole language movement. Whole language scholars and practitioners differ on a host of issues, such as the role of skills, conventions, and strategies within a language arts program. Some say, if we can just be patient, skills will emerge from meaningful communication activities; others spur things on by taking advantage of spontaneous opportunities for mini-lessons; still others are willing to spur spontaneity a bit.
Even so, it is fair to conclude that by the early 90s, whole language had become the conventional wisdom, the standard against which all else was referenced. The rhetoric of professional articles belies this change. As late as the mid-1980s, articles were written with the presumption of a different conventional wisdom—a world filled with skills, contrived readers, and workbooks. By 1991–92, they were written with the presumption that whole language reforms, while not fully ensconced in America's schools, were well on their way to implementation. The arguments in the 90s were less about first principles of whole language and more about fine-tuning teaching repertoires. The meetings of the Whole Language Umbrella grew to be larger than most large state conventions and regional conferences of the International Reading Association. By 1995, whole language was no longer a collection of guerrilla sorties into the land of skills and basals that characterized it through the mid 1980s. It had become the conventional wisdom, in rhetoric if not in reality.
Returning to the lenses outlined at the beginning of this essay (range of materials and practices, role of teacher, role of learner, and the processes of reading and learning to read), in whole language, we finally encountered major shifts in emphasis in comparison to what we found at the beginning of the century. In whole language, teachers were facilitators not tellers. They observes what children do, decide what they need, and arranged conditions to allow students to discover those very insights about reading, writing, and learning for themselves. Because this is truly child-centered pedagogy, learners occupied center stage. As Jerome Harste puts it, the child was the primary curriculum informant. Students were decision makers involved in choices about the books they read and stories they write. The materials of reading instruction were the materials of life and living—the books, magazines, newspapers, and other forms of print that children can encounter in everyday life are the materials they should encounter in the classroom—no less, no more. There was no need for the sort of contrived texts and tasks of the sort found in basal reading programs. Instructional practices focused not on presenting a diet of skills carefully sequenced to achieve mastery but on creating activities and tasks that supported the learning students needed at a particular point in time. If skills and strategies were taught, they were taught in “mini-lessons,” highly focused forays into the infrastructure of a skill or strategy followed up by immediately recontextualizing the skill in a genuine reading or writing situation. In contrast to previous periods, reading was now regarded as a meaning-making, not a perceptual, process. The reader was an active participant in creating, not a passive recipient of, the message in a text. The process of acquiring reading was also markedly different from the “readiness” perspective so dominant in the first eighty years of the century. Emergent literacy, the alternative to traditional reading readiness views, did not specify a “pre-reading” period in which children are prepared for the task of reading. All readers, at all stages, were meaning makers, even those who can only scribble a message or “pretend” read.[92] Thus, at century’s end, reading pedagogy finally developed some viable alternatives to the conventional views of teacher, learner, and process that had dominated pedagogical practice for the entire century. As it turned out, the new directions were short-lived.
At century's end, just when it appeared as if whole language, supported by its intellectual cousins (process writing, literature-based reading, and integrated curriculum), was about to assume the position of conventional wisdom for the field, the movement was challenged seriously, and the pendulum of the pedagogical debate began to swing back toward the skills end of the curriculum and instruction continuum. Several factors converged to make the challenge credible, among them (a) unintended curricular casualties of whole language, (b) questionable applications of whole language, (c) growing dissatisfaction with doctrinaire views of any sort, (d) a paradigm swing in the ideology of reading research, (e) increasing politicization of the reading research and policy agenda, and (f) increasing pressure for educators of all stripes, especially reading educators, to produce measurable results.
Unintended curricular consequences. In its ascendancy, whole language changed the face of reading instruction, and in the process, left behind some curricular casualties, few of which were intended by those who supported whole language. Those, myself included,[93] who supported practices that were discarded in the rise of whole language, had difficulty supporting the whole language movement even though we might have been philosophically and curricularly sympathetic to many of its principles and practices. This lack of enthusiasm from curricular moderates meant that whole language failed to build a base of support that was broad enough to survive even modest curricular opposition, let alone the political onslaught that it would experience at century’s turn.