CHAPTER NINE

Use Your Words

Hearing the Language of Childhood

I was living in Chicago some years ago when an unexpected snowstorm forced my family to postpone the pickup of our new puppy, Otto, from a dog breeder in downstate Illinois. The prospect of waiting an additional twenty-four hours to meet the new puppy was only a minor disappointment to me and no disappointment to my husband. But to our children, who had feverishly conspired to break down our dog-owning resistance over the previous twelve months, checking daily with increasing plaintiveness to see if the needle of probability had wobbled a little in their favor, the postponement was a calamity. My middle child, Lysander, could barely contain his torment, so he did the only thing that made sense to an anguished five-year-old under the circumstances: he grabbed a black permanent marker from the kitchen drawer, marched upstairs to his bedroom, and inscribed the following message (spelling improved in transcription of the photo inserted below) upside down on the inside of his closet wall:

My dog is not coming

today

because it is

too snowy

Signed Lysander

My son writes on his wall with heartfelt disappointment.

ERIKA CHRISTAKIS

Note the assertive, zigzagging flourish and official-looking “sind” (sic) he’s placed directly before his signature. What a perfect punctuation to his feelings! I can’t think of a better example of the expressive power of written language than my son’s enraged, upside-down scrawl. The misspellings, the run-on words, the spatial muddle, and even his inappropriate canvas are all immaterial. He perfectly made his point. Perhaps a little too perfectly: we were so moved by the gesture that, when we later moved back to the East Coast, my husband cut the chunk out of the wall and replastered the damage before selling our house. The inscribed slab now hangs framed in my office, a daily reminder of a young child’s yearning to be heard.

That desire to be heard—to have a voice—is an utterly universal aspect of the human condition, yet it is the element of language instruction too often neglected in American preschools and kindergartens today. There’s probably no aspect of pedagogy more tied up in polemics than what we call, in a painful illustration of wish fulfillment, the Language Arts. But we have to consider why the preschool literacy environment (and, in particular, reading instruction) has been so contested for so many decades, pedagogically, developmentally, and even morally. It starts with young children themselves, whose mixed signals about their language abilities give rise to wildly divergent interpretations and solutions.

If you’ve been paying attention to education policy at any point in the last few decades, you may have heard some version of the Reading Wars, a simplified explanation of which pits systematic, teacher-directed phonics instruction (which is a reading strategy that connects sounds to individual letters and small segments of words in an alphabetic reading system) against what might be called meaning-based literacy approaches, where the focus is less on mapping individual letters to sounds, and more on comprehension of the whole text. In my view, both perspectives are crucial to literacy and language development. But an Internet search of the phrase reveals all kinds of triumphalist pronouncements that the debate is now finished and that phonics instruction is the coin of the realm. Like most metaphorical wars, however, “phonics” and “comprehension” are mere proxies for the real battle lines, which have a lot to do with how we value children’s voices, and especially the voices of children in poverty and other environments that make it hard to become literate. Let’s give those voices an audience, and consider the meaning of language for the young child.

Of all the paradoxes of early childhood, language development may be the biggest. Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker describes the human language instinct as so much a “part of our biological birthright” that children are already basically fluent speakers by the time they are in preschool.¹ Infant development expert Andrew Meltzoff and colleagues agree, noting, “The world’s most powerful computers have been unable to crack the speech code—no computer has reached fluent speech understanding across talkers, which children master by 3 years of age.”²

This is a paradoxical state of affairs considering how many things a three-year-old can’t yet do. Pinker describes preschoolers as “notably incompetent” at many non-language-related occupations and “flummoxed by no-brainer tasks like sorting beads in order of size, reasoning whether a person could be aware of an event that took place while the person was out of the room, and knowing that the volume of a liquid does not change when it is poured from a short, wide glass into a tall, narrow one.”³ Pinker’s insight captures the mystery I found myself puzzling over virtually every day of my life as a preschool teacher, as I watched little kids in action: how could these children talk to me in such animated detail about important differences between crested bullhead and Galapagos bullhead sharks, yet have to be reminded multiple times per day—for a whole year!—to pull up their pants after they left the bathroom?

We can imagine a lot of reasons why it would make evolutionary sense for an early hominid child to become a fluent speaker as quickly as possible. (“Help! There’s a cobra in my bed, Mommy!” is a more effective way to summon help than indiscriminate grunts and gurgles.) But the mismatch between a child’s oral language and other abilities can leave adults a little whiplashed trying to figure out how best to pitch our expectations.

We know that children come into the world wired to make sense of spoken language. In fact, infants of six months can distinguish between a person speaking a foreign language and the language they hear every day around them. And the truly freakish part of this innate ability is that they can make the distinction by lip reading and physical cues alone!⁴ Moreover, babies lose this ability as they start acquiring other, more necessary language skills. So there’s a lot of neuronal pruning going on to maximize what young children can and need to do linguistically.

But the language story is a bit more involved than can be described by mere instinct. For one thing, young children need other people to activate their instinctual behavior. Language development is so socially dependent that there has never been a recorded case of a feral child (raised in isolation) acquiring language on his own; in fact, these tragic cases have demonstrated quite clearly that there is a critical window for language learning, which, if missed, will never open fully again. Young children need intensive interaction with loving, or at least attentive, caregivers in order to speak and comprehend. And no matter how much we convince ourselves otherwise, they simply can’t learn language adequately from a screen.

In addition to the mixed messages we receive from children about their abilities, the other puzzle regarding language involves the ability to read, which is a relatively recent chapter in the human story. Reading mastery requires the integration of a huge number of different skills and is one of the most demanding cognitive tasks faced by a child. But unlike many other cognitive abilities, which can emerge in a variety of contexts, reading is almost always achieved in a specific environment, namely school. Developmental psychologist David Bjorkland explains that humans did not evolve to read and that “it is unheard of for an unschooled child in an illiterate culture ever to learn to read.”⁵ Children can perform mathematical operations without living in a numerate culture, but a child born in a nonliterate society will never read Harry Potter, no matter how intelligent she may be.

Indeed, the social context of language use matters greatly, which is one reason that children from disadvantaged backgrounds know many fewer words than children who have been exposed to a language-rich environment. The language ability gap starts by eighteen months, and, at twenty-four months, children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are already six months behind their more advantaged peers.⁶ Schooling can make up some of this deficit, but, as we’ve seen with the attention to vocabulary lists disconnected from real lives, a lot of what passes for language instruction in today’s preschools and kindergartens may be giving disadvantaged children only the most superficial facility with words.

Fortunately, however—and this needs to be stated very clearly—there is no reason to believe that children from disadvantaged environments can’t close this language ability gap with the right kind of parental or other close adult interaction and teacher support. In fact, researchers have found that only a fraction of the difference in language and reading ability has a hereditary basis, providing, as one scientist put it, “substantial opportunities for early interventions to have positive impacts.”⁷ In fact, according to one leading researcher, “When mothers’ beliefs and knowledge about child development were taken into account, [socioeconomic status] no longer predicted children’s later verbal ability, indicating that parents from all backgrounds may be able to provide appropriate language support to young children but may not recognize the value of parenting strategies that support language learning.”⁸ I would add teaching strategies, too.

A few years ago, a video went viral capturing twin toddlers in diapers, babbling earnestly to one another by the family refrigerator. Their hilarious utterances, which quickly captured millions of views and were covered on the morning talk shows, contained many of the features of real conversation, including grownup-sounding intonation, thoughtful pauses, recognizable gesticulations (with hands and even feet), and turn taking punctuated by startling bursts of laughter. It seemed at one point that one of the twins was discussing his missing sock.

Commenting on the video, speech and language expert Stephen Camarata told the New York Times, “Here are these children interacting with each other in a very spontaneous and unguided way, and there are a lot of rich things going on that are really cool. . . . I worry that we’re not looking for and celebrating these kinds of spontaneous things that our toddlers do that are really exciting and fun.”⁹

One of the problems in overcrowded preschool and kindergarten classrooms is the tendency for teachers to rely on directive language that’s geared to classroom management (“Good job!” “Put the toys away!” “Time to wash your hands.”) rather than on conversational or instructional language that elicits two-way conversation. Children use more advanced language in smaller groups and when doing things they really care about, which is why it’s usually much more fun to eavesdrop on children when they are playing naturally than to record their comments when they are doing desk work or at Circle Time.

Policy makers like to talk about a child’s school readiness; however, there is no special gate through which children need to pass before they can be deemed ready to learn to read. The literacy process is continuous, not always linear, and starts at birth. In short, it is a developmental process heavily mediated by social influences, as we can see when comparing children’s scribbles in their native languages. Children as young as two or three make markings that look identifiably like their own native languages (American cursive, Hebrew, and Arabic, for example), suggesting that, even before they have learned to write a single word, small children are engaged in an exquisitely complex process involving careful observation and imitation, not to mention fine motor development and mental perseverance. The scribbles aren’t arbitrary at all, but, rather, reflect the child’s deep cultural rootedness and aspirations. This is a complicated reality for many educators and parents to parse: literacy is developing long before children actually crack the code, and language experiences in infancy help to build the language skills that two- and three-year-olds acquire, which, in turn, build the foundation for subsequent reading skills. As an example, a young child who doesn’t have experience picking up, say, Cheerios with her pincer grasp will, as a toddler, not have success holding a chubby crayon to scribble and write.

We have to be especially mindful of just-right learning and teaching expectations. Preschoolers need an exceptionally language-rich environment in which to acquire the skills that will finally culminate in reading text correctly. But this language-rich environment needn’t, and usually shouldn’t, consist only of a paper-and-pencil set of objectives. This is a roundabout way of saying that of all the difficulties we have in finding the sweet spot for learning in young children, I think reading instruction must be the most challenging, especially because children learn to read at such different rates and in different ways. For that reason, I include here the whole range of early childhood ages when we talk about early literacy, from infancy to age seven or eight.

MAKING SENSE OF READING

Let’s take a closer look at all these elements that culminate, ideally, in good readers. We get into a lot of hot water over what constitutes reading skills, and I suspect it’s partly due to the mixed messages we get from young children themselves. They confuse us with their command of oral language, seeming to be both immigrants and natives, amateurs and experts, in need of explicit instruction and no instruction at all. Even within the same child, these extremes can be dizzying, which is why it’s exponentially more challenging to teach a whole classroom of such changelings how to read and write. We think preschoolers are ready to read, and they may be, because they sound so knowing and clever. But we shouldn’t forget for a second what hard work it is to become literate, a fact of which the thirty-two million American adults who can’t read a newspaper or the instructions on a bottle of cough syrup are no doubt painfully aware.¹⁰

It’s easy to overlook the fact that, unlike talking, reading and writing—though essential learning processes—are by no means inborn ones, like learning to walk, that unfold more or less naturally regardless of environment. This reality is made apparent in the wide range of ages at which formal instruction begins. A four-year-old in the United Kingdom may already be receiving remedial work with phonics and writing, whereas in Finland, children aren’t required to read at all (although a large number do) before age seven. American preschoolers fall somewhere in between these extremes. Some children suffer a lot to figure out these unnatural linguistic processes; and some tiny fraction of children don’t seem to suffer at all. (Those are the kids who learn to read without any formal instruction, and there are some important lessons we will learn from them.)

For many children, much of the drama of early childhood quite often comes down to the speed and ease with which they jump—or rather, fail to jump—through literacy hoops that are specified less by scientific evidence about children’s cognition and development than by programmatic cultural expectations about when children are and are not deemed ready for school. What grief the scheduled hoop jumping can inflict on young children and their anxious adults! I can’t think of a faster way to drive a parent nuts than to innocently ask if little Olivia is reading yet. Be sure to work the word “yet” into the conversation.

Precocious reading (and particularly self-taught precocious reading) is popularly seen as a marker of academic intelligence. But not all precocious readers are intellectually gifted, and the vast majority of young children across a wide range of abilities, including exceptional ones, manage to learn to read and write at a rather plodding but nonetheless effective pace.

Why is it that some children become good readers while others struggle? To understand this question, we have to take a few steps back to understand how the interconnected processes of reading, writing, talking, and listening fit together to form what we might call a literate mind. In other words, we have to look at the whole child, not just some widget in him that is labeled “reading readiness.”

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO READ?

There are five basic components to reading, and most good readers acquire strengths in all of them: phonological (or sound) awareness; phonics (letter-sound connections); vocabulary; comprehension; and fluency. The phonological ability to recognize specific sounds, such as the difference between the words “go” and “going,” is necessary in order eventually to match those individual sounds to letters or combinations of letters, which happens through knowledge of phonics. But, as we will see, sounds and letters in the English language have an uneasy relationship at best, so other skills are important, too.

Vocabulary is important because if you’ve never seen snow before or heard anyone talk about it, you might more easily get tripped up on the word “snow,” even if you possessed the decoding skills to sound out “sn-ow.” It’s the difference between being able to grasp quickly, “Oh, sure, that word is the stuff that falls from the sky in winter” if you live in Montana, or wondering in your Louisiana classroom, “Huh? What’s a ‘sn-ow’?”

But vocabulary words alone don’t make a good reader. A child also needs to develop more complex comprehension skills than simple recall of definitions, and these skills often come from speaking and being spoken to about many different things, as we’ve seen, which is why comprehension skills are hard for children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, or for those who aren’t spoken to regularly, to master. Another key skill is fluency, or the practice of reading smoothly and quickly enough for a child to derive meaning and also to impart meaning to others (if she is reading out loud). While most people assume that children with poor decoding and comprehension skills can’t possibly become fluent readers, it’s also the case that a lack of fluency can inhibit the decoding and comprehending process. A child can get stuck and completely lose sight of what he or she is trying to read and comprehend. Good instructional practices therefore treat these five readings skills as highly interdependent and teach them in concert, not in sequence. This is a lot easier said than done, however, which is why reading instruction often falls far short of what it can do in ideal teaching circumstances.

There is a mysterious wrinkle in this story, however. Notwithstanding the interconnectedness of these five distinct reading skills, some children teach themselves by bypassing phonics instruction entirely and relying only on contextual cues and whole-word memorization. Every child is different, and good reading teachers will try a variety of strategies until they hit on a winning combination. That instructional flexibility is often discouraged at the policy level, where proponents push this or that instructional model. But in the classroom, teachers are accustomed to trying and adapting many different strategies to reach as many children as possible.

Although the optimal reading strategies may differ from child to child, the ability to hear small variations in sounds is a constant for almost every new reader. This is why it was so hard, historically, for deaf children to learn to read when sign language was not in favor. They were denied access to their own complete language (signing) but didn’t have the sound awareness to learn spoken English. In fact, a key component of learning to read involves learning, first, to listen. In order to become proficient communicators, preschoolers need lots of practice hearing the small differences in sounds, which, in turn, involves conversing with others.

This ability, which we call phonemic awareness, is necessary in order to pair a sound to its symbol. So, for example, the words B-A-T and C-A-T each have three phonemes, or smallest units of sound, and the child who can’t detect the difference between the first phonemes of those words is more likely to encounter reading problems than a child who can easily identify the difference between those small units of speech.

Phonemic awareness was a big concept when I was training to be a teacher, and there are wonderful ways to incorporate it into teaching practice. But it’s also worth noting that people have been teaching phonemic awareness effortlessly for centuries, long before it got branded, in the form of nursery rhymes and songs:

Hickory, dickory, dock.

The mouse ran up the clock.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star.

How I wonder what you are!

Willoughby wallaby woo.

An elephant sat on you!

Underscoring the critical role of oral language for reading, we find that children with dyslexia have poor phonemic awareness skills. And some of the strategies to support dyslexic children work equally well with typically developing children who may simply need more practice hearing and distinguishing phonemes. As a result, educators sometimes conclude that phonemes must be taught to preschoolers only in an academic context with quizzing and work sheets. We’ve seen before that there are direct and indirect ways to teach young children preacademic skills, and those children most at risk for reading problems are usually the ones in classrooms where they receive phonemic knowledge from a top-down, teacher-driven script. In general, the direct pedagogic mechanisms can be useful in a narrow sense, though they also tend to be less cognitively complex. To put it bluntly, they can be dull and simplistic. Compare them to an indirect mechanism, such as helping three-year-olds to sing the words to “Ring Around the Rosy” while dancing in a circle holding the hands of two other people and coordinating their movements to fall down at the same time as their confederates.

HOW CAN I SPELL LOVE?

It’s only been in recent years that educators have come to see the important role of writing, along with oral language, for learning to read. For a long time, writing was a kind of ugly stepsister to reading, something to be tackled only after the important work of decoding had been accomplished. Previous generations of children wisely found ways to ignore this advice outside of school, marking their name in the dirt with a stick. In today’s preschool and kindergarten classrooms, writing and reading are encouraged together—for the most part. In reality, we still see a lot of variation in children’s exposure to writing opportunities between high-quality and low-quality classrooms. This difference in writing opportunity might be one of the most important differences in program quality, although it’s a difference that most parents are not trained to appreciate.

Effective preschool classrooms take children’s own stories very seriously, listening attentively to often bizarrely rambling tales and incorporating quite tangential first-person narratives during group time. The teachers in these sorts of classrooms have the time and flexibility (because they have a coteacher or assistant) to help the children tell a story in many different ways, through their own emergent spelling, through expressive arts, and also through dramatizing familiar stories with simple props and an audience. Sometimes they might feature bookmaking areas where they help kids to draw or dictate a sequence of simple actions, one sentence to a page, which they illustrate and later share with the class.

Teachers treat these narratives with great respect, binding and laminating the books between colored card-stock pages and adding the stories to the class library for other children to enjoy. It came as a genuine surprise to some of the parents I worked with to see their children’s marked preference for these handmade and quite primitive stories, which they would often select over a beautiful new real book. The act of encouraging children to narrate stories for themselves—and the accompanying message that a child’s stories are themselves important—is a striking counterpoint to heavily scripted curricula, in which children might be asked to respond to predetermined questions about a story’s sequence (“Where did Mr. Toad go first?” “What problem did he have to solve?”), and where the emphasis on sequencing skills is superficial and not always transferrable to other settings.

Children in dynamic literacy programs, by contrast, have continual access to writing material, not only in a formal writing center but in every area of their play. They are viewed as authors and are encouraged to write their own stories (or to dictate them if they can’t yet form any letters). They can always find writing materials, such as clipboards or little notebooks, in the building or dramatic play areas because it is assumed they will need to communicate things in writing—a dinner order for a pretend restaurant, a sign for a zoo made of blocks. And the words change as the children’s interests change. Children in these pro-writing classrooms make their own name labels and use writing to organize their activities. Instead of a big “word wall” placed up high on a bulletin board that no one wants to look at, these classrooms place laminated cards labeled BULLDOZER, EXCAVATOR, DUMP TRUCK, and JACKHAMMER in the spots where children actually need them, next to the bulldozers and excavators and dump trucks and jackhammers.

But most important of all, the pro-writing stance of these programs is felt in the attitude the children exhibit toward writing, which they are taught to see not so much as work that must be slogged through (before heading outside to recess) but as a source of joy in itself, a whirring conduit for meaning, content knowledge, and the expression of feelings, including affection and pride.

Children in pro-language environments show a fierce desire to join the world of words. I’ve even seen preschoolers express disdain for their infant siblings who can’t yet write. They are often very conscious of the quality of their (and other children’s) writing and like to display and share their efforts. But they also use writing in their relationships, and one of the greatest pleasures of teaching this age group is to watch how small children discover writing as a new way to express kindness. Adults may have long shredded their stationery in favor of digital communication, but the old-fashioned art of written physical correspondence is happily thriving in certain preschools. Having been on the receiving end of mountains of cards and presents from preschoolers (usually tatty envelopes littered with strings of semirandom letters), I can confirm how terrific it feels to experience this strong link between the impulses of generosity and writing.

In pro-literacy classrooms, where stories are shared so easily, children quickly develop an accurate understanding of the role of print in their lives. A teacher friend of mine at Lincoln Nursery School asked her class of preschoolers to think about writing’s purpose. This is a transcript of their ideas:

“Writing is for homework. You have to write in homework.”

“You write down things that children say.”

“You write their words down.”

“Writing is like a message.”

“A message you send to yourself.”

“You do it to tell a story.”

“Writing can sing sometimes. Like a poem. Like ‘Do, a deer.’”

“So you might get it wrong if you use the wrong letters. It would spell the wrong words.”

“Or it won’t spell a word at all.”

“How do you spell ‘blood cell’?”

“The brain makes you think so you can write.”

“I write so people can read it if they don’t know what it was.”

“I wrote the word ‘stop’ because I wanted to make a stop sign and everybody knows it means ‘Stop.’”

“So writing is something that everybody can know about.”

“Everyone can know about it, unless they are babies because they have to learn.”

“I can only read one book. The Cat in the Hat.”

“A message is when you write something that no one understands until they find out.”

“How do you find out?”

“By reading the message until they find out.”

“How can I spell ‘love’?”

I remember one particularly compulsive emissary in my classroom who would send dozens of notes each day to her friends. I sometimes had to manually escort her from the writing center for a few minutes’ pause when her demeanor became a little too pressured. She’d carefully copy the names of her friends and sign her notes with an enormous K that took up half the page. Sometimes she’d add illustrations to her messages and instruct me to take dictation. “This is really funny,” she’d note, pointing to a scribble. “I’m going to tell you what it says.” I’d write down her descriptions, which usually included something along the lines of:

This is a frog going to take a bath but before he does that he has to go to school and he doesn’t have any shoes because he’s a frog, so they went to the shoe store in the Frog Pond at Boston Common, so that’s really funny. The End.

Who wouldn’t enjoy her stories?

This little girl was a major paper chewer, too, and I’d sometimes find her gnawing away on her notes with a mouth full of snow-cone-colored teeth, which she dismissed with the explanation that she loved to “eat” her words. Naturally, I assumed she had heard an adult promising to “eat his words” and was taking the saying a bit too literally. “You know, I just love all these letters, and I can’t wait to have them all,” she laughed, pretending to eat more words. I love this notion of having them all. I still see alphabet soup for sale in the grocery store, so maybe this physical craving for words is more than metaphoric.

I wish all children could experience that kind of passion for language (minus the blue-stained mouth). Sadly, it’s much more common that children feel frustration.

FRUSTRATION LEVELS

Consider this:

In graduate school, I was very surprised to learn that many of my cehbvidlms, all of whom were bidlvern or current teachers, had been frustrated by their own reading danbqipdpsz as children. Some reported that they didn’t read olwitmabqiz as adults and felt anxious when reading out cfpo to children in class. I wondered how teachers could be lylsiagh to instill a passion for reading, much less be effective scogtmsi, if they didn’t have a solid grasp of these skills tlpdoijnop. I’m not mgeodihnds they didn’t know how to read qksnidprsj, but they didn’t feel comfortable reading, which is equally depressing.

How do you feel as you were reading this paragraph? Irritated? Frustrated? Indifferent? It’s probably safe to say that you weren’t feeling the joy of reading. You may have been able to grasp the gist of the text, but to understand the full meaning, you would need help to decode it, which you can do (frustratingly) in the endnote.¹¹

Parents grossly underestimate the frustration that comes to children who are reading texts that are too hard or may even contain what is, to them, gibberish. When teachers help children choose a book, they distinguish between independent, instructional, and frustration levels of reading. Parents may be surprised to learn that instructional level is 94 to 97 percent accuracy (i.e., reading 94 to 97 words out of 100 accurately). Independent reading is above the 97 percent accuracy level. And frustration level kicks in surprisingly early, at 93 percent accuracy or less. To imagine what a frustrating reading experience feels like, consider that you just read a text at 90 percent accuracy. But it’s not even a fair approximation of the experience of learning to read for a young child because you, unlike your child, have had a lifetime of contextual clues to bring to the task. You probably recognized the phrase “reading out loud,” for example, so you were able to substitute the missing word based on your own cues.

Contextual clues are extremely important in languages, like English, with inconsistent spelling patterns. The reason is that English has what psychologist Daniel Willingham describes as a “deep orthography,” or a very twisted relationship between letters and sounds.¹² Take the letters “ough” in English and you can come up with dough, enough, through, cough, slough, and more—each with a different pronunciation.

Italian and Spanish children, by contrast, have the good fortune only to need to master a largely phonetic code, with a simple and consistent correspondence between letters and sounds. We see this difference in difficulty in the huge variation in spelling errors cross-culturally: by the end of first grade, 67 percent of British kids are still making mistakes in their “foundational” language (i.e., making errors in words they are supposed to know how to spell) compared to only 6 percent in Spain.¹³

So why, exactly, can’t we give these little English speakers a break? Why are they supposed to spell words correctly when we already know in advance that more than two thirds of them will spell them incorrectly? Is it time to adjust our expectations? Willingham worries that our obsessive focus on literacy development (we spend almost two thirds of classroom time on language instruction in the early years) may dissuade young kids interested in the arts or science and, further, he argues that “it would be worth our accepting slower progress in reading in exchange for broader subject matter coverage in early grades—coverage that will actually pay dividends for reading comprehension in later grades.”¹⁴

THE SEARCH FOR MEANING

Rebalancing this coverage might also help address the achievement gap between disadvantaged and well-off children in the later elementary years. The solution nowadays seems to be a dogged but rather limited focus on boosting vocabulary. Unfortunately, vocabulary instruction is often conducted so artificially that it fosters a superficial level of understanding. “To know words as more than labels,” educator Judith Schickedanz reminds us, “children must encounter them not only in books, but also in authentic contexts such as hands-on science experiments. They must also have multiple encounters with a word, in a variety of contexts. In short, meaningful firsthand experiences (historically a mainstay in preschool programs) are part and parcel of good emergent literacy programs, with long-term effects.”¹⁵

Recall those essential concepts in the preschool Under the Sea curriculum: tube feet, sea stars, and exoskeleton. Sure, it’s nice to use fancy words to describe mollusks. It might garner a tally mark on somebody’s Early Learning Standards checklist. But spitting back a vocabulary list a few days after it’s been introduced is nothing like dunking your hands in an actual tidal pool.

The Reading Wars debate is allegedly concerned with the relative weight that phonics and comprehension should be accorded, and it comes down, in brief, to your reaction to a hypothetical scenario I was given in graduate school and that student teachers everywhere are asked to consider. Which of the following two phrases would you prefer to see a four-year-old child produce spontaneously, without a teacher’s assistance?¹⁶

BAD DOG

or

FROSHUS DBRMN PENSR

In one camp, we have the cryptology purists (the phonics-first crowd) who would prize the first phrase over the second one for the simple reason that it’s correct. Moreover, the phrase “bad dog” reflects a particular sequence of code-breaking skills, starting with consonants and short vowels that are easy for children to hear and sound out. The child can break the word down into two chunks by learning to isolate what is known as an onset, the part of the word before the vowel, in this case the B, and the rime, the part of the word containing the vowel and what follows it, and the child can thus do the decoding quite easily by sounding out “B-AD.” Alternatively, the child can break the word further into phonemes, and sound out “B-A-D” in three parts instead of two.

One of the problems with that approach is that we tend to sound out things that aren’t really there, such as teaching a child to say “Buh” for B. “Buh” is not really a B sound at all, and some kids will hear two sounds captured in “Buh,” which is extremely confusing. So teachers are trained to make a very rapid “B” that sounds a bit like someone starting to vomit. Nonetheless, there are some obvious advantages to the sounding-out approach, and it is a standard way to learn the English words that follow predictable phonics rules.

But consider our FROSHUS DBRMN PENSR. You may have guessed that the writer was thinking of not just any old bad dog but of an unusually bad dog, a scary dog, a ferocious dog. And not just any old ferocious dog, but a particular breed of ferocious dog, a Doberman pinscher (with all due respect to Doberman pinschers, who I understand have been fully rehabilitated in the public eye and are in fact gentle giants).

In the FROSHUS DBRMN PENSR camp, we find the proponents of meaning-based language instruction, and these advocates would prefer to see a four- or five-year-old produce this phrase because “FROSHUS” suggests a much richer vocabulary than a plain little word like “BAD.” The child clearly also has quite a lot of phonics knowledge, in fact, as we see in the accurate use of most of the consonants, but this writer is focused on meaning and fluency, not an exact letter-to-sound match. “DBRMN PENSR” is a sophisticated choice, too, suggesting the child understands the category of things called “dogs,” which equally suggests that she understands lots of categories of things, and how to sort them. I imagine that most American adults would prefer to see their children learn to write both “bad dog” and “ferocious Doberman pinscher” (though, I confess, I had to spell-check it twice myself). But the question is when and how should we expect to reach that goalpost?

That, in a nutshell, is the basis of the so-called Reading Wars.

If you think about it, cracking a code is always in service of something else, and that something else is understanding. Children learn to read in order to figure out things and to communicate those figured-out things to others. Try reading cereal boxes for a living, or think about the ultimate compliment we give great actors: I’d listen to him read the phone book. Is there a reason to speak if you have no one to talk to? What is the point of cracking a code that has no meaning, interest, or relevance to the human condition?

When I was a little girl, I used to spend inordinate amounts of time alone in my room concocting codes to convey secret messages. The problem was that I usually worked out my secret codes before bedtime, after playtime was over. And as soon as I had constructed my ridiculous messages, I was stuck with no one with whom to share them. So, I’d write the words:

GSRH RH NB HKVXRZO XLWV!

(“This is my special code!”)

And a little voice in my head would whisper back: So what?

Should children treat words as codes to be broken by a predictable, systematic sequence of phonics instruction? Or should they treat words as vehicles for meaning, which can only be interpreted within a context of experience of the world, interactions with other people, and exposure to rich oral language? This is the question that has plagued parents and educators for decades.

Like the perennial mommy wars that rear up every so often about appropriate childcare arrangements, the reading instruction debates are actually often about much more than just how to teach the ABCs. I think the Reading Wars carry special potency because they tap into questions about how much power children should be afforded to create meaning in their lives. Like many metaphorical wars, this one is not really about phonics versus whole language. No serious educator suggests anymore (if they ever really did) that children shouldn’t understand phonics or that they can simply become readers through osmosis. The fact that some tiny fraction can indeed learn to read through some form of osmosis (or, in any event, without any phonics instruction at all) should give us pause. But there is virtually no disagreement any longer among respected educators about the importance of phonetic knowledge in reading development for the great majority of children, if not every single one of them.

The real question is how, not whether, to teach phonics, a subtlety that is totally lost on a lot of grumpy school committee members and op-ed contributors. Let’s consider how different teachers might approach a child who gets a word wrong in a sentence. The educator Alfie Kohn describes a beginning reader who stumbles over the sentence, “I think my car needs new tires,” substituting the word “trees” for “tires.” Kohn explains that a teacher who’s most concerned about phonics skills would focus on the architecture of the incorrect word, telling the child to zero in on the word and “sound it out.” Often this strategy makes sense. But a teacher who prioritizes comprehension first is, as Kohn notes, “more likely to respond, ‘My car needs new trees? Does that make sense to you?’” Then, once he gets the word right, she’d probably call his attention to the way it’s spelled.¹⁷

It’s vitally important that we understand the distinction between a reading program based primarily on meaning-related skills versus one based primarily on decoding skills. It’s a mistake to imagine that the meaning-based program isn’t interested in accuracy or phonics development. It’s true that some teachers really did go overboard with meaning-based instruction in the 1980s and early 1990s, sometimes neglecting the tools to help children arrive at the meaning. Some die-hard proponents of the “whole language” approach to literacy may have been overly sanguine about the ease with which children could pick up phonics without explicit instruction. But it’s unfair to tar the whole meaning-based-instruction camp with the follies of those at the fringes of this philosophical approach. Meaning-based instruction is not the opposite of skills-based instruction; they both share the same goal of phonics knowledge. However, and this is very important, the approach that places decoding skills within a meaningful context is actually more successful, for the simple reason that, as Kohn quotes a young child, “I could read this if I knew what it was about!”¹⁸

CHICKENS AND EGGS

When I was student-teaching in a second-grade classroom, I sometimes noticed a chicken-and-egg problem, namely that a slavish devotion to decoding rules often slowed kids down to the point that they simply couldn’t comprehend what they were reading, which in turn made it even more impossible to decode (because they lacked the context that would help them self-correct). Reading is a kind of dance, and it requires a certain degree of coordination to execute. When we read a sentence on the page, our brain is asking three different sets of questions: Does it look right? Does it sound right? Does it make sense?

These are what we call cueing systems, and I want to give an example of how they work together in the following sentence:

It was raining, so we put on our boots and played outside in the puddles.

As you read the sentence, your semantic (or context-based) cueing system automatically kicks into gear, telling you that rain and boots and playing outside fit together somehow with the idea of wet weather. That context will help you when you encounter an unfamiliar word, “puddles,” which might otherwise be confused with the word “poodles” or, who knows, maybe “piddles” or “pudding” or other totally unrelated words. Children who get hung up on decoding often don’t realize they are saying silly things, but when you get them to pause and activate their other cueing systems, they’ll often laugh and self-correct right away. The problem, of course, arises if you don’t have a strong semantic cueing system about wet weather because you live in sunny Tucson and you’ve never played outside in the rain.

Along with the contextual cues, the syntactic or structural cueing system helps the reader sequence the ideas: a seasoned English speaker (one who has engaged in a lot of conversation) understands that the rain needs to come before the kids can play outside in the puddles. And, finally, the graphophonemic system helps the reader to connect letters to sounds, recognizing the “oo” in “boots,” for example. A child using multiple cueing systems simultaneously will employ a lot of different tricks to make sense of a sentence. One child may observe that the word “Chris” is smaller than, but similar to, “Christmas,” and use the actual number of letters to unpack the word. Another child would connect the word “Christmas” with other words in the sentence, such as “Santa Claus” or “December.”

Beginning readers can find it hard to keep all these cueing systems humming along nicely together; it’s why some children race ahead, making obvious stumbles on simple words they already know like “a,” “the,” and plurals, while others plod pedantically (and sometimes infuriatingly), with a higher degree of accuracy but missing the gist of what they are reading.

And underlying all of this is the reality we’ve seen—that children without things to talk about really can’t learn to read.¹⁹ Reading is hard work. Effective teachers know this and, unlike the Reading Wars fanatics, they actually do their best to give children as many different strategies and approaches as possible, because children learn to read in different ways. We can’t forget this simple fact.

BALANCING ACT

At some point in the recent iterations of the Reading War, a group of “balanced literacy instruction” advocates emerged. These educators recommitted to the value of good phonics instruction but also understood the importance of placing phonics learning within the broader context of literacy. The idea was to convey an appreciation for conversation and books in whose service all the rules and strategies were employed. I was taught within this balanced framework, and I learned how to foster complex language skills, how to choose good stories, how to read out loud effectively, and how to use contextual and other cues to make meaning of unfamiliar words. But I also learned how to teach phonics systematically and explicitly, in a logical sequence. I learned an awful lot about phonics instruction, some of which I can still remember, including the trade-offs between synthetic (parts to whole) and analytic (whole to parts) word analysis and hundreds of different onset and rime combinations and phonemic awareness games. I’m sorry to be a bore, but I just want to establish my street cred here.

So it came as a surprise when I left graduate school and entered the world of policy makers and fear-stoking news headlines to discover that my balanced instruction training was apparently a sham. Balanced literacy advocates were accused of trying to foist the same old broken methods (etc., etc.) on poor (often literally poor), unsuspecting children. We were refusing to accept decades of evidence that phonics instruction was the only way to produce good readers. We were living in a fantasyland. We were dupes and frauds.

It was around this time that the National Early Literacy Panel took a strong position on systematic phonics instruction, letter awareness, and other decoding skills, and the U.S. government made a gigantic push into the Reading Wars debate by putting its financial muscle behind a strongly code-based initiative called Reading First, which was targeted to poor, at-risk children. Finally, those dreamers in the meaning-based camp were to be silenced for good!

There was just one small problem.

Reading First was a failure. Well, it wasn’t entirely a washout, but it certainly didn’t do what it intended to do. In fact, statistically significant improvements were noted in only one of the four targeted child outcomes (letter recognition), and the effect size was tiny, probably resulting in an average increase in letter awareness of just a couple of letters per child over the whole year. The program had almost no impact on other aspects of language development, such as phonological awareness (the difference between “map” and “mat,” for example) and oral language. The evaluations finessed the disappointing results in reading outcomes by noting that, “RF [reading first] teachers, on average, reported having spent significantly more time attending professional development activities—conferences, workshops, college courses—in the past year than did teachers in non-RF Title schools (40 hours versus 24 hours).”²⁰ So teachers attended more workshops. Great. To some renowned literacy experts, who wrote a stirring warning about the National Early Literacy Report over its potentially harmful neglect of oral language, this could not have been a big shock.²¹

The real focus in the preschool years, in my view, should be not just on reading, but on talking. How easily we forget that spontaneous, unstructured conversation in the early years is vitally important because it builds understanding. Through authentic, face-to-face conversation, young children acquire content. They learn things. They solve puzzles that trouble them. This learning is especially powerful when it emerges spontaneously, from little sparks we may not be able to plan or even see. Recall the little boy learning about S-words who found soulfulness in his garden of spinach and soil.

Sometimes, to be fair, what children learn in conversation is wrong, or made up. They might conclude, as my young son once did, that pigs make ham, just as chickens make eggs and cows produce milk. But these understandings are constantly worked over, refined, adapted to new situations as the children acquire yet more knowledge through the harsh reality of, say, eating a ham sandwich in front of a brutal older sibling who sets things straight. The early learning theorist Piaget called these mental frameworks “schemas,” and he showed that children are continually deepening their schemas as they come into contact with more and more experience.

This early childhood learning process is worth gold. It’s the most efficient system we have. It’s far more valuable than most of the reading-skills curricula we could implement. And this is literally true: one major meta-analysis of thirteen literacy programs “failed to find any evidence of effects on language or print-based outcome.”²² Take a moment to digest that devastating conclusion.

CONVERSATION AND MEANING

To understand the importance of oral language to a young child’s literacy development, consider this transcript from a group of children who are struggling to understand the big things in life. These are the same children we met earlier in the chapter, when they reflected on writing, and here is a sampling of their thoughts about God, nature, beauty, and the afterlife.

“Look out the window!”

“Oh, the snow!”

“Mother Nature!”

“Cloud nature.”

“How snow works is, there are tiny crystals that are made from crystals. And they form snowflakes. And then the snowflakes fall. They form lines.”

“I know who Mother Nature is. She’s, like, a really tiny fairy. She might creep in at night. She’s so tiny. She’s as tiny as a baby mouse.”

“Maybe the snow is a painting.”

“Mother Nature squeezes the clouds. All she does is squeeze the clouds.”

“Maybe someone painted the trees.”

“Like God painted it.”

“They say God lives in the sky.”

“God touches you so you can’t even feel it. Sometimes you can feel God invisible and sometimes you can’t.”

“Sometimes you can’t hear your heart but you can feel it.”

“You can’t see your heart but you can feel it.”

“I know what a miracle means. It means when something comes true.”

“What are prayers?”

“So people are feeling better.”

“Words you say at nighttime.”

“Sometimes you wish on a star so that might be it.”

“In prayers you say what you did that day. You say it to make you feel better.”

“We would need to have God to help us fly. God is flying in space. God is someone who was born a few hundred years ago.”

“He wasn’t born any day. He’s been living forever.”

“He’s like a star.”

“He’s not a ghost, he’s a man.”

“There’s a few God people and they see shooting stars. They make storms, big holes and ships and things.”

“Jesus was a magic person.”

“Because he was dead and he came back alive.”

“Well, he was dead and then it was like, ‘No, he’s not!’”

“He’s alive right now.”

“Maybe Jesus is a magician. But we don’t really know. We’re just guessing, right?”

“Will you live with your parents until you die?”

“Yeah, but I will be under the ground there, with bugs eating me.”

“No, you’ll be in heaven.”

“You think so?”

These poignant, mysterious thoughts drive home the beauty of spontaneous communication, but they also point to how hard it can be to train teachers to cultivate the art of listening, an art that young children themselves are apparently so capable of—if given ample time and encouragement.

There is an unfortunate bias in the educational field in favor of decoding skills, and the reason for this bias is not simply that decoding skills are somehow preferable to other instructional methods, but also that—and this is critical to understand—we know more about how to teach phonics than we do about how to teach kids how to converse actively with complex language.²³ Leaving aside for a moment the fact that the things we measure are not always the things we should be measuring, why do we know so much more about how to implement measurably effective phonics instruction in classrooms than we do about how to implement other, equally, or more important, language-related instructional practices?

In one study of approximately seven hundred preschools around the country, researchers found only 15 percent of the teacher-student conversations could be described as “effective.”²⁴ Speaking about the difficulty of boosting oral language and vocabulary in preschool classrooms, Steven Barnett, of the National Institute for Early Education and Research, told the New York Times, “There is a lot of wishful thinking about how easy it is, that if you just put kids in any kind of program that this will just happen.”²⁵

Two well-respected researchers in the early literacy world explain that “there are speculative suggestions in the literature that it is challenging to help teachers improve their support of children’s oral language skills because high-quality language instruction requires responsive linguistic input to children that cannot be readily included in a scripted curriculum or protocol.”²⁶ Translation? A lot of teachers simply don’t know how to chat effectively with little kids, so we give them stacks of work sheets to hand out instead. In all likelihood, these teachers didn’t spend their own childhoods conversing in this rich and educational way.

I want this to sink in. This is a workforce problem, once again masquerading as an instructional imperative, and parents ought to push back hard against this kind of confidence game. If they can’t make progress shifting the culture in their children’s classrooms, they should at the least liberate themselves while at home to have fun with their children, singing and reading and telling stories together and chatting about all the interesting, silly, enchanting stuff that goes on in a child’s daily life.

MORE THAN JUST BOOKS

It made national headlines when a Chicago-area public school abandoned homework for children in the early grades in favor of a new policy called PDF, or play, downtime, and family time. The move prompted educator Alfie Kohn to express disappointment that “a common sense move like this is so unusual that it counts as news.”²⁷ Parents embraced the new policy, noting that adults like to relax when they come home from work, so why shouldn’t children? Others realized that their children were now playing outside until dinnertime and seemed much more motivated to learn when they came in. Despite these casual observations, on top of a pile of evidence that homework has not been seen to improve academic performance or learning motivation for the majority of children in the elementary years, these kinds of efforts are still sadly seen as subversive.²⁸

As with homework, the logic behind some of our other instructional practices can be maddening, which is why it’s a good idea to question conventional wisdom. Consider the cherished “picture walk,” a common warm-up strategy that preschool and kindergarten teachers use to introduce a new story. Before reading a word of the text, the teacher asks the children to comment on each picture and predict, without hearing the text, what will happen next. As literacy educator Frank Serafini points out, “Being able to predict what happens next in a story may, in fact, reveal the shortcomings of the plot of a particular story, not necessarily the comprehension skills of the reader. In other words, if the plot of a story is that predictable, is it really an engaging, quality story worth reading further? In most cases, the books we enjoy reading the most are those for which we are not able to predict what is going to happen next.”²⁹

Simple changes in a classroom or at home can make literacy learning so much more valuable. Many schools simply have too few books, and the ones they have are inaccessible to children. Teachers trot out a collection of books on a particular theme, but a lot of kids aren’t actually interested in browsing through ten books about mittens.

One of my teaching mentors encouraged me to keep a full library of books in open milk crates in my classroom for children’s ready access. Lacking a better system, I alphabetized the picture books by author’s last name and was surprised to find that the children could easily handle this method, even the ones who didn’t know all the letters of the alphabet. The book corner was always the favorite part of the room and occupied by far the biggest space as well. My colleagues were stronger teachers and more artistically gifted; I had to work with my own more limited strengths, but I always took pride in the language-rich environment I was able to foster for my preschoolers. This part of teaching came quite easily to me because I, too, had been exposed to such a language-rich environment in my childhood.

Books were everywhere in my house and, unusually for a child born in the early 1960s, I had no official bedtime. The policy in my home was that I had to be in bed by eight o’clock each night, but I was allowed to read as long as I wanted. “You have no bedtime?!” my friends would declare in amazement. “Nope,” I’d answer proudly. “My mother lets me read all night if I want.” In reality, I never made it past eight thirty. Some nights I was fast asleep by four minutes past the hour. There came a point when I realized my eight P.M. curfew was actually earlier than my peers’, but I had been so brainwashed to think that I had the best deal in the world that I didn’t balk. I want to be very clear that I was not a precocious reader, although I eventually became a good one. I was not really precocious at anything, truth be told. I was a basically normal kid given the conditions to crave books and, to this day, my life revolves around the written word. (My husband often teases me that I would conduct my entire life in epistolary form if given the chance.) Now, I can already hear the counterfactual: I must have been predisposed to love written words and, look, the proof is in your hands: I wrote my own book. But I’m not so sure. I believe I grew up to be a reader because books were the currency of my home.

Let’s return to our literacy outliers, the tiny percentage of children who teach themselves to read without any instruction at all. They’re not all geniuses, and some of them are even average in intelligence, but they share an uncommon motivation to read (often pushed by an older sibling) and the privilege of living in extremely literature-rich home environments where they hear and handle books all the time. Psychologist Peter Gray speculates about why these unusual children can learn to read at home, fueled only by their own fierce desires (and without any formal phonics knowledge at all), whereas, at school, children generally need to learn the decoding rules first, and are pushed and prodded to do so.

No matter how liberal-minded the teacher is, real, prolonged self-direction and self-motivation is not possible in the classroom . . . children in school must learn or go through the motions of learning what the teacher wants them to learn in the way the teacher wants them to do it. The result is slow, tedious, shallow learning about procedure, not meaning, regardless of the teacher’s training. . . . Under those conditions, methods that focus on the mechanical processes underlying reading—the conversion of sights to sounds—work better than methods that attempt to promote reading through meaning, which requires that students care about the meaning, which requires that they be able to follow their own interests, which is not possible in the classroom.³⁰

But why is it not possible for a preschooler to pursue his own interests? I don’t mean to be naïve. But once you get beyond “because that’s the way it’s always been,” or “that’s the way the program is designed,” or “because the experts say . . . ,” a whole world of possibilities opens up. Do preschoolers need all the trappings of elementary school we encountered in Chapter Two? The faux academic overstimulation? The enforced choices? The cultlike obsession with readiness? I would say, mostly, they do not. And I think some of these trappings, such as the notorious print-rich environments we encountered with their busy totems to industriousness, can actually interfere with the task of becoming a good communicator and a literate person. We spend a lot of energy on creating print-rich environments but that’s not at all the same thing as creating a language-rich environment.

Consider again the hope that Finland offers; its guidelines for preprimary (preschool) education remind us that:

The basis for emerging literacy is that children have heard and listened, they have been heard, they have spoken and been spoken to, people have discussed things with them, and they have asked questions and received answers.³¹

For our young children, what else is there to wish for?