http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=325436

See Jane read

By WILLIAM BRANTLEY, Staff writer

Sunday, January 23, 2005

In the beginning there was the word, and the word was dog. And the dog was Spot. And Spot was the canine pal of Dick and Jane. And Dick and Jane and Spot poked around in the world of the Elson-Gray Basic Readers, which were typical of the kind of materials that dominated early reading instruction in the United States from the 1930s until the 1960s.

The readers were written in what became known as the language of "look-and-say." They were steeped in the philosophy that if a young reader looked at and said a word often enough, it was bound to be branded as one whole shape into a bustling young brain.

In one book, for example, Spot spots a frog behind some bushes. He barks. Jane, two steps ahead of Dick, calls out: "Look, oh look. Look and see. Come, come see." In another, Dick tosses a toy airplane over the white picket fence. He says, "Look. See it go. See it go up." Jane looks and says, "Oh, look. See it go. See it go up."

Up is where every educational movement has tried to take reading skills and literacy rates. As long as there have been hysterical parents, there has been someone around to envision a better method of teaching children to read. The problem is that what happens as a child learns to read defies easy explanation, because no child learns to read in quite the same way as any other. A web of social, genetic, cognitive, and neurobiological factors influence the relative ease with which a child learns to read. But that has never stopped researchers, educators, parents and presidents from trying to pinpoint what works and doesn't when trying to teach children how to master the skill that underlies all other learning.

The coming of phonics

The look-and-say, or whole word, method got a black eye in 1955, with the publication of Rudolph Flesch's screed "Why Johnny Can't Read and What You Can Do About It." Flesch criticized the limited vocabulary and simplicity of look-and-say and, in its place, promoted the system of phonics. Flesch stressed the importance of the alphabet and the primacy of the reader being able to "decode" words by sounding out each letter.

"You take up one item after another," wrote Flesch, boiling down the idea of sound-letter correspondence, "learn what it stands for, learn how to reproduce it and how to recognize it, and there you are."

Phonics grew in popularity through the 1970s and into the early 1980s.(GS ???!!!) By that time, the arrival of the so-called whole language system sounded to certain educators like liberation. Less rigid than phonics instruction, whole language put forth the idea of a decentralized, more teacher-friendly system that stressed context and reading's relevance to students' lives.

While phonics assumed that reading is a mostly unnatural practice that involves learning to break down an arbitrary communications system (i.e., the alphabet), whole language revolved around the idea that immersed in the right materials -- actual books instead of programmed readers -- children will naturally pick up on the sounds and meaning of words without having to have the alphabet drilled into their heads.

Both sides now

Phonics seesawed back into favor in the mid-1990s, after California's high-profile experiment with whole language was largely blamed for the state's plummeting test scores. During the past 10 years, a pragmatic middle road has emerged, says Frank Vellutino, a cognitive psychologist at the University at Albany, who specializes in reading and language.

A decade and a half of studies have shown Vellutino that there's something to like in both phonics and whole language.

"The research we've done makes it very clear that a child learning to read in an alphabetic system has got to master the alphabetic code," says Vellutino. "But as anyone who's attempted to teach a child to read will tell you -- as the whole language people will tell you -- reading has to be a meaningful enterprise. This enterprise of decoding symbols has to get children to the point where reading is a meaning-bearing enterprise."

Where it starts

What is indisputable is that reading starts with spoken language, almost immediately after birth.

After the first months of life, during which the child's absorbent mind is grasping at whatever is thrown its way, the highly organized brain begins to narrow its focus and become more efficient.

"After four to six months, babies become responsive only to the individual speech sounds used in the language spoken around them," says Vellutino. "They're trying to acquire a vocabulary in that language."

By 18 months, a child's vocabulary is mushrooming. Depending on the exposure to the language and a sensitivity toward it, the child may be picking up a minimum of nine new words a day at this age.

"Children learn to shape their vocal tracks," says Laurie Feldman, a cognitive psychologist who works at both UAlbany and the Haskins Laboratories at Yale University. "As a kid babbles, the babble gets more and more like the language that's being spoken around the kid."

Exposure to writing

At this point, the environment in which a child is being raised will often contribute a great deal to the kind of reader he will become. How often, if at all, does the child see a book or any written language? What and how often do his parents read to him? Is he exposed to rhyme?

Ideally, says Vellutino, as a young child's spoken vocabulary continues to grow, he will be exposed to written language so that he will begin to develop emergent literacy skills that inform his idea of what written language is.

"There are these concepts that a kid acquires about what print is and how print is organized. He may start to pick up some of those conventions," says Peter Johnston, a professor in the Reading Department at UAlbany and a senior researcher for the National Research Center on English Learning and Achievement.

"In English, the text is arranged across the page from left to right, through the book from front to back. There are spaces between the words. Things like spatial orientation are difficult to acquire. For example, a car is still a car no matter if it's upside down. But a 'p' is not," says Johnston.

Making the connection

These "print concepts" can start to mold some kind of recognition in the child that the symbols on the page -- even as their meaning remains foreign -- have some correlation to the spoken language. "A kid begins to understand that written language captures spoken language, that whatever you capture in print is a word and it's a word you can speak," says Feldman. As all this information comes in, say researchers, some children are able to organize it easily, so that their understanding of written language's conventions continue to deepen.

In other words, some kids get it right away. For others, it takes explicit instruction, some more than others.

A crucial step for children learning to read English is the ability to digest (initially the idea, eventually the actual mechanics) of the alphabet.

"In an alphabetic system, like English, the letter symbols represent individual speech sounds," says Vellutino.

To be able to figure out how to use the alphabet, a child must be able to identify the individual speech sounds -- called phonemes -- that correspond to letters. For example, that the word "cat," though only one syllable, consists of three individual speech sounds. Think of the animated child pointing out letter sounds on "Sesame Street": "kuh"-"a"-"tuh."

(Alphabetic systems like English differ from logographic, or pictorial, languages like Chinese. In alphabetic systems, the individual symbols -- letters -- take on meaning only after they've been combined into words, those words arranged into sentences. Logographic languages, like Chinese, have symbols that represent not just sounds, but concepts. So that an individual character means something on it own.)

"In an alphabetic system, you have a small number of characters that are combined in an infinite number of ways," says Vellutino. "A child who has mastered the alphabetic code is able to parse out individual speech sounds."

Once a child can identify the letters of the alphabet and parse out those speech sounds, says Feldman, the child is beginning to learn to read, beginning to recognize that dog is the word for the thing that barks and not just a spot on the page.

Overcoming illiteracy begins with alphabet

According to Frank Vellutino, a cognitive developmental psychologist at the University at Albany, research has shown that illiterate adults learning to read must go through the same stages as children do to "crack the alphabetic code." Once an adult knows and can use the alphabet, he may progress as a reader faster than a child does. Why? Because:

* A stronger vocabulary helps with word identification and reading comprehension.

* More knowledge about the world in general helps with reading comprehension.

* Better developed reasoning abilities (and better developed cognitive abilities in general) help with reading comprehension.

* Stronger powers of concentration and a deeper motivation to improve help drive reading improvements.

On the other hand, says Peter Johnston, a researcher at the Center for English Learning and Achievement at UAlbany, many illiterate adults have had some unsuccessful attempts at reading before.

"There are a number of complications that happen as you get older," says Johnston, pointing to the possibility of low self-esteem, learning difficulties and the more urgent call of daily life. "Normally, an adult who's learning to read has a bunch of scar tissue. They have a lot of useful stuff, but there's also a lot of stuff that gets in the way."

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