#152 The Reading Wars Are Older Than You Think by Have You Heard published on 2023-03-07T12:52:24Z Two decades ago, phonics fever swept the land as George W. Bush made “scientifically-based reading instruction” a centerpiece of his education agenda. But despite its scale and huge price tag, Bush’s Reading First initiative has largely been forgotten. Have You Heard revisits the Bush-led effort to transform reading instruction, learning a familiar lesson along the way: history can’t teach us anything if no one remembers it. The financial support of listeners like you keeps this podcast going. Subscribe on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/HaveYouHeardPodcast or donate on PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/haveyouheardpodcast Genre News & Politics Comment by Rchametzky Chametzky, cont.-2 As I used to tell my linguistics students, English spelling is very good—if you can already read English. It carries all sorts of information that would get lost in a “simplified” or “sensible” spelling system. If, however, you need or want to learn to read English, then it’s not so good. Spelling systems are not, and need not, be (only) about grapheme-phoneme transparency. Anyway, I wonder what specifically is the “so-called” part of “science of language”? Is what is being unspokenly (unscientifically?) gestured at people such as Mark Seidenberg or Stanislas Dehaene or . . . ? I find the situation, and myself, becoming curiouser and curiouser. 2023-03-14T21:12:56Z Comment by Rchametzky Chametzky, cont., My PhD, unlike the hosts’, is not in education but in linguistics. When I ran into “whole language instruction” while not completing English Language Arts certification back in the 1990s, I thought that they were kidding. Of course there is a decoding requirement in reading—the “grapheme-phoneme” correspondence—no one could seriously doubt that, could they? It is possible that no one needs to be explicitly taught anything about this correspondence. Indeed, it’s more or less the founding idea of whole language that this relationship is acquirable in as untaught a way as language itself. But why would anyone actually believe this? Again, there’s just never been serious evidence for It (though, in fact, many kids don’t need much explicit decoding instruction, which can “maskerade”, as it were, as evidence). 2023-03-14T21:11:32Z Comment by Rchametzky One the one hand, I was quite puzzled by the consistent use of “so-called” in collocation with “science of reading”. On the other, nearly the first bit of business in the episode is an apparent attempt to inoculate the hosts / listeners against possible infection transmitted by those who might communicate such puzzlement. Still, I am puzzled. Are we to infer that there is no “science of reading”? Not now? Not in the past? Not ever? Why should we believe this? Do the hosts? As far as I could tell, neither evidence nor arguments were either adduced or referred to that supports such inferences / conclusions. Now “science of . . . “ does function in the current US context, for some at least, as an honorific, and being wary of arguments from authority is a Good Thing. But, again, no actual evidence/argument is presented that this is an argument from authority, as far as I could tell. Rob Chametzky 2023-03-14T20:59:56Z Comment by Brian Stecher This is an interesting episode because of the "here we go again" nature of the reading wars. Two suggestions would have made the episode better for me. 1. Clarify what are the elements of the various reading approaches. 2. Talk more about what the countervailing forces were that moved us away from phonics based instruction. There was some of this toward the end of the episode, but it would have been informative to hear more discussion of the pressures and counter pressures that drove reversals in reading policy. 2023-03-08T17:28:02Z
