Missing the Forest for the Trees in Literacy Instruction: Resisting the Nonsense in Crisis-based Reading Reform (Again)

[Header Photo by Irina Iriser on Unsplash]

One brief analogy I use when asking students to consider both literacy and teaching literacy (as well as teaching and learning in general) is to recall a time when they had to assemble something like a bookshelf or a large toy for children.

The point is to consider the ways in which we navigate the directions and assembling the item. I nudge them by asking how well they feel the written directions help them and then what they do when they find themselves confused while assembling.

A typical moment of community in this thought experiment is that many of us rely on the picture on the box to help guide us.

Yes, we turn to look at the picture to help us make meaning of the process.

I recently assembled two large filing cabinets and cannot express the relief of having the detailed directions, the image of the completed filing cabinet in several angles on amazon, and a video of someone assembling the cabinets.

My point is that the most compelling part of assembling an item for many people is the whole, finished product. We really want and even need is to see the whole authentic thing.

But that does not mean that the step-by-step instructions do not matter; they certainly help, and following the instructions carefully often makes assembly successful.

In my case, I also found that the second cabinet was a breeze because I had the experience of building the first one.

All of this is to say that literacy, like the assembling analogy, is a holistic and authentic human behavior that is both natural (speaking and listening) and requires a learning process (reading and writing).

And like my experience with building two cabinets, literacy development is best learned when grounded in its holistic state but greatly aided by attending in some ways with identifiable parts (so-called skills). Ultimately, as well, literacy development requires a great deal of authentic experiences as part of that growth.

I have again been thinking about all this after presenting at LitCon 2024 and having several people approach me about my stance on nonsense words as a way to asses students’ phonics knowledge.

The reason issues about how to teach phonics in reading instruction (parallel to how to teach grammar, mechanics, and usage in writing instruction) remains a point of debate, I think, is that most literacy debate is driven those who are missing the forest for the trees, committed to implementing inauthentic and decontextualized practices.

My standard position is that using nonsense words to assess phonics knowledge in students is misrepresenting the purpose of reading skills (all of which are ways in which readers seek to make meaning) and misrepresenting reading achievement (testing phonics knowledge is not testing reading, which must include comprehension).

For a century, alas, we have remained mired in a literacy debate that itself is mostly nonsense.

I know of no one who advocates for no phonics (or no grammar) instruction.

Again, the debate is mostly between those hyper-focusing on the trees (such as the “science of reading” [SOR] mandates for phonics-first and systematic phonics for all students) and those arguing that regardless of how we teach, we must keep the forest in sight (the holistic and authentic acts of literacy, reading and writing).

A key question is not whether students have acquired phonics knowledge but if students can read for meaning and are eager to do so.

The SOR movement and the concurrent rise in SOR legislation, policy, instructional practices, and programs are mostly a recycling of many eras of reading crises followed by reading reform.

We have in recent history a reading crisis/reform movement grounded in scientifically-based mandates, NCLB, that has led to, yes, the exact same reading crisis and nearly the exact same reform agendas.

And once reading research and science have been diluted by ill-informed media and even more ill-informed politicians, we are faced with mandates that are banning some practices as not “scientific” (often without any citation to that science) and mandating practices and programs that are themselves not supported by scientific evidence—LETRS training, Orton-Gillingham, so-called SOR programs (see blow), decodable texts, phonics checks using nonsense words, etc.

In short, reading wars often fail reading, students, and teachers because ideological biases are wrapped in veneers such as “science” and research. The agents of that failure are often non-literacy experts and non-educators—notably journalists, politicians, and corporate entities eager to rebrand and market new educational materials and programs.

As I documented in my SOR policy brief, the problems with SOR are mostly not that we should avoid reading reform (specifically the need to do a much better job of serving the needs of marginalized and minoritized students since literacy, like all of formal education, remains inexcusably inequitable), but that reform must be (1) grounded in accurate identification of the problems, (2) informed by educators and educational researchers without market stakes in that reform, and (3) designed to serve the individual needs of all students (and not one-size-fits all mandates).

The current wave of SOR stories and legislation fails all of those guidelines and is proving to be another attempt at doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.

Let’s now consider a couple examples of why SOR is misguided.

First, assessments using nonsense words and systematic phonics for all students are not supported by reading science; further, these practices can in fact cause harm:

Advocates of the phonics screening tests claim that they are fun. In fact, for fluent readers, it can destroy their recognition as competent readers. In one school example, a boy who came to school reading, and who continued to flourish as a fluent reader, scored 2/40! Since the test includes nonsense words in the quest to focus on decoding (he read “elt” as “let,” “sarps” as “rasp,” and “chab” as “cab,” to foreground a few!) What he seemed to be doing was re-arranging the letters or sounds and reconstructing them into recognizable words that he knew made sense. Meanwhile, another child whom the teacher regarded as not being a fluent reader was able to sound out the nonsense words as well as regular words and achieve a score of 16/40, all without knowing their meaning. Thus, the raw scores from the test of each child give us no information about them as readers and how they can make meaning from text; they simply show how they decode words out of context.
Phoney Phonics: How Decoding Came to Rule and Reading Lost
Meaning

When any instruction starts with the content or skill without regard for what the student knows or needs to know, that practice is wasting precious time better spent on what that student needs and in some cases mis-teaching students (nonsense words make the phonics knowledge the goal and misleads students to see making meaning as unneeded).

Next, as noted above, the SOR reform movement is once again making the fatal mistake of misreading the importance of reading programs while simultaneously falsely blaming some programs as failures while endorsing programs that have (ironically) been discredited through research.

Once at the center of the Reading First scandal during NCLB, Open Court is now being mandated in states such as Virginia (as one of a few districts can choose).

Endorsing Open Court is evidence that the SOR movement remains mostly ideology and not “scientific”; in fact, the resurfacing of Open Court is deja vu all over again:

Back in the 1990s, the Los Angeles Times was a big fan of the scripted reading curriculum, Open Court, designed to teach reading in the elementary grades through a heavy dose of explicit, systematic phonics. The Times reporters wrote lots of favorable articles about phonics instruction in general, especially then-education reporter, Richard Lee Colvin. Others got in on the act, too, including Jill Stewart of the LA Weekly, whose “The Blackboard Bungle” article should be a case study in the lack of “fact checking” in reporting.*

Open Court ended up being adopted by Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), among many other districts around the country – never mind that the evidence for the effectiveness of phonics was (and is) severely lacking. (LAUSD eventually abandoned the program in 2011.)
Closing the Books on Open Court Reading

And after Open Court was adopted in a major US city (think about the outsized anger leveled at Units of Study in NYC), what does the scientific evidence show?:

Translation: Open Court does no better, and often worse, than the alternatives.

This most recent study is by no means the only evidence against phonics instruction or programs such as Open Court. The list of studies that show the failure of phonics is too long to repeat here, but you can whet your appetite by looking at what happened with the U.S. Department of Education’s spectacularly expensive and utterly ineffective Reading First program (here, here, and here, for starters).

Journalists and politicians get to move on to the next Great Cause, but the teachers and kids stuck in Open Court classrooms often have no such option.
Closing the Books on Open Court Reading

As McQuillan warned, we are now in the throes of the “next Great Cause,” and students and teachers are trapped, again, by mandates driven by ideology, politics, and market interests.

If you take the time to look, the greater the missionary zeal about a reading crisis and reading reform, the more likely the person is blinded by beliefs, motivated by political gain, or cashing in.

Regretfully, centering the use of nonsense words in the SOR movement does capture what all the reading crisis histrionics ultimately are—nonsense.

As is typical of education reform, SOR advocates are missing the forest for the trees.