Merrow on reading

Over on Learning Matters in his blog, Taking Note, John Merrow published an entry entitled “On Learning to Read” that raises some good points, but nearly omits a terrifically important one. I suspect regular readers (whom I’ve neglected terribly in the recent months—sorry) can guess which one was omitted.

Here’s Mr. Merrow’s lead:

Why children want to be able to read is not open for debate. It’s for the same reasons that they want to walk: to control their own destiny. It’s purely pragmatic; children understand that, when they know how to read, they are better able to navigate their environment successfully, just as they intuitively understand that walking is better than crawling or toddling.

When he began to compare learning to read to learning to walk, I got pretty wary. Fortunately, though, he didn’t go for the “reading is natural” point, though. Instead, he draws this analogy:

Encouragement is a huge part of learning to walk. Think back to your own children, if you have them, and I am sure you can conjure up images of you and your spouse smiling, clapping and otherwise encouraging your toddler. You were there to lend a hand or prevent a serious fall, of course, but you also tried to keep ‘hands off’ when you could.

And you are a walker yourself, meaning that you modeled the behavior for your child.

Learning to read follows that pattern. Encouragement, modeling, timing are all part of the recipe.

Yikes! It’s the motivation trap with modeling an critical periods added! However, he follows that with a statement about teaching (hooray!):

But there’s one other essential ingredient—knowing something about how to teach reading—because, unlike walking, reading is not instinctive. At bottom, it’s an unnatural act, albeit a vital skill.

And, after a paragraph about the importance of learning to read there is another that contains an anecdote about his own children receiving books from Reading is Fundamental. In that same he (pull on your galoshes!) pitches a good word for sustained silent reading and motivation. In a subsequent paragraph Mr. Merror nods to teaching again, but tempers it by arguing that “teaching must take advantage of children natueral desire to learn.”

There is more to Mr. Merrow’s column, and I encouage folks to to read it directly. About the parts I’ve underscored here, I have a couple of notes:

• Even with extraordinary desire to learn to read and promises of huge rewards for learning to read, only a few children will learn to read in the absence of systematic, explicit instruction. There is ample evidence of the importance of such instruction available in academic circles (e.g., Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read) and the general press (e.g., Sally Shaywitz’s Overcoming Dyslexia).
• One of the things effective teachers do is generate “motivation”; complete teaching often requires that teachers make the results of accurate academic (and social-behavioral) responding reinforcing, thus increasing the chances that students will repeat those responses. “Motivation” isn’t only an innate characteristic of individual; it’s also inherent in tasks, in accomplishment, in succeeding, in learning.
• Despite it’s cosmetic-cardiac appeal, “sustained silent reading” (and its cousin, “drop everything and read”) has an at-least mixed record for effectiveness. The strongest evidence in favor of it is in methodologically less rigorous studies; the strongest studies are equivocal.