Last Saturday I joined around 160 other language and
literacy enthusiasts (predominantly teachers, both primary and secondary, and
speech pathologists) to hear Dr Louisa Moats speak in Melbourne on the science
of reading instruction. I was well primed for this event, having read rave
reviews of her presentations in other states, and also having re-visited some
of her published work in the week prior to the workshop, most notably this one
from 2007: Whole
Language High Jinks – highly recommended if you haven’t read it.
Dr Moats was in Australia as a guest of LearningDifficulties Australia (LDA). LDA celebrates its 50th birthday
this year, and in a generous and inspired piece of gift-giving, brought Dr
Moats and her expertise to Australia so that we might benefit from her wisdom
on matters pertaining to teacher training, literacy instruction, Response to
Intervention, and management of children with dyslexia.
I’ll focus in this blog on Dr Moats’ comments on reading instruction in particular, though I will also mention some of her reflections on Whole Language and on teacher training.
Dr Moats impresses as an under-stated highly knowledgeable
scientist, who also has the benefit of many years’ experience as both a teacher
and an educational psychologist. She has personally assessed thousands of
struggling readers of all ages, as well as conducting rigorous research on
optimal teaching methods and teacher training regarding language constructs
relevant to reading instruction.
Much of the Saturday workshop was devoted to the science of
teaching reading. Here, Dr Moats drew on Hollis Scarborough’s 2001 “reading rope”
(see below) to drill down on the specifics of reading-related subskills such
as
-
What is a phoneme?
How do voiced and voiceless phonemes differ? How does place of articulation influence phoneme production?
- What is a grapheme?
- What does phoneme-grapheme correspondence mean?
- What is morphology and how does it inform the teaching of reading and spelling?
- How can children’s vocabulary be strengthened?
- What do syntactic knowledge and understanding contribute to reading proficiency and how can they be developed?
- The importance of comprehension and the role that oral language skills play in this.
For a self-described “Phonicator” Dr Moats’ approach to reading instruction richly reflects the cognitive psychology evidence on early reading and goes way beyond the necessary but not sufficient role of early phonemic awareness and phonics instruction. Dr Moats also stressed that while poor decoding skills play a large part in reading difficulties in the early years, by secondary school, the picture is more complex, and deficits in early decoding skills are now compounded by decrements in vocabulary, syntactic understanding, and reading comprehension. If the foundations of a house are not sound, then we can’t expect the walls and roof to be strong either.
Some of the exercises Dr Moats asked the audience to do
(like determining the number of phonemes in common words) proved a little
challenging on a Saturday morning, even for this highly motivated and
more-knowledgeable-than-average audience. This took me right back to first year
linguistics when I was studying to be a speech pathologist, and it struck me
that if I was teacher who had not been schooled in these concepts (a la most
Australian teachers in recent decades), I would have been feeling out
of my comfort zone. That’s a comment on teacher training and not on teachers,
and it also reflects the truth behind the title of one of Dr Moats’ most
well-known texts: Teaching Reading IS Rocket Science.
While there was much intellectual ecstasy in listening
to Dr Moats (OK, yes, I’m a bit of a nerd) bringing the science of reading
instruction to life and seeing its teaching illustrated with clear and
theory-based examples, the metaphorical agony lay in the fact that Dr
Moats was preaching to the choir, albeit in ways that gave the choir stronger,
more in-tune voices. I doubt there were many Balanced Literacy advocates
in the room, nor Reading Recovery teachers, nor, perhaps most
critically, teacher educators who (in the main) persist in their promotion
of non-evidence-based approaches to early literacy instruction. On this, Dr
Moats observed that “…we need to be outraged and less tolerant”. Dr Moats also
observed that there’s no point telling teachers that “phonemic awareness is
important” if teachers don’t know what phonemes are (as indicated by the research evidence on teacher knowledge).
As a first-time visitor to Australia, Dr Moats expressed
humility at the reach and influence of her work here, but also some incredulity
at our preponderance for following in the footsteps of our UK and US neigbours
with respect to changing tack, and adopting approaches ahead of the science
being adequately accounted for. It’s too late to put the Whole Language/Reading
Recovery genie back in the bottle, but I wonder what cliff we’ll jump off next
if we don’t abandon our lemming ways?
Dr Moats noted that reading is one of the most studied human
skills, yet we persist in failing to apply the hard-earned science in early
years’ classrooms, and instead accept high rates of suboptimal literacy levels
in first-world nations such as the US and Australia. I’m not the first to
observe that such willingness to look the other way would result in riots in
the streets if interventions that treated a potentially chronic medical illness
were being withheld from small children. Low literacy, however, is such
a condition, yet we have allowed a confluence of social and political factors
to force evidence to take a back seat, in favour of allowing ideology to drive
the literacy instruction bus.
As an important aside, at Dr Moats’ workshop, I also met
Berys Dixon, whose work I became aware of when she contributed to the
discussion forum following this piece on The Conversation that Alison
Clarke and I recently co-authored. Berys is a primary school teacher who had
her own phonics epiphany in 2008, having been using Whole-Language based
approaches such as the Three Cueing System. You can hear Berys telling
her story at this link on the Spelfabet website. There’s also more information about Berys’ work at this link and here's information about sourcing her fabulous little Pocket Rockets.
So this added a bit more ecstasy to the day.
In addition to a dozen or so workshop and seminar
presentations, Dr Moats also met with senior state and federal education
bureaucrats and ministers during her visit. In the interests of preventing us
from having to replicate other nations' expensive mistakes, I hope some of
those people listened carefully to what this very measured scientist had to
say.
(C) Pamela Snow (2015)
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