I have always loved to read, and I have always loved the English language. I cringe every time I read some grammatical error on a billboard, advertisement, or even (as I noticed recently) a newspaper headline.
One night, while searching in the woods for food, Frankenstein’s monster discovers a leather suitcase containing three books: The Sorrows of Young Werther, Plutarch’s Lives, and Paradise Lost. Goethe is a source of “astonishment” but also alienation; the monster can sympathize with the characters, but only to a point - their lives are so unlike his own. From Plutarch he learns about public virtue. It is Milton who expands his soul. Paradise Lost “moved every feeling of wonder and awe,” the monster says. As a created being, he identifies with Adam, but Satan is “the fitter emblem of my condition, for…when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me.”
It may move us to wonder and awe that the monster is able to read Milton at all, let alone form a complex analysis. But fate took a hand in his education when, alone and wandering in the woods, he happened upon a cottage where two children were teaching French to a visitor. Listening and looking through the window, the monster became a pupil, too. “While I improved in speech,” he explains, “I also learned the science of letters.” He learned, in other words, how to read.
It is possible that absent those lessons and with knowledge of the alphabet alone, the monster might have puzzled over Paradise Lost long enough to figure it out for himself. Some people are just naturally good at hearing all of the individual sounds within words. In time, with enough exposure to text, they start to make all of these connections - decoding and pronouncing and mastering, by intuition and practice, the contradictory and exception-ridden rules of written English. As Milton might put it, with wandering steps and slow, they make their solitary way. In common parlance, they figure it out. But the phrase “science of letters” suggests that Frankenstein’s monster was more like a member of the greater majority, the 60 percent who require direct and explicit instruction in phonics to learn to read.
Phonics is nothing more than a relationship between sound structure and a print structure. It is breaking down the word “cat” into a spoken hard k sound, followed by the short vowel a, and finally putting the tip of your tongue on the front roof of your mouth and letting go to make that little burst of t. Phonics teaches you how to handle consonants, long and short vowels, digraphs, diphthongs, and so on - and to smoothly blend phonetic units, repeating them like the characters on Sesame Street who push letters from one side of the screen to the other until a word is born and sense breaks through sound.
In Reading in the Brain, the cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene identifies three stages of learning to read: the pictorial, where children memorize a few words as if they were pictures; the phonological, where they decode graphemes into phonemes; and the orthographic, where word recognition becomes fast and automatic.
Ultimately there are two distinct neural pathways that are used in reading. The “phonological route” is used for words that are “very regular, rare, or novel.” In the beginning, of course, all words are novel. But even when we become fluent at reading and are not aware of using the phonological network, it still operates at the nonconscious level. The other network, the lexical route - in which the brain sees letters and takes a direct route that first recovers the identity and meaning of the word and then uses the lexical information to recover its pronunciation - is used for words that we encounter all the time or whose spellings are irregular. Without this network, we would not be able to distinguish between words like “maid” and “made,” or “board” and “bored” - a whole world of puns and double meanings would be lost.
If you are not born with the gift for phonological understanding or taught it, you can try to memorize words or rely on the lexical route. But you will stall out. Memorization is laborious and does not take advantage of the efficiencies in how the brain maps written words for automatic retrieval. Children who need phonics instruction and do not get it may pore over a page of Paradise Lost till Christ returns - or Frog and Toad, or Go, Dog. Go! - and never become fluent readers. They might stumble or fake it through “easy readers,” but as texts grow more sophisticated, they will grow more frustrated and confused, spending all their energy trying to figure out what a given word is rather than what it means, skipping and skimming to get by. They are likely to feel stupid, ashamed, or angry, and to avoid books altogether. They may be diagnosed with a reading disability, when the only problem they have is that their education has failed them.
The good news is that everyone, even monsters, can learn to read. The bad news is that for the past 30 years, despite research that clearly established phonics as the best, the only, way to teach reading, many American schools clung to the pseudo-methods and fantasies of an educational approach known as balanced literacy or literacy by vibes.
The consequences have been grim. According to a 2022 Department of Education assessment, 67 percent of American fourth graders are not proficient readers. Some of these children will never get the help they need.
Debates over the best way to teach reading, and anxiety that American schools are failing to graduate good readers, go back more than 100 years. In the 1960s, New Zealand schools were using something called the “book experience” method, which was derived from the “whole word” method.
In America, the whole-word method was taught through Dick and Jane books; New Zealand had a similar series, called Janet and John. The book-experience method replaced Janet and John with so-called little books that used more difficult vocabulary. The idea was that learning to read is easier for children - and more interesting - if they start with whole stories, whole sentences - not individual words.
Calling this a “method” seems a bit grand. It was more like hopes and prayers, and it worked about as well. Good readers were not using phonics to decode words but were acting as “detectives,” looking for clues and cues in context. The problem was that good readers were so skilled at phonics that they did not appear to be sounding words out - but they were. The program that evolved out of that study standardized and institutionalized the things that poor readers do to cover up and compensate for the fact that they cannot sound words out.
In the 1990s two Americans, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, launched a curricular empire of Guided Reading books, with different levels of difficulty and chock-full of pictures, along with separate assessments. Their approach has come to be known as “cueing” or “three-cueing.” The idea is that children should use context to guess at an unfamiliar word’s identity, and then ask themselves the following questions: Does my guess make sense? Does it sound right? And, finally, does it look right?
When Lucy Calkins, who had previously specialized in teaching writing, wanted to write a book about teaching reading, she turned to Pinnell for guidance. Calkins’s “balanced literacy approach,” which involves setting up classroom libraries of leveled books and using cueing to read them, became very popular. (It was mandated in most New York City elementary schools.) Among teachers, Calkins had celebrity status and they applied in droves to attend her weeklong training sessions at Columbia Teachers College.
It is estimated that the Calkins curriculum is used by one in four elementary schools in the United States, but cueing as a strategy is far more pervasive - as Education Week reported in 2020, according to a 2019 national survey, “75 percent of K–2 and elementary special education teachers use the method to teach students how to read, and 65 percent of college of education professors teach it.” But the situation has rather abruptly changed: in the past year, in light of increased media coverage of American children’s abysmal reading scores and a drumbeat of attention on the plentiful research on “the science of reading,” districts across the nation, including New York City, have abandoned or pledged to abandon cueing and return to phonics-based instruction.
Attention to the issue also increased during the Covid pandemic, when parents, who usually know little of what happens inside their children’s classrooms, were able to see for themselves how reading was being taught.
Fountas and Pinnell’s guided reading program is troubling for many reasons. Their assessments have been demonstrated to be worthless. Students test all over the place, because their understanding depends not on their ability to decode words but rather on how much they already know about the subject of a given book.
As for cueing itself, it is almost sublime in its absurdity.
For a long-time progressive pedagogy, which is opposed to anything “rote,” had smeared phonics as fusty, top-down, and old-fashioned. Partisan politics was also a factor in the reading wars. George W. Bush was a phonics booster - he was reading The Pet Goat at a school to bring attention to his $5 billion Reading First initiative when the planes flew into the World Trade Center - and many teachers could not stomach being on his side of any issue. (Phonics had been a plank in the 2000 Republican Party platform.)
Fountas and Pinnell warned teachers to be wary of the data on phonics and encouraged them to lobby legislators. (Pinnell said that cueing, like gravity in the time of Isaac Newton, was an idea ahead of its time.) The death knell of Bush’s program came in 2005, when Reading Recovery Council of North America - an advocacy group - accused Department of Education of a “misinformation campaign,” claiming that its programs were being maligned and unfairly excluded from grants. An investigation by the inspector general found that the grant review process was biased in favor of phonics instruction and that “some consultants who reviewed Reading First grant proposals had professional ties to commercial reading programs.” The idea that some instruction is worth funding, and some is not had no traction, and eventually Congress cut all funding for Reading First.
Some say that asking a child to just sound out a word is simplistic and analogous to telling the child not to think. But of course, the opposite is true: without being able to sound out the words, thinking in any meaningful sense is not possible at all. That is assuming you want children to think about the text in front of them. Reading should be an opportunity for self-expression rather than a practice of comprehending text. And it involves a degree of performance.
It is wonderful when a toddler pretends to read or memorizes a book and “reads” it out loud, but it is quite a different thing for a teacher to tell a four- or five-year-old that she is reading when the child knows that she is not. (Most kindergartners do not yet know how to read.) What does that do to a child? Does it make them feel empowered and proud? Does it confuse them as to the meaning of “avidly”? Or does it make them feel anxious and fraudulent, like they cannot trust the adults around them to tell them what is real and what is not.
It was not just money that was behind cueing and balanced literacy, though districts threw plenty of it around. The thing driving it all was a fantasy. That fantasy, or maybe we should call it a delusion, was, that children could skip ahead to the “good part” of reading - the part where they would “curl up in a cozy nook” and contemplate big questions of story and meaning. In other words, the balanced-literacy advocates liked the part in Frankenstein where the monster is awed and expanded by Paradise Lost. They were less interested in the science of letters that allows him to decipher the marks on the page. But learning how to read is the good part.
The thing that has most preoccupied me is the bizarre and pernicious ideology at the heart of cueing - the idea that a good way to know what a sentence says is to assume it echoes your preconceived ideas about the world.
Certainly, we all do an amount of cueing when we encounter new ideas. We test what we learn against what we already know and expect of the world. The glory of reading, the reason for reading at all, is to encounter the new. To be surprised by where a sentence lands, to trip over an unexpected adjective, to be thrown out of the dullness of habit into a new and unfamiliar place. That is the whole point - that of all the possible words that could come next, this one does. That of all the possible worlds, the writer - someone who is not you, who has thoughts and ways of expressing those thoughts that you could never have - imagined this one.
For 30 years, very young children have gone to school and been told that reading is an exercise in seeking confirmation of what they already know - these children who are at the beginning of knowing anything at all. It is as if we have been training them to be algorithms, honing their ability to make predictions rather than their capacity to enter the minds of others. One can only conclude that a kind of crime has been committed, a vast impoverishment. It leaves me less surprised that our world is rife with misinformation.
There is one more text in the suitcase that Frankenstein’s monster discovers. He finds pages from the journal of Victor Frankenstein, his creator.
To read is not always to enter a cozy little nook. Sometimes we read to enter the horrors of history and of our own lives. The monster might have been happier if he had never read a single word. But then he would not know where he came from, or where he was going.
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