Is Learning to Read Natural?

I need to offer as few clarifications since my recent post on how the teaching of reading has been historically corrupted by the influence of reading programs. The motivation of the clarification comes from a comment posted by KenS.*

First, my literacy teaching for the past thirty years does rest on a controversial concept—that grammatical knowledge is essentially biological (see Pinker and Chomsky). This I believe is important as it helps keep literacy instruction from being reduced to seeing language as something acquired.

Next, and to KenS’s questions, speaking and listening are inherent to being human, but reading and writing are artificial, thus acquiring reading and writing are not natural.

However, my point in the earlier post, which certainly wasn’t clear or fully explored, is that Dewey’s claim about not needing to teach reading is grounded in that when children have privileged environments, notably ones that are language and text rich, the acquisition of reading can appear to be natural.

Our goals, then, should be to insure all children have privileged homes that are conducive to language acquisition and that schools provide parallel environments that foster and reinforce  literacy acquisition.

One additional caveat is all of the above is addressing decoding and comprehension (“reading” is a complex term). But I never see decoding and comprehension as going far enough in formal education.

Direct instruction and careful fostering of critical literacy must be provided to all students, and the acquisition of critical literacy, I believe, is certainly not acquired naturally since it requires that we confront and challenge all of the conditions that constitute “natural” for each person.

I hope this is more clear and addresses the great comment from KenS.

* See the comment from Kens at my original post and below:

First, Dr. Thomas, thanks, as always, for making me aware of historical perspectives I was not previously aware of. Your writing always provides much food for thought.

I am not certain of your point with this post, however, and because understanding how young people learn to read (or don’t) has become so important to me, I hope you will clarify for me.

Mea culpa: Despite the fact that I am in my 17th year of teaching middle school English, I have come to see myself as a teacher of reading only gradually. Earlier in my career I saw it as my job to teach literature and academic writing. It took me far longer than it should have, but I finally began to wonder why students reached middle school with such widely varying aptitudes for understanding what they read.

My question pertains to your statement that your “perspective on reading isn’t all that different from Dewey’s” belief that “reading just happened.” How close, then is your perspective to Dewey’s position?

Dewey’s stance contradicts what I’ve come to believe – although there seems to be much disagreement about reading instruction, even among experts, so I am keeping an open mind.

OK, I’ll try to be brief: Pinker, in The Language Instinct, convinced my that young children are wired to learn oral language without formal instruction. Hart and Risley, in Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children, convinced me that the extensive differences in the quantity and quality of verbal experiences among children had an enormous impact on children’s readiness to learn once they started school. Lakoff and Johnson, in Metaphors We Live By, led me to believe that the advantages affluent children had in verbal practice led not only to a larger vocabulary, but a conceptual system far more prepared to make sense of the abstract content they encountered in school.

But here is where I disagree with Dewey; here is where I think he just didn’t understand that a reason he didn’t remember being taught to read is that his young mind didn’t have the conceptual framework yet to be metacognitive about what he was undergoing in his childhood.

Dr. Diane McGuinness, in several books, has argued that children don’t naturally learn to read any more than they naturally learn to work on car engines. Yes, some people have more aptitude for learning how car engines work, just as some people learn to read faster. But, still, having some guidance from someone more experienced seems a “natural” part of our development as humans.

McGuinness points out that writing systems are a human invention and the English alphabetic system is particularly complicated. To fully understand it, children must be taught to decode written words and encode into writing the sounds we produce as words. She also points out that the brain is an incredible pattern-spotting machine, and children will learn, even when teaching methods are not particularly efficient.

Now, to be clear, it seems to me there are essentially two stages (that must overlap) to learning to read – learning to decode and encode the code that is our alphabet, and learning to read for meaning. Perhaps I misunderstood your position, and you were referring to learning to read for meaning. To some extent, I think that can occur more “naturally,” as our brains are also meaning-seeking.

Finally, all this has led me to believe most definitely that discrepencies in wealth and power and priviledge are responsible for the much of the discrepencies we see in children’s academic achievment. In that regard, I agree with you 100%.