The Critical Missed Step

By Geraldine E. Rodgers

The root cause for present-day literacy problems has never been seriously considered. This book attempts to explain the facts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546228059

Geraldine E. Rodgers

As a third-grade teacher. Geraldine E. Rodgers was appalled by the inadequate reading of the children arriving at third grade, after having “learned” to read with the standard sight-word readers. To study the problem, she took a sabbatical leave in 1977 to observe first grades and to test over 900 of the resultant second graders in their own languages on oral reading accuracy. She tested in New Jersey in the United States, and in Holland, Sweden, Germany, Austria and France. For the oral accuracy test, she used, with permission, a portion of a speed test from IEA (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement). She found that two dominant and quite different types of readers, or relative mixtures of the two types, resulted from differences in first-grade methods. She then spent the following thirty years or so researching the history of reading, in the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, Harvard University Library, the University of Chicago Library, the British Library in London, and other libraries and sources. As a result, she has published a three-volume history and five other texts concerning the problem.

Book preview

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS FUNCTIONAL ILLITERACY?

THE BUSY-BODY ACTIVISTS OF 1914-1930 ENTER THE SCENE, WITH A LONG AND DISMAL BACKGROUND BEHIND THEM

THE OMISSION OF THE SYLLABLE STEP

DIFFERENT APPROACHES IN TEACHING READING PRODUCE DIFFERENT RESULTS

THE SLOW SWITCH FROM SOUND TO MEANING EXPLODED IN THE MID 1820’S

CONCERNING THE HIGH LEVEL OF LITERACY FROM WEBSTER’S AND OTHER SYLLABLE-BASED METHODS, AND THE OPPOSITION TO THEM

A COMPARISON OF CULTURAL CHANGES, BEFORE AND AFTER THE SYLLABLE METHOD WAS DROPPED

Appendix A

Appendix A-1

Appendix B

INTRODUCTION

Back in the early 19th century, a culture-destroying, upside-down change was being massively promoted in the English-speaking world on both sides of the Atlantic. It is astonishing, not only that the change was successfully promoted, but that it left so few historical tracks.

We are still reeling from its cultural and other effects, such as damaged conditioned reflexes. Yet almost no one knows that a cultural change occurred and that it was catastrophic. That is because, with Mephistophelian lying skill, the experts who promoted it also sold it as a huge improvement. To this very day, the few who do know about that improvement, innocently think it was good. Also, this writer formerly thought that some of its damage had been reasonably minimized but now realizes that its damage is impossible to remove. So this awful improvement remains today. It is as culturally unchallenged as the hideous foot-binding of little girls’ feet was unchallenged in China for so many centuries, but today it is brains that are being permanently bound.

What was this watershed and enormously harmful change which has been misunderstood or ignored for so very long, for some 200 years? Before answering that question, something should be considered that has been very truly said. It is that, in order for an answer to a question to be understood correctly, an inquirer must already know about 90% of the answer that is to be given. Therefore, it will be worthwhile first to review some of that necessary 90% background of knowledge.

WHAT IS FUNCTIONAL ILLITERACY?

Concerning part of the background, few people know that we have a so-called functional illiteracy problem. Of the relatively few who do know, almost no one knows the massive extent of that problem, or the nature of the problem, itself.

It would be reasonable to conclude that functional illiteracy must mean that there are literate people who can read fluently but who are, because of some defect, incapable of understanding what they are reading. Such a condition does, of course, exist but more commonly with computer software than with human beings. Computer software can read aloud anything that is printed here with quick and astonishing accuracy but is incapable of understanding any of it. However, a vast group of true functional illiterates are very different from the two groups just mentioned, the people with defective understanding, and the computers with no understanding. With this third group, the problem is not that they cannot understand what is written, which is true of the first two groups. With the third group of functional illiterates, the problem is that they cannot read all of what is written, and that is why they cannot understand.

Almost no one knows that about 75% of anything spoken or written in English is composed of words from a very short list of the 300 most frequently used words. Almost no one knows that more than 90% of anything that is spoken or written in English is composed of words from a short list of the 1,000 most frequently used words. English, of course, has a vastly greater vocabulary than a mere 1,000 words, and instead has a probable total of far over a half million words.

Healthy listeners can hear 100% of anything made up of words from that over-half-million list of English words. They can hear very well even the English words that are the rarest and the most difficult, probably words that they had never heard before. However, those same healthy listeners might not do so well if those same words are given to them in writing. They may not be able to hear some of those words when they are written, even though they had no trouble at all hearing those words when they were spoken. Some listeners, when they try to read, are unable to hear a vast number of written words which they have no trouble hearing when they are spoken. For instance, a very intelligent middle-aged woman I knew, a college graduate, told me that she skipped over all the hard words when she was reading!

Reading experts say that a reader who knows only 90% of the sight words on a page may be able to read that page above the frustration level for understanding. Therefore, since words from the list of the thousand most frequently used words compose a little more than 90% of almost anything, a reader who knows only those thousand words may be able to read many things above the frustration level for understanding. Such a reader context-guesses correctly at least the meaning of the words he cannot read, the remaining 10%, from the 90% he can read from the list of the thousand most common words. With the help of jig-saw-puzzle phonics, which is the piecing together of parts from already learned words, or using beginning letter sounds to context-guess, he also may be able to figure out what many of those unknown 10% of the words actually are, as in, Mary had a little l…...

Even though that reader could not read 10% of the printed words in the selection if they were out of that context and on a printed list, he can be passed along as being literate. The reason is that he could very probably answer reading comprehension questions correctly if the selection is simple enough. Such tests of so-called reading comprehension are the standard test for reading ability today. Yet, of course, he certainly is not literate since the English language has over half a million words. While words taken from the list of the 1,000 most frequent do form 90% of almost anything, a truly successful reader is able to hear and so to pronounce aloud, not just those words, but all of the words in the selection, even if he does not know their meanings. A truly successful reader can read aloud just as accurately as computer software can read, and for the same reason, because he has been correctly programmed to read the sounds of syllables in words, and the very occasional truly irregular words (such as one).

It is when material becomes harder to understand, even if a reader does know those thousand most frequently used words (and perhaps many more), that such context-guessing on the meaning of the more difficult unknown words may no longer work. Of course, the more intelligent a word-guesser is, and the more words above 1,000 frequency that he knows, the longer the context-guessing process will continue to work, but at some point it breaks down for almost all of them.

It is only when a reader fails those reading comprehension questions on more difficult content (which means when guessing fails to work), that he joins the ranks of what are euphemistically called the functional illiterates. Yet no one ever tests his oral reading accuracy to see if the problem is that he cannot really read all of the words. All that he is given is silent reading followed by the pernicious silent reading comprehension questions. Those silent reading comprehension questions really only test intelligence, not reading ability, but they have served to mask our true illiteracy problem ever since 1914.

The formal testing of reading was almost unknown before about 1911 or so, but it burst into prominence in 1914. (See the bibliography to William Scott Gray’s 1917 doctoral thesis.) However, some formal testing had been done for years in Switzerland’s testing of its army recruits, and some formal testing had been done in New England schools about the end of the nineteenth century. Possibly the best known testing of reading before 1911 was that done in England in 1884 by G. J. Romanes, but it was apparently not formal, but casual.

In Romanes’ 1884 book, Mental Evolution in Animals, he discussed his casual silent reading speed and comprehension tests on adult men. From those tests, he had apparently concluded that high speed in reading correlated with high comprehension. (Of course, this is almost certainly not true.) Romanes’ apparent purpose in giving his informal tests had only been to find the effect that reading speed had on reading comprehension. Romanes’ purpose had not been to measure the subject’s fundamental ability to comprehend.

The early psychologist, James McKeen Cattell, was living in England in 1886 and 1887 and likely met Romanes since both gave addresses in England to the Aristotelian Society about the same time. (See Michael M. Sokal’s remarkable book on Cattell’s diaries, An Education in Psychology, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981). To the subjects in his 1880’s experiments. Cattell flashed whole words and then flashed isolated letters (or presumably vice versa). He found the people viewing the fast projections could read (name) a whole word as quickly as they could read (name) an isolated letter. Cattell’s results are wrongly used to support the teaching of whole words to beginners, instead of phonic letter sounds. However, like Romanes, Cattell was really only experimenting on reading speed, not on reading comprehension.

In William James’ 1890 text, The Principles of Psychology, he quoted Romanes at length on his reading speed and comprehension tests. James’s only psychology student at Harvard in the fall of 1890, Mary Whiton Calkins, later had her student at Wellesley, Adelaide M. Abell, publish in 1894 the first American paper on reading speed, Rapid Reading, Its Advantages and Method. That 1894 paper was followed by works on reading speed by J. A. Quantz and by Joseph Jastrow in 1897.

However, all of these Romanes’ influenced people were only paralleling Romanes in his work. What they were measuring was the effect of reading speed, not the basic ability to comprehend.

The early psychologist, Dr. Alfred Binet of France, wrote in 1908 what may have been the first real intelligence test. Dr. Binet did so while working with Dr. Theophile Simon, who wrote the following quoted material in 1924. Binet had also worked with a man named Vaney who, in 1907, had prepared tests to show relative reading-speed levels for children. Obviously, those 1907 Vaney tests did not concern comprehension, but only speed. However, Binet’s 1908 test of intelligence did have a reading comprehension portion and that portion certainly does shed some very informative light on what were to come very soon, the apparently first, and very formal, reading comprehension tests.

Yet Simon (and Binet) recognized the real nature of reading comprehension tests. That is because Simon’s comments on those 1908 tests make it very clear that reading comprehension tests only test intelligence, not the ability to read.

Dr. Simon wrote on page 164 of his book, Pedagogie Experimentale, (Librairie Armand Colin, Paris, France, 1924):

"... the memory kept of a reading was made part of the first scale of tests that we published in 1908. [XVe Annee psychologique] We had diverse matter read [on which] we had made a list of the successive ideas. We asked the child to tell us what the matter concerned. We found that at eight years the child retained two memories, a very small comprehension of the reading; at nine years, he could recover eight in a diverse work that contained twenty.

Since then, we have confirmed many times this curious thing: it happens that some children read very incorrectly, so incorrectly that their oral reading is, for those who hear it, almost incomprehensible, and then, if one asks them what they have read, they say it almost correctly. There is therefore less correlation than one would believe between comprehension and correctness in reading.

Such children, who read so badly that they cannot be understood, would