Reading Instruction

One way to describe the reading problem is to say that it is a teacher problem and - even more - that it is a problem of the teaching of teachers. Why? Since 1920 it is estimated that there have been published fifty thousand books and articles describing research on reading. Suppose this estimate is a terrible exaggeration. Suppose there have been only twenty thousand books and articles on reading; still, how may we account for the fact that reading instruction in the primary schools has not changed basically since the 1920's?

Because meaning rests in words rather than in letters, the ensuing months of reading instruction are devoted to reading and rereading material containing a carefully selected and controlled vocabulary of elementary words. As he reads these words again and again in various contexts, in experience charts, primers, and readers, the child becomes increasingly familiar with them as individual entities or pictures, and he gains speed in reading them. These words form part of his basic sight vocabulary, which, at the end of his first reader, is about 300 words.

However, the hasty acceptance of the imprecise ideas embodied in the phrase "recognizing words as wholes" and the consequent rejection of the significance of letters have led to something like a revolution in methods of teaching reading in most English-speaking countries of the world. There can be little doubt now that the result has been a serious decline of literacy in these areas. By itself, such a vague concept of what is involved in reading as was embodied in the new theories of reading instruction could never have found such ready and uncritical acceptance, but the new theories were first widely canvassed at the time when there was a favorable conjunction of other developments in education.

The reading experts who brought Gestalt theory into the theory of teaching reading saw in this system of psychology further justification for ignoring letters at the early stages of reading instruction. It is characteristic of books published since Gestalt theory became popular that it is only with the greatest reluctance that a writer on the teaching of reading ever refers to the letters of the alphabet. What one finds in books on modern reading theory is an unending series of references to "word-configurations," "word-gestalten," "general shape," "internal characteristics," and "the general structure of the word." Nowhere in these books is there ever any suggestion that printed words look as they do because particular letters are there in a particular order.

The reading readiness fad as we have described it here was invented to excuse poor reading instruction by shifting the entire blame to the child. And the two measuring instruments most commonly used as evidence against the child's native preparation for learning to read are the reading readiness test and the mental ability test.

Reading instructional method in this country is abysmally poor, and blaming the matter on the child is never going to provide any improvement. Until the present reading method is replaced with something more sensible, we can expect no improvement. One day, when education comes to its senses regarding reading instruction, some determined reading researchers will devise an entirely new approach to the teaching of the subject. They will discard the present method and write a new one.