We’re teaching reading wrong

The first thing that the government schools did wrong was to abandon phonics for whole reading.

Whole reading is appropriate for Asian languages, but not for character-based languages.

We’re teaching reading wrong, writes Natalie Wexler in The Atlantic. U.S. schools spend a lot of time on reading skills in the early grades, very little teaching history, science or the arts. If students struggle with comprehension, “history and science may continue to be relegated to the far back burner through middle school.”

Reading proficiency hasn’t improved in 20 years on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), writes Wexler. The latest results showed gains for high achievers in eighth grade; low achievers are doing even worse.

A panel of experts convened by NAEP blames the focus on teaching skills, year after year, without teaching the background knowledge and vocabularystudents need to build comprehension, reports Wexler.

Literacy experts Timothy Shanahan and Marilyn Jager Adams also called for giving students grade-level reading with help to make sense of it. “Giving children easier texts when they’re weaker readers serves to deny them the very language and information they need to catch up and move on,” said Adams.

Wexler concludes:

The failure to build children’s knowledge in elementary school helps explain the gap between the reading scores of students from wealthier families and those of their lower-income peers—a gap that has been expanding. . . . wealthy children are far more likely to acquire knowledge outside of school. Poorer kids with less-educated parents tend to rely on school to acquire the kind of knowledge that is needed to succeed academically — and because their schools often focus exclusively on reading and math, in an effort to raise low test scores, they’re less likely to acquire it there.