Literacy and Illiteracy: Teaching the Nonreader to Survive in the Modern World Robert Calfee School of Education Stanford University Stanford, CA

The Graduates Who Can't Read "A child should be in school to learn to read, write, and do arithmetic--and nothing else. If they can't do that at $2,000 per pupil a year, 170 days a year for 12 [sic] years---then there's something wrong, and by God, I wanted somebody to say so"(San Francisco Examiner, 1977). These are the angry and despairing words of the mother of Peter Doe, a high school graduate described as functionally illiterate, who spends his days at home, unable to find a reasonable job. Not every nonreader is a failure, to be sure. Nelson Rockefeller (1976), who stated near the end of his life, " . . . I still have a hard time reading today," nonetheless achieved notable success in life--"I made it simply by working harder and longer than the rest . . . . " Peter Doe may not have worked hard enough, and Nelson Rockefeller may not have fully appreciated the advantages of wealth in compensating for his dyslexia. The bottom line in these and numerous other instances is the same, that literacy is one of the most vital skills

Presented at the 32nd Annual Conference of The Orton Dyslexia Society, Seattle, Washington, November, 1981. Preparation of this paper was funded in part by: National Institute of Education, Grant No. G-79-0139; Office of Education, Grant No. G007903258; and Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Annals of Dyslexia, Vol. 32, 1982. Copyright © 1982 by The Orton Dyslexia Society ISSN 0474--7534

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for success in modern society. As citizens and parents we expect our youngsters to have mastered the skills of reading and writing by the time they graduate from school. Moreover, in the United States (indeed, in most of the countries in the modern world), we expect virtually all children to complete their education, and by that token to achieve levels of literacy that a century ago were reserved for a select few. How well are we succeeding? The facts are a little murky. The proportion of students receiving a high school diploma peaked at 77 percent in 1970, a remarkably high level of school completion (Dearman and Plisko, 1981). Farr, Tuinman, and Rowls (1974), after an extensive examination of reading achievement test scores covering the last half century (mostly from the elementary grades), conclude cautiously that " . . . there is no reason for en masse pessimism . . . . the gradual improvement in reading competency over the four decades prior to 1965 may have lessened or halted, and over the last ten years there may have been a very slight decline in reading achievement" (p. 139). They are generally optimistic, however. On the other hand, performance by college-bound seniors on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (verbal) has dropped by more than 40 points over the past quarter century (Harnischfeger and Wiley, 1975); whatever the cause of the decline, the magnitude and consistency of the trend are distressing. Equally troubling are the findings from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP, 1981). Over a ten-year span, reading achievement has increased in low-level reading skills, especially in the elementary grades, and decreased in high-level reading skills, especially in the high school grades.

A Thesis--Reading is Thinking What have these remarks to do with children who are typically labelled as "nonreaders"---dyslexics, learning disabled, and so on? It is the thesis of this paper that there may be a very direct relation between the trends at the national level and the problems encountered by individual students. The most effective approach to improving higher level skills in high school may also turn out to be a good answer for handling youngsters who are identified as learning disabled in ele-

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LITERACY AND ILLITERACY

mentary school. To put it in a slightly different perspective, if present trends continue, most "student failures" in future years may be youngsters who cannot pass the high school competency examinations. The treatment program for these students (disregarding the dropouts) is generally similar to what is done for elementary students identified as learning disabled--individualized remedial programs. These programs, though they provide some short-term benefits (they may help the student pass "the test"), have serious limitations. This paper will look beyond those boundaries to longer-term goals of instruction in reading and writing. The argument goes as follows. For many centuries, reading (and writing) served as the major vehicle for instructing children in a special style of thinking and communicating. This special style, which at one time was transmitted to a small and select proportion of the citizenry, has in recent years become a basic skill necessary for survival in modern society. It is a style that emphasizes reflective, analytic, principled thinking--abstract, intentional, rational. Unfortunately, during the past two decades, largely as a consequence of new techniques in assessment, the reading curriculum in the elementary grades has focused more and more on the lower-level facets of reading; knowledge of literal details taken from skimpy paragraphs are easier to measure by multiple-choice items, and they fit more nicely onto the pages of a workbook. The result is a piecemeal curriculum that emphasizes rote learning. If this thesis is correct, the change in emphasis might be expected to affect some youngsters more than others, to disrupt some tasks more than others, and to show up at some levels of development more than others. Some children, either through natural disposition or home surroundings or both, are inclined to organize the information in their environment into a reasonably coherent structure. Other children, less driven, depend much more on the organization of the curriculum to aid them in learning. Some tasks, because they are relatively simple and invariant, are most easily acquired by rote---for instance, searching for a theory of social security numbers doesn't make much sense. Other tasks, because they are relatively complex and come in a variety of different guises, cannot be learned by rote; it is necessary for the student to acquire a deep structural understanding of such tasks. Finally, tasks that must be handled in this fasion make up

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an increasing proportion of the curriculum in the later grades. Dickand-Jane stories may be memorized by rote, but this approach does not work for learning physics or automobile mechanics. It is my conjecture that many youngsters w h o appear functionally illiterate suffer not from perceptual, linguistic, or intellectual deftciencies (such deficiencies may be the source of learning problems for a small proportion of students, to be sure); rather, their misfortune (and such it is) springs from the interaction of their resources, the format and context of the curriculum materials, and the character of the instructional program. A not inconsiderable number of youngsters, if the materials are confused or if the teaching is confusing, will fail to acquire what they really need to learn from reading instruction--they may retain the words, but they will not understand the music. What Is the Music? An important mark of the competent adult in m o d e m society is the ability to deal with formal language, as contrasted with informal or natural language. Some scholars (e.g., Goody and Watt, 1963) appear to link formal language with writing and natural language with speaking. It is probably true that instruction in reading and writing has for some time constituted the main vehicle for teaching formal language. However, formal competence permeates all manner of language usage--speaking, discussing, even listening (Calfee and Sutter, in press; Heath, in press). It is, moreover, not just a different style of language, but a different way of thinking. Anyone who has read this far can be described as literate, educated, competent. Those of us in this group, as we produce and understand language, as we communicate with one another, can operate at either of two extremes, and at several gradations between. Sometimes we speak or write plainly and directly (for example, at a party w h e n you "'let your hair down"); at other times, we "lecture" one another on abstract, metaphorical topics (for example, at a school board meeting to protest a school closure). The Characteristics of Formal and Natural Styles For convenience, let me refer in this paper to the plain and natural style of communication as understanding, and to the more sophisticated and formal communication as comprehension. 74

LITERACYAND ILLITERACY

In distinguishing between understanding and comprehending, I am extending the argument presented by Olson (1977, 1980) w h o builds on previous work by Luria, Vygotsky, Goody and Watt, Wells, and Simmons, among others. Olson points up several constrasts between spoken and written language, which he refers to as utterance and text. These distinctions, summarized in Figure 1, also provide a useful framework for exploring the task of the school. You can probably figure out on your own what most of the contrasts mean, and additional detail is available in Olson's papers. The first two distinctions, however, deserve some comment. In the formal language of text, little is left to chance. Misinterpretation is kept to a minimum. Our natural tendency is to assume that people know what we mean, and that they will ask questions if they are unsure. The writer seldom resorts to phrases like "you know what I m e a n . . . " A book is designed to communicate a message that remains fairly constant regardless of where the book is read. A friendly conversation, on the other hand, makes sense only in the situation where the conversation takes place. Conversations are often elliptical; much is left unsaid, on the assumption that shared context and experiences will fill in the blanks. T h e notions of explicitness and of contextuality are thus bound together. To the degree that the immediate situation provides information, the natural thing to do is to say only what needs to be said. Books cannot answer questions, and so the writer must try to foresee any problems that might arise, and provide solutions to these in the text. To be sure, the text cannot include everything, and writers also assume certain prior knowledge on the part of the reader. This knowl-

FORMAL LANGUAGE NATURAL LANGUAGE (TExT) (UTTERANCE) HIGHLY EXPLICIT HIGHLY IMPLICIT INTERACTIVE CONTEXT FREE CONTEXT BOUND UNIQUE, IDIOSYNCRATIC,PERSONAL REPEATABLE,MEMORY-SuPPORTED LOGICAL--RATIONAL INTUITIVE EXPOS1TORY--"CONTENT" SEQUENTIAL--DESCRIPTIVE

Figure 1.

Contrasts between natural and formal modes of language and thought 75

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edge is highly formalized, and it is the acquistion of the stylized frames for handling formal writing that is an important function of schooling. To illustrate, suppose that as you are walking to the campus library, you spot a person sprawled unconscious on the ground, the nearby bicycle mute evidence of an accident. Think for a moment about h o w you might respond to this situation. A natural reaction is, "It would depend." You might roll the person over, check for breathing, and so on; but what then? In my wallet I carry the card shown in Figure 2, which tells what steps to take in case of accidents of various sorts. The information is compact but comprehensive. Sometimes it runs counter to "common s e n s e " - - " D o n ' t move patient unnecessarily." But think for a moment about what is not written: • • • •

Read this card in its entirety before doing anything The boldface headings are major categories of accidents Combinations are possible Some problems are more important than others, and not necessarily in the order listed on the card

The list could be extended. This first aid card illustrates a style of technical writing that is commonplace in society and upon which we are increasingly dependent. Explicit--yes; context-free---yes. But only if the reader has learned a set of schemata or frameworks that allow the information to be interpreted. Three Addenda The distinctions in Figure 1 have been identified by anthropologists as the major contrasts between formal and natural styles of language thought. I would like to append three other items that seem important from an educational perspective. First, notice that the critical issue is not writing versus speech. Love letters resemble natural language; a conversation between business associates is like formal language. What counts is not the medium, but the style and level of formality in the message. Second, all children encounter a significant shift in style w h e n they leave home and enter school. Families by their very nature embody a great amount of shared experience--the early development of language is a "natural" phenomenon. People in a classroom share 76

LITERACY AND ILLITERACY

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

F A I N T I N G OR UNCONSCIOUSNESS: Plata g4P I tient on his side, face d o ~ n v ~ r d , +posen clothing. a~giy cold clOthS to face. administer smelling salts. Gas fresh air into room. When victim revires, give a m m o n i , inhalant.

EMERGENCY GUIDE

m~

II ~

/,

IN C A S E O F E M E R G E N C Y %-..~./ uSe f i r e a l a r m b o x a n d / p c t e l a p h o n e i

For FIRE, POLICE, AMBULANCE, or FIRST AID, call:

n.n11

,;1 , J . J t

from University phones with 497 prefix.

911 from all other phones. WHEN REPORTING AN EMERGENCY, d~¢ribe the nature and the location of the i n c i d e n t . ThQ e m e r g e n c y c o m m u n i c a t i o n s dispatcher will initiate the appropriate emergency equipment response.

8URNS A N O SCALOS: Call emergency number imrnediatMy. Keep patient lying flat down. D o n ' t use antit~'l;Itics, Oon't Ol~fl bllsters. Do not Out ; anything on a burn except a clean dry dressing. POISONING: Call emergency number. Give 5 to 6 gdassc$ of l i q u i d to dilute the poison. Use m i l k . Try tO d e n t fy the p o s o n and relay information to decree, induce v o m i t i n g (except when sub, stance s ~ l l o v s e d iS hydrocarbon, strocKJ acid, or alkali). If m o u t h i$ burned, give raw eggs or blive oil. and do not induce vomiting. E L E C T R I C A L SHOCK: Cut off current. Rerno~l w;¢e from victim, using stick or g l o v e s - N O T B A R E . H A N D E D . If patient it uncon=:ious and not t~eathing, initiate carOiopulmona~t resuscitation. (See back cover.) T O X I C GAS OR VAPORS: Open doors or break w ; n d o w s =f necessary tO admit air. DO not breathe gas or vapor. Remove vie[ira to open 4it. Call emergency number.

CARDIOPULMONARY (CPR) e

WOUNDS: (1) Small wounds:'Claanse w i t h soap end wate¢ and dress w i t h sterile gauze. (2) Wounds w i t h severe bleeding: A p p l y f i r m pressure on v~0und v~th gauze pack to control bleeding w i t h heel of hand. Call emergency numI=~r--maintain pressure constantly.

RESUSCITATION

IF UNCONSCIOUS: Open l i r ~ l y ~ tilting head I~¢k; clear m o u t h of any dot~'iL Pull angle of j a w for-t~wd. Pull tongue f o r ~ r ~ . IF NOT B R E A T H I N G : Give m o u t h - t o - m o u t h or ma~lth-to-noze resuscitation at 12 inflations Oar minute.

H E A R T A T T A C K : Call emergency ~ m b m I t once (common symptoms: severe chest pains. c o l d sweat, nausea and vomiting, collapse). Help patient take most comfortable position--utuany halfway b e s v ~ n lying and sitting. Do not cart~f or lift. Loosen tight clothing. Do not overheat. DO not give liquids. Keep patient quiet until professional h(tlp ~rives. If patient becomes unconscious, or stops t~'eathing, initiate ¢ardioouimonary resuscitation. (Sea back co~l<).

NO C A R O T I D PULSE [(M¢Ip ;n nllck, under" jaw): D~oresl sternum (br M~Ib o n t I 1'/= i~¢hes to 2 inchN 80 t i m m per m z n u ~ . IF

~ . ~ / / ~

One oporesoT: A l t e r n l t l 2 q u ~ k inflation~ ~ t h 15 c o m o ¢ e s s l o n s ~,~thin f 5 ondL

F R A C T U R E S . SHOCK: D o n ' t move patient unnecessarily. O o n ' t "~eck-knife" patient i n t o an automobile. Send for ambulance. Ke~o victim c o m f o r t a b l y ~ ¢ m but do not overheat. Covlh" wounds v~th sterile gauze or clean towel.

TwO

ocmretorl:

InterDole

one inflation a f t e r every fifth con~ore$$ion. 60 COW~ preslions pro, rain.

NOTE: Whenever an unconscious patient stops breathing. or heartbeat ot pulse cannot be detected, b e ~ n c a r d i o o u l m o n a w resuscitation, (Sea back COVET.)

Z

Continue until natural p u l l e and I~eathing return. Get Petieflt tO hospital as soon es pOSSible. *Obtain CPR trainintl from Red C r o l l o¢ Heart A.~oc~-tm~

Figure 2. Stanford University first-aid card

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ANNALS OF DYSLEXIA

less in common. The institution of the school has as its primary purpose the inculcation of formal skills and knowledge. To be sure, youngsters have differential exposure to print before entering school; some have learned to read and to value reading, while others have had little opportunity and encouragement to deal with the printed word. More important, some parents have more education than others and are more likely to "talk like books." Nonetheless, virtually every child discovers in the school setting a rather alien emphasis on formality-the tasks serve no immediate purpose, and serve no obvious need. They are performed in the absence of strong contextual supports. Students often feel that school is an "unnatural place," as indeed it should be. It is the place where we learn "unnatural acts"--like reading (Gough and Hillinger, 1980). Third, formal language and thought often entail conscious reflection upon themselves. Psychologists now refer to meta-cognitive activities in thought (Brown, 1978). A person is engaging in metacognition when he not only can solve a problem, but can describe what was going on in his mind as he wrestled with it. Metacognition is the antithesis of intuition. You may take for granted your skill in thinking about how you think. In fact, there is good reason to believe that this talent is the result of schooling, and there is clear evidence that the acquisition of reflective thinking skills is associated with improved meta-cognitive ability: Research shows t h a t . . , students become increasingly aware of their mental activities . . . . that they can l e a r n . . , to gain metacognitive control over novel tasks . . . . and that there is correlation between the degree of meta-cognitive awareness and the level of performance on complex problem-solving tasks. Helping the student gain a broad perspective on the meaning of experiences so that this knowledge can be brought into play in other situations can be a powerful basis for transfer (Calfee, 1981, p. 42). •

.

.

The Reading Curriculum and Formal Style It could be said that students learn to read and write so that they can have access to information presented in a formal style but to think 78

LITERACY AND ILLITERACY

about the reading curriculum in this way is probably a serious mistake. Rather, to learn to read and write is to come into possession of formal language and thought. These statements may seem puzzling and contradictory--it is important to untangle the issues. Scribner and Cole (1981) have studied in some detail the literary skills of the Vai, a tribe in northeastern Liberia. The Vai developed their own script, a picto-syllabic system learned at home and used for personal and commercial purposes within the village. The research shows the Vai literacy has none of the traits associated with formal style; tribespeople who can read only Vai, when asked to define words, communicate with one another, solve problems, or in other formal tasks, perform no differently from those who are completely illiterate. In contrast, tribespeople who have gone to school and are literate in English do perform differently, both qualitatively and quantitatively. It may be that English literacy leads to cognitive changes that are not produced by Vai literacy. The more likely reason for the differences is the experience of schooling, however; Scribner and Cole did not investigate the nature of the schooling, and so their findings are only suggestive. Let us leave Africa and return to North America. It is possible to teach elementary school students the technology of reading and writing by rote, without deep comprehension of the writing system. While such an approach is possible, it is a mistake for at least two reasons. First, to learn any complex system in this fashion is tedious and time-consuming, and many students will fail to transfer what they have learned to new situations every detail must be covered in the curriculum. Second, training of this sort leaves most students without the most important knowledge that can be gained during the acquisition of literacy--the knowledge of how writing operates as part of a formal system of thinking and communicating. The important point, as illustrated by the Vai findings and (I suspect) by the experience of increasing numbers of American school children, is that it is possible to acquire literacy without acquiring formal style. For the Vai, this result is of no consequence given the conditions of their life. For American schoolchildren, it is a major disaster given the demands of modern life. What is there to "comprehend" about the writing system? Figure 3 shows a sketch of the major facets that make up reading, writing, and the language base on which they rest. The figure suggests important parallels among these skills. The parallels lead to the adoption of a 79

ANNALS OF DYSLEXIA

SPEECH= ON: (PRODUCTION) LHORPH ~

t~DING = WRITING=

(PRODUCTION)

+

I (LEXiCAL I ÷ I SE"ANT'CS)I

+

CONVERSATION& 1 MONOLOGUE

BECODIHG } +

_._

SENTENCE

* ~NACR~

÷

Figure 3. Models of speech, reading, and writing fairly simple instructional strategy; teach students to decode and to encode (spell) printed words by helping them make a transfer from their already existing skills of speech. Then the students should be on their way to literacy. The experience of many school teachers, as well as the results of several research and evaluation efforts, leads to the conclusion that this strategy does not work. Students can be taught to pronounce and spell written words, but these skills do not guarantee that the children will automatically become proficient at comprehension and competent at composition. To the contrary, it appears that many students lack understanding when they read and have difficulty expressing themselves when they write.

The English-language Writing System To see what is wrong, we need to look more reflectively and analytically at the printed page. The evolution of literacy is one of mankind's greatest cultural achievements. The technology of writing has greatly extended the span of the mind; the technologies of the computer are likely to provide further extensions of mind that will be far-reaching beyond imagination. As is true of any invention, these tools work largely to the advantage of those who have learned to use them, and leave at a relative disadvantage those individuals who remain untutored and unskilled in their application. The most obvious feature of print technology is the transformation of the auditory-phonetic code into a visual representation--speech can be seen. The model in Figure 3 shows this transformation as 80

LITERACY AND ILLITERACY

Decoding; scope-and-sequence charts sometimes refer to phonics. The lists of things to be learned under decoding are quite extensive, often seem to make little sense, and are replete with contradictions; the vowel sounds are impossible, and even the consonants behave strangely. What does it all mean? The evidence suggests that, whatever the significance of this mountain of unrelated detail, it is important to skilled reading (Chall, 1967). How is spoken English represented in print? Let us reflect on this system for a moment. To put it another way, suppose you had to design a writing system from scratch. What decisions would confront you? There are at least three ways in which you could proceed--each symbol could stand for a word, or a syllable, or a phoneme. Unfortunately, you would quickly encounter a problem: Each of these italicized words would be difficult to pin down until you had created the writing system, yet each term is a significant concept in deciding how to build the system. Competent readers have trouble appreciating the chicken-egg nature of this dilemma, but it poses a genuine challenge to the beginning reader. One can find fairly pure examples of word, syllable, and phonetic writing systems---Chinese, Japanese, and Finnish, for instance. Each approach has strengths and weaknesses, which we need not go into here. What about English? It is clearly not a hieroglyphic system like Chinese, nor do the basic symbols correspond to syllables. To be sure, students can and have been taught to read English as hieroglyphs ("see the tail on monkey") and as syllables ("see the 'cat' in caterpillar"). English is an alphabetic language; the symbols represent phonemes, or "sounds." Failure to comprehend this principle leaves the student without any grasp of how the system operates. Critics are quick to raise objections to the pedagogical value of the alphabetic principle as a basis for learning to decode English words. The principle may hold in the abstract, they say, but in practice there are numerous variations and exceptions, hence the long and tedious lists of lettersound correspondences in the scope-and-sequence charts. • . . Besides, many children experience great difficulty in perceiving phonetic segments in isolation (Ehri, 1979). English is not a particularly simple language, but the complexities are scarcely restricted to the written form, it is a complicated spoken form also. Moreover, the written language is far simpler than portrayed in the typical reading curriculum, teachers' manual, or 81

ANNALS OF DYSLEXIA

textbook on "how to teach reading." Almost without exception, these materials complicate the structure of written English, and leave both teacher and student with a confusion of ideas about the system. Most people are left with a welter of letter-sound correspondences learned by rote (~,ff, ph, and gh make the sound/f/most of the time, though one can find lots of ghastly exceptions despite careful shepherding of examples), as well as rules that fail more often than not ("when two vowels go walking, the first does the talking"---exceptions appearing too frequently to overlook). A Non-diversion The History of Spoken English A dominant feature of the formal style is an optimistic reliance on rationality, on systematic problem solving. If the English writing system appears complicated and unmanageable, that is not a fixed and immutable fact; it is a problem to be solved. In this particular instance, the solution comes readily once we move away from the field of reading and look at the work of other scholars. History turns out to be the key to understanding English and the English writing system (Nist, 1966; Pei, 1968). The language springs from a variegated heritage. Each wave of conquerors sweeping across the British isles left permanent marks on the speech of the inhabitants (Figure 4). Some of the invasions were physical (the Angles, Saxons,

Figure 4. The layers of the English language 82

LITERACY A N D ILLITERACY

Danes, and Normans), while others were intellectual (the French, Italians, and, from the seventeenth century on, most of the world). The result is a polyglot language of incredible vitality and richness. The word is the fundamental element in English. Grammar is largely a matter of word order, no fancy declensions or conjugations, just words served up fairly plain and simple. Modern English has words for every occasion; actually, it will have several, which differ subtly in connotation and style. If a new discovery lacks a label, the natural thing in English is to beg, borrow, or steal a word. Significant intrusions will attract a variety of labels, some fancy, some simple, some weird--thus television, TV, telly, idiot box, and so on. The English language is structurally simple, and lexically complex. We take words from any source, or create new ones at the drop of a hat. N e w words need only be put into the right place in the word order of the sentence, and we all know how to do that from the age of two or three. Back to W r i t i n g . . . So much for spoken English, what about the written version? Reading and writing were not very popular activities in England until the fourteenth century or so; the printing press was introduced to England in 1476. The language to be written embodied the three distinctive layers shown in Figure 4. The earliest efforts to "write English" made use of Norse runes, but the major influence came from Catholic missionaries, to w h o m it was quite natural (i.e., they did not think deeply about it) to use the Roman alphabet to transcribe the prevailing Anglo-Saxon language. The Roman letters which serve as the base for written English can be traced back to Egyptian picotgraphs and the Phoenician syllabary, and thence to the Greek alphabet (Gelb, 1952). The Greeks, so far as can be learned, developed the alphabet principle, i.e., each letter representing a single sound. Spoken Greek was fairly simple and consistent. The insight of the Greeks was to develop symbols for the vowels, which until then (and still in languages like Hebrew) had to be determined from context. The Romans took over the Greek alphabet and an alphabetic principle, and adapted it to Latin. The main change was in the vowels; Latin had only five vowel phonemes (the "short" vowels), and so the Greek "long" vowel letters were dropped in the passage across the Adriatic. The adaptation of the Roman alphabet to spoken Anglo-Saxon 83

ANNALS OF DYSLEXIA

posed a considerably greater challenge. Anglo-Saxon had several consonant phonemes not found in Latin, for instance, the sounds at the beginning of with, thin, child, ship, and joke. Runic symbols were used at first to handle these sounds, but eventually they were represented by Roman letter combinations or by introducing variant pronunciations for a letter. The writing of Anglo-Saxon vowels was a more serious problem (Fries, 1962). Both long and short vowel sounds had to be represented, the match to Latin vowels was not close, and the sounds of German vowels in England (as elsewhere) underwent major changes from time to time. The most consistent practice was to mark long vowels by doubling the vowel letters, and to mark short vowels by doubling the consonant letters after the vowel. As luck would have it, in the fifteenth century, just at the time that the introduction of the printing press locked the spellings in place, the pronunciation of Anglo-Saxon vowels changed again--the "great vowel shift." However well the spellings may have matched the sounds before the shift, the patterns thereafter were less clearcut. So How Do You Read Anglo-Saxon? "Good grief," you may be saying to yourself, "this doesn't seem like the road to a simpler comprehension of decoding? The situation is getting worse rather than better!" Patience, we have almost arrived. The major insights of the preceding analysis are: (a) treat the Anglo-Saxon base of English as a different situation than the words coming from other origins (we shall address these others directly); (b) vowels and consonants need to be handled quite differently; and (c) within these categories, concentrate on major generalizations, being aware that a people with sword in one hand and pen in the other were not always entirely consistent. In Table I is a brief summary of the major patterns of letter-sound correspondences in modern English words from Anglo-Saxon origins. The consonants are quite well behaved, the evidence is that most youngsters pick up these correspondences relatively quickly if given a chance, and it is likely that a considerable amount of the time spent on consonant patterns, in instruction and on worksheets, could be better spent on something else. Vowels are slightly more complex, for the historical reasons noted above. The major task for the child is to learn that single vowel spellings of Anglo-Saxon words generally take one of two pronunciations (long or short, free or checked), and that the 84

LITERACY AND ILLITERACY

Table I Basic Structure of Letter-Sound Correspondences for Anglo-Saxon Words in English CONSONANTS Single Letter

Blends

Digraphs

Consistent and simple Combinations of single Relatively few correspondences, easily letter sounds: combinations, each learned except for c st a r t consistent: and g pr o rapt ch air sh are their, thing wh ere

VOWELS Single Letter Long vs Short mate Pete pining nodes cubed

mat pet pinning nods cubbed

Digraphs

One sound: ai/ay may ee meet eu/ew oi/oy soil Two sounds: ea breath oa broad oo cook ou/ow cow

maid few toy

r and 1 Affected par pare pal her here sir for

pall

breathe boat food flow

decision of which pronunciation to try is marked by the consonant pattern that follows the vowel (Venezky, 1967, 1970). The long-short principle is of fundamental importance in handling Anglo-Saxon vowels; it is a remarkably productive piece of knowledge and the student can use it in tackling lots of new words. 85

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Vowel digraphs in Anglo-Saxon words pose a greater challenge. In general, the "two vowels walking" rule has all the properties of a "klang" association--it sounds great, but it doesn't mean anything. The patterns in Table I do a reasonable job of organizing the most prevalent spellings. Half of these patterns are actually quite consistent, in the sense that they are associated with a single phoneme (ai/ay and ee) or a single diphthong (eu/ew and oi/oy). The replacement of i by y in final position is a "gift" of early scribes---think of y as i with a final tail. The remaining half of the digraphs in Anglo-Saxon have two pronunciations, which are not marked in any clearcut fashion. Here the important task for the student is to learn (a) that these spelling patterns are variable, (b) what the choices are, and (c) if one choice does not make sense, try the other. The situation is not much different from many other events in life. The -r and -I affected vowels are included in the list for completeness. Natural pronunciation tendencies will suffice for most children in learning these variations. Teachers should know about the effects of semi-vowels (that is what r and I are) on vowel pronunciation, so that they can answer students' questions. Other Vistas The preceding discussion was intended to serve as a rather detailed example of a formal approach to the analysis of the English writing system. The emphasis is on simplicity and on comprehension. Complexities are disregarded (the ough pujzzle, for instance, which you can untangle with the help of the Oxford English dictionary), and the explanation seeks to explain why the system works the way it does. Where might we go next? One direction aims toward the examination of patterns larger than the letter-sound unit. It turns out that syllabification rules and techniques for word compounding in AngloSaxon are fairly straightforward and quite productive. In decoding a word like unforgivable, for instance, the student is well advised not to tackle the problem from left to right, but to first break the word into smaller chunks. The rules for doing this are not difficult, but more is entailed than "looking for little words in big words." A second and quite different direction explores the decoding patterns typical of words with origins in French and other Latin-based languages. Again, history gives important clues. With William the Conqueror's victory at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 came, not only the 86

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Norman domination of Great Britain for two centuries, but also the intrusion of a new language. During that period, Old French was imposed as the commercial and governmental language of the land. Eventually the French gave in and English returned as the official language, but the English of 1200 was greatly changed from that of 1000 (Nist, 1966, p. 107). The vocabulary had become greatly enriched, and the grammar was much simplified. The new words retained their French spellings, and while the English modified the pronunciation to fit their more guttural Teutonic style, these changes were quite consistent. It was at this time that words like nation, occasion, partial, and actual entered the language. In these words, the final CVVC (C consonant, V vowel) spelling is "mushed" into a sibilant beginning, a rather dull schwa vowel (an "uh"), followed by the final consonant vowel, creating a sound not nearly as elegant as the original, but functional and consistent. The next important historical episode for English writing was the coming of the Renaissance to the British Isles during the reign of Elizabeth I. It was the time of the King James Bible; of Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Donne, and Spencer; of the exploration of North America. Technical words from Latin, Greek, modern French and Italian, among others, were brought into English by the tens of thousands to meet the needs of scientists, scholars, litterateurs and technicians. From abbreviation through neurosurgeon to zymurgy, these words poured into English, and so on to the present day. These words generally retained their original spelling, although the pronounciation was in many instances altered to fit English styles.

Application to Present Practice Even this brief review suggests a rather interesting conclusion; instruction in decoding skills is likely to generate considerable confusion if a single set of letter-sound correspondences is forced onto all words regardless of origin. The fit will be poor, and the writing system will be easily mocked, as in Shaw's spelling of fish as ghoti. This is unfortunately the strategy that dominates present-day teaching materials, which in turn dictate teaching practices. Not only are the specific letter-sound correspondences somewhat different from one layer of the language to another, but the character of syllabication and of word 87

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formation tends to be somewhat distinctive. The writing system of English is actually quite marvelous, and stands as a remarkable tribute to human ingenuity and inventiveness. To portray it in the manner typical of most scope-and-sequence charts is like chopping a nice steak into hamburger--the basic nutritional value may be about the same, but something of value has been lost, and it is easy to mix in a lot of extra fat. What about the Slow Learner? The metaphor is actually misleading, because the predigested bits that are served up as decoding actually fail to provide essential sustenance for many youngsters. Let me make the argument from a counterposition. It may have occurred to you that the information about the history of England and English writing may be appropriate to the brighter students, and may be within the capability of a few teachers for w h o m English is a specialty, but that it is far too abstract and impractical for the slow or disabled learner, and probably incomprehensible to the typical primary teacher or learning specialist. As to the ability of teachers to understand such material, the question is rather demeaning. Teachers are generally bright individuals, concerned about their students, and ready to take on challenges when they can see the benefits for their teaching. Efforts to "teacher-proof" programs have not worked very well. But even more important, the slow or disabled learner is precisely the one who most needs guidance in seeing how a complex system works. It is fairly well established that in the absence of an organizational structure, virtually everyone has trouble learning anything that is complicated (Calfee, 1981). The slower student is almost by definition, one who has not had much success in fashioning memory frameworks on his own. It is these children, more than any others, who need help in seeing how the systems of modern society operate. By teaching the "low-level" skills of decoding as a problem-solving search for meaning and order, a foundation is laid for the acquisition of formal style in other areas of reading, and in other curriculum domains. Incidentally, an example of just this approach is the Lindamood's ADD program, which helps students who have difficulty in developing auditory-phonetic segmentation skills by teaching them in quite explicit detail how the various phonemes are produced (Lindamood and Lindamood, 1969). 88

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What about the Rest of Reading? There is not space in this paper to explore the other areas of reading and writing represented in Figure 3. Suffice it to say that in each of these domains the invention of the printed word has led to the evolution of devices and systems that are quite unlike what comes about through natural language development. Word meanings in the untutored mind tend to be closely linked to the concrete and the functional---an apple is red, a hole is to dig. The fully literate person has acquired a totally different strategy; words become elements in taxonomic structures (animal, vegetable and mineral), and dictionary definitions become comprehensible. The grammar of books, because memory demands are different when all the pieces remain in view, is more complex, more economical, more informative, if you know how to untangle the syntax. Finally, the comprehension structures in textbooks are quite unlike anything that appears in totally oral cultures (Calfee and Curley, in press). Nor are many students likely to discover these structures on their own. The decline of expository writing in schoolbooks (Chall, 1977), and the increasing reliance on episodic "story-book" approaches to teaching concepts in science and social studies may solve one problem (poor readers find the materials more interesting), but they do not change the realities of the modern world. The need to communicate in a business letter cannot be served well by the style of informal correspondence. One does not guarantee mastery of computer programming skills by having the student read a novel in which incidentally the hero learns to program.

The Bottom Line(s) Nature is the best teacher of understanding. The job of the schools is to teach comprehension. Their task is to instruct in formal thought and expression. The content is important, but secondary to the processes of thinking and problem solving. Youngsters need to learn the "facts" that aid in recognizing the right answer on a multiple-choice test, but they also need experience in organizing their arguments for discussion and debate. They may learn some specific skills by completing the page-size bites of a workbook, but they also need to learn how to assimilate the larger and more complex structures that are 89

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found in a well-framed lecture. They need to know how to fill out an application for a driver's license, but they also need to know how to draft an essay. Within reading, they need to reach to the upper limits of inferential comprehension and text analysis, but they also need to understand h o w the spelling-sound system operates in English, and to possess strategies for morphological analysis of word meanings. Included in this curriculum are teaching of initiative, persistence, and active engagement in problems, a searching out of information, self-assessment and review, an awareness of strategies for learning, and achievement of mastery in the fullest sense of the term. These qualities are not optional; while they may represent values to some, they are essential to formal study, because of the need for discipline and sustained effort. This curriculum is important not just for the academic college-bound, professional, but for all citizens. The curriculum provides for teaching the technical skills of literacy, math, science; it also must provide room for art (for knowing "how to look at a dandelion") and for technical vocations (comprehending h o w a four-cycle engine operates). This also calls to mind Inkeles' (1978) characterization of the modern person--informed, self initiating, efficacious, engaged with the societal world at many levels, capable of global perspectives. The terms "formal," "analytic," and "rational" all may conjure up a coldness and inhumaneness, but I think this is a mistaken impression. We are blessed in a remarkable way with the organ that resides inside our skull. It has led to dominance of this planet, for better or worse. Left unchecked, our mental powers can have disastrous consequences. But as we bring together our skills in thinking, we can reach the potential of solving the most demanding of problems. That is the ultimate achievement to be gained through schooling, and it is toward this goal that the attainment of literacy is most profoundly directed.

References

Brown, A. L. Knowing when, where, and how to remember: A problem of metacognition. In R. Glaser (Ed.), Advances in Instructional Psychology (VoL 1). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 1978. Ca|fee, R. C. Cognitive psychology and educational practice. In D. C. Berliner (Ed.).

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Review of Research in Education. Washington, D.C.: American Educational Research Association, 1981 Calfee, R. C., and Curley, R. G. Structures of prose in the content area. In J. Flood (Ed.), Understanding Reading Comprehension. Newark, DE: International Reading Association, in press. Calfee, R., and Sutter, L. Oral language assessment through formal discussion. Topics in Language Disorders, in press. Chall, J. S. An analysis of textbooks in relation to declining SAT scores. Paper prepared for the Advisory Panel on the Scholastic Aptitude Test Score Decline, sponsored by College Entrance Examination Board and Educational Testing Service, June 1977. Dearman, N. B., and Plisko, V. W. The Condition of Education. Statistical report, National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 1981. Ehri, L. C. Linguistic insight: Threshold of reading acquisition. In T. G. Waller and G. E. MacKinnon (Eds.), Reading Research: Advances in Theory and Practice (Vol. 1). New York: Academic Press, 1979. Farr, R., Tiunman J., and Rowls, M. Reading achievement in the United States: Then and now. Prepared for Educational Testing Service by The Reading Program Center and the Institute for Child Study, Indiana University, August 1974. Fries, C. C., Linguistics and Reading. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1962. Gelb, I. J. A Study of Writing: The Foundations of GrammatoIogy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1952. Goody, J., and Watt, I. The consequences of literacy. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1963, 5, 304-345. Gough, P.B., and Hillinger, M. L. Learning to read: An unnatural act. Bulletin of The Orton Society, 1980, 30, 179-196. Harnischfeger, A., and Wiley, D. E. Achievement Test Score Decline: Do We Need to Worry? Chicago, [L: Cemrel, Inc., 1975. Heath, S. B. Ways with words: Ethnography of communication in communities and classrooms. In preparation. Inkeles, A. The future of individual modernity. In J. M. Yinger and S. J. Cutler (Eds.), Major social issues. New York: The Free Press, 1978. Lindamood, C. H., and Lindamood, P. C. TheA.D.D. Program, Auditory Discrimination in Depth. Boston: Teaching Resources Corporation, 1969. NAEP. Three national assessments of reading: Changes in performance 1970-80. Report No. 11-R-01. National Assessment of Educational Progress, 1981. Nist, J. A Structural History of English. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1966. Olson, D. R. From utterance to text: The basis of language in speech and writing. Harvard Educational Review, 1977, 47, 257-281. Olson, D. R. On the language and authority of textbooks. Journal of Communication, 1980, 30, 186-196. Pei, M. A. What's in a Word? New York: Hawthorn Books, 1968. Rockefeller, N. A. Don't accept anyone's verdict that you are lazy, stupid or retarded. TV Guide, October 16, 1976, 12-14. Scribner, S., and Cole M. The Psychology of Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle, September 25, 1977. Venezky, R. L. English orthography: Its graphical structure and its relation to sound. Reading Research Quarterly, 1967, 2, 75-106. Venezky, R. L. The Structure of English Orthography, The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1970.

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