Coffey 1

Ariel Coffey

Prof. Johnson

English 1201-505

18 July 2021

Why Are We Teaching Our Kids To Read the Wrong Way?

Reading is a very important of everyday life. The way we learn to read sets us up for

success if done correctly. Many teachers rely on sight words and pictures to read. Which can

help you read but it does not always work effectively. I was taught to read by learning sight

words and looking at pictures. I was never taught how to sound out words and why we learned

about counting syllables. While pictures and sight words help kids read sometimes because

they use memory to remember the word, decoding and phonemic awareness are the best way

to learn to read. Phonemic awareness tells the sound you need for a letter, then adding

decoding teaches the connection between letters and sounds they represent.

Emily Hanford talks about how a lot of people think learning to read is a natural

process when it is not. “But decades of scientific research have revealed that reading doesn't

come naturally. The human brain isn't wired to read. Kids must be explicitly taught how to

connect sounds with letters — phonics.” (4) In American schools most teachers do not

understand the science behind reading and do not want to learn it. Children are being failed

because teachers do not want to learn the science of reading and how it is better formulated to

teach kids to not only read but to read well and excel in other areas. Many people have said that

not being able to read was because of poverty. Studies have shown that even kids of wealth

cannot read well. students in honors classes, weren't very good readers. "They didn't like to

read," she said. "They avoided reading. They would tell me it was too hard."(4)
 Coffey 2

A popular book on the subject “Why Our Kids Can’t Read, and What we can do about

it.” By Diane McGuinnes talks about why they changed how reading is taught. “They threw out

the alphabetic-phonics method, which is the proper way to teach children to read an alphabetic

writing system, and replaced it with a new whole-word, look-say, or “sight” method that taught

children to read English words as if they were whole configurations, like Chinese characters.” (5)

Reading Recovery was developed in New Zealand in the 1970 by researcher Marie Clay.

Reading Recovery is the process used in most schools to teach kids how to read. It was thought

that Reading Recovery was the best way to teach kids how to read. Reading Recovery is

structured to teach kids to guess when reading. Going by cues of trying to sound the word out or

by sight. Reading Recovery does not truly trach kids the right way to read. Not all teachers want

to teach Reading Recovery but unfortunately many do not get the option to choose even if what

they are made to teach is not helpful in long-term. “Still, teachers may not know that cueing

strategies aren’t in line with the scientific evidence base around teaching reading” (7)

Science of Reading: The podcast, talks about how the Science of Reading works and why

it is much more reliable in teaching kids to read. How the Science of Reading is backed by

scientific research. Intervention cost so much money and parents are realizing their kids are not

learning to read in school. So, there is a push more from parents to use the scientific research to

teach instead. (8) To be a proficient reader you need language comprehension and word

recognition. Some people think just because you can google something you do not need to

actually learn in school. The Knowledge Gap is elementary school’s intense focus on skills

instead of actual knowledge. (7) Kids need to be able to decode and comprehension to learn to
 Coffey 3

read well. This is evidenced based and a lot of teachers and kids like it better when they learn it

this way.

Across the country millions of kids are struggling to read. The National Assessment of

Educational Progress 32 percent of fourth graders and 24 percent of eighth graders, only read at

the basic levels. Few kids read at an advanced or proficient level. Research proves that we are

not wired to read from birth. People can only become skilled readers of written text if you are

good at coding speech sounds. If a student comes to a word, they don’t know they shouldn’t bet

told to guess and move on if they can’t figure it out. Instead, if students are taught how to

decode, they should be able to look at the letters in a word and be able to figure it out. (4)

Why reading is so Hard this short video by Margie Gillis emphasizes why it is so

important we teach reading the right way. Learning to speak is easy we are wired to do that. We

learn to speak because we are always exposed to it. Learning to read is a cultural invention. It is

recent that was have a spoken system to help us convey our thoughts. We have to use area of the

brain and develop it in school to learn to read and be a skilled reader. (2)

Natalie Wexler wrote an article about reading and why American students haven’t gotten

better in 20 years. Too many schools focus on comprehension skills instead of general

knowledge. They know that the cause of kids not being able read well is the way kids are being

taught to read, not that kids aren’t smart enough. The first several years of elementary school

need to be dedicated to learning the basics of reading. How can we expect kids to excel at other

subjects if they can’t read or read well enough to understand what they are reading? If that
 Coffey 4

movement spreads, the NAEP may finally live up to its name, and the American education

system may at last be able to unlock the untold potential of millions of students. (10)

Natalie Wexler wrote another article Missing Pieces In The Puzzle Of Reading

Comprehension. In this article she touches base on Emily Hanford’s APM radio documentaries

about why kids can’t read. A reading researcher explains how African American kids face many

more difficulties when learning to read because the language used is so different from how they

speak. A mother from Nashville was furious that her seventh grader could only read at a second-

grade level. Saying his school did not want to help. Her son was not taught how to decode and

didn’t have adequate comprehension skills to understand what he was reading. One danger is that

if students are taught to decode but still can’t understand what they read—because schools aren’t

also building their knowledge—skeptics will say, unfairly, that phonics just doesn’t work. And

we’ll be back where we started. (6)

New Zealand used Reading Recovery, but it failed. They implemented a literacy

taskforce to give recommendations on ways to improve literacy achievement. They started this

started in the 1990’s but still was in issue in 2011. In 2011 an assessment showed that New

Zealand still has a gap between their good and bad readers. The literacy strategy was using

Reading Recovery which from its claims should have closed their gap, but the gap has not

diminished at all. New Zealand is using reading as a process and using cues, picture cues,

sentence context cues, preceding passage context, prior knowledge. For New Zealand to

overcome this hardship they need a new program that is used from the day school starts. Using

the skills but also using knowledge to achieve remembering how to read. (11)
 Coffey 5

Reading Is Fundamental literacy network list some shocking statistics about reading

levels. 34% of children that enter kindergarten lack skills needed to read. 65% of 4th grade

students read at a lower grade level. Only 37% of high school students graduate at or above a

proficient level. Of all adults in the United States 93 million people only read at or below a basic

reading level. An astounding 43% of all people in the United States are functionally illiterate. In

Ohio 64% of students in 4th grade read below a proficient level, 28% read at proficient level and

only 8% of students read at an advanced level in Ohio. (12)

Literacy Project also has some shocking statistics that should really start a movement,

getting kids to read the correct way so they are not struggling as they get older. 50% of adults

cannot read a book written at an eighth-grade level. 85% of juvenile offenders have issues

reading. Every 3 out of 5 people in American prisons can’t read. Every 3 out of 4 people on

welfare can’t read. In middle-income neighborhoods the ratio of books per child is 13 to 1, in

low-income neighborhoods, the ratio is 1 age-appropriate book for every 300 children. 61% of

low-income families have no books at all in their homes for their children. One in six

children who are not reading proficiently in the third grade does not graduate from high school

on time, a rate four times greater than that for proficient readers. Low-income families’ kids

struggle before even being in school. When they start school and are not even being taught the

correct way to read those kids are going to struggle especially if they don’t have the help at home

they need. (2)

Jill Coffey has a bachelor’s in education and her masters in literacy. She is a kindergarten

teacher, so she knows first-hand how to teach kids the correct way to read. She sees with her
 Coffey 6

colleagues the difference in her teaching the science of reading while they teach reading

recovery. She says they focus on decoding never teaches her kids to guess or skips words.

Doesn’t drill or kill sight words. Even in irregular words look for the parts they do know. Work

on phonemic awareness. Take the time to talk about letters and the sound that they make.

Teaching to read is not an all or nothing sequence. She still teaches comprehension but does it

through read aloud and authentic literature. (2)

David Kilpatrick and his book Equipped For Reading Success, his book is a manual for a

successful way to teach reading. His book includes a phonemic awareness training program,

word recognition strategies, multiple assessments. David Kilpatrick is a leader in Orthographic

Mapping. Orthographic Mapping is the process of students using the oral language processing

part of the brain to map the sounds of words they already know to the letters in the word. This

then gets stored as words that we know and know the meaning of “sight words”. Orthographic

Mapping is a mental process to store and remember words, it is not a skill or anything that can be

taught. The process that helps to engage Orthographic Mapping are Phonemic awareness and

phonics skills. Phonemic awareness is the ability recognize and manipulate the spoken parts of

words, hearing and rhyming. Phonics skills is the connection between letter symbols and sounds.

(9)

Kathleen Bast who has many years of experience with literacy and reading teaching wise

and now is a principal, in Bethlehem Pennsylvania. She had used what most people have always

used to teach reading, the whole language approach. Which consisted of children being exposed

the printed word all the time, in the hopes that seeing it and writing it more often they would

become better readers. Until Bast was introduced to the Science Of Reading, she didn’t want to
 Coffey 7

accept it but stated that the facts where in her face. After Bethlehem had incorporated The

Science Of Reading in 2015 in the fall 51% of the incoming Kindergarteners could read at grade

level by June 71% where able to read at grade level. Learning to read is just as much the visual

part of it as is the hearing someone read it aloud, we learn to read by listening just like how we

learn to speak. Adding the science of reading to certain schools in Philadelphia has been hard,

upending the way something has been done for years is hard to get the teachers to agree on. The

principles in many Pennsylvania schools take the professional development classes alongside

their teachers. (14)

The old way may have worked for a while. Everyone thought it was the right way to

teach kids how to read. Now there is science proving that programs like reading recovery only

hurt kids in the long run. The Science Of Reading has the science to show why its affective and

how it is effective. Schools have seen great improvement when implementing this reading

system.

Schools around the country have a long way to go. So many teachers are stuck in the old

ways of teaching reading with the literacy of reading strategy. They don’t want to learn anything

new and think the old way is enough. If The Science Of Reading was pushed in every elementary

school, it would surprise people how much faster children could learn to read. So many people

kids would be reading at or above grade level instead of at or below. While pictures and sight

words help kids read sometimes because they use memory to remember the word, decoding

and phonemic awareness are the best way to learn to read. Phonemic awareness tells the

sound you need for a letter, then adding decoding teaches the connection between letters and

sounds they represent.

 Coffey 8

Works Cited

"30 Key Child Literacy Stats Parents Need To Be Aware Of – Literacy Project

Foundation". Literacyproj.Org, 2019, https://literacyproj.org/2019/02/14/30-key-child-literacy-

stats-parents-need-to-be-aware-of/. Accessed 17 July 2021.

Coffey, J., 2021. Why our kids can't read. Interview in Person 16 July 2021

Gillis, M., 2017. Why Is Reading So Hard? [video] Available at:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dpi83OQEDaQ&t=13s> Accessed 5 July 2021

Hanford, E., 2019. How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers.

[online] Apmreports.org. Available at: <https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-

wrong-how-schools-teach-reading> Accessed 5 July 2021

McGuinness, D., 1997. Why our children can't read, and what we can do about it. New

York: Free Press.

Missing Pieces in The Puzzle of Reading Comprehension. 2020. video APM REPORTS.
 Coffey 9

Schwartz, Sarah. "The Most Popular Reading Programs Aren't Backed by

Science". Education Week, 2019, https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/the-most-popular-

reading-programs-arent-backed-by-science/2019/12. Accessed 16 July 2021.

Science of Reading: The Podcast, 2019. About Science of Reading. [podcast] Science of

Reading: The Podcast. Available at: <https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s1-00-about-science-

of-reading-the-podcast/id1483513974?i=1000453498821> Accessed 5 July 2021

Sedita, Joan. "The Role Of Orthographic Mapping In Learning To Read - Keys To

Literacy". Keys To Literacy, 2020, https://keystoliteracy.com/blog/the-role-of-orthographic-

mapping-in-learning-to-read/. Accessed 17 July 2021.

Sykes, C., 1995. Dumbing down our kids: Why American children feel good about

themselves but can't read, write, or add. Educational Leadership, 53(8), p.89.

The Atlantic, 2021. Why American Students Haven’t Gotten Better at Reading in 20

Years. [online] Available at: <https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/04/-

american-students-reading/557915/> Accessed 5 July 2021

"The Issue". RIF.Org, https://www.rif.org/literacy-network/the-issue. Accessed 17 July 2021.

Tunmer, W., 2021. Reading Recovery and the failure of the New Zealand national literacy

strategy. [online] Citeseerx.ist.psu.edu. Available at:

 Coffey 10

<https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1072.6023&rep=rep1&type=pdf>

Accessed 7 July 2021

Von Bergen, Jane M. “A New Teaching Method Might Help More Philly Students Learn to

Read.” The Philadelphia Citizen, 17 May 2021, thephiladelphiacitizen.org/better-way-

teach-reading/ Accessed 17 July 2021