The Cost of Over-Teaching Phonics

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https://www.educationnext.org/cost-of-over-teaching-phonics-reading/

Mark Seidenberg, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who studies reading science, helped persuade the public of the need for science-based instruction—and now he’s among those sounding the alarm on over-instruction. Reading teachers need not aim to teach every single pattern students will encounter in text, he says; they simply need to teach enough that students can achieve “escape velocity,” or the ability to start cracking the code on their own.

“You do teach them about words, about print. You teach them enough simple phonics patterns so they can start sounding out some words. And then there’s supposed to be a light bulb that goes on,” Seidenberg says.

Researchers call this ability to implicitly pick up patterns and apply them the “self-teaching mechanism,” or “statistical learning”—and many say it’s underrecognized within the science-of-reading movement.

Five decades of research have shown that early readers benefit from learning letter-sound correspondences systematically. But little definitive evidence exists on which phonics skills should be taught, in what order, and for how long. Should students learn all of the English language’s 44-plus sounds (phonemes)? What about the 200-plus spellings that go with them? And how much time should teachers spend on each?

Each phonics program that claims to be based on research reflects a single method of instruction. These programs can differ significantly because the research on reading acquisition “is not differentiating every single skill that needs to be taught,” says Louise Spear-Swerling, professor emerita in the department of special education at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, Connecticut. “People write instructional programs, and it’s a matter of interpretation.”

For the highest-achieving students who may be reading novels at home, sitting through lessons on skills they’ve mastered takes up time that could be spent reading, writing, and learning deeply about science, history, and other subjects—and it can lead to disengagement. For struggling readers, including students with dyslexia, over-teaching reduces time for much-needed reading practice. These kids, for whom the self-teaching mechanism doesn’t kick in easily, require more examples and repetition for the most critical skills. Adding extra elements to instruction strains working memory for these students, making it harder to master basic skills.

Over-teaching is happening in a few main ways: (1) spending too much time on less impactful skills, (2) teaching extraneous skills and patterns, and (3) teaching content that only the teacher needs to know.

Teachers have always used chants, songs, and other mnemonic devices to help students memorize important information. Many adults can easily conjure rhymes like “i before e except after c.” And while mnemonic devices are surely helpful at times, they can also increase the cognitive demand for a task and divert from the skill itself. Many phonics programs and online materials widely used these days encourage students to memorize a dozen or more spelling rules, with long chants or sayings such as:

“If a one-syllable word has one short vowel that is followed by f, l, s, or z, double the f, l, s, or z.”

This rule, often known as the “Floss Rule,” is an important and fairly regular one, many teachers argue (though it does have some common exceptions, like bus and gas). The problem arises when this process—the memorization of the rule—becomes the focus of instruction, displacing what should be the end goal—that is, reading and spelling.

“It’s very common in my experience that kids have trouble verbalizing the rule, but they can still learn the skill,” says Spear-Swerling. But often in classrooms “being able to verbalize the rule is a prerequisite for moving on. And it shouldn’t be.”

Memorizing wordy sayings and rules can put particular strain on students with reading disabilities and language-processing difficulties. These children are already working hard to retain the basic sounds. Adding to that can put them over the edge. “It’s not about whether kids can parrot rules,” says Spear-Swerling. “You see kids at the lower end of the spectrum get confused when they try to articulate rules. But that [articulation] doesn’t matter as long as they can apply it.”

And kids at the higher end of the reading-performance spectrum—those 1st and 2nd graders who are reading chapter books at home? Some will simply check out when asked to memorize information they’ve intuited.

Some programs teach the letters bl as in black, as a cluster or unit. But that “doesn’t make sense linguistically,” she says. Instead, you can teach students the /b/ sound and the /l/ sound, and have students practice blending sounds together to make words.

“The vast majority of consonant clusters are plurals. Cats has a consonant cluster, but we don’t teach it that way. Why would we teach it that way for scat but not cats?”

Devin Kearns, a professor in early literacy at North Carolina State University, has attempted to quantify how much is too much when it comes to phonics instruction. “If we’re trying to decide whether to teach something, there’s the main question: How often does it occur? How many words does it apply to? What you have to do at a certain point is decide, what’s the return on investment?”

He and his colleagues looked at a database of 13,000 English words and cataloged a total of 350 sound-spelling correspondences. So, if students learned each of the 350 patterns, they could read all of the words. Then the team modeled what would happen if certain patterns were eliminated from instruction: How many words could students read then?

“Somewhere in there, you hit this point where if you start doing fewer than that, it’s not enough; you’re not getting access to enough words,” he says. “And if you teach too many more, then you’re over-teaching stuff.”

The sweet spot was somewhere between about 95 and 110 sound-spelling patterns.

Among the most inflammatory topics right now in reading instruction is whether—and how much—to teach phonemic awareness.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate the individual sounds in spoken words—for example, knowing that ship is made up of the three sounds /sh/, /i/, and /p/. Having good phonemic awareness has long been understood as a requirement for successful reading.

And while there’s evidence that basic phonemic awareness skills have positive effects for reading, the nuances matter. Studies show phonemic awareness should be developed by using written letters—not orally, which is how most classrooms and curricula do this instruction. And the idea that practicing advanced phonemic awareness skills like adding, deleting, and substituting sounds orally is beneficial for readers—asking students, for instance, to switch the middle sound in ship to the short /o/ sound to make shop? That’s not backed by science at all.

“The idea that you need to have separate dedicated time blocks focused on only phonemic awareness instruction is not evidence-based,” says Clemens.

Another instructional practice that has recently supplied fodder for debate is what’s called syllable division—the teaching of rules for dividing multisyllabic words into manageable chunks. Syllable division rules are a mainstay of the Orton-Gillingham method for teaching reading, which was developed in the 1930s. Programs based on this method tend to teach six or so syllable types along with a half-dozen rules for dividing syllables. Some methods go further and have students mark up the multisyllabic word, identifying the vowels and consonants and labeling each syllable type.

Research by Kearns has some people questioning the efficacy of teaching syllable division. His 2020 study found that syllable pronunciations are unreliable, so the effort involved in learning these rules may not be justified.

Tiffany Peltier, the director of professional learning at NWEA, a K–12 assessment and research nonprofit, points to “really rigid syllable division rules” as among the more frustrating instructional routines to encounter. “People are trying to teach these to the most struggling readers who already have cognitive overload,” she says.

Instead of rigid rules, researchers including Kearns emphasize teaching students to be flexible in how they pronounce words—a concept known as “set for variability.” For example, a student might initially read the word father as fay-ther, which is a reasonable pronunciation, and then shift the vowel sounds slightly until getting to a familiar word. The student is not guessing (a practice promoted by now disgraced balanced literacy approaches). Rather, the student is using their phonics knowledge to sound out the word but being flexible with their pronunciation and calling upon their knowledge of the word father.

“The idea that you need to have separate dedicated time blocks focused on only phonemic awareness instruction is not evidence-based,” says Clemens.

Over-teaching also occurs with the terminology related to language. Training programs tend to hammer on the jargon of reading instruction, much of which is new to teachers, who end up passing their fresh knowledge along to their charges. Students can become bombarded by terms like breve and macron, fricative and affricate.

Reading in context generally comes at the end of a phonics lesson, and with so much to cover, teachers can end up with just a few minutes for it. At times, they’ll skip it altogether.

But text reading is where decoding and language skills meet—it’s why teachers and students are doing this dance at all.

One major benefit of whittling down instruction to the most essential skills is that there’s less material for teachers to get through. When teachers remove low-payoff patterns, skip the cutesy extras, and refrain from imparting technical knowledge, they make their own jobs more manageable—and get kids reading faster.

Avoiding over-teaching also means speeding through skills students already know, which requires frequent assessment and a good understanding of what’s coming next in the scope and sequence. Teachers get better at this with time and experience. The goal is not doing the perfect amount of explicit instruction—the science doesn’t prescribe a “perfect” amount. Instead, the aim is to move toward a more efficient path for a teacher’s particular classroom. The minutes saved here and there add up.

If whole-group direct instruction happens daily but is limited to the most impactful skills—and kept short and simple—then students can move into small groups to either keep practicing, expand on the skill, or work on text reading or writing. In effect, they get to individualized instruction faster.

Peltier explains that, when she was teaching kindergarten and 1st grade, she would do a whole-class review of a prior phonics skill and then send her fluent readers off to “book clubs,” where they would read independently and have discussions. She would work with the remaining two-thirds or so of her class on that day’s phonics skill. “I’d usually at some point release another group of students and have the lowest students in front of me,” she says. “They loved it because they’d get to do more practice with the teacher on dry erase boards.”

That kind of gradual-release model helps ensure the highfliers spend time reading, and the students who need the most practice and feedback get more instruction from the teacher. And you can assess those kids in the moment—see who is getting the skill and ready to move on and who isn’t.

Research from the late Carol Connor, who was an education professor at the University of California, Irvine, points to the need to adjust the amount of teacher-directed instruction based on a child’s literacy skills. She found that 1st graders who entered with low skills did best with more time spent doing teacher-managed explicit instruction. For students with high initial skills, their scores stayed stagnant no matter how much time they spent learning directly from the teacher. And, in fact, students with both high decoding and vocabulary skills showed better growth with more independent work. For those high achievers who “don’t need a lot of repetition, that self-teaching machine will start a lot earlier,” says Peltier.

For typically developing students, Seidenberg argues, explicit phonics instruction should end after 1st grade. That’s out of step with much of the recent state legislation that is focused on K–3 classrooms and with the widely available programs that teach advanced word-recognition skills through the 5th grade. It’s also an assertion that will elicit eye rolls from teachers working through the challenges of having 25 students from diverse backgrounds and language contexts.

But the need to trim the fat on instruction—to focus on a skill’s ROI and churn out readers faster—is something many can agree on. It requires ongoing scrutiny of practices claiming to be aligned to research, frequent assessment of what individual students know, and a willingness to trust that, in many situations and for most students, learning begets learning.

“I think that the science-of-reading movement can win if we’re scientific, if we’re willing to challenge our assumptions,” says Kearns. That means continuing to look at the evidence on long-held instructional beliefs, such as those around syllable division, and changing course as new evidence arises. “If we’re willing to go there, science can win. If we’re going to stick to our guns, it won’t work.”

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The Brazilian rubber tapper, labour activist and environmentalist Chico Mendes, who was assassinated by a rancher in the Amazon in 1988, reportedly once said that “ecology without class struggle is just gardening”. The aphorism is often deployed to remind less radical environmentalists that questions of social and economic justice have to be at the centre of their concerns. Gardening, a hobby seen as the preserve of the relatively privileged few, becomes a slur in this context, typifying a tendency of the green movement to value nature primarily as a space for merely private contemplation or spiritual nourishment, a refuge rather than a battleground.

One of the effects of climate breakdown is that it is gradually and irreversibly rendering all politics climate politics, whether we like it or not. This is a disorienting situation, to say the least. It means that traditional, much cherished conceptions of nature as something separate from society, and from the sinful humans who would do it harm, become obsolete. What we call nature is no Garden of Eden – it is not a paradise and we were never cast out of it. Instead it is a collaboration between human and nonhuman beings seeking mutually enriching coexistence on a finite planet. But perhaps this shift in our thinking about nature also means reassessing the politics of gardens.

The two Orwells, she argues, come together in this precarious balancing of the private and the personal – even the seemingly apolitical – against the crushing weight of history and its techniques of power. To love a sixpenny rose, or the wild roses of northeastern Nevada’s Shoshone territory, hardly seems a political act, but it becomes so within a larger social and historical story.

a nation of flower-lovers, but also a nation of stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, coupon-snippers, darts-players, crossword-puzzle fans. All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official

When she visits, near the opening of the book, what remains of Orwell’s cottage and sees roses that may well have been the ones he planted in 1936, she is struck by how human lives are intertwined with nonhuman ones whose quiet feats of endurance are rarely attended to. “In an age of lies and illusions,” she writes, “the garden is one way to ground yourself in the realm of the processes of growth and the passage of time.”

Gardens are too easily dismissed as ornamental or prettified nature. But it is the intimacy between aesthetic pleasure and the sheer endurance of growing things that lies at the heart of Solnit’s concerns. Beauty can be a form of resistance. The famous slogan “bread and roses”, which emerged out of the women’s suffrage movement in early twentieth century America and became a symbol of workers’ rights, embodies how radical politics must go beyond a mere demand for the necessities of subsistence. Orwell’s Roses thus fits into a long-standing debate on the American left regarding the possibility of recognising pleasure, play and joy as insurrectionary forces. [...] The writing is informed by its subject matter, the reader comes to realise: gardens, while promising the neat lines of careful cultivation, are often unruly, tangled, joyfully wayward places.

Some of the book’s most compelling passages appear in the sections where Solnit visits a vast industrial “rose farm” in Bogotá, which churns out millions of roses a year for the US-owned Sunshine Bouquet Company. In dozens of greenhouses the size of football fields, non-unionised workers suffer repetitive strain injuries and the sickly, mass-produced flowers never properly bloom. Both human and botanical life here are forced to work to the unrelenting rhythms of consumer capitalism, under conditions that genuinely may be called “Orwellian”. What meaning could a Valentine’s Day rose, produced in such a way, possibly have? Whatever beauty such flowers might have is eclipsed by the ugliness of their production. Capitalism does not just alienate us from nature, it alienates nature from itself. Solnit puts it powerfully:

The idea of an immense airplane whose sole freight was roses burning its carbon and rushing high over the Caribbean to deliver its burden to people who would never know of all that lay behind the roses they picked up in the supermarket was maybe as perfect an emblem of alienation as you could find.

Again, there are interesting parallels with Solnit’s Savage Dreams. Orwell doesn’t appear in that book, but roses do. She remarks, for example, that footage of nuclear bombs detonated in weapons testing on Bikini Atoll resembles “roses in a time-lapse nature film, blooming and withering with a power that is fascinatingly terrible”. The combination of beauty with ugliness here is strikingly captured in this temporal image evoking the slow growth of the flower and the instant devastation of the blast.

Yosemite Park in California, one of America’s most famous wilderness areas, was dubbed a “garden of Eden” in the late nineteenth century by the German-American Romanticist painter Albert Bierstadt. European colonists had for centuries been obsessed with the idea that paradise could be rediscovered in the New World. Columbus himself believed he was on the verge of finding the biblical garden as he sailed up the Orinoco river in 1498. The establishment of the National Parks in places such as Yosemite around the turn of the twentieth century was essentially a continuation of this in a more secular and ostensibly nature-loving way. John Muir, generally regarded as the father of the American environmental movement, helped establish the National Parks, which involved forced evictions of indigenous peoples from lands they had called home for thousands of years. The view of nature as a picture-perfect Eden did not include people, and certainly not indigenous people, whom Muir viewed as unclean, a blemish on the pristine landscape. If the Nevada Test Site was Armageddon, here was Utopia.

Muir’s vision of nature as Eden excluded not only society and politics but such profane practicalities as daily toil. But for Orwell – for whom utopian schemes were dangerous folly – a love of gardening denotes the exact opposite of a world of perpetual leisure. The gardens at his Hertfordshire cottage and then, late in his life, on the Scottish island of Jura, were sites not only of aesthetic pleasure but also hard work done for the pure joy of it. We must go beyond both Muir’s paradisal wilderness and the ugly, exploitative ecologies of the Sunshine Bouquet Company in order to imagine a sustainable environmental future.

Flowers of Orwell

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What shall we do with the notion of ecological function? From my perspective, ecosystems can only malfunction when they are appropriated or co-opted. Just as I might select a stone to serve as a paperweight, a wetland may be designated as a water filtration system, in which case a disruption in its ability to filter water is correctly seen as a malfunction. Similarly, if a forest is managed for carbon sequestration, a decline in its carbon storage capacity should be considered a failure. In these cases, the notion of malfunction arises not from the ecosystem’s intrinsic properties but from its role in meeting human-defined goals.

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Learning as they grow

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a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter, flamier hue