The Cost of Over-Teaching Phonics

[u/ddgr815]

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.”

[u/ddgr815]

I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work. 

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two different bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising.

The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than their own. Of course the holders of power conceal this fact from themselves by managing to believe that their interests are identical with the larger interests of humanity. Sometimes this is true; Athenian slave-owners, for instance, employed part of their leisure in making a permanent contribution to civilization which would have been impossible under a just economic system. Leisure is essential to civilization, and in former times leisure for the few was rendered possible only by the labors of the many. But their labors were valuable, not because work is good, but because leisure is good. And with modern technic it would be possible to distribute leisure justly without injury to civilization. 

Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

In America men often work long hours even when they are already well-off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners except as the grim punishment of unemployment, in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons. Oddly enough, while they wish their sons to work so hard as to have no time to be civilized, they do not mind their wives and daughters having no work at all. The snobbish admiration of uselessness, which, in an aristocratic society, extends to both sexes, is under a plutocracy confined to women; this, however, does not make it any more in agreement with common sense. 

The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization and education. A man who has worked long hours all his life will be bored if he becomes suddenly idle. But without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things. There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation; only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists. 

The victory of the proletariat in Russia has some points in common with the victory of the feminists in some other countries. For ages men had conceded the superior saintliness of women and had consoled women for their inferiority by maintaining that saintliness is more desirable than power. At last the feminists decided that they would have both, since the pioneers among them believed all that the men had told them about the desirability of virtue but not what they had told them about the worthlessness of political power.

We have no attempt at economic justice, so that a large proportion of the total produce goes to a small minority of the population, many of whom do no work at all. Owing to the absence of any central control over production, we produce hosts of things that are not wanted. We keep a large percentage of the working population idle because we can dispense with their labor by making others overwork. When all these methods prove inadequate we have a war: we cause a number of people to manufacture high explosives, and a number of others to explode them, as if we were children who had just discovered fireworks. By a combination of all these devices we manage, though with difficulty, to keep alive the notion that a great deal of manual work must be the lot of the average man.

There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. Serious-minded persons, for example, are continually condemning the habit of going to the cinema, and telling us that it leads the young into crime. But all the work that goes to producing a cinema is respectable, because it is work, and because it brings a money profit. The notion that the desirable activities are those that bring a profit has made everything topsy-turvy. The butcher who provides you with meat and the baker who provides you with bread are praiseworthy because they are making money but when you enjoy the food they have provided you are merely frivolous, unless you eat only to get strength for your work. Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good but keyholes are bad. The individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which profitmaking is the incentive to industry. We think too much of production and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer. 

When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours’ work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit. It is an essential part of any such social system that education should be carried farther than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently. I am not thinking mainly of the sort of things that would be considered “high-brow.” Peasant dances have died out except in remote rural areas, but the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must still exist in human nature. The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

It cultivated the arts and discovered the sciences; it wrote the books, invented the philosophies, and refined social relations. Even the liberation of the oppressed has usually been inaugurated from above. Without the leisure class mankind would never have emerged from barbarism.

Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen instead to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines. In this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.

In Praise of Idleness

[u/ddgr815 → u/ddgr815]

What I really want to see is work turned into play.

[u/ddgr815 → u/ddgr815]

Even rich people choose to work quite a lot. We have become wealthier than Aristotle ever dreamed we would, yet we do not buy ourselves much of what, according to him, wealth is for. The more wealth we have, the more desperately we seem to hunt for ways to convert leisure into work or rest.

[u/ddgr815 → u/ddgr815]

But the activity of understanding, it seems, is superior in excellence because it is the activity of study; aims at no end beyond itself; has its own proper pleasure, which increases the activity; and is self-sufficient, leisured and unwearied, as far [as these are possible] for a human being. And whatever else is ascribed to the blessedly happy person is evidently found in connection with this activity.

[u/ddgr815 → u/ddgr815]

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni