More than One Way to Teach a Child to Read
by Tom Mashberg
Jeanne S. Chall
The debate over how to teach children language and reading skills is not new. More than four decades ago, Jeanne S. Chall was commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to take a thorough look at a vexing controversy: Should children be taught to read using phonics, which teaches the sounds of letters one by one by one, or through the increasingly popular "look-say," or "whole literature," method, which encourages students to recognize and intuit the sounds and meanings of words and sentences?
Diligent and precise, Chall--who died in 1999, a professor emerita at the Harvard Graduate School of Education--looked beyond the biases and vested interests garrisoning the issue and dove headlong into three years of meticulous research. She analyzed prior studies, visited scores of classrooms, and spoke with teachers, textbook authors, and other language specialists. The result, Learning to Read: The Great Debate (Harcourt Brace, 1967), launched an intense conversation--one that continues to this day--on the challenges and joys of teaching literacy to children, adults, and dyslexics--anyone who was just beginning to learn how to read.
"‘Where's the evidence?' was one of Dr. Chall's favorite questions," recalls Lecturer Vicki Jacobs, associate director of HGSE's Teacher Education Program, who studied, researched, and wrote with Chall. "Another was, ‘How will this help the children?' Dr. Chall asked herself these questions as relentlessly as she asked them of her graduate students." Jacobs notes that Chall's work has remained a touchstone over the decades. "It was foundational, and a great edifice of research has been built upon her legacy."
In Learning to Read, Chall set out to examine the two prevailing forms of language teaching from a neutral vantage point. As part of her effort, she founded the Harvard Reading Laboratory in 1966, directing it for 20 years. She worked hard to eliminate preconceptions about reading and made her impartiality plain in the original subtitle of her book: An Inquiry into the Science, Art, and Ideology of Old and New Methods of Teaching Children to Read, 1910–1965. After her book was published, she became one of the first prominent educators to advocate for the use of both phonics and exposure to challenging literature as the best methods of teaching reading.
As Diane Ravitch, research professor of education at New York University, noted about Chall in the fall 2000 publication Perspectives, from the International Dyslexia Association, "She did not agree that there was one and only one successful method of teaching beginning reading."
Chall certainly found that well-designed studies and other evidence supported
phonics for beginning readers. But she warned against going overboard
in the practice of decoding--in which readers sound out every letter
of a word until they grasp the full word itself--and against
jettisoning intuitive comprehension through good stories. "She concluded
that no single method had completely solved the problems of teaching reading;
some methods were better than others, but none was a panacea," Ravitch
wrote.
When her book came out, it lived up to its title by stimulating debate, some of it ferocious and ideological. Chall may have been a proponent of challenging reading material, but she was in no way shy about discussing the virtues of decoding through phonics. She pointed relentlessly to the research, noting that "comparisons of different beginning-reading methods over the past 70 years have found that methods that teach decoding earlier and more systematically produce better word recognition as well as better reading comprehension." The hard data, she declared, showed that knowledge of the alphabet and familiarity with the sounds that make up words were in fact crucial to literacy.
Through it all, Chall respected the need for debate. "The debate is great and it is centuries long, and Jeanne knew that," says Maryanne Wolf, Ed.D.‘79, professor of child development at the Tufts University Center for Reading and Language Research. "What she was doing was the historical, contextual, psychological, and educational research necessary to bring to bear a meta-analysis of data. And she saw her task as placing the evidence ahead of the typical kinds of biases that were at work then, and unfortunately continue to be at work till the present."
About the Article
A version of this article originally appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
