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Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams is the Chief Scientist of Soliloquy Learning Inc., and is internationally regarded for her research and applied work in the area of cognition and education. Recipient of the American Educational Research Association's Sylvia Scribner Award for outstanding research, Dr. Adams' contributions include the landmark book, Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print and Phonemic Awareness in Young Children (co-authored). Dr. Adams has also written/designed three empirically proven instructional programs: on thinking skills for middle school students, on reading and writing for elementary school students, and on linguistic awareness for emergent readers and special needs students. Additional bio info
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The following transcript has not been edited for journal or magazine publication (see 'Interview Notes' for more details). Bold is used to emphasize our [Children of the Code] sense of the importance of what is being said and does not necessarily reflect gestures or tones of emphasis that occurred during the interview.
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Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: I'm honored
to chat with you. Tell me a little
about your project.
David Boulton: Thank you. The honor is mine.
It
seems that very few people in our society really understand how this code came
to be the way that it is and the kind of artificial challenges involved in
learning to process it. That’s one of the things that we really want to get
at.
Origins of the Phonemic Awareness Revolution:
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Do you know the history of Haskins Lab? It was begun by Caryl Haskins, who wanted to build a reading machine for the blind. He got a hold of Alvin Liberman just as Al was finishing his doctorate and said, 'Would you do this?' So Al worked and worked and worked and worked, and eventually he created a machine that would read text aloud. In the course of this, he basically had to invent everything he needed, starting with a way for the machine to recognize characters.
David
Boulton: Sounds like
an amazing parallel with Ray Kurzweil.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Yes, but the Haskins groups started on this project more than thirty years before Kurzweil. In the early 1950's they even had to invent ways to tell the machine how to sound words out and to generate speech sounds electronically. Back then, there just wasn't that kind of technology around to be begged, borrowed, or bought.
By the early 1950’s he had to
invent ways to electrically generate phonemes for each letter, you know, the
sound for each letter; which there just wasn't that kind of information around.
David
Boulton: So he would have been back in the days of analog oscillators to
generate phonemes.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Yes, I
believe Liberman
started this in the mid 1940's. So finally, I think it was the 1950’s
when he got to the point where he could have a text read aloud. For example,
given 'Once upon a time...' it would say things like, 'Oh, unn, sss, uh, puh,
nnn.'
He gave it to some kids
to listen to and immediately got some terrific results. Then he found out the
kids were cheating. He was so heartbroken.
This had been his
whole life at that point. He thought about it long and hard. And eureka! His
insight, as he explained it to me, was, 'Well, if people could understand text
by reading it phoneme by phoneme, or understand oral
language phoneme by phoneme, then they ought to be able to understand written text if you just
spelled it to them. If that were so, then learning to read out to be easy. Yet,
as we all know, learning to read is hard for nearly all children and extremely
hard for some.' In this way, Al
Liberman cam to realize he was missing some piece of the puzzle - and became
determined to figure it out.
So it was Al
Liberman and his group who gave us the enormously important insight that phonemes are not audible signals.
Using their equipment they showed how phonemes are blended together and
co-articulated in spoken language. Alongside, there
was this burst of activity in the early 1960’s that showed, for example, if
other stimuli came at you with the speed of individual phonemes that they would
exceed the resolving power of the ear and come out as one big buzz
- the idea that phonemes could not be heard, that they were not
perceptually...
David Boulton: Distinct?
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Entities,
right. Basically, the individual phonemes - those little sounds that go with the
letters of the alphabet - are not real. Or not in an acoustic sense, that is.
It turned out that Al Liberman's wife, Isabelle, had earned
her doctorate in psychology with him at Yale. Evidently, they were both
exceptional students. When they finished
school, she was offered a job at a fine liberal arts college in Connecticut, and he at the University of Connecticut
The story that I was told was that the board of the college that had sought to hire Isabelle, gathered that August to approve the new faculty as they did each year. When the board looked at Isabelle's appointment, they said, 'Isabelle? We never met a gentleman named Isabelle.' So the story goes, they decided it would be inappropriate for a lady to teach their students. However, being gentlemen themselves, they arranged an appropriate job for her in the Remedial Reading Department at the University of Connecticut. Now, of course, this must have seemed brutally unfair to Isabelle at the time. But, as it turned out, it was a great gift to all of us. Her job was to teach people how to teach reading and how to look for reading problems.
Meanwhile, Al was still back at Haskins working on his problem. In the 1960's, he was preparing what could become a very important paper - his 1967 Psych Review article, Perception of the Speech Code. Not having word processors at the time, a common practice among professors was to give their papers to their wives to edit with red ink. Isabelle, being a very good wife and scholar, dutifully read read Al's draft. What Al's paper said, in essence, is there's only a single, well-integrated ballistic vocalization in the word such as bag. It's made of three separate elementary speech gestures that are bundled into a single ballistic speech movement that results in a single, seamless sounds: BAG!
Isabelle realized that if phonemes were not acoustically real, then traditional phonics lessons must be confusing at least. So she went out to test this outrageous theory on a bunch of kindergartners. To do this, she made a list of two and three-sound words, such as go, peek, my, etc. The kids' task was to just tap out how many sounds they heard in each word. She'd say, for example, 'Low', and the kids were supposed to tap one, two, and say, 'Two.' After each turn, she'd show and tell the children what the right answer was if they didn't get it. She also gave them an analogous task where they were to count syllables (e.g., puppy has two syllables; bee has one; and so on).
Almost all the kindergarteners were fine on the syllable-counting task, which meant that they did understand the game, and they could count. Nevertheless, hardly any of them showed that they could hear or count phonemes. She repeated the experiment with first-graders. Again, they were fine with the syllables. In contrast, I think it was seventy percent of them who succeeded with the phoneme task. The rest just couldn't do it despite the feedback she gave them on each attempt. If they didn't get it in one or two trials, they never got it. They couldn't answer. They couldn't play this game.
So this is very interesting. It was the end of the school year. These kids had spent a whole year being 'taught' phonics through such questions as, 'What is the first sound of the word bag?' ' What is the last sound of the word bag?' 'How many sounds in the word bag?' If these questions made no sense to the children, then what in the world might they have learned?
Again, Isabelle conducted these test in the spring, so she had to wait for the next school year to check the kids' reading. Again, the fairy godmother steps in. Researchers are generally not allowed to fool with people's classrooms in the first six weeks of school. During those first few weeks, the classroom teacher is very, very busy. She has to make sure all her students know the school routine, that they understand how they are expected behave themselves, that they know how to bring their lunchboxes, that they remember what they learned in first grade. Researchers are not welcome in the classroom until things settle down. So Isabelle had to wait until October, November to find out whether the kids' performance on her phoneme counting activity might be related to their reading.
Now, there's something you need to know about second grade. On the first day of second grade, when the kids come in the door, there are typically a few who are reading like champs. Most of the rest seem totally clueless! You almost want to step back and say, 'Okay, raise your hands. How many of you had first grade last year?' It's like they never learned a thing! Now, learning to read is a little bit like learning a foreign language - the less well you know it, the easier it is to forget.
The ones who were really incredible
readers at the end of first grade had been reading over the summer, and they're
fine. But the rest of them, it's like learning a foreign language. They barely
knew how, they haven't done it for three months, and they've forgotten
everything. So usually by the middle of October, those who actually learned
something in first grade are up and going again. But when that point comes, you
always find that there are a bunch who just still don't remember, don't show any
evidence of having learned much of anything in first grade.
David
Boulton: Particularly in relation to this phonemic discrimination. They're not
being exercised to make those kind of distinctions except when they're in that
situation.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Exactly. The one who are good readers at the end of first grade often ready by themselves over the summer, and they're fine. But the rest of them need some serious review. Fortunately, it's pretty easy for people to recover things they've forgotten given appropriate review. By the middle of October, those who actually learned something in first grade are up and going again. But when that point comes, teachers always find that there are a bunch who still don't remember, who still don't show any evidence of having learned much of anything in first grade. Some of those kids came with notes from their first grade teacher. But others did not. What's going on? This has forever been the big mystery and huge tension of second grade.
At any rate, Isabelle didn't show up until October or November. By that time, the kids who were going to get back in the saddle were back in the saddle. What Isabelle found was that virtually every single kid who did fine on her test was reading fine. She also found that every single kid who did badly on her test - now, remember, it was kind of all or nothing - was in deep trouble. Whether kids were reading in fall of second grade was just about perfectly predicted by whether they could count Isabelle's phonemes at the end of first grade. The great mystery of second grade was solved!
So that was the original phonemic awareness thing. It was funded by Reid Lyon's predecessor at National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. It was that that got us all thinking about phonemic awareness. We began to worry about it long before we quite understood what it was she was talking about. It's like, are they trying to rote memorize their way to literacy, or did they get the logic of it? Did they understand how this works so they can think when they don't know a word, to read or write? And so that was the phonemic awareness thing. If it hadn't have been for that series of fairy godmother events we never would have been there
David
Boulton: There’s a remarkable parallel in this story to Pat Lindamood's
story, also in the 1960's. She came at it from a point of view of speech
pathology...
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Exactly.
David
Boulton: And recognizing the same basic core distinction process difficulty, and
then learning to exercise that as a way of helping people through it.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: That's
right. So as it happens, this notion of the importance of phonemic awareness has
actually been around before them. There are people in the literature who had figured it out
long before and more than once. But phonemic awarness is so second nature to
those of us who can read and write that it's very hard to understand what
people are talking about.
I didn't get it until I wrote Beginning
to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print. Feeling unsure of
myself, I went out and played with kids. When you run into a kid who
doesn't get it, it's so obvious.
For Al it was not kids, it was a
computer that didn't get it. No matter, whether it's someone or something, the
problem is so obvious when you see it. If you can get teachers in a situation
where they're watching kids, and you say, ' That! Right there! That's what we're
talking about!" The teachers respond, 'Oh, that! That's a huge problem! Why didn't you say so?'
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David
Boulton: So you’ve got to focus them in some
way so that they're actually, first-person, 'getting' the distinction, rather than it
being merely an abstract idea.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Where they
see what it is. When you try to describe it academically it just sounds like
something rare and esoteric. 'Phonics without the letters' is
the most frequent description I hear from teachers, which is not right at all.
At the basic level, a better summary of phonemic awareness is can you pay attention to the sounds of words as distinct from
their meanings? Given that, the next level is whether you understand that every spoken word can be conceived as a
sequence of these little elements or speech gestures called phonemes, and that
the letters represent those left to right?
David
Boulton: Which is not natural. It’s an artifact of our writing systems.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: All
languages are made of phonemes, right? And they're all made of roughly the same
number?
David
Boulton:
We can look at languages and analyze them in terms of phonemes, but
would we need to make these kinds of phonemic distinctions in our oral language
environment to engage in oral language, or do they become necessary only when
we're trying to relate oral language to something that's written?
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: That’s a
good question. I hear where you're going and the simplest little answer to your
question is, yes. The real answer is phonemes are very human. They are our
birdsong. In fact, there's a
literature that argues that every animal has a max capacity of forty to sixty
calls. For us it's phonemes. What's different about us is that we
developed this capacity to merge them, to co-articulate them,
so
that in effect we get many, many, more. We developed the capacity to use combinations and permutations of
them
letting each combination mean something different.
David
Boulton: We’ve gone back and taken a look at the jaw and throat and tongue and
teeth and the speed of articulation.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Right. If
each phoneme is like the forty calls of a cat or the whale or the whatever, if
each phoneme is like that, then what we've done is we've said, 'Okay, forty
calls is not enough, but we can have forty times forty times forty times
forty...by merging them together to make words. And then we can have that times that times that times
that by combining the words to make sentences.' Suddenly you have an explosively powerful communication system, but only if you
can have a way of packing and unpacking those basic sounds, and by doing it
quickly enough to keep up with thought. If
you're going to say, 'What I care about is a combination of these three
units, which is different in this order from that order, or it's different if
this is the third one and that's the third one,' then what you have to do is
have the information processing capacity, the speed to get all three of them in.
David
Boulton: Right.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Which means
that human beings also have to have the brains to unpack these strings of
phonemes, too. So
the challenge is both producing them and unpacking them, and the argument is
that it's the whole temporal lobe- that's what's special about human
beings. That's
what we got. Co-articulation is what we got, combinations and permutations of
our chose hoots and hollers.
Babies, by the way, have to very
actively and deliberately attend to phonemes. They sit around going bah, bah,
bah, bah, bah, right? But after not too much time, they don't need to attend to
the phonemes any more. They hear them effortlessly. From that point forward, the normal,
natural thing for people to do is to focus their attention on the meaning, not
sound. Human
attention can only be focused on one thing. It's like a spotlight. So the normal
adaptive natural intelligent thing for people to do is to focus their attention
on meaning. The trick with little kids, who have gotten so good at doing this
that now they can hear lots of different voices, not just their mommy, and they
can hear them over different media, and they can hear them without looking -
they’re just incredibly good at it now, and now we're asking them, please,
to release their attention from meaning and put it back on the sound of the
word.
There isn't really a good way to
explain that to children. So
you have to devise educational activities that will engage them in doing that,
and where you can see if that's in fact what they're doing, because until
they can do that, the alphabetic game just doesn't make sense because
they're trying to pay attention to meaning, and it's not the way this particular
game works.
David
Boulton: Right. So this has something to do with
whether or not they're operating at high enough frequencies of distinction
during the process of developing their oral language facilities and whether
they, by virtue of learning to discriminate speech sounds, have already,
implicitly, made the kind of phonemic distinctions that can then be used to map
onto print. To the extent that they haven't, we need to explicitly exercise the
development of that. Is that what you're saying?
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Yeah, but
all of this is cultural. So when you ask teachers how do kids learn the ABCs?
They say, 'By print exposure, by storybook reading, by environmental
print.' But how does one know that that one is a b? They’re stuck.
Guess what? Somebody has got to tell you that one's the b.
David
Boulton: Right. But at that level, it's a simple associational labeling thing
like dog and cat and mom and dad
and house, except that the visual image is this letter.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: That's
right. So there is learning the image and the formation, stuff like that. But
again, it's something we know so well. We
like to talk about having it just arise through exposure and we forget how dependent it is, how it is culturally
transmitted. The
first thing a teacher needs to do is to find out if a child knows the letters
yet or not. If the child doesn't yet know the letters, then we've got to teach
them.
David
Boulton: Right. Now the question: Should we be teaching them the letter names
of the alphabet?
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Of
course.
David
Boulton: I
agree. A lot of people don't.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Of
course.
David
Boulton: As Dr. Tallal and other neuroscientists
will say, 'the neurons that wire together fire
together.' It would seem that the more that we teach
children to have an automatic response with a sound to a particular letter, the
more that we're setting them up for confusion later when that letter rarely
means that sound.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Well, I
like that idea in theory, and I have to say I've spent my time thinking about
it. But in fact, these are the names of the letters, they're the consensual
names of the letters. They're the names we use when we spell words aloud. They're the names their parents know
and teach for the letters. I do
need to tell children what the names of the letters are sometimes and knowing
letter names is very useful for young readers. Knowing your ABCs gives you an enormous leg up on learning to
read and spell. The names of the letters are mnemonically very useful. There are only a few of them
that are confusing, and they stick out, so even they are not much of a problem.
David
Boulton: Right.
But that's a different level of confusion than what happens when these letters
are blended together in words. Rather than being separated in time and space, as
if they're discrete entities with relatively stable sound associates,
these letters have to read as groups and that’s when their letter sound
correspondences break down. We’ve been trained to relate to letter sound
correspondences as if discrete and separate in space and time, and that creates
some confusions.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Well,
again, I understand the argument. But in fact, there are many things in the world
that have both a name and a function. The argument that their names will
interfere with their function is only one more step in the argument that we
should use the International Teaching Alphabet
so no letter would have more than
one sound. There is a name, and that's different, and I think people are wired
to know the difference between a name and a function.
I need to be able to say to kids, 'Okay, these are vowels, these are special letters. One of the
special things about vowels in English is that they have two favorite sounds,
each one of them and it's different from the name of the letter.' I don't want to
have to say this is eh-ar-ee. 'This is the letter e. It needs help to say
it's name.' Or when they're spelling you might say, 'Every syllable has to
have a vowel. Tell me which one you have in there.' You can't do it, then,
by sounds because you can't articulate consonants without sounds. That's why
they're called con-sonants.
With sounds, right? Con is with, son is
sounds.
It's very useful and it's socially
easy. The kids like knowing and it just works. You can argue about it
theoretically all you want, but it turns out that in the real world they're
useful as labels and they're useful in terms of learning development. It’s
socially, communicatively, consensually useful to know the letter names. They
don't get in the way any more than the names of things get in the way with their
functions in other places.
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David Boulton: My understanding from talking to other researchers is that the decoding bottleneck comes down to matching up the right sounds to the right letters. One of the differences here is that in a lot of things human beings do, we have time to volitionally think about it. In the creation of this reading stream, in order for it to happen at the rate that's necessary for attention to cohere and for it to be comprehensible, this process of getting from letters to the right sounds has to happen really fast; faster than they can think about.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Yes, it
has to happen very fast.
David
Boulton: So we're talking about some kind of
unconscious processing reflexes that have to…
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: That's
right. Wouldn’t it be a shame if every time you saw a silent e you
said /eh/? Isn't it nice to be able to say, 'You know, that's one
of those helper things, that when you put that letter e on the end of a
word then... - And not when you put that sound /eh/ -- or would you call it /ee/?
I suppose you could introduce it as /eh/, /ee/, or /silence/...,
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David
Boulton: I'm
not pro or con. What I'm trying to do is understand what is
it that's so confusing and where the…
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Oh, for
the kids?
David
Boulton: Yes.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: If you
look at the special education literature, you find that all children can learn
their ABCs, provided they're taught. It definitely needs to be assessed. You
also find, by the way, huge differences in how well they know their ABCs when
they enter school. In our voyeuristic studies, those differences in how well
they know their ABCs continue to predict big differences in reading achievement
throughout the primary grades.
David
Boulton: I've
heard some go all the way to the tenth and twelfth grade.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Yes, and if you can't tell one letter from the other, then how are you going to learn the word? It can’t be done.
David Boulton: Implicit
in that is somehow that if they haven't got it by the first grade, they've taken
off behind.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: We can
talk about that, too, because that’s a big problem.
David Boulton: When
I have been with children that are struggling to read, and I listen to and watch
their mind’s ‘stutter’,
it seems to correspond to letter sound confusions in the code they're reading.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Does it
correspond to the individual letter sound confusions in the code they're
reading, or does it correspond to the collective letter sound confusions in the
code they're reading, or spelling word confusions? I think that that differs
developmentally a little bit. See, if you get a lot of beginning readers who are
truly — if they hit a word they don't know, will stop and say, /k/...
[makes kind of gurgling sound] 'can.' But when you get to the older
readers, it's almost never that they don't know that p says /p/.
It's that now there's this load of, 'I have to read this word, I have to
put it in this sentence.' There may be many letters in this word. Good readers
see whole spelling patterns. Have you talked Chuck
Perfetti or Linnea
Ehri, or any
of those guys?
David Boulton: I've talked with Venezky.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Venezky
- but not
Chuck Perfetti or Linnea
Ehri?
David
Boulton: Right.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Okay. There
are a couple pieces that you might want to tuck in your reading list. One is
that it's pretty clear from a whole lot of cognitive research that what the
mature reader does, although it's at the atomistic level, they're looking at
letters and looking at phonemes, those things very quickly — the connectionist
theory is alive and well in reading.
So those things very quickly tickle
each other and inhibit each other so that at the level of phonological response,
they're quickly responding with words and syllables. At the same time, there's a grand
circuit in there that goes in both directions; so if they get the phonology, it
tickles the word, and as they get the word, it tickles the phonology, and as
they get the orthography, it also tickles the word.
David Boulton: The more that
they're comprehending, the more it's setting up an anticipation that's narrowing
the range of what will tickle.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Right and
they are learning about spelling patterns and about the phonological patterns
that they go with. So you really can trick them by putting letter sounds in
funny neighborhoods, and very instantly and automatically, you really can
disturb them by putting spaces between syllables where they don't belong. You
really can send out internet hoaxes, where you scramble the letters inside of
words and say, 'Look, they can read it anyway, so why teach them the inside
letters of words?'
David Boulton: Yes,
and there's a difference between how a masterful reader can pick this stuff up
and what's happening in a still developing or struggling reader.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Yes, and
that's what I'm saying — that the quickness comes from a whole lot of
interactive help that's from the inside-out as well as the outside-in that's
based on all of this letter-sound experience that you've amassed so that it is
automatic, so you recognize things. That's
the goal. You want to be able to recognize things rather than having to figure
them out.
David Boulton: In addition to
what I'm hearing you say about the relationship between the letter sound
processing and the spelling or morphological unit pattern recognition, and then
comprehension, is that all these things are inter-looping with one another to
collapse the field to the particular word sound that they're trying to read.
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Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: The
other thing you might want to look at, David, because it's kind of cool is —
did you talk to any of the eye movement people, like Keith
Rayner?
David Boulton: Keith Rayner
is on our list and we have corresponded with him. (Ed note: subsequent to this
interview we did interview Dr. Rayner)
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: To peak
your curiosity, what it basically looks like is that the eyes are ahead of the
mind in reading. Their job seems to be to collect the words and get them ready
for the mind to buffer up so that you can read groups of words at a burst.
Good
readers focus their eyes on each word in the text, skipping function words
such as be, in, or to, if they need to or whatever. They use
the peripheral vision to say, 'Okay, the next word is coming, and it's
about that long, and I want to get my eye in about a third of the way.'
That's how they use the visual information in the periphery.
But even when that peripheral word is
physically located where you could have seen the letters had they been in the
same word, the mind seems to say, 'Don't mess with them.' So you
get this wonderful tunnel vision just looking at each word at a time; which is
just fabulous when you think about this horrible system of having to take a
specific combination and permutation of these twenty-six stupid symbols that
look just like each other, of which you only use fifteen.
Rayner’s done so much good stuff there. What we do learn, as in any other
perceptual task, is what kinds of things go together and that makes life much
easier for us. So when you look at the older kids who are getting that wonderful
expression of yours, 'mind
stutter,' they don't have the patterns built, they don't have enough
orthographic substructure, infrastructure, to do the automatic processing.
The word is not in their vocabulary, so they don't get the full duplex out, when
they kind of sound it out, and nothing comes back.
David Boulton: Right. Which
is magnified all over the world for everybody else that doesn't have English as
a primary language.
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Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Right.
'The boy kissed the
ji-girl.' That's the way it's supposed to
work. But if the word is not in your vocabulary, you go, ji-uh-erl, jurl,
jurl.
David Boulton: Right. So we've
got whatever is going on at the decoding level, we've got comprehension at the
other end, we've got to have…
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Vocabulary.
David Boulton: The vocabulary
has to be there.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Right.
David Boulton: And
you've got to develop a pattern recognition system for disambiguating the
relation to…
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: The
letter patterns.
David Boulton: And
all of this has to happen faster than you can think about.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Faster
than you can think about. I can tell you from my own research that the kids
really do a huge amount of predictings, so that helps them, too.
David
Boulton: Or hurts
them, right? Because misestimates in their
predictions will cause them to tank.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Right.
They're not doing it on purpose, the good readers.
David
Boulton: Right.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: You know,
'In the factory they will can the beans? Will can? Will can? You can't
say will can!' Things like this can blow their fuses.
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Predication
vs. Guessing Strategies
David
Boulton: We've
got a lot of people out there that are still teaching guessing strategies, too.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Oh, no,
you can't — no. No, no, no, no, no.
David
Boulton: Some are
teaching guessing strategies.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Guessing
is different from predicting, right?
David
Boulton: Yes.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: I mean,
from the automatic predicting.
David Boulton: From automatic
prediction, yes.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: It's sort of
like in driving. There are an awful lot of automatic prediction strategies you
have to use, but that's very different from guessing.
David Boulton: Yes.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: You're
supposed to use the information.
David Boulton: But some kids are
being taught to scan around to find extra-orthographic information, too.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: What Keith's
stuff shows, and this is what I think is so cool about it, is that it shows what
the eyes are doing when you encounter any little typographic glitch in a word. The eyes are using all of that information in super abundance and in
redundancy. Only through the redundancy does the visual system have the
wherewithal to make sure that all of your brain has to do is focus on meaning
rather than on the mechanics.
So this whole visual system, it just
gets to the point where it's taking every bit of information and saying, ‘It
all fits, next chunk, it all fits, next chunk, it all fits, next chunk, got a snag here
- pause and figure it out’. It's so cool.
David Boulton: And the visual
information, as you said before, is going into a buffer of some sort.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Yes, but
it's not just visual. It is getting instantly automatically translated into
phonology and words and stuff like that.
David Boulton: But
sometimes the phonological equivalent of the visual information can't be
determined in the word that you're actually looking at, it comes down the road.
So there has to be some buffering that's happening that's stretching out in time
across a larger field than just the particulars that you're looking at.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Right. So
the eyes are a little bit ahead. But what you see when you look at those
millisecond experiments is that if there are ambiguous words there, that the
head cranks out all of them. You just have to figure out a way to probe within
the time before it decides this is the right one, that's the wrong one. So if
it's a bug, it cranks out insect, and it cranks out listening device, and it
cranks out software infelicity.
If you put the probe in quickly
enough you can see that it does, it's just that by the time — within not very
much time it said, 'This is the one, kill the others.' But then if
you go and listen to the kids reading who are first of all, much slower, and not
running — they're just not running warp speed; they're running on one or two
pistons instead of four or six.
So then that's when you get things
like, 'In the factory they will can, can will, can will, can — can't say
will can. Is it can or is it will? Come on.' And you do see those
things. In the data that we have now, we have tons of places where the kids
flinch on usage errors, where the word that comes up is more frequently used in
another form class, like, 'Lewis and Clark wanted to sight new flora and
fauna.'
Now, they know the word sight, — ‘What a beautiful sight.’ The sight of this, the sight of that — but as a verb? To sight? How do you to sight? I can't do that.
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David
Boulton: All of
these things you could say are different levels of ambiguity, right?
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Right.
For example, we have one where ‘The lions were walking up and down and
switching their tails.’ And the kids, the weaker second grade readers,
have to sit there and figure the whole word out. And they can read — even the
ones who have words like switch — just take forever because they don't get a
full duplex on it. ‘Switch your tail, switch, switch? Switching what?’ But
the good readers just plow right through it. ‘The lions are walking up and
down and switching their t—‘ And then they go right back and go, ‘That
can't be right. Switching their tails with whom?’
David Boulton: Right. That's
because they've developed a certain solid inner reference for their prediction
system about what's right.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: That's
right. But they did get so they could read that word automatically, and that
check didn't get there until after they'd done it. Whereas, the kids
who are working on it, they needed the full duplex. It never got there when they
were finished. Then there are the other kids who have to sound it out, and
they just work. They work, they work, they work. It's so much work, so much work
to be a little reader. There are so many pieces that have to go together. Watch
the body language.
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David Boulton: One of
the things that we’re very concerned with is the role of affect in all of this
from
a point of view of interest and attention, but also on the downside, what we
call the 'downward spiral of shame.' What happens when the children
start to feel self-conscious about reading…
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Oh, yeah!
And that happens very quickly.
David Boulton: It
implies a dissipation of processing resources, regardless of the emotional
things that we say about it.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Forget
the sublime explanations, people don't like to do what they don't do well. And
kids are extreme human beings, you know? People like to do what they do
well, and especially if it's in front of other people.
David Boulton: But there's no
escape from reading.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Yes, I
shouldn't say people like to do what they do well — that's not always true.
But they really don't like to do what they don't do well.
David Boulton: We
are masterful shame escape artists. We learn that very early, and all of us do
it.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: I remember
when my firstborn came home from first grade one day and he said, "No,
Mom, you don't get it, because see, the girls like to read and write, but the
boys don't. The boys like to do math, but the girls don't." And I thought,
‘Oh, good, there's two things I wasn't really hoping you'd ever learn in the
first semester of first grade.’
He read fine. It was just that they
decided collectively the difference between girls and boys. He's twenty now, so
this was in the peak of whole language and the girls were writing books and
illustrating them and binding them with yarn and stickers and all that stuff.
I’m sure that the boys just said, ‘Hmm, can't compete in this arena and not
sure I want to. I'm going over here with the trucks.’
David Boulton: Which means, like
you said earlier, ‘I'm going to go where I can
feel good about what I'm doing and I’m going to move away from the place that
makes me feel bad about myself.’
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Right, and
we can call them girls and us boys, and it works.
David Boulton: What’s
generally animating the Children of the Code Project is our sense that a
significant number of our children are confused. They're drowning in ambiguity
overwhelm, and they feel like there's something wrong with them because of it.
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Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Well, they aren't — back to the ABCs. It turns out that I have this huge database from California; I mean huge, like four years, with 130,000 kids per year, kindergarten through third grade. If you go and look at entry of kindergarten, and you look at: Do they know their ABCs? (As is if I show them the ABCs, can they point to them and say what they are? You know, that's an A, that's a B, that's a C, that kind of stuff.) It turns out the mode — and it's a steep mode for the upper SES quartile — highest SES quartile is knowing 100 percent of the letters. The mode for the bottom SES quartile is zero. One is a J-shape function, the other one is a backwards J-shape function. Hardly any of the kids know just half of the letters. Those that do are on their way, you know. Most of them know all of the letters or none of the letters.
Those are modes. Even in the high SES
group, there's the peaks: one is at 100 percent, and the other one is at zero.
You get in the first grade and say, ‘Okay, I'd just like you to write about
what you did over your summer vacation. Don't worry about how it's spelled, just
spell it as it sounds, blah, blah, blah.’ When I taught whole language, one of
the things that made me craziest about it was this basic thing like ABCs.
In kindergarten we said it was ‘developmentally inappropriate to teach
them,’ and in first grade we assumed they knew them.
David Boulton: It’s pretty
bizarre.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Kids
don't raise their hand and say, ‘Excuse me, I'm a little shaky with my
ABCs. Could we review H, I, J?’ They don't do that. They might write
a story with all Ts, and it's up to you to notice that in some other way
that gives you a really good view of what's going on.
David Boulton: There's a couple
people I've encountered that cite you as a case for the idea that the most
important thing to do in reading is to get kids to write the ABCs in forty
seconds in kindergarten.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: I never said
forty seconds.
David
Boulton: Okay.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: I will say
that if you do it right, then learning those ABCs is the only part of the
whole darn reading challenge that represents a significant rote memorization task. You
simply have to rote memorize them. Unfortunately, most of them rhyme with each
other, and those that don't have names that don't make any sense in terms of
their usage, right?
I mean, it's the W and the H that have no rhymes. They rhyme with each other, they look more like each other than anything the kids have had to learn before, right? They just look like each other. And it matters not only that you know each one, but it's going to be combinations and permutations. It's just not a chore that's designed for a crash course. The ABCs must be taught and they're not hard to teach. But just make sure you have lots of time so they can really be learned.
Your kids were probably singing their
ABCs by the time they were two or three, right?
David
Boulton: Right.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: And this was
fine. Maybe they wrote J backwards until they were in second grade.
Who cares? That's not the issue. The issue is that kids have got to get those
letters down pat at the level of recognition because I can't talk about them if
they don't know which is which. I’ve got to get those down. Imagine
if I'm a first grade teacher and I come in, and the kids don't know their ABCs.
I have this wonderful scope and sequence or set of state standards that I
have to teach them with.
David Boulton: That
is assuming that they do know.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Yes, by
the end of the year. Then I have a choice. I can stop and teach the ABCs.
They're not designed for a crash course. It takes a lot of time to do it right and
to make sure they're there. And that's at the cost of not meeting the schedule,
the instructional schedule that I am on. Or I can short shrift them, and that's
at the cost of the kids not being able to meet the learning schedule that's
implied by my instructional schedule. I don't have a choice. It takes a lot of
time. But it's the only thing. So just do it. Kids don't mind, you know? They
learn all kinds of things.
David Boulton: Yes,
and in the long run, what's going to harm them the most is not being able to get
through this.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Right. The
other part that — and I never said the forty seconds.
David
Boulton: Okay. Nonetheless,
the one strongest predictor of success is their facility with the ABCs as they
enter their first grade.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Well, probably
the single most unforgivable lapse is to not make sure that they're comfortable
with their ABCs, whether that means recognizing them, writing them,
and/or naming them. You just make sure they can do it. Teachers can do
phonemic awareness in the first three weeks in five minutes a day. Teachers can
do a lot of stuff, but they can't do anything with that, if the kids don't know
their ABCs; if they have to think about which letter a letter is.
David Boulton: There’s no way
they can go on from there.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: I don't
want to hear about rapid automatic naming tests and neural tests. The question
is do they know their ABCs?
It's so basic. After that the game is
to get them to think and pay attention - learning at its best. But that one
piece is rote memorization, there's no question.
Processing
ABCs into word sounds:
David Boulton: But
in that sense, though the symbols are a unique kind of challenge, the idea of
having a name or label for an object that we visually recognize is something
kids are doing all the time.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: All the
time!
David Boulton: So
that's not so unnatural a challenge. On the other hand, if when they start to
read, as they see a letter, it doesn't have a particular sound, it has a range
of sounds that need to be disambiguated in that buffer.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Right.
David Boulton: That takes time.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: That
takes time. The best leverage you have on time is good teaching. Good
teaching is a game of conning the kids into believing that, A) they want to
learn what you're about to teach, and B) they can understand it. Once you got
that, you're okay. So don't screw up, because you could lose it, right?
David Boulton: Right.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Yes, but
then that's why the business about systematic phonics instruction is really
important. Still, I need to begin by saying right off the bat, I'm going to see if the ABCs
appear okay. The other thing we're going to do is we're going to learn that
these red ones here are vowels, because vowels are very special letters. We will
hear that over and over and over and over again, that vowels are very
special letters.
In addition to teaching the ABCs, I
also like to teach them about vowels so they know that these are special
letters. Most of the letters behave themselves quite well. The vowels don't. And
so I don't want the rest of the alphabet to take a hit when the vowels are
misbehaving, right?
David Boulton: I think the spelling
reformers have said that
the average consonant has nine different sounds and the average vowel has twenty.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Well, yeah.
And then they should attribute weights by likelihood of occurrence, right?
David Boulton: Likelihood of
occurrence at different stages of learning to read.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams: Right.
Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams is
a brilliant and
rigorous scientist with a fairy god-mother like passion for helping kids.
The following conversation ranges from the 
