Index: What Reading Does for the Mind How did you get into reading? Automaticity Phonemic Awareness Breaking and Processing the Code Decoding Unfolding Ambiguity The Matthew Effect Downward Spiral of Shame Reading Exercises Intelligence The Importance of Reading in Today’s Society Most of Our Children are Below Proficient Reading Shame can Generalize to Learning Shame Reading is like Operating a Complex Technology A Brief History of the Code A Technology-Interface Learning Process

Dr. Anne Cunningham is the Director of the Joint Doctoral Program in Special Education with the Graduate School of Education at Berkeley and the Historian of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading.  She is the co-author of "What Reading Does For The Mind" and numerous other articles and research papers related to reading.  Additional bio info The following interview with Dr. Anne Cunningham was conducted at the studios of KCSM (PBS) Television in San Mateo, California on September 5, 2003. Dr. Cunningham elegantly balances public school reading teaching experience with rigorous scientific research work and university level teacher training. She is dedicated to making a difference in the lives of children by helping them learn to read more effectively.

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.

David Boulton:  It’s a real pleasure to meet you.

Dr. Anne Cunningham: It’s a pleasure to meet you as well. It’s wonderful what you’re doing.

David Boulton:  Thank you. Your article was one of my early research inspirations.

Dr. Anne Cunningham: Really? Oh, I’m touched.

What Reading Does for the Mind:

David Boulton:  The title of your article “What Reading Does for the Mind” was one of my questions. So finding it really helped me.

I’ve been very interested in this assembly processes. My view is that our kids fates are being determined by how well they can process this code. I understand the code as a code scientist might and I come at it from a perspective of learning, watching children learn from the inside-out. What are their natural modalities? How is it they extend themselves into the world in the most natural ways? What happens when these two systems collide (the code and our natural modes of learning) amidst the social pressure, the academic pressure, the whole (reading) thing? The more that I get into it, the more amazed I am and what’s most amazing to me is how little understood it is in general by teachers and parents.

Dr. Anne Cunningham: Yes.

David Boulton:  That’s where this series comes from, we’ve got to wake up here. We’re letting this archaic, bug ridden, code determine the fate of our children.

Dr. Anne Cunningham: Yes, and there’s things that we can do.

David Boulton:  There are things that we can do. They start with realizing the challenge and understanding the challenge at the social-economic level, at the individual-intellectual and affective-emotional level, and that what’s at stake is everything.

Dr. Anne Cunningham: Yes.

David Boulton:  The future of each child and all of us collectively is running through this funnel called how well the brain reads, in a way.

Dr. Anne Cunningham: Yes.

David Boulton:  And something different has to be done about it. So, as I started to zoom in on this area of the inquiry I came across your article and I was just in awe. You’re one of the people, one of my heroes in the story of all this. I’m glad you made it.

Dr. Anne Cunningham: Thank you. Well, this work is very collaborative with Keith Stanovich, who actually is very seminal in his developing of the Matthew Effects in reading. I’ve been privileged to work with him as a colleague, but much of these ideas really come from him. Mine are the collaborative part of it and the interest in the application to the teaching of reading and children. So we’re a good partnership. 

How did you get into reading?

David Boulton:  Yes, it certainly seemed like it. It was very seamless in my reading, you flow well together in articulating things. So, why do you do this? What interests you the most?

Dr. Anne Cunningham: Well, you know, reading is a very rich and complex and cognitive act. So, as a developmental psychologist you’re looking for a domain of study such as reading that would motivate you to investigate it for a lifetime. Cognitive psychologists really enjoy looking at reading because of its layers and levels of complexity in understanding this rich endeavor.

The other side of it is an educator, as a former pre-school, kindergarten and first grade teacher, prior to my academic training, I saw the daily struggles of children who didn’t learn to read very readily. Despite what I felt was very detailed types of instruction that I was providing to them, they displayed inordinate difficulty in learning to read. As a young woman I wanted to understand that better. So, that’s when I left teaching to go back to graduate school to understand more deeply why it was that some children learned to read more readily and with relative ease than other children.

It’s been a journey of trying to unpack and understand those developmental processes of what’s important at one stage in reading begins to drop out and something else comes into play that plays a significant role and again, drops out again. It's those factors that really led me to this journey, as I say, of understanding how children learn to read and then looking at the other side of the coin which is once we have a certain level of reading ability the outcome of it, the reciprocal part of it, that is what we call the cognitive consequences of being an avid reader. So, it’s both sides of the coin that fascinate me.  

Automaticity:

David Boulton:  When you said drop out a moment ago I was wondering if you mean that it falls into automaticity, it falls into being automatic and therefore it no longer requires conscious, volitional effort to workout; it’s now in the background and moving on to the next level of challenge.

Dr. Anne Cunningham: That’s right. For example, we have an inordinate amount of attention and emphasis placed on phonology and phonemic awareness in the early stages of beginning reading and at kindergarten and first grade we rightfully spend a lot of time on that. But at some point phonemic awareness itself doesn’t become an enabling sub-skill, other variables come into play. Like at the word recognition level understanding and having a deep appreciation of the orthography, how those letters map on to those sounds, becomes a variable that causes maybe increasingly more divergence among readers than phonemic awareness. So, as a developmental psychologist, we’re fascinated with looking at those trajectories and how those factors change. 

Phonemic Awareness:

David Boulton:  Is phonemic awareness something that is required in our daily oral interchange or is it unique to writing?

Dr. Anne Cunningham: Well, that’s a great question because phonemic awareness is something that young children, prior to having to learn in an alphabetic script such as ours, they don’t focus on the structure of language. They don’t play with it to the degree that they need to to learn in an alphabetic language. We’re more focused on meaning, as we should be, but in order to become a successful reader at some point we have to shift our attention away from the meaning to the structure and be able to perceive these sounds that are contained within words, and be able to rhyme and segment /c/ from at to make cat. That’s the precursor to being able to break the code and without that facility and awareness children just suffer too long in learning to read.

David Boulton:  Yes, and the way that phonemic awareness is often discussed is as if children that are struggling with reading have something wrong with them, some deficit. What you’re saying now, it seems to me, is that phonemic awareness is not a naturally occurring challenge to a speaking human being. It’s an artifact, again, of our technology, of our artifacts. 

Dr. Anne Cunningham: Precisely. So, children may have implicit experiences with phonemic awareness when their parents read nursery rhymes to them. Peter Bryant, for example, has argued that nursery rhymes are the genesis of phonemic awareness. That’s the beginning place that children might naturally begin to shift to language play. Certainly doing Pig Latin, for example, might be something that you would naturally play with language. But many children don’t necessarily do that and so we have to provide those specific experiences for the children so that when they go to school they’ll be ready to begin to break the code.

David Boulton:  So, we’re creating these not-normally-used-juxtapositions-in-sounds inside of language to create awareness that there are components in sounds that can then be built on. It’s almost like formatting a hard drive, of creating these kind of distinct placeholders that are necessary to juggle the quantum or units, the discrete sounds.

Dr. Anne Cunningham: Right and it’s with that understanding of how reading develops and how the code is broken that we as educators can go back and provide experiences for all children, not just the advantaged children whose families do this more naturally, but children whose families don’t provide these experiences. We can, as educators, provide these experiences for children in a very child centered pedagogical fashion that doesn’t make it discrete or skill and drill, but one that’s engaging and fun, but still leads them to this conscious awareness that there are sounds that are contained within words that we can segment and put back together in very playful ways.

David Boulton:  Right, an ‘erector set’ for sound.

Dr. Anne Cunningham: Nice.

David Boulton:  A playground that isn’t this tedious, rote, boring exposure drill, but rather something that creates fun while creating the realization of the distinction that’s necessary.

Dr. Anne Cunningham: Yes. This is where a lot of educators confound the content of what we need to teach in learning to read with the pedagogy or the practices. I think we need to separate that clearly in everyone’s mind so that they can appreciate that you can teach phonemic awareness and you can teach the code, but you can do it in a way that is child centered and allows them to be able to stay with it long enough in terms of their attention span, it can be game oriented and you can still help children to appreciate and reach these milestones in breaking the code.

David Boulton:  So, we’ve talked about the first layer which is that before we can deal with the code we’ve got to have the distinctions and the processing placeholder mechanisms to be able to juggle the elements of the code to be able to go to the other side to construct this stream that we call reading.

Dr. Anne Cunningham: Yes. 

Breaking and Processing the Code:

David Boulton:  Once we’ve got the phonemic awareness distinction then we start to bump into the code and we’ve got another set of problems. People use terms like the alphabet principle...

Dr. Anne Cunningham: Right.

Decoding the Imprecise Code: