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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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David Boulton:
It’s a great pleasure to talk with you. You seem to be somewhere in the
middle of a big fire.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan:
Sometimes it seems like that.
David Boulton: So much disagreement and
dissent going on around reading related issues and what we can trust and what we
can’t trust about the information that is gathered. You seem to be pretty well
situated in the midst of it.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan:
I seem to be right in the middle of it and I guess that’s a good place
to be. I see my role in lots of ways trying to settle it down.
David Boulton: It needs that. Maybe we
could start with you giving a biographical sketch of yourself and on how is it that you come to this
work. Tell us about your passion and motivation to work in this field.
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Dr. Timothy Shanahan:
I came to it initially as a public school teacher. I was a former first
grade teacher. I actually started tutoring kids in reading when I was about 18
or 19 years old and got interested in it and started taking some classes and
ended up becoming a teacher. That’s sort of how I got here in the first place.
I guess what really impassions me is I just have a very strong belief that we
haven’t succeeded in giving this literacy franchise to enough people and at a
high enough level to many people. I really think we need to do something about
that.
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Literacy
and Civic
Participation:
David
Boulton: Both instrumentally and cognitively/emotionally.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan:
Absolutely. I often, in my speeches and classes, use economic
examples. But reading is part of civic participation, it’s part of enjoyment,
it’s part of social interaction, it’s part of religion. It doesn’t have a
narrow meaning in terms of what I’m talking about. It’s actually got a very
broad set of implications and clearly we have a large percentage of our citizens
who either don’t have literacy, which is fairly rare, or have it at too low a
level, which isn’t rare at all.
David
Boulton: We could say that how well
children learn to read is all but fating to the unfoldment of their life.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan: Absolutely.
David Boulton:
That’s kind of the place we meet. This is not like anything else. This
is a class unto itself. We
think that a pretty radical social reframe of the whole idea of reading has to
take place. You’re connected with this at a high level, with the NRP
oversight of the nation as a
whole, and also grounded in a very specific concern for the well
being of people.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan: I think that’s a fair description. I think that’s what literacy work really is. It has both societal implications in terms of the fate of the nation, what kind of society are you going to live within. It obviously also has that very personal, individual issue of how are you going to think, how are you going to take part in civic life and so on. I think the social and personal implications are always there and I certainly think about both of them a lot.
David Boulton: In our work
we make the distinction that it doesn’t matter whether you care about the
spiritual or emotional well being of the children of humanity or whether you care
about the social economic participation of human ‘bots’ and their economic productivity
and really don’t care about the individuals, you still come
to the same place.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan:
Absolutely. And that’s why I get kind of bored with the
accusations that politicians are supporting literacy only for economic reasons.
It really doesn’t matter. What we really want all systems set up towards is making sure that
people are getting more literate. Obviously, more literate means different
things. If we’re talking about a third grader it might mean just raising his
traditional reading level. If we’re talking about an older student or an adult
you very well might be talking about using literacy in an entirely different way
than they’ve ever used it before or using it to drive a kind of thinking that
they never or rarely engage in. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who wants to
increase literacy, I’m on their team.
David Boulton:
That’s how I feel, that’s why we’re talking. Let’s spend a moment
and ask: what is reading?
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Dr. Timothy Shanahan:
Reading, to me, involves some kind of an interpretation of written
symbols. Being able to grasp linguistic information that somebody else has put
out there in written form, that you can actually make sense of that. More than
that, that you can actually think and act with it. I think that for me kind of
captures it.
David Boulton:
So, you just made a distinction that underlies the distinction between
basic and proficient in a way. On one hand, the kind of instrumental ability to
interface with this technology that we might call basic, and then at another
level that you’re able to move through it with such fluency that you can think
with it, that you can apply it rather than just having words cued into your mind.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan:
Absolutely. It is both of those things. Again, this is one of those
places where people get in fights over which is it.
David Boulton:
It’s both.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan: If you can’t interpret those symbols, whatever form they might take, then you can’t do the other. And if you can only interpret those symbols and can’t think or act with them, then it’s kind of an empty skill. Why would we put much social money behind making this happen?
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National Perspective & Immigration
David Boulton: It might
help you read the street signs, but it’s not going to empower your learning to
travel in the directions your life is needing. Tell me about the state of
reading in America as you assess it from your position with the National
Reading Panel and as a member of the International
Reading Association – share with us your national perspective of this.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan:
It’s a little complicated, but essentially I look at it and say in
terms of what schools have done, we’re probably pretty equivalent to where we
were thirty years ago. Things haven’t gotten any better. Likewise I could say
they haven’t gotten any worse. We’re probably doing about as good a job as
we’ve ever done in dealing with the teaching of literacy. That’s
probably both a victory and a defeat because on the one hand we’re managing to
teach literacy as well as ever but we're doing it under more difficult circumstances. For example, we have a
lot more people in this society who have to learn to speak English while
they’re learning to read and the fact is we’re doing that and still
maintaining the literacy levels.
David Boulton: So, you
could make one comparison and say the people coming into the country that do not
have English as a primary language is a greater number percentage than
there has been historically.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan: In
terms of numbers, we’re going through the largest immigration we’ve ever
gone through. And this is a nation that prides itself on being a nation of
immigrants. You go back thirty years ago and that door had just been kicked open
again. Schools in 1971 had very small numbers of second language kids relative
to what they have now.
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Nothing Wrong with These Kids:
Dr. Timothy Shanahan: There’s nothing
wrong with these kids
who are English learners. These are wonderful kids. There’s not a problem with
the kids. The point is trying to teach them to read in the same amount of time
that your teaching them to read and learn English simultaneously. The second
task is tougher.
The schools have managed
to do it. You look at 1971 literacy levels and you look at 2003 literacy levels
and you come away saying man, there’s no difference. We’ve held the line.
Our schools are terrific. And there’s truth to that, that’s not a fake
picture.
The problem with the
picture is that it neglects the other side of the equation and that is how does
this look from the kid’s angle? The way it looks from the kid’s angle is
that there has been a kind of inflation that’s set in with regard to their
literacy level.
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Dr. Timothy Shanahan: Look at it this way. Let’s say in 1971 you had a thousand
dollars and you wanted to save it so you hid it in your
mattress. You put it away and you’ve held it now for thirty years. No one
stole it and now you take out that thousand dollars
and you want to spend it. It buys a whole lot less than it would have in 1971. That thousand dollars has
lost value because currency has inflated over the last thirty years. Sort of the
same thing has happened with literacy. Having 1971 literacy levels, just like
having 1971 money, isn’t such a great deal. And the reason for that is because
of two things: 1) the incredible growth of technology and 2) the
internationalization of our markets and our world.
David Boulton:
The shrinking job base for low-literate labor.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan: Absolutely. In 1971 if you weren’t very good at literacy,
you just didn’t do well in that for some reason, not a problem – you can go
out and build a car. You can go into a sewing mill. You’re going to be able to
go out and support your family. You’re going to be able to socially
participate. It’s not going to be a big problem because you have other skills.
You can show up on time, you can work, you can do manual labor. Those kinds of
jobs still exist, it’s just that now their high tech jobs. You want to build a
car – no problem. Can you handle the computer codes that drive our robotics?
The answer to that in far too many cases is no. You want to be a mechanic,
that’s fine. Where did you get your Bachelor of Science degree?
We go out and do
interviews with people working in different job categories and you’ll talk to
people, for example an auto mechanic, and it has gotten so complex that, in
fact, the notion of hiring somebody who is uneducated who is just good with
machines – that doesn’t happen anymore. Those days are gone. You want to be
a truck driver – there will be a computer in your terminal, in the cab of your
truck that will essentially allow you to do things like track inventories and
book trips. . In other words, it’s
no longer true that being a truck driver, a mechanic, or an auto assembler are
low education jobs anymore. Medicine, insurance, banking, education and law and
so on – those were always high education jobs.
So, what's really happened is we've shrunk the number and percentage of blue collar jobs and more importantly we've turned those blue collar jobs into higher education jobs. What that means is if you don't have literacy skills at a higher level than kids did in 1971, the economic return on your work won't be as great and, therefore, you're not going to live at the same standard that your parents lived.
That’s the tension we’re caught between. The schools are doing at least as good a job, probably a better job, than they ever have, but kids aren’t getting enough literacy to do as well as we have done.
David Boulton: Especially
when you consider the dilution of the increased percentage of children that need
extra literacy support given their lack of English native language.
Dr. Timothy
Shanahan: That’s our situation.
It’s an incredible tension where parents and politicians and media are
demanding a better job be done with our kids and the schools are saying we’re
doing as good a job as we ever have and we’re working really hard at it.
People are getting angry at each other.
David Boulton: Well said.
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Why is Learning to Read
so Difficult?
David Boulton: Why is learning to read so difficult?
Dr. Timothy Shanahan: I’m not sure we entirely know that. Certainly, one very small group of kids has something that doesn’t quick work right in their brains in terms of picking up this kind of information. They don’t do it that easily. That doesn’t mean that they can’t learn to.
David Boulton:
They’ve got a neurobiological disadvantage of some form. Now you’re
talking five percent or so?
Dr. Timothy
Shanahan: Yes, it’s probably
relatively small. People have always argued something between one percent and
about twenty percent. It’s probably about three-to-five percent, some place in
the middle. There clearly are some kids who, for whatever reason because of the
way their neurological systems work, don’t pick up this information easily.
They need special teaching and even with that they will probably learn more
slowly or have more difficulty than other kids.
David Boulton:
We said earlier that the process of how well children learn to read is
all but fating their development in life. About three-to-five percent of
children have some neurological disadvantage taking off in the process. The rest
of the children that are struggling are struggling for a variety of different
reasons, but effectively it has to do with how we as adults are building
‘on-ramps’ into reading that will actually work for them.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan: No
matter what the reason why they’re having trouble, it’s so important in
their lives that we as adults find ways of overcoming whatever those problems
are. Whether that is some form of a special kind of education or extra education
for kids who have learning problems, but also our willingness to adjust what
we’re doing for all the kids as we see aren’t succeeding; and being really
vigilant about that. Not letting kids slip through the cracks. Not failing to
notice when Johnny is falling behind. There’s nothing sadder than seeing a
youngster who maybe doesn’t have a major problem, but nobody has done anything
to help sufficiently.
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David Boulton:
Right, just drowning - not being met in this confusion. The NAEP
report – eighty-eight percent of fourth grade African-American children are
reading below proficient. The trajectory continues, eighty-four percent of African-American
children leaving the twelfth grade
are still below proficiency. The general
aggregate is sixty-four percent of the nation’s children are below proficient
in the twelfth grade.
Dr. Timothy
Shanahan: One estimate of it from
those figures is the typical African-American high school graduate is leaving
school with a reading level that is comparable to the reading level that an
eighth grade white student has. That’s the average. Now, of course, averages
are just that. You have African-Americans that perform not only high above the
African-American average, but who perform above the white average. But when you
look at the two groups the differences are huge and those differences are
certainly connected to family income and financial resources.
They’re
likely a product of any number of racial bias and inequities in our society,
both current and past. It doesn’t much matter if you’ve made things more
equal in terms of access right now if past inequities continue to operate. If
you happen to live in a poor neighborhood even though your mom now has a job
what that might mean is you go to school where the teachers are less likely to
be certified, you go to school where the amount of instruction in a given day is
probably less than other schools, and so on and so forth.
The big
differences in terms of what we provide to our children really do make a big
difference in terms of achievement. If we look at some of the international
reports that compare our kids with kids in other countries, we obviously have
big economic inequities in our society and those are mirrored in the big
differences we see in reading attainment. If we look at other countries that
have less economic diversity, they have less diversity of literacy attainment.
The variation is less. The two things are connected.
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David Boulton:
This plays right into the National
Institute for Literacy’s upcoming report on the state of adult literacy
and the strong correlations between the patterns that we see at the NAEP
level and how they seem to play out in adult society. That high percentages of
inmates in prison are people of color and people that can’t read, and
similarly in welfare and health care. There’s such a strong correlation
between literacy and all these other social pathologies.
Dr. Timothy
Shanahan: How aware you
are of what’s going on in your society is correlated with it. How often you
vote, whether you’re registered to vote – that’s connected to literacy.
Whether you’re working, what level job you’re working in, your likelihood of
getting employed – all those are connected. Not all low literacy people commit
crime, but it does appear that the largest percentage of people who commit crime
are of low literacy. Every social pathology appears to be related to literacy
attainment. Every good that we distribute in our society seems to be
related to it. Literacy is a great enabler.
Let’s be
honest – a child who comes out of an impoverished background in terms of what
his mother or father can provide materially – if that kid does well in
learning literacy he is much more likely to live at a higher standard than his
parents, he is much more likely to be able to participate in any number of
social activities that his or her parents can’t participate in. But the deck
is stacked against that kind of a child, and the statistics suggest that he or
she will probably end up more like their parents in literacy attainment (and the
outcomes that can buy).
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2000 Florida Election &
Reading Difficulty:
Dr. Timothy Shanahan: One aspect of this that I had personal
experience with was one of the newspapers asked me to analyze the votes in the
2000 Florida election. Obviously, media attention was directed to the hanging chads and the failure of the machines
to record people’s votes. The thing that is interesting is that in Florida
there are probably more counties that are using paper ballots than machine
ballots. One of the newspapers said let’s look at the paper ballots and see
how we did there. Florida lost even more votes with paper ballots than
machine ballots, and they lost these votes primarily because people couldn’t
make sense of the directions.
Florida lost lots of votes because many citizens couldn’t do the
simple reading tasks on the ballot. They would spoil their vote by voting
multiple times for different candidates. Even this basic franchise of whether
you get to cast a vote is connected to literacy. You’re less likely to go
and try to vote, but if you do try, you’re more likely to fail and your vote
will be lost. We’re almost fifty years beyond the Supreme Court saying there
wouldn’t be any kind of a literacy bar to vote in this country.
David Boulton:
Of course there’s going to be. Even if you get around the instrumental
simple part of it, you’ve got the deeper issue of whether somebody is a
competent participant.
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Low Literacy, Civic Participation & Health:
Dr. Timothy
Shanahan: Yes. In fact, one
interesting analysis done with adults who are low in literacy is that low
literacy individuals are less likely to read a newspaper than a high literate
person. But, of course, these folks could still participate by getting
information from television and have radio. There’s absolutely no reason why a
low literacy person wouldn’t be able to access a lot of the information that
is available over those media.
Except it turns
out that lack of literacy has an isolating effect. What happens is low literacy
people are less likely to watch informational shows on television, they’re
less likely to watch news, for example, than other kinds of television.
David Boulton:
How can they navigate?
Dr. Timothy Shanahan: Exactly. They just don’t pay attention to stuff like that which means, they miss out on information about the candidates and elections and so on, but they also miss out on the large amount of health information that is on television news and so on. They don’t find out about the free pap smears down at the clinic. They don’t find out about the new statistics on smoking. They don’t find out about how to take care of their children better. And so their kids are at greater risk in all kinds of ways and they themselves are at greater risk.
David Boulton:
We’re trying to pay a lot of attention to that. The underlying
connection here is both a lack of the instrumental ability which would allow
them to navigate a field of options, and also an aversion to being intellectual
that comes as a consequence of this shame.
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Low Literacy, Isolation
& Shame:
Dr. Timothy
Shanahan: It is a kind of shame and
they do hideout. Again, you see that participation in professional organizations
and honorary societies are more linked to high literacy than low literacy. Well,
that’s not surprising to anybody. But then you start to look and you see that
adults who are low literacy are less likely to participate in athletic
organizations. They’re less likely to participate in religious organizations.
They don’t take part in as many of the social activities. They essentially
get isolated.
You talked about it being an
intellectual aversion, I think that’s part of it, but I think it’s even
bigger than that. I think there’s a kind of a pulling back, there’s an
embarrassment.
David Boulton:
A shame aversion to
everything
that can stir up the
kind of shame they want to avoid.
Dr. Timothy
Shanahan: You got it. It plays out
in terms of I’m not going to participate in an intellectual discussion or
debate, or whatever, but I’m also not going to participate in a lot of
other social activities as well. So, they really are losing out on big
chunks of their lives.
What it means is that
we’ve put through the Civil Rights laws of the 1960's and we’ve done so many
things to try to facilitate full participation, but literacy still is there as a
barrier holding people out, even though politically the barriers have been taken
down.
David Boulton:
In a recent report from ProLiteracy,
according to their surveys and also by American
Medical Association research, they find that most of the people that can’t
read go to inordinate lengths to hide it. Something like sixty percent haven’t
told their spouses. One projection was that when low literate Americans walk
into a grocery store or department store they are stirred with anxiety trying to
make sure that they can get past the cash register without making a mistake that
they can’t afford but that they can’t know they’ve made because they
don’t have the skills.
Dr.
Timothy Shanahan: This
hiding of the problem is real common. I don’t have a lot of statistics on it,
but I have many personal experiences. For example, the mother who had come into
one of our literacy programs – her kids were eight or nine and she was taking
literacy classes because she didn’t want to hide it anymore. Her children,
even at their age, didn’t know she didn’t have literacy. It was really
surprising that she could hide that from them living in that household for so
long. She said she always had to be on guard.
For
example, she told us that, ‘When the kids come home from school I always make
sure I’m busy – I’m washing, I’m ironing, I’m doing something so that
if they come in and say here’s a letter from my teacher it allows me to say
set it down I’ll get to it later, I don’t have time for that right now.’
She would depend upon her husband to do her reading.
In North Carolina we held a seminar on literacy for some teachers
and we brought in a local business man who was low in literacy and he was
willing to come in and talk to the teachers. The thing that was important was
only two people in his life knew about his literacy problem: his wife and his
business partner. Nobody else knew because he feared that if any of potential
clients knew of the problem, he wouldn’t get contracts. He wanted this kept
absolutely secret. We literally had to smuggle him onto the campus where we were
working and put him in a room where we pulled the shades and had a guard at the
door.
These fears, sometimes it’s just a personal thing, that I
don’t want my children to think less of me, and in other cases it really
has larger meaning in terms of I don’t want to be discriminated against.
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David Boulton:
Sometimes it’s so powerful and fast and operating before those kind of
rational reasons to just be an avoidance. One of the dimensions that we’re
trying to bring to this is our work with emotional scientists and cognitive
scientists and neuroscientists and bringing together just what is going on here.
There’s no question human beings generally do not like to feel shame. We
learn very young to become escape artists.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan: Absolutely.
David Boulton:
We’re being put into circumstances, with this learning to read challenge,
in which day after day, week after week, month after month, in some cases year
after year, we’re forced to do something we’re not good at. It’s not like
basketball or sewing or music or other things that are an option –you can’t
avoid it. And these kids are developing a shame aversion to the feel of their
own learning.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan: Absolutely.
And when they
become adults it ends up becoming a part of the social reality of their lives.
It’s not just harder to learn then, but emotionally that whole network that
builds up around you makes it tougher. So, if you’re that low on literacy what
usually happens is you have to find somebody you can depend on. I might not want
the whole world to know, but maybe my spouse knows that I am illiterate or maybe
it’s one of my older kids, but nobody else does. What that does is it builds a
dependency. If I were especially low on literacy and my wife knew it she would
do certain things for me to take care of me and make sure that I’m okay. But
what happens to the relationship when I decide this is terrible, I have to go
learn literacy, I’m going to go enroll at the local library program or
whatever. How much does that threaten the partner who has come to depend on my
dependence?
Quite often
when an adult who is really low on literacy goes off and becomes literate it
leads to divorce. There are many cases documented where women are beaten or
abused in various ways, either verbally or physically, certainly emotionally,
because the partner who is depended on doesn’t want to give that up. The
reason you’re going for literacy classes is because you want to get away from
me.
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David Boulton:
That brings us back to the core purpose of all of this. We’ve touched
on the social, civic, democratic participative processes; in our conversations
with Whitehurst and Doherty we touched on the hundreds of billions of dollars
involved every year. We’ve touched on the psychological interior shame
aversion implications of not being able to read, and the obvious academic
implications relative to reading as the gateway skill to reading to learn that
is so important to education and to subsequent economic opportunities. We can
come at this from all these different dimensions and it comes back to we need to
build an effective stairway for these children to get into reading.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan: Absolutely.
David Boulton:
So, let’s go there for a moment.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan:
Sounds good.
David Boulton: Let me set up this one question for you if I could. One of the
major things that seems to be at the base of the polarities or the dichotomies
is that, on the one hand, without the experience being consciously meaningful
there is insufficient interest to power the engagement process. Without
comparatively meaningless, unconscious assembly construction, decoding,
disambiguation and projection from this lower level up into consciousness –
there is no meaning.
Dr. Timothy
Shanahan: If we’re talking about
teaching here, certainly one fundamental notion that would need to be stressed
is how complex literacy is. Frankly, it’s that complexity that you have to
introduce to kids. It’s not we’ll work up to the complexity. We
actually start there.
I guess for
most kids the beginning would be kindergarten or first grade, in terms of formal
teaching being introduced into their lives. Some kids, of course, get that at
home, some kids get it in pre-school. But the greatest number get it when
they’re probably about five or six when it comes to literacy. Certainly
there’s a notion that, somehow, if we just teach the code, if we just teach
kids the letters and what the sounds are, and teach them those entry level
skills then everything will be fine.
But, frankly,
our best programs don’t really do that. Our best programs teach those entry
level skills, but they’re simultaneously introducing kids to the idea of
reading; the social, meaningful aspects of reading. And so, they’re dealing
with comprehension or thinking with text when kids are five and six. They’re
doing that right along with teaching them the letter sounds and teaching them
how to recognize those first words. It’s not an either/or.
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Vocabulary, Fluency, Comprehension & Writing:
Dr. Timothy
Shanahan: From the very beginning we have to teach a whole variety of things to
kids. In fact, in terms of what I tell teachers or how I organize things in
schools that I work in, is that there really are four big things that have to be
addressed with literacy instruction.
One of them has
to do with words. Initially, you’re talking word recognition. You’re talking
all those phonics skills and letters and stuff like that. Eventually, that goes
away and it becomes about working with word meanings, working with vocabulary,
building up kids’ knowledge of academic language. That’s one piece if it.
The second piece of it is what’s come to be called fluency, which really means you cannot just recognize words, but you must string those words together so that if you read a text aloud it would sound like language. The words would be grouped properly. You would have the emphasis on the right ones.
David Boulton: And it would be flowing at a pace that is consistent with our attention, our natural flow of listening.
Dr.
Timothy Shanahan: You’ve got it,
exactly. So, that’s an important piece and we work on that piece all along
until kids get to some high enough level that we’re satisfied.
The
third piece is really working on comprehension and thinking about text. Teaching
kids how to think about text, but also engaging them in some of those
intellectual conversations that you’re talking about.
But
right from the beginning you can have a really interesting conversation with a
five year old about the ideas presented in the children’s book. And so,
getting them engaged in that grand conversation early on and all the way through
is pretty important. And of course, that means learning different discourses,
that means getting exposed to different kinds of text, and really different
kinds of worlds.
And
then finally, knowing how to compose your own text. Knowing how to write,
knowing how to communicate so that you’re not always in the role of just
interpreting other people’s ideas, but you’re able to put your own ideas out
there.
I
think all four of those things have to be taught all the time. If you go into a
first grade classroom you should see all four of those things getting a fairly
substantial amount of time, each one. If you go into a twelfth grade classroom
you should be able to see all four of those things happening. And if they’re
not, we’re probably not doing the full job of teaching literacy and the scores
aren’t going to go up and the kids aren’t going to be able to participate in
the ways that we’re talking about.
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David Boulton:
Excellent. There’s no question that it requires a very carefully
balanced, ideally on a per-child basis, on-ramp through these different domains
that you spoke to. Now, let’s take the relationship amongst these pieces
because while we can say they’re relatively autonomous behaviors and
functions, they’re all implicitly integrated at a level underneath them all.
We’re talking about a radically, unnatural, artificial code processing
challenge.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan: An
invention.
David Boulton: Yes. An invention that is 3500 years old and that for the first 2500 years of its rise to become the ‘OS’ (operating system) of western civilization, it was largely phonetic. It degenerated through ignorance and neglect during the collision between the Latin and the English to develop these letter-sound confusions. It’s already radically unnatural to be a code processor, but you could argue that that’s just a high speed naming and blending process. In its original incarnation, see a letter, say its sound, blend it together fast and its code-cued speech – no problem. But now, because of all the confused letter-sounds there’s this ‘internal assembly required.'
Dr. Timothy Shanahan:
Absolutely.
David Boulton: Which is an
entirely different challenge than the human brain evolved to deal with.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan: Absolutely.
Certainly, you
can abstract these, we can talk about them separately, you can teach them
separately, but ultimately they have to come together. It doesn’t do you much
good to be able to just read a list
of words. Or it doesn’t help you to be just fluent, or even to just be able to
think clearly. All of these things have to get linked up and instruction can
play a big role in that, in terms of tipping kids off to what’s really going
on here.
For example,
say a high school teacher brings in a scientific text for the students
to read and does some work on the word meanings so that youngsters can
interpret those words and understand the meaningful parts of those words because
our language is morphemic, that is that words are made up of meaningful parts.
The word cat refers to an animal that has certain characteristics but then you
put on that additional little piece, that S, all of a sudden you’re talking
about more than one of those animals. Combining meaningful parts becomes pretty
important in vocabulary learning, and so the teacher teaches that but then also
makes sure that the kids actually can read this kind of language. The students
still might not understand what that discourse should sound like. The teacher
might read some of it aloud to the kids so they can hear what it should sound
like.
More
importantly, at the level we’re talking about, the teacher engages the kids in
trying to read this like a scientist would. It isn’t enough that you can just
pull the information out of a text. Different groups of people read in different
ways and scientists are going to look for certain kinds of information.
They’re interested in certain kinds of relationships among the ideas in a
text. Somebody has got to tip students off to that.
David Boulton: Right. This
presumes that the underlying processing engine that’s projecting this word
stream into consciousness…
Dr. Timothy Shanahan: Is
there.
David Boulton: Is there,
yes.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan:
It’s intact and has been taught.
David Boulton: And it’s
functionally efficient enough that it’s not dissipating the processing
resources needed to reflect on and think about the meaning.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan: What that depends on is kids who have been taught to interpret the letter-sound correspondences and how to use those proficiently to decode and spell early on.
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Brain Ca
Dr.
Timothy Shanahan:
One of the things that is so critical is that our brains only allow so
much stuff to go on at one time. The faster and easier you can do some tasks,
the more room you have to do other ones.
So, this notion of if I can recognize the words quickly and easily then when
that other person starts asking me these scientific questions I can struggle
with that, I can really focus on that. I’m not going to be so tied up with
phonemic awareness and phonics - is that a /f/ sound? I mean, they’ve lost it by then.
David Boulton: One of the things that we notice is there is a very definitive,
first-person, observable correspondence between the articulation stutters of a
struggling reader and the code confusion that they’re actually encountering at
that part of the stream of reading.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan: Oh, no doubt about it. And so again, all four of those things need to be taught and they need to be taught at all levels. If students don't learn to recognize words and decode, and to turn the letters into language, all the rest of the process is at great risk.
David Boulton:
Right. This is one of the differences that we explored with Reid Lyon –
it’s often called the alphabet principle or the alphabetic insight; as if
there was some principle to grasp, after which this processing would work.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan:
Right.
David Boulton:
Which doesn’t seem at all an appropriate way to think about it. What
we’re talking about is faster than consciousness, unconscious processing
reflexes that have got to recognize a letter and put it into a kind of buffer
space where it’s got to reside, hanging in time, while other information comes
in and is applied from other sections of the brain to disambiguate that
letter’s actual sound rather than its field of potential sounds, and assemble
a recognizable whole word for comprehension to pick up and move with.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan:
That’s exactly right. What you’re describing is incredibly complex and
it almost sounds so complex that it would be unteachable. The fact is that it’s
very teachable.
David Boulton: It’s very teachable. Yes, I think so, too.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan: The key here is a lot of what the students have to come to learn, they have to learn to do unconsciously, so quickly, so easily that they don’t have to pay attention to it. That said, when you start out you have to pay a lot of attention to it and the instruction has to be fairly explicit about what’s going on here.
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David Boulton:
Absolutely. I’d like to circle back to that, but before we move there,
the other thing that seems to be missing is some discussion about the spectrum
between basic and proficiency. Most people would say that people below
basic have not gotten the alphabetic principle with the caveat we just put on
it.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan: For
the most part that’s true.
David Boulton: So, then we
could say that the people below proficiency may have gotten an instrumental
ability but it’s not all happening fast enough to create transparency and an
ecology of processing that will leave enough energy left over for the subsequent
processes to comprehend and act on. So, code processing runs the spectrum.
Dr. Timothy Shanahan:
Absolutely. It’s not just knowing it (the code), it’s knowing it at a level and speed and facility that allows you to
automatically, without conscious attention, fire these routines off.
One of the things
that’s remarkable about it is when you look at what it is that somebody must
do. If you do some kind of a logical analysis of print and map how that would go
into the brain and use what we know about how much information the eye can pick
up at a time, and so on, you’ll come to a picture of people able
to look at every letter, see these patterns within words and know
what that means in terms of their sound values and turn that into oral language
and then interpret that in a way that they would oral language. It’s fairly
linear, it’s fairly straight-forward and it seems like, oh okay, let’s
just teach kids those patterns and let’s teach them the relationships and
it’s going to be fine.
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