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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: Thank you for being here Dr. Venezky.
Dr. Richard Venezky: Thank you for having me.
David Boulton: Perhaps we could start with a brief sketch of your background and what led you into orthography.
Dr. Richard Venezky: There is a marvelous line from one of Ionesco’s plays, something about mathematics leading to philology and philology leading to crime. I feel like I’ve been along that route. I went to college to be an electrical engineer and endured a five year program, then switching to linguistics and psychology, and received a Ph.D. in the former. From there I went to the English Department at the University of Wisconsin and taught linguistics and structure of English courses. Within a year I discovered that the Computer Sciences Department paid more and promoted faster, so I switched my primary appointment to computer sciences. When I left there to go into the educational studies department at the University of Delaware I was chairman of the department. That’s the underlying story.
The story that brings me to orthography and to reading, is that during the time I was switching from engineering to linguistics I was hired to work on an artificial intelligence project. We were attempting to build a machine that we could train to recognize speech. Now please don’t ask me if it worked because that question has an obvious answer. Nevertheless I became more interested in the psychological and linguistic questions than I did with the switching circuits that I was hired to develop, in which I wasn’t doing very well with anyway.
So that’s what actually led me to an interest in linguistics. But that then led to being hired to write a computer program to relate spelling to sound in 20,000 dictionary words for a reading project at Cornell. Now the truth of the matter was I couldn’t write a program for any computer. I was trained to develop and analyze circuits on paper and to predict what happens to electrons when they roll off the end of a round steel ball on a dry day on a flat, nylon rug. Construction of practical devices was not one of the strong points of my E.E. training.
Nevertheless, I went to the sales office that was supplying the new computer for Cornell’s computing center, a Control Data 1604, and obtained a manual. Like a typical arrogant graduate student of the time, I marked up all of the inconsistencies in the manual’s text and all of the non agreements in its syntax and took it back to the person in the sales office. Well, oddly that led to being hired to teach technical writing at Control Data’s programming office in Palo Alto, California, where I learned to program and wrote the program finally to relate spelling to sound. I went on to do my dissertation on the topic, both the history and a structural/transformational analysis of English spelling.
So that’s what got me into orthography. Because I was in orthography, not because I knew anything about reading, the reading people came to me soon after I’d finished my dissertation and started teaching, saying, ‘Gee, you must know all about spelling; we put money into a spelling program and we’re not going anywhere with it. Would you be willing to review this and tell us what’s wrong?’ So pretty soon I found that I was becoming the, I shouldn’t say ‘the’ leading expert, but a so-called expert on English spelling and soon on English reading, at least on decoding.
David Boulton: Epitomized by that picture on top of the mountain I think. I think a lot of people do respect you in that way.
Dr. Richard Venezky The other accident that I should mention is that while I was at Stanford doing my Ph.D. in linguistics, a post grad in psychology was sent to me to get some of the data I had generated on letter-sound correspondences because he was working with Pat Suppes on one of his computerized reading programs. We had a very pleasant ten-minute conversation and he went off with reams of print outs of letter-sound correspondences. I didn’t see him again at Stanford.
When I finished my Ph.D. and took a position at Wisconsin, for one reason or another I was in the psychology building shortly after I arrived there and noticed this fellow’s name on a door. It was a very distinctive name, Robert Calfee, so it’s not one you forget very easily. So I knocked on the door and by luck, he was there. So we had this marvelous reunion of our ten-minute conversation at Stanford the year before, during which he mentioned that there was a new educational research and develop center at Wisconsin with lots of money and not much to do with it yet so maybe he and I ought to talk about some kind of research project, maybe studying how children learn letter-sound correspondences.
That’s what got me into reading in a real sense. Bob Calfee and I worked about six years together, studying how children learn to read, pre-reading skills, letter-sound correspondences, and related issues. He then accepted a position at Stanford and I continued working at Wisconsin for a number of years with Dom Massaro, who is now at the University of California-Santa Cruz. During this time I was often called on to speak to teachers about reading, to give keynote addresses at conferences, and even to co-author reading and spelling programs. It concerned me that an obvious part of my appeal derived from my position as a computer scientist—as an outsider with scientific credentials. So, in 1976 when the Educational Studies Department at the University of Delaware offered an endowed chair and asked what else it would take to bring me there, I was ready to become an “insider.” That was a long and perhaps overdone answer to what you probably thought was a very simple question.
David Boulton: No, I never expected it to be simple. I appreciate the background. I myself can also say that I relate to this synchronous, serendipitous path that we get on that seems to be why we are somehow getting to where it is we need to be focused that we really can’t claim credit for.
Dr. Richard Venezky: Yes, perhaps we don’t really grow up and set goals for ourselves; we just follow the string somebody pulls across the floor. If it leads here or there, well that’s where we go.
David Boulton: So I think it’s fascinating and interesting that rather than growing up in the field of orthography or growing up in the field of reading science, that you’ve taken this path that would allow you to look at these things with entirely different lenses than people that grew inside of these fields in a more traditional way.
Dr. Richard Venezky: I never felt that it was the only path to take, but I did feel it was an advantage to come at the orthography from a more formal linguistic and mathematical standpoint.
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A Pattern Recognition Problem:
David Boulton: So your take off in this was the challenge of how a machine could reconcile the spelling of sounds and that took you into understanding our orthography.
Dr. Richard Venezky: To me it was a complex pattern recognition problem. There are many patterns at different levels of analysis, some with many exceptions. Some of them interacted, some of them interfered with each other, but somewhere along the line it could all be sorted out. And the marginal mess that wouldn’t fit anywhere led to nice narratives about the history of words.
David Boulton: So I think we’ve also covered, implicitly in the last question, what most interests you about orthography because it’s part of the story of how you got there. Is there anything you’d add to that particular question, what interests you most now that you’ve arrived in this space?
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Orthography is Like a Big City:
Dr. Richard Venezky: I look at English orthography perhaps as a tourist might look at a beautiful big city like Paris. Here’s a city laid out with Baron Haussmann’s wide avenues converging on a circle at the Arch de Triomphe. But then there are a multitude of side streets and dead end alleys and other patterns that intersect, interrupt, and occasionally complement. And I see the same thing in the orthography. In the same way the orthography has old and new. We have all these new spelling patterns for words like inputted and formatted. We use letter names like x-ray in words. At the same time we have good old Anglo-Saxon words like cow and sheep and raven and French borrowings in the same way that Paris has the newly remodeled Pompidou Center, the Foundation Cartier, other examples of modern and post-modern architecture along with the older parts of the city.
David Boulton: Somewhat analogous to the human brain of these layers that grew on top of one another without necessarily having this integrated unfoldment.
Dr. Richard Venezky: Just like that - which actually looks a lot like Paris. You can start on the islands, which represent the old brain, and then build the city in districts around it.
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Important Distinctions in Orthography:
David Boulton: What are the, in my language, 'jewels of significance' - the most important attributes, the most meaningful distinctions in the field of orthography? What are some of the things you think stand out as being really important?
Dr. Richard Venezky: Well, I’d say maybe the first and most important thing is that the orthography is structured. It’s not a chaotic mess, it’s not this damnable collection of accidents and historical mis-readings, but there really is a patterning there if you’re willing to tease it out. But that patterning derives from the fact that we have fifty some sounds and only twenty-six letters. So we have to adopt a whole variety of mechanisms to close the gap. One mechanism, very simply, is that we have two-letter and three-letter functional units, so if you want to understand how the orthography works first you have to define what the minimal units are, what I call functional units. Things like TCH and DG and CH and SH, where you couldn’t derive the sounds they have from the sounds of their constituent parts. That’s as small as you can get for those units. So that’s one factor.
Another factor is that, like many of the romance languages, we use what I call markers quite extensively. Markers are letters like the silent, final E, the U in guide, the doubled consonant in running, that themselves have no sound but point out how to pronounce something else or preserve a graphical pattern.
Another factor, going back to these functional units, is that some of them are what I call complex and some are simple. What that means is that spellings such as DG and CK and TCH and even X, when they have a single letter vowel spelling before them, that vowel spelling will always be pronounced with its so-called short pronunciation because these spellings operate as replacements for either two sounds like X or for a double spelling: CK is a replacement for KK, TCH is a replacement for CH doubled, and DG replaces GG. On the other hand, spellings such as SH and CH are simple. So in a spelling such as ache, the E signals a long vowel pronunciation of the A, while in a spelling such as axe, the E doesn’t signal a long pronunciation because the X is complex.
Another factor that has been pointed out for at least 200 years is that English, unlike Spanish and Finnish, tends to preserve the spelling of meaningful units with affixation and compounding, up to the point where translation to sound breaks down. As others have pointed out, we have electric and electricity, even though the C has two different sounds, and sane and sanity, even though the A has two different sounds. The 'C' and 'A' are retained in the spellings even though they change their sound values. This preserves the visual identity of the morphemes or meaningful units. English tries pretty hard to do this but doesn’t always succeed. But nevertheless, it’s a fairly modern principle that derives more from the 15th century than it does from the Old English period.
David Boulton: Is that a post printing press artifact?
Dr. Richard Venezky: No, it comes roughly around the time that English is restored as the language of Parliament, just after the first quarter of the 15th century. With charters and other royal documents now being written in English, the chancery scribes began to regularize spelling choosing mainly from trends already apparent in the spelling. Grammarians and orthoepists, writing later in the 15th and 16th centuries, shared a responsibility for reinforcing this meaning preserving trend.
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Don’t Let Me Make it Sound too Complicated:
David Boulton: So there’s a number of layers of structural units and their relationships to one another that is part of the pattern recognition system that’s necessary to process this well in learning to read.
Dr. Richard Venezky: Yes, but don’t let me make it sound too complicated.
David Boulton: I don’t know that you haven’t done that, I mean it does sound a little complicated so far.
Dr. Richard Venezky: Let me put it in slightly different terms. It’s not clear that one needs to teach all that to children for them to be successful as readers. That is, they certainly don’t need to know that we honor etymology over letter-sound transparency; they don’t have to know much about simple and complex units, even though perhaps by third grade it’s a useful thing for them to be exposed to if they haven’t deduced it already.
David Boulton: That’s an analysis that we might bring to understanding this thing on the other side of getting it, but not necessarily the path to learning it.
Dr. Richard Venezky: Exactly. And this is always a problem when you are confronted with a cognitive analysis of a skill that you’re interested in people acquiring; in this case learning to translate from letters to sound. But missing from such an analysis is the psychological/pedagogical side. How much of this do we need to teach? What’s really essential? What sequence should it be taught in? Those are independent questions that have to be resolved through experience and experimentation. That a linguist identifies a particular pattern in the orthography does not mean that the pattern necessarily needs to be taught overtly to promote reading ability. The words that the pattern applies to may be too few in number to justify such effort, or too infrequent, for example.
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History of the Fall of Phonetic Correspondence:
David Boulton: Let’s back up for a second. At one point in time, at least as far back as the Greeks, the alphabet was phonetic. Plato even says that ‘Once we knew the letters of the alphabet we could read.’ The suggestion being that initially reading the alphabet, this writing technology that lays underneath the development of written western civilization, was a case of seeing these letters, responding with their sounds, doing it fast and blending it together into a stream that sounded like we were talking. Code cued speech.
In the case of the English language it seems as if this code, which may have degenerated in its correspondence before it got to England, nonetheless was closer to correspondence between letters and sounds. Over a period of a thousand years or so, intermixes with this oral language, like you said in the beginning there was fifty something, some people say there was no more than forty, and some people say forty-four, but clearly there’s a lot more sounds than there are letters.
Dr. Richard Venezky: Right, it’s dealer’s choice. It depends upon the dialect of English you analyze and the approach you take to creating a phonemic system.
David Boulton: Dealer’s choice. Okay. So there’s this limited number of letters which originally had a close to one to one correspondence which then fused into this sound system of spoken English and then evolved into where we are today. Beginning with that point where they meet and ending with today and the stability that you’ve been able to identify with your pattern system…let’s talk about that window, how that happened and the history about that a bit.
Dr. Richard Venezky: Let me try to give the fifty cent tour first, then we can go back if you want and elaborate on any of the pieces. The first writing of English words, which occurs sometime perhaps in the 700’s, was done by scribes who were trained in Latin. These scribes probably were from the Northern parts of England, they may have been Irish – a lot of the scribal and graphemic forms were Irish forms. But the relationship of the letters to sound for English clearly came from Latin.
Latin, like English at that time, had long and short vowels, but no way to mark the distinction. Latin also had long and short consonants but for these a simple mechanism was adopted to distinguish the two: one doubled the consonants in writing to show a long consonant pronunciation, leaving a single letter, by default, to show a short pronunciation.
But right from the beginning English encountered problems. English, like Latin, had phonemically distinct long and short vowels; it also had guttural sounds that Latin didn’t have and it took quite a number of years to find ways to mark those. So right from the beginning there was a mismatch between spelling and sound.
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Written Latin and Spoken English Collide:
David Boulton: Before you go on, let’s pause right there at that point. We are talking about the intersection, collision if you will, of two different language systems: an oral language with so many units and a written language that was kind of mapped over or laid upon it or fused together with it that had an insufficient number of elements. Even though there were certain commonalities relative to the vowels you’re speaking of, it seems like a unique juxtaposition of two different systems.
Dr. Richard Venezky: And imagine now the people trying to fit them together, sometimes not being very good at speaking the language they were supposedly mapping into. And themselves perhaps not even hearing some of the differences.
David Boulton: And certainly not aware of the implications a thousand years later on what this was going to do to the world.
Dr. Richard Venezky: Yes. And you must not think of writing then in the same way that we do writing today. The majority of everything from the early period of Old English is ecclesiastical records: gospels, homilies, and the like. These were mostly church materials to be read aloud. And a good percentage of them are nothing more than inner-linear glosses. That is, a Latin manuscript with English words written above the Latin ones. The form of Old English that results is very stilted.
There’s a remarkable document that originates from King Alfred’s court when two travelers who had sailed far northward where the Finns related tales of icebergs they saw and how when the Finns died the body would be kept on ice for six months while people would party every night and divide up the estate, so to speak.. It reads almost like modern English, not quite. But when you finally get a glimpse of what English really sounded like in those times, which is not what you get from 95% of the other manuscripts, there’s a whole different language and it’s the language we speak.
David Boulton: As if this whole thing has gone in a circle to come back to where it was in some ways.
Dr. Richard Venezky: Yes, So we’re getting sometimes with scribes, not always, but sometimes with scribes who weren’t very good at speaking English, they’re not really writing the English language, they’re writing Latin. They’re writing an aid to translating Latin into English.
David Boulton: They’re writing cues for themselves and for their elite little group of pronouncers that are going to be cued by what they’re writing rather than for the kind of general reading that we think of today.
Dr. Richard Venezky: Right. Later on as urban centers grew, administrative records become more common. I don’t want to make it sound like all of the extant Old English manuscripts consist of psalms and Bible passages.
David Boulton: But initially writing in England, like it is when it starts to show up just about anywhere, is instrumental. It’s relative to the logistics and record keeping and receipts and transactions and its first movement beyond that isn’t so much into literacy as it is into whatever the prevailing religion is.
Dr. Richard Venezky: For Old English, the earliest records are glossaries and religious poetry. Administrative records come a little later, with the exception, perhaps, of charters.
But
two other elements add to the complexity of letter-sound correspondences in Old
English. First, England was settled originally by three different Germanic
tribes. Even though these tribes spoke the same language, they brought different
dialects or they developed them because of geographic isolation once they got to
the island. These
dialects were reflected in the writing.
Second, there’s variation in how any given scribe tends to render certain vowels and certain consonants; as we were saying before, dealer’s choice. So we have individual scribal variation and then we have a dialect variation and then we have this mismatch with the sounds and the letters.
It isn’t until fairly late in the Old English period when King Alfred, who was from West Saxon, conquered a good part of England, defeating the Danes who had conquered and settled a fairly large area of England. With the consolidation of English rule comes a movement towards standardization of spelling, which is implemented almost in time for the Norman invasion. I should point out, however, that not all Anglo-Saxon scholars agree that King Alfred managed to implement a very extensive standardization.
In summary, there is first a cycle of dissonance, moving toward some kind of harmony and then wham! Here come the Normans, French now becomes the language of Parliament, the court of law. English now begins to be almost an underground language. Now, not quite, but it begins to be that way. So the central authority is gone, the dialects become even more prominent, all the sound changes that had been occurring over the last 200 years begin to show up.
The French scribes now begin to import French spellings for English words and do a reasonably good job and begin to move towards some kind of standardization. But then they lose their homeland back in France; they’re no longer tied to any native French speaking group. French begins to break down, English is coming back. By 1420 it’s the spoken language of Parliament. Now a different group, as I had mentioned before, the chancery scribes, were standardizing the language. Only they’re as interested in showing etymology and meaning as they are for smoothing tongue and glottis coordination.(1)
Within another 200 years the orthography becomes pretty much the English we see today. But with the establishment of the American colonies and with independence there is a movement, led by Noah Webster and a few other super patriots, to make American spelling different from British spelling. Some spellings that were optional, for example, you could spell honor with an OR or OUR in England, eventually ended up differentiating British and American spelling. For the OR/OUR case, on our side we went for OR because on their side they began to move towards OUR. Shakespeare probably has almost fifty/fifty in his writings.
British-American spelling differences represent a small split. Not a real big deal, but something of interest. There are, for example, different uses of S and Z; we can put IZE on the end of everything. The British pretty well stick with S. There are also some different pronunciations for words like schedule and a variety of other spelling differences but the total number of words affected is small compared to the total vocabularies of the languages involved. Furthermore, with the global economy and the Internet there’s a very strong tendency for British spelling to get swamped out.
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David Boulton: American English is dominating more and more. I’ve heard from a number of linguists that the printing press played a role in this because the cost of creating new type, new fonts to represent the sounds, the letters that had been previously hand written was pivotal. That they used a narrower set and used that to represent sounds that otherwise had distinct markers in handwriting.
Dr. Richard Venezky: Personally I think the impact of the printing press on spelling is over rated.
David Boulton: What about fixing the standards of whatever confusions or spelling differences?
Dr. Richard Venezky: Even worse. Take the case in England for example of the first English printers. The first three of them: Caxton, de Worde, and one other whose name I can’t recall, all worked in the Low Countries, and spoke Flemish for twenty or thirty years before they came back to England to print. Caxton was English, but had gone to Bruges to work. The others I think were born in the Low Countries. It was to the printer’s advantage, for example, to be able to put E at the end of a word or not put it there because they could justify lines more easily. If you look in some of Caxton’s earlier works you see that the city where he worked, Bruges, he spells at least six different ways. There was really very little tendency in say the first forty or fifty years of printing for the English printers to impose any kind of standardization on spelling.
The business about the letters has some truth to it. There were probably by the time of printing, by 1476, two letters that were still used in handwriting, eth and thorn, that were not in the standard European type case, although they were pretty much on their way out anyway. And for thorn, for the most part early on Y was substituted. And that’s where we get things like ye old shoppe. It never was meant to be ye, it was always meant to be the. Caxton substituted TH for both eth and thorn.
David Boulton: So when we pronounce it today with the ye we’re actually saying it differently than they would with the same spelling. They would have said the.
Dr. Richard Venezky: Right. That was a rather short-lived substitution.
David Boulton: With a long lived after effect.
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In Defense of English Spelling:
Dr. Richard Venezky: We really haven’t talked about English spelling and an orthographic system. One of the advantages of the variability in English spelling is that we can use spelling as a personal marker. For example, Exxon is spelling with a highly distinctive doubled X. Totally illegal; not allowed. X cannot double- someone ought to go to jail for violating such a principle of the English language. Skyy vodka with two Y’s, similar violation. Notice, also, how homonym spellings are used in commerce. I stopped for a vitamin drink at a little bakery in Union Station and on the cup I was given was written, All you knead to know about the bakery…KNEAD. And you can find lots and lots of uses of these kinds of homonym spellings as ways of getting attention. You can’t do that very easily in Turkish or Finnish.
David Boulton: Let me say right now, as we proceed here, just so that you and I know where each other is coming from, that I think there’s been a number of really brilliant pieces of work in defense of spelling because the lack of a rigid correspondence has created a creative opportunity…
Dr. Richard Venezky: Exactly.
David Boulton: For differentiation and experimentation and extension that has fundamentally enabled a different kind of verbal intelligence and verbal creativity in the minds of its users. And I am fully behind that.
Dr.
Richard Venezky: Terrific. I call these creative spellings.
David Boulton: My issue is not with that at all. I think this is perfectly right in that sense. My question is simply what is the on-ramp for the child to get up into it?
Dr. Richard Venezky: That’s a good question.
David Boulton: That’s where I am.
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David Boulton: So I hope that I have established some leveling between us because I do appreciate the positive aspects of our spelling system. I have studied the history of spelling reform attempts from Ben Franklin, Noah Webster, Melville Dewey and the grand 1880’s to 1906 efforts and the collapse of it all with Theodore Roosevelt’s tragic miscalculation. And it’s a fascinating story but I think it’s tugging on the wrong end of the elephant some how.
Dr. Richard Venezky: Oh, I think so.
David Boulton: My perspective is we have to have a concern for the ecology of learning and that a focus on trying to correct the problem by trying to change the spelling has historically gone down as folly relative to the inertia of the established traditions and inventories and rightfully so in consideration of what we’ve been talking about of the creative enablement that’s part of the system.
Dr. Richard Venezky: There’s that and there’s the simple problem of getting any kind of agreement. The Dutch have gone through I don’t know how many reforms since WWII and it’s always more chaos added by the time some select committee releases its proposals. The battles start in the press. The same thing in Germany. Germany announced a whole group of reforms in 1998. Within 2 years an enormous number of people: editors, writers, educators, and others, announced that they refused to accept, going back even further than the pre-98 spellings.
David Boulton: Yes, well, I do think we’ve got a problem. I just don’t think that’s where it lies. I mean the attempts to fix the code have gone like this: change the alphabet, no we can’t do that - change the spelling, no we can’t do that - let’s re-evaluate the alphabet. It’s gone back and forth with Franklin starting with the alphabet and Webster doing the spelling, and then George Bernard Shaw and Mark Twain changing sides in the middle on both issues at one time or another.
I think that there was some wisdom in all of this, this is an unnatural technology. This isn’t natural. This isn’t like learning how to do most of the things human beings learn how to do. This is a special case that has special demands. And we ought to find some way to make it as learnable as we can out of being careful stewards to the intellectual and psychological and other dimensions of development of our children. But that doesn’t seem to be the approach. Are there parts of this story that interest you that you can speak to - either this history of spelling reform or some place you want to go before we go on?
Dr. Richard Venezky: No, no. Some other time we’ll deal with spelling reform. I’ve got to agree with you that it’s the wrong place to be barking. It’s interesting and it’s odd that Theodore Roosevelt went down in flames over such a small part of it. What he proposed was actually pretty reasonable but it was small.
David Boulton: Well, my understanding is that the national press, stimulated by the international press, jumped in and the whole thing spiraled out of control - Congress got involved, the Supreme Court got involved. But the national press basically said, and this is what did spelling reform in as I understand it, that this whole thing was a scheme of Carnegie’s. That’s why he put the quarter of a million dollars up so that they’d have to reprint all these books and Carnegie would make money. Now we know that wasn’t the underlying motive, but that was a really powerful thing to lay on the country as a whole in the national press relative to the motivations behind the reform attempts.
Dr. Richard Venezky: Yes he took a real beating from the press and Congress and wisely withdrew all of the reforms within a few months.
David Boulton: I think some say the only reason he got into it to begin with, like Darwin’s involvement with it in the English version, was that he was ashamed of his own spelling skills.
Dr. Richard Venezky: That wouldn’t surprise me. It was going to be a part of the program to help everybody learn English better.
David Boulton: Well sure, you could say that that was one of the things that glued this together; the language imperialists could say this is in the economic best interests of the planet because English is spreading all over the place and it’s retarded by how difficult it is to learn. By making it easier to learn, it’s in our economic and global imperialistic interests quite independent of the argument for the well-being and the educational efficiency of children.
Dr. Richard Venezky: Right, and it even came down to the need for less metal on road signs if we could reform spellings and eliminate silent GH's and other "superfluous letters". Anyway, I think that's for another time.
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The Pros and Cons of English Spelling:
David Boulton: I think we touched on the positive benefits of our way of spelling. Would you like to discuss the negative?
Dr. Richard Venezky: Yes, let me deal with that for a few minutes. Let’s take both the positive and the negative side because I think that will take us into learning to read and learning to spell. The positive side of English spelling is that it serves the experienced reader well. It takes longer to learn which is the downside. But for experienced readers, we don’t even have to talk about the speed reader, just the average person reading silently, the fact that we do try to preserve word meanings, common roots, keep the same spelling as far as we can, means that at a visual glance it’s easier to recognize the word and its meaning. If we changed the A in sane when we went to sanity, a bigger load would be placed on comprehension. For the speed reader, who operates mostly by eye, keeping the same spelling for word parts that mean the same thing is an advantage. For the learner, and especially for the non-native English speaker, it’s a disadvantage.
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The Reading Issue in Perspective:
Dr. Richard Venezky: Let me preface any other remarks, though, by one thing that I think will give you a sense of where I am on the learning to read issue. There have been several large international studies done over the last twelve or thirteen years, comparing reading performance across different countries. One done in 1990-91and one just finished in 2001 are particularly revealing of how well reading is taught in the United States compared to the other industrialized nations. Fourth graders and eighth graders were tested in both studies, which involved about thirty-five countries. Do you want to guess where the United States ranked in both studies? You could even do your estimate by quarters. Were we in the lowest quarter, second quarter, second highest quarter, top quarter?
David Boulton: I would have said the second up from the bottom.
Dr. Richard Venezky: We were second in the world in both studies, beaten only by Sweden. The studies had multiple scales and other countries scored equal to the United States when statistically significant differences were considered; however, the simplest summary is that on average for reading for literary purposes, we were second to Sweden at both grades and in both studies.
And so one thing I think any honest person has to admit is that if you’re only looking at average ability, if you’re forgetting about the tail of the distribution, if you’re forgetting about the fact we have more variance than any other country in the world, then the teaching of reading in America is terrific. There is no problem. So that’s where you’ve got to start. We’re not talking about a national problem where all schools are terrible and no one knows how to teach reading, where all kids are failing or not read as good as they should. On an international comparative basis we’re second in the world in fourth and eighth grade.
Where this leads me to is to say, we’ve got to be honest about where the problem is. The problem is mostly in inner city schools and some rural schools where we fail miserably, just miserably. And teaching to read is a serious issue in those places. But I don’t want to give the impression that I think it’s a serious problem everywhere because clearly it’s not.
David Boulton: Alright, let’s go there. I appreciate you setting this up. A couple of technical questions to help get to sync about this: as part of this research study was there any indexing against the amount of hours of instruction or dollars per child or what other things were put into the mix to organize the balancing of these studies?
Dr. Richard Venezky: There was an attempt to account for instructional time, parental education or income, years of teacher experience, and many other potentially relevant variables. Even, believe it or not, regularity of orthography. These background factors were grouped as home, school, and national context variables.
David Boulton: What is the name of this study?
Dr. Richard Venezky: These were the International Education Association, IEA, reading literacy studies. The 2001 study was called PIRLS-Progress in International Reading Literacy 1991-2001. Boston College has a Web site for PIRLS publications, which you can locate on the Web by searching under “PIRLS.”
David Boulton: Good. There is a number of international studies, most recently Dr. Eraldo Paulesu in Italy, the BBC did a story on it a couple years ago, that are showing that the highest incidence of dyslexia is associated with English orthography.
Dr. Richard Venezky: Yes, I did see that. I don’t know what to say about that. What you can say is that in United States we have the highest percentage of kids labeled learning disabled as any place in the world. And a good part of that is an economic issue in the same way that we give out more pills per person than any other country in the world and do more bypass operations.
David Boulton: Our ‘sensors’ are further out and extended and so we’re labeling more things with more differentiation than anybody else.
Dr. Richard Venezky: Right, we give more tests. We create more categories.
David Boulton: So let’s pull back then and go back to whether or not there is a reading problem in the country. Having left the international comparative scene and I understand and appreciate what you’re saying, but let’s stay here for a moment. It seems that people have done research that says that by the end of the first year of school, how well a child has learned to read can predict how well they will be doing as they exit high school, whether they will go on to college. Yesterday I interviewed Dr. Lesley Morrow, President of the International Reading Association. She mentioned that there are states in this country that based on literacy levels project how many prison cells to build for their state based on literacy levels.
Dr. Richard Venezky: I would be a little suspicious of that.
David Boulton: She said it’s a fact, she hammered it. I’m not asking you to verify it. I’m sure you are aware of the NAEP results, that the national average is 68% of fourth graders and 60% of twelfth graders are less than proficient in reading.
Dr.
Richard Venezky: These labels: proficient, basic, and so on, are
totally arbitrary. They don’t correspond to anything in the real world.
In fact, there’s a whole commission working on
trying to refine them and make them more accurate. In the same way you can look
across states and see which ones have high percentages and which ones have low
percentages of students at a particular grade passing the state reading test.
Mississippi claims that 80%, I think, of fourth graders are proficient in
reading but when you look at the National Assessment of Educational Progress you
see something like 20%
proficiency for Mississippi fourth graders. While on the other hand
Wisconsin, which has much higher standards, and Delaware interestingly, have
more kids proficient by the National Assessment than by their state tests. There
is a lot of wiggle room in the
standards
- in the labels such as proficient, basic, and so on.
I’m not saying there isn’t a reading problem. What I’m trying to do is put the reading problem in perspective. Just like fighting a war, you want to know where the enemy is, who the enemy is and concentrate your fire accordingly. Going after the grade schools in Shaker Heights and trying to force them to give more tests and change the way they teach reading when the average kid is in the 80th percentile nationally is not an effective way to improve reading performance in the United States.
David Boulton: We know that the frequency of distinctions in the oral world before beginning to read, like a lot of things that more advantaged children are exposed to, contributes significantly to the probability that they’re going to take off and read. So we know when we talk about a national average this is not uniform, this is all over the place and moving in relation to these socio-economic distinctions.
Dr. Richard Venezky: That’s why I say yes; on average we’re doing a real good job. But we also have a large variance to contend with. And the lower end of that distribution is where our problem is. And that’s where, if we really want to help kids, we’ve go to focus. There the code becomes very important, as I’m sure you’ve heard over and over and over and over again. To focus on the entire distribution is to waste resources.
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Learning to Read Significantly Influences How Life Unfolds:
David Boulton: Let’s transition into that conversation if you’re content that we’re moving together. I feel good about this, I understand where you’re at and appreciate that and we are not trying to advocate attention to some universal massive problem that everybody’s got. But we are trying to say that it’s a significant challenge…that how well a child learns to read is a significant influence over how their life unfolds.
Dr. Richard Venezky: It’s probably the biggest factor because it would be hard to identify something else for the average child. Now granted, you get above a certain level and the differences aren’t going to predict much about earnings or happiness or anything. But we all know that if you don’t get up to some reasonable level of reading ability, you’re in serious trouble. I think that’s pretty safe to say.
David Boulton: Yes, in terms of academic success, economic success, and psychological well being. So inside that space, however big it is, however it is that it’s distributed in the world and in this country, we have millions of children whose lives are shaped or misshaped by the challenge and struggle they experience in the process of learning to read. And this learning to read process is not a natural process like speaking. We know that whether you take the genetic approach or the anthropological approach or whatever angle you want to come in on it, we’ve been speaking for a while and we’ve got wiring that supports us doing it. We haven’t been reading long enough for the wiring to be innate for us to do it. It’s a learned process that’s in relation to a man-made, artificial, external, technological contrivance.
Dr. Richard Venezky: Definitely.
David Boulton: How well somebody is able to master this external, technological contrivance can shape their entire lives.
