Beginning to Read and the Spin Doctors of Science: An Excerpt

Beginning to Read and the Spin Doctors of Science: An Excerpt

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Download the complete excerpt (PDF) from Denny Taylor’s seminal book, “Beginning to Read and the Spin Doctors of Science: The Political Campaign to Change America's Mind About How Children Learn to Read”.

By Denny Taylor

Theorizing and research are informed by assumptions about what knowledge is and who gets to say what counts as knowledge. In this excerpt, Taylor critically unpacks the recent debates over phonemic awareness and reading. Her analysis is a reminder of the positionalities that undergird all writing in the field of literacy education. She asks us all to consider how we think about the ways in which knowledge about reading and reading instruction is constituted.

 While there are many researchers who have contributed to the research base on the importance of phonemic awareness in learning to read, there are only a small number of researchers whose studies are central to the idea that we should specifically teach phonemic awareness skills to young children.

One of these researchers is Barbara Foorman, who consistently references Marilyn Jager Adams and Keith Stanovich, both of whom also agree that phonemic awareness should be specifically taught. In Beginning to Read, Adams relies heavily on the research studies conducted by Stanovich. She discusses no fewer than eight of his articles in her report, and in her bibliography she makes twenty-six references to his work, including “Matthew Effects in Reading: Some Consequences of Individual Differences in the Acquisition of Literacy,” which received the Albert J. Harris Award from the International Reading Association, is also referred to by Foorman, and is one of the most -cited research articles in support of the proposition that variation in phonological awareness is causally related to the early development of reading.

“The remedy for the problem must be more of a 'surgical strike,' to use a military analogy,” Stanovich writes in “Matthew Effects in Reading,” adding, a few sentences later, “identify early, remedy early, and focus on phonological awareness” (pp. 393, 394).

The research of Foorman and Stanovich is also discussed in Grossen's report on the research of NICHD—which is hardly surprising, since both receive research funding from that institute. Adams' government report is also mentioned. Because the research of Foorman and Stanovich and the report written by Adams are also frequently referred to and relied upon by governmental agencies at the national, state, and local levels, I have begun my evaluation of the research on phonemic awareness with an analysis of some of their work. The Foorman studies that are a part of my analysis are those referred to by Honig and Winick2, which are also relied upon by the states of California, Texas, and North Carolina.3 They are also the studies referred to by Grossen4 in the NICHD research circulated by John Silber to every superintendent in the state of Massachusetts.

In my analysis of Stanovich's research, I have begun with “Matthew Effects in Reading,” and I have also read the reports of a number of the studies to which he refers in that article.5 “Even more popular has been my work on Matthew Effects in the reading development,” Stanovich (1993/1994) writes in his “Distinguished Educator” article in Reading Teacher. “The term Matthew Effects derives from the Gospel according to Matthew: 'For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath' (XXV: 29). It is used to describe rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer effects that are embedded in the educational process” (p. 281).

In addition, I have also read many of the studies which now refer to “Matthew Effects” as if Stanovich’s arguments and conclusions are indisputable. Thus the corpus of data for this analysis goes well beyond what I consider to be just the primary studies in phonemic awareness.

Since I am trained in both anthropology and psychology, I will present a synthesis of my analysis from two very different perspectives. I begin with an exploration of empirical research in which reading is regarded as a psychological process and the emphasis is on reading words.6 This is an “in-the-head” viewpoint on young children learning to read, which, as Adams states, “depends as much on [children] detecting invariants as on attending to distinctive or differentiating features” (p. 203). Learning to read is “the creation or strengthening of associations”—visual, auditory, motor, or conceptual—“to interlink the printed appearance of words with ones knowledge of their sounds, contexts, functions, and meanings” (p.206).

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Beginning to Read and the Spin Doctors of Science

Beginning to Read and the Spin Doctors of Science: The Political Campaign to Change America's Mind About How Children Learn to Read, available on Amazon.

About the Book

Suggesting that the contention that phonemic awareness must be taught directly and that children need explicit systematic instruction in phonics is less of a scientific "fact" than an exercise in political persuasion, this book presents the story of the political campaign that is taking place to change the minds of Americans about how young children learn to read. The book begins with a close look at the empirical research being used to support a massive shift in the national understandings about language, literacy, and learning and concludes by revealing the ways in which research studies on early reading instruction are being used by the federal and state governments to support a new methodology that has turned early reading instruction into "a massive business of unprecedented commercial worth."