A Contested History

The History of Reading Movements in the Twentieth Century

Chapter Two outlines the ongoing division between the two most widely-accepted approaches to reading instruction in the twentieth (and now twenty-first) centuries:  the behaviorist model and the psycholinguists and whole language approach.  At stake here is the answer to the ultimate question: How do students learn most effectively?  The first model, the behaviorist model, was exemplified by graduated readers, recitation, drill, and mastery, in which the teacher is the holder of knowledge and the student must have that knowledge "drilled" into them through routine activities.  We see elements of this model throughout our schools still today, not only in timed reading comprehension assessments, but also in the nation's commitment to standardized testing.  A key theorist in this approach was Edward L. Thorndike, who applied his stimulus-response theory to education, arguing that "all learning is a matter of habit formation," and that rigorous training and discipline was key to everything from civic and moral education to penmanship to reading speed (p. 10).  This approach to learning views a student's abilities as innate, or natural, and essentially unchangeable (an approach we see often used in justifying tracking).  Other elements of this approach involve focusing on the development of phonemic awareness regardless of word meanings; the phonics approach so popular in the 1990s and early 2000s was driven by the mass marketing of this behaviorist, repetitive, skills-driven approach.

The second model, the whole-language, meaning-centered, social constructivist approach, has its roots in theorists such as John Dewey and E.B. Huey.  Dewey, whose educational philosophies on education were fundamentally based on incorporating a student's lived experience into the classroom (and beyond), advocated an "inquiry-based lesson" which presents problems to be solved by students who are encouraged to think and question and interact.  This focus on building knowledge around the child's own experience marked a major shift in the more authoritarian, behaviorist approach to learning (and, as we know thanks to James Gee, better incorporates the student's primary Discourses by developing lenses through which a student can transfer new knowledge of their secondary Discourses).  According to Dewey, the student is at the center of the learning process and are active co-constructors of knowledge.

Huey, whose seminal book The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading (1908) may be worth taking a look at (but who is so widely-cited that I likely will simply keep my eyes open for what the major relevant takeaways are), found that it takes longer for us to read unrelated letters or words aloud than it does for us to read words combined into meaningful units.  This is an important early finding in reading education, as it shows us that the instruction of nonsensical sounds (such as isolated phonemes) is more difficult, and that students would be better taught to read using meaningful words. 

Other advocates of the meaning-centered approach include whole language philosophers, such as psycholinguistics researchers and Noam Chomsky, who emphasizes that the deep structure of a text is connected not to the reader's own knowledge and to the rest of the text.  These advocates continue to remind us that "reading is not word-centered but meaning-centered, a transaction between the print and the reader" (p. 18).  Further, social constructivists remind us that "knowledge is always in the process of being negotiated," especially through our development of new Discourses and identitity development.