Learning to Read, the self-directed version.
Phonics v. balanced literacy, natural learning, and is SOR the final word?
Today I’m sharing a post I wrote a few years ago for my website. It’s about learning to read - looking at the available research, what is missing, and how this is helpful for our homeschooled and/or self-directed children. I’ve made a few edits to the original piece.
The past few years I’ve been on a small quiet mission to try to figure out how the research around literacy applies to my self-directed children, and how it can apply to children who are home educated in an informal, consent-based manner (which includes unschooled, self-directed children, but also any eclectic homeschoolers and others who care about consent).
One point of contention is whether including an awareness of phonemes, phonograms and phonics, is a necessary component of learning to read, AND of further literacy development leading to skilled reading. Another is whether there needs to be explicit phonics instruction in order to learn to read, whether phonemic awareness can happen in a less explicit way, or whether most children will ‘pick up’ reading just by being surrounded by the written word in many forms.
The context of all this are the so-called Reading Wars. In US schools, balanced literacy has been the norm and there is a current push towards changing this, and incorporating explicit Phonics programs. This podcast lays it all out for you and is worth a listen. I do want to point out that the UK has had decades of explicit phonics instruction in schools, and literacy rates still aren’t what they should be.
Anyway, moving on.
For the purpose of this post, I’ll call emergent reading (the sort of independent reading that children do at the very beginning) simply ‘reading’ or ‘learning to read.’ Some may consider this sort of reading to be achieved once children can decode AND understand text. There’s an actual equation for this! (Here.) Some have raised issues about how reading isn’t a finite skill and there’s almost no stark beginning and end to it. Right now I’ll assume that ‘learning to read’ is the ability to decode the words (recognise and pronounce them) and fully understand their meaning.
As an aside though, skilled readers is what we ideally want, and let me explain what I mean when I say this is “what we want.” It has helped me to view reading as a combination of skills that a child acquires, and that weave together to form a rope that is ‘skilled reading’ ( Scarborough’s Reading Rope, 2001; SCORE, 2020). Many children will ‘learn to read,’ even though they may not yet be skilled readers. Many children will pick up these skills intentionally and consciously and others almost without knowing or noticing. Some children may pick up some skills and not others, and not ever become skilled readers (the statistics for literacy in the US are a reflection of this). I’ll come back to this later.
Words and texts are everywhere, and I think we can all agree that reading is an essential skill. Becoming a skilled reader helps a child access books, research, courses, online resources or programs, further education of any kind. It opens a whole lot of doors in terms of self-directed education. As far as I’m concerned, skilled reading is something I prioritize in supporting. Like, I am not sitting back and waiting for it to happen, I am actively creating a home and general vibe that centres literacy. We don’t all have to do this - this is my choice, because I’m a reader and I love words! You might be a visual artist and your home might be full of beautiful art. I am not saying we should all centre literacy.
But, I am saying that no matter who you are, skilled reading will be important in almost all lines of work, in engaging with civil society, politics, activism, and all legal, administrative and healthcare information in an informed way. We probably should want our children to become skilled readers – to have the ability to read, understand and engage with written text at a high level. We don’t *only* need them to pick up basic reading – we need them to keep improving until they are skilled. Nikolai Pizarro speaks about literacy as a tool for liberation, and I love all of her work on this.
Even if you personally don’t want this for your children, I think we need to consider whether they might want it for themselves in the future. (I’m going to set aside the need/desire many of us might have of having our children love to read for pleasure. I’m not saying this is either a good or bad or neutral thing – I’m simply not going to deal with this aspect of reading in this piece. But I do have a short post about it here.)
Ok, lets get to the juicy part now. There seems to be a lot of chat in unschool circles about how reading is “natural” and how children will “just pick it up.” There are all sorts of analogies for this. Some compare reading to speaking – humans are primed for picking up spoken language, surely reading is the same? Children learn so many other things, like walking for example, by observing, watching, and experimenting. Why would reading be any different? Carol Black has written a very persuasive, beautiful essay about this and I recommend reading it.
It makes a sort of rational sense that if children are able to learn most things without intervention, why wouldn’t they be able to learn reading “naturally”? I was super sold on this. I dismissed phonics programmes as schoolish interference in children’s natural process. I believed that simply waiting, trusting and supporting appropriately would do the trick. To an extent, I still believe this. For many kids, it DOES do the trick. (Both my children learned with relatively little explicit instruction - but I really dislike when people generalize based on their own children, so I’m not going to do that here!)
Also, I suppose it depends on what you mean by waiting, trusting and supporting. I don’t believe that phonemic awareness or phonics instruction (when asked!) is incompatible with trusting and supporting. But hear me out.
The first point that I think is really really important to bear in mind is this: humans are NOT wired for decoding written text. Linguists have talked a lot about how we are primed for language – what they mean by this, I believe, is that we are primed for *communication* and talking and language was invented for that purpose. Kids learn to speak their native languages without being taught – they learn through observing, and listening, and trying and failing, and getting adult feedback on their attempts. They learn “naturally” without being systematically taught (although I should say this is not the case for ALL children), but they don’t just “pick it up” - they get constant feedback, sometimes correction, sustained and constant support in learning their spoken language. Communication is something most animal species are wired for, and something that is essential for survival, AND we are not bystanders as our children learn to speak.
I am not sure we are primed for reading and writing. Nothing about our brains is primed for reading (SCORE, 2009). Sure, we invented reading. We also invented coding. I don’t think anyone would claim that coding is “natural”. Some people might get there in a self-directed, informal, “natural” way after a lot of time and practice, but others (like me) will not get there without instruction. Or at all (me again!). This serves to illustrate that learning to read doesn’t *have* to be a natural process by definition, simply because humans do it. We do a lot of things that I wouldn’t describe as “natural”!!
Not all human processes and skills are “natural’ by definition. (And also, we could talk about what ‘natural’ even means in this context.)
Written language evolved after millennia of humanity living without it. Perhaps with time our brains will rewire to make it easier for us to pick it up, but brains evolve a lot slower than our environment does, and I haven’t seen a ton of evidence to suggest that our brains have radically changed to make literacy “natural.”
Reading involves rewiring our brains. This is a quick overview of how our brain is trained and re-wired to read. If you consider that English written text is a code where letters and combination of letters stand for different sounds, and words stand for meaning, then reading is a bit like cracking a code. Once you know what letters or groups of letters stand for, what their sound is, and how to combine those sounds to make words, you can ‘read’ those words, in the sense that you can pronounce them (you may still not actually know what they mean). Once you know what words mean, and how to combine them into sentences (grammar), you can read a sentence, pronounce all the words, and understand the meaning of the words and the sentence as a whole. This is my simplistic version of a very complex process (SCORE, 2020).
In fact it’s very much like riding a bike (but not in the way people usually assume). You don’t just get on a bike and immediately ride it, in the same way you don’t just open a book and immediately read. I spent 30 minutes watching my 15-month-old niece trying to figure out her new tricycle. First she sat backwards on it and pushed her feet down on the floor, moving backwards. She spent quite a while doing this. Then she turned herself around on the seat and practiced moving the handlebars. Then she pushed her feet into the ground and moved forwards a bit, then backwards a bit. She never did get around to using the pedals. Not today, at least. And this isn’t even a bike, it’s a tricycle! She will eventually figure it out, and then perhaps graduate to a balance bike, and then a fully-fledge bicycle. Much liked becoming a reader, bike-riding is not “natural” – it takes time, a ton of practice, observation, experimentation and perhaps, for some kids, scaffolding and a supportive adult to offer suggestions, champion, sometimes even instruct.
And that brings me to my next point: it is different for every single child. Some children will require more adult intervention, some less. Sure, the human brain is similar in many ways, but none of us learn in exactly the same way.
So we can agree that reading is a learned skill, and that learning to read is made up of many ‘strands’ of skills that include understanding that letters and words are made-up symbols that stand in for concepts or objects, or represent meaning, language comprehension skills such as understanding meaning and knowledge of grammar, and word recognition skills that include phonological awareness, decoding (knowing that ‘a’ makes a specific sound), and sight recognition (of words such as ‘the’).
Agreeing on this means that in order to become a skilled reader, children will need to master all of these skills. Some children will seem to “naturally” pick up reading, when in fact what they have done is their brains have unconsciously cracked the code of reading without explicit, systematic instruction from an adult, or app, or programme, or much of anything other than just exposure to language and text in its many forms. According to studies, this is a minority of children: between 1% and 7% (SCORE, 2020; Margrain, 2005; Snow, 2007). But given that some of the studies are done on either kindergarten children, or school children below age 8, I personally would need to see further studies to be able to pin down a number. I agree with Carol Black when she says that you can’t generalize about all children based on the research on children learning in schools. It just isn’t representative of the way children as a whole learn.
These percentages come from studies that are based on children who could read before they started formal schooling at either kindergarten and first grade. Only a tiny minority of children could. What this really tells us is that a tiny minority of *school* children learn reading ‘by themselves’ before they start school. I wonder what this number would have been were there a study that looked at informally home educated children – perhaps only a tiny minority would have learned to read ‘by themselves’ at age 5 or 6, but perhaps a larger chunk would have learned by ages 8,9,10, or later. We can’t know this from school children because at age 6, systematic reading instruction begins, and therefore you can no longer claim that a child is learning to read ‘by themselves’ even if perhaps they are ignoring all teaching, and in fact learning by themselves.
The other issue with the “science of reading” is that the children who don’t learn to read by Grade 1 or 2, are then officially “behind.” This probably makes it harder for them to actually take their time and pick up reading later on, for a variety of reasons - feeling incapable, stress, learning difficulties that go undetected, instruction that has moved on, and more. So we will never know whether these children, if given time and space and support, would have just organically learned later on.
The other issue that comes up with studies on reading, is that many of them measure learning as if it were by definition the direct result of teaching. This is the “classic assumption.. that children learn because they are taught.” (Trevarthen, 1995), and that when we measure children’s learning, it is the direct result of teaching. In fact, learning is much more complex than that. There is a lot of research on how our conventional constructs of learning are flawed, or incomplete, and children’s learning is in fact much more complex and there is so much of it that is simply not measurable or even evident to adults.
From looking at the very few studies done on home educated children, and the one and only study of how home educated children learn to read (Pattison, 2013), it seems that children who are home educated in largely informal, consent-based and self-directed homes, will tend to learn to read in their own time, which can range from age 2 to the teenage years, and with a combination of informal methods. These include but are not limited to observation, conversations, exploration, and a variety of activities that might be adult or child-led, or might be online, and that sometimes involve the use of Phonics instruction, and sometimes do not. I think this, and Harriet Pattison’s book, is valuable research because it pushes back against the conventional ways we assume children learn, and considers that it’s a much more complex, less measurable, sometimes relational and sometimes hidden, process. Both Harriet Pattison and Alan Thomas have done valuable research around this process.
Just to go back to some of the research around reading, most of which is done on children in school settings. The research shows us that because written language is a code, and because the English language is essentially a code made up of letters and combinations of letters that represent specific sounds (phonograms), and because there is in fact a logic to the way phonograms work in English, explicit, systematic instruction of Phonics in schools has generally speaking been shown to work more effectively than Whole Word instruction (where children learn letter names and sounds and then ‘figure out’ words by repetition and being read to) or ‘balanced literacy’ (which is basically a no-mans-land between Whole word and Phonics where no method is implemented properly, and it takes place in some schools in an attempt to satisfy both camps). Basically, the available research tells us that in a school setting, and perhaps in a more formal homeschool setting (although we have no research to show for this), Phonics instruction will be more effective in helping your child learn to read, and eventually become a skilled reader. (Although, one recent study claims that phonics instruction in schools does help some children in the short-run, but makes no difference in the longer-term.)
The problem we encounter as unschoolers and informal home educators is the following: we don’t tend to implement anything systematically and regularly. That’s just not how we roll. However, what we do do, is we give our child a lot of space for the other ways children learn: play, observation, exploration, conversations and “doing nothing” (Thomas & Pattison, 2007), the latter of which is a way for researchers to account for how children learn in ways that are not immediately or ever apparent to adult observers. Our self-directed children learn in these ways, and many others.
As such, the studies on Phonics tell us that knowledge of Phonics helps children learn to read in settings where they are mostly exposed to systematic instruction, and less exposed to the other ways children who are home educated informally might learn. We may also stretch this research to tell us that, if in doubt, and if you are not sure you are providing your child with a variety of rich unstructured, informal learning, then a Phonics program or Phonics app is more likely to get your child reading, and also help them become more skilled in the long-run, than leaving them to their own devices. That said, there is no research that directly confirms or challenges this statement – we need more research on self-directed children!
For those of us who feel confident that our home facilitates our child to learn in a myriad of different ways, it might make sense to assume they will learn to read. And because we are usually in no big rush, we trust it will happen. Based on the ONE research study on how children learn to read at home, *it’s likely* that if children have a multidimensional and text-rich environment, and an adult who is knowledgeable enough to support and facilitate (or who knows how to access the knowledge they don’t have,) then they will learn to read. There seems to be a lot of informal evidence in the homeschool community that would confirm this idea.
(Side note: Many reference the low literacy rates in the US to mean that skilled reading does not come, even later on. This may be so – and it may be a case for phonics instructions in schools. Harriet Pattison’s study also does not follow up to see if children who learn to read then become skilled readers. I tend to think that if you are in a school setting and are labelled as ‘behind’ or a ‘late reader’, this sticks with you, and may even prevent a child from becoming a skilled reader in future – whereas a home educated child who is given time and space, who sees themself as a life-long learning, may not feel this sort of pressure. (We can’t know this for sure because - no studies comparing homeschooled to schooled children who learn reading later in life!))
The way I see it is this: research in schools seems to show that Phonics is helpful in learning to read. So, knowing what we know about how reading is like a code we all need to crack, in one way or another, why wouldn’t I support my child with phonological awareness? Why wouldn’t I consider the research and bring in some of the accumulated knowledge about how our brains crack the code of written language to our home learning?
I realise I haven’t spoken much about trust – as unschoolers we fundamentally trust that our children will learn what they need to learn, when they need to learn. I’m fully behind this concept. We are consent-based & self-directed at core. That will always be my baseline. I simply don’t think that an awareness of phonograms and phonics contradicts this fundamental principle in any way; in the same way that if my child was really interested in engineering, I would facilitate their knowledge of things like the Laws of Motion and other principles of Physics, because I recognise this knowledge could help them significantly. Of course I would only offer if I saw they were interested in digging deeper, or if I noticed they were stuck and that this knowledge would help them.
I do the same with my knowledge of phonics – I offer it if asked, when I see they are stuck or struggling and might be receptive to it, when I feel like it might support them get where they want to go. This is totally possible.
The last thing I’d like to mention is that I haven’t spoken about SO MANY OTHER aspects of this topic. One is that critics of the science of reading have claimed it does not consider neurodivergent children and how they learn, and that extrapolates from one group of children to all children. Perhaps there is validity in these claims – I didn’t have space to address this here because I wanted to focus on the idea that phonics makes sense as an effective way to decode language – this makes logical sense, and has been seen to work. I also haven’t spoken about what ‘reading’ actually means – research also differs on when a child is considered as being ‘able to read,’ because reading is not a finite skill that you achieve, it is constantly changing and is multidimensional. This would need a whole other post.
Lastly, I would like to see more studies on self-directed children because I believe that further quantitative and qualitative data on how these children learn to read is absolutely necessary. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Thanks for reading!
References:
Scarborough’s Reading Rope in The Science of Reading (link below)
The Science of Reading, State Collaborative on Reforming Education (SCORE), 2001: https://tnscore.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Science-of-Reading-2020.pdf
Precocious Readers, Margrain, Valerie Gail Margrain, 2005,
http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/handle/10063/481
Snow, Catherine E. 2017. Early literacy development and instruction: An overview. In The Routledge international handbook of early literacy education : A contemporary guide to literacy teaching and interventions in a global context, eds. Natalia Kucirkova, Catherine E. Snow, Vibeke Grøver, and Catherine McBride-Chang, 5-13. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/32872030/Snow_EarlyLiteracyDevelopmentAndInstruction.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Harriet Pattison study https://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/5051/1/Pattison14PhD.pdf
How children learn at home, by Alan Thomas & Harriet Pattison, 2007
Rethinking Reading, by Harriet Pattison (2021)
LSE study https://cep.lse.ac.uk/_NEW/NEWS/abstract.asp?index=6236
As a former speech and language therapist and now home educating mother, this resonates immensely. I have spoken with Harriet on this topic and also echo your words of there being a need for more research with populations of children learning beyond school in order to offer an alternative body of evidence to the biased sample base underpinning phonics. However, I suspect (having been that person that drove adult instruction of phonological awareness once upon a time), there’s more flex in the normative data than is interpreted on the ground. It’s the external and internal pressures for children to all be at the same pace and hitting the same norms that is problematic. I now see phonological awareness and decoding as a spring board of information that I come and go from, as and when my son asks or is interested in the written form, appears stuck or responsive to guidance. Much like many areas of learning. We don’t do regular instructive adult driven sessions of learning to read, we do instead use the information as he seeks it. My analogy being, much like a filing cabinet drawer, when he asks a question or is engaged in an activity and responsive to guidance this is when the cognitive drawer opens, I offer information, the drawer closes when cognitive, interactional and cultural process moves on. It’s responsive as opposed to instructive. I imagine I could talk for hours with you on this, beautiful piece of writing and expression.
This was really helpful, thank you!