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KVOS Special: The First R
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- Good evening.
- Have you ever stopped to ask yourself,
- how does a person learn to read?
- We often hear a great many glib answers to that question when,
- but when you stop to think it over carefully,
- you realize that how a person learns to read
- is one of those great mysteries, as is any kind of learning.
- However, we have discovered and developed
- a variety of ways and theories and methods
- of teaching reading.
- Tonight, one of the leading experts in teaching reading
- is with us.
- He is Dr. Donald Durrell, professor
- of English at Boston University in Massachusetts.
- Talking with him is Dr. James L Jarrett,
- president of Western Washington State College.
- Tonight, you've been listening to a conversation between Dr.
- James L Jarrett, president of Western Washington State
- College, and Dr. Donald Durrell, professor of education
- at Boston University in Massachusetts
- and authority in the field of teaching reading.
- Goodnight.
- Dr. Durrell, I have the general impression, which
- I imagine you share, that seldom in our history in this country
- has there been as much interest as there is today
- in the problem of reading--
- in learning to read, and continuing to read.
- And I should like to ask you a general evaluation
- on your part, how well do American youth read today?
- Well, fortunately, they can still read,
- and I think they're reading better than they ever have.
- It's a little hard to prove this,
- except for the fact that colleges are more and more
- pleased with the quality of people that come to them,
- and are getting fussier and fussier about the people
- they take in.
- Also any types of measures we apply,
- that we're used 20 years ago or 30 years ago,
- versus today's youth will show a higher degree
- of achievement of reading.
- On the other hand, you still have
- many schools in which the reading is rather poorly
- handled.
- You can't generalize for American schools,
- because within the same 10-mile radius,
- you're going to have reading taught very well--
- must emphasize-- beautifully in one school system that's
- more casual.
- Or even the same building--
- I recall visiting a school just before the school closed
- in Massachusetts.
- In the same building, one extremely
- skilled first grade teacher, across the hall
- another who was clumsy.
- By the way, both were my graduates.
- Well, I guess you're saying in the latter,
- then, that this is not a matter of difference in methods--
- one using one method, and another teacher
- using another method, and that accounting for the difference.
- But just something about the general skill of the teacher?
- Well, it's how well the time is being used,
- and whether the material is suitable for the child.
- If you have a youngster that has no ear for sounds in words,
- then he can't use phonics, and therefore,
- if he doesn't get that help, he doesn't go.
- A skilled teacher gives his help.
- A child who is weak in letter knowledge,
- doesn't know too much about this is given help immediately.
- Some people, the child spends a lot
- of time coloring six hens red, where another person spends
- that same amount of time in reading several hundred words.
- So there's a degree of intensity,
- a degree of a suitability, a degree of fitting instruction
- to the level of the ability of the child.
- And these are a whole series of skill,
- it's not just one technique.
- As a matter of fact, there's so little difference
- among the general approaches in beginning reading,
- it's pretty hard to tell a difference.
- Only the experts want to quarrel about
- whether you do vowels first or consonants first.
- I see.
- It's very minor.
- One does hear though, today a good deal of criticism
- directed against the teaching of reading, particularly
- as I read the popular literature,
- against what is believed to be a neglect of phonics.
- Are we today neglecting to teach pupils
- to read so that they can pronounce
- the words which they read?
- One hears all of the stories about how
- here is a pupil who has, in some sense, learned to read.
- His eyes travel over the page, and he has some comprehension,
- but you ask him to read aloud, and he is lost.
- Or you ask him to pronounce a word,
- and he pronounces it in some perfectly arbitrary fashion.
- Now, is this a well-founded criticism
- of a lot of the teaching today?
- We had, in the 1930s, when some of the more idiotic
- progressives were in charge of certain small numbers
- of schools, a whispering campaign against phonics.
- It had no standing whatever with the research men
- or the men who were in the teacher education, that
- had some concern about the realities of service.
- And there's been never a colleague of mine
- that I know of who's been anti-phonics.
- As a matter of fact, most of us are constantly
- looking to make phonics more effective.
- But so many people think that any phonics is good.
- The first 2,000 reading failures--
- I've been studying reading failures since 1925--
- and the first 2,000 I saw were in Iowa.
- In those days-- '25, '27--
- the children who were failing came through Beacon and Aldine
- phonics, the cough and sneeze kind of phonics.
- And they were reading failures, so the phonics
- didn't correct them.
- The trouble was, in their case, well,
- that the youngsters didn't notice the separate sounds
- in spoken words.
- And it's a little hard to explain.
- A youngster, in order to use phonics,
- has got to notice the speech sounds.
- And I brought along here--
- this is one thing I did bring along.
- Good.
- Somewhere.
- A way that you can tell whether a child has this ear for
- sounds.
- See, the phonetic work is so designed that he who speaks
- should be able to read, but only if he notices
- sounds in the words he speaks.
- And many youngsters speak beautifully,
- have high intelligence, fine speaking vocabularies,
- but never noticed that the first sound in magic, many, machine,
- had a "mm" in them.
- They don't know whether it's "tuh" or "guh" or so on,
- even though they've been taught phonics.
- So one of the things that I regularly
- do with a group of youngsters that are having trouble,
- I will hand them these four letters, same back, front.
- I've got a set for each one, because usually there'll
- be five or six in a classroom early in the year, that
- will have no work.
- So I say to them, show me M, show me B, G, F,
- and the children hold up the right letters.
- I see.
- And they've had a little phonics, you say, show me "mm,"
- and up comes "mm."
- Show me "buh," "guh," and this comes up.
- Fine, they got the phonics.
- Then you say, show me the first letter in this word--
- fountain.
- And up comes "buh" and up comes "mm."
- They have no idea that fountain has a "ff" in it.
- And this is many bright youngsters,
- and more boys than girls.
- And how do you go about correcting this?
- How would you proceed to teach a student
- that that F sound, as it actually occurs in the word,
- is [INAUDIBLE].
- Well, you have to--
- first, it's a problem of identifying it.
- And therefore, we go back to speech correction techniques
- for this.
- You to a child, say these after me, 5, 15--
- and you watch the lips and the teeth--
- 5, 15, half, thief, rough--
- so they can feel it.
- And that's one of the ways that some of the youngsters,
- who have not gotten it yet, get it.
- Or how an L feels.
- Like, listen, lake, wall, tall, tell.
- And they feel it.
- You go back to speech correction,
- just as if they had speech defects,
- and then they begin to feel this.
- One of the easiest ones, that's more dramatic for the kids,
- is pin, pipe, paste, tap.
- Just let me make sure I'm understanding this.
- Are you saying that you do this for the average and normal
- child just in the process of teaching him,
- or are you talking [INAUDIBLE]?
- Now, as to the first question, you
- make sure that the child coming into grade 1
- has this ability to notice "mm" in magic,
- the "t" in take or ticket in the first week of the school.
- If he doesn't, he can't use look-and-say methods,
- he can't use phonic methods at all.
- Because without noticing the sound structure in the words--
- and about 1/3 third of your first graders
- are deficient in this, and they are
- the ones you have to land on and really work.
- And this should be done in the first two
- months of the first grade.
- Well, now if it's--
- If it's not done, the youngster is going to go through the year
- and he's never going to catch out
- that trick of the tie between the sounds,
- because he doesn't know the sound
- and he can't make the tie.
- And this is the primary reason for our reading failures.
- Well, if one starts learning reading that early,
- in the first grade, it sounds to me
- as if there must be something that
- should go on before the child ever hits the first grade.
- Do you have any suggestions to parents
- about preparing their students for this traumatic experience?
- I let parents alone.
- I'm maybe alone in this.
- But when I was 19, I gave lectures to mothers
- on how to raise children.
- But in 1933, when my first child was born,
- I quit teaching child psychology,
- because I think child psychology should be taught only by people
- that have no children.
- They can be sure.
- And I'm grateful if parents send their child
- to school with certain--
- well, if a child knows the names of letters
- before he comes to school, if he knows that this is an M, fine.
- If he knows almost all of them know that this is O
- and this is X--
- those are ones.
- And they learn a lot of the words-- stop, street signs,
- school signs, all sorts of essential signs
- you have to do nowadays.
- And the television has tremendous amount
- of impact, mostly ads.
- After all, they play up letters on all kinds of television ads.
- And so the child gets this.
- And a child that comes to school knowing his letters
- learns to read faster.
- We can test this by teaching six words in the morning,
- and then seeing how many the child remembers
- in the afternoon.
- The children who remember all of them
- are virtually all youngsters who know their letters.
- So if you can to help your child know the letters--
- And this means all the letters [INAUDIBLE]??
- Yeah, and also--
- Not just an M and N, for instance?
- Well, we're grateful if he knows the capital letters.
- But if he knows the lowercase, fine.
- But one of the problems in lowercase letters is this--
- the n and h look a lot alike.
- The stem is higher.
- Of course, the ones that give the worst
- trouble in lowercase letters all loops on stems.
- We ought to have a more distinctive thing here.
- And by the way, also one of the things too,
- we use print rather than the cursive writing,
- primarily because you want to diminish--
- well, look, if this is an f, what is this?
- Yes.
- I mean--
- Two separate [INAUDIBLE].
- Two separate symbols.
- Like if we start learning a foreign symbolism,
- say Sanskrit or something like this,
- and they had two ways of doing it,
- it's lots harder than having one way.
- So generally--
- Or even the learning of German, for that matter.
- We would rather not have to learn the script
- at the same time that we're learning the language.
- And so yeah, it's easier.
- Although many youngsters get going in the grade 1,
- immediately move over to this on their own,
- even though you do this, because they think this is grown up.
- I see.
- And so they want to write like the grownups do.
- And these are the ones who know these.
- So if they know their letters before they come in--
- as a matter of fact, the three and four-year-olds are
- the first--
- that's the age where they first show the desire to write.
- And I let them write.
- Look, there are quite a number of books that tell
- parents don't teach reading.
- It's a very, very delicate thing.
- Now you don't believe this?
- Nonsense.
- You can read yourself and don't lie to the child
- like you can't do anything wrong.
- Because the child, anything you do, and the teacher's smart,
- she can utilize to a good advantage.
- I see.
- And many youngsters force you to teach them to read at home.
- You don't have much choice.
- Because they bring words to you, or they
- start writing and make you spell letters for them,
- spell words for them.
- And sure, go ahead.
- That is, if you yourself know all the letters
- and can read the words, why then help the child.
- The only thing a parent can do wrong-- or two.
- One, if the parent gets the books from the school
- and ruins them for the child before the child gets
- to the teacher, this is bad business.
- Let the school's material alone.
- The second thing, if the child doesn't
- come to you for the lesson.
- In other words, if you are driving the youngster
- and then he begins to run away from you,
- then you make reading distasteful.
- And it's a little harder for him although he can get over it.
- As a matter of fact, I think there
- are quite a lot of things that could be done in kindergartens.
- But I'm not enough crusader for that
- because I find that whatever child brings to grade 1,
- we know what to do for him generally.
- Although one thing many teachers are not doing well enough
- is the ear training and even letters.
- We've had, by the way, a whispering
- campaign from some odd source against teaching letters.
- But every single study since the beginning of research
- in reading shows if a child knows his letters and can write
- them or can tell you what the names-- that that's an h,
- that's an n, that's a p, and this is an m, and so on--
- this always is advantageous in learning.
- [INTERPOSING VOICES]
- But for some reason or other, some people
- are against it, as though it's some mysterious cult
- that you should not do it.
- I don't know why.
- We get a lot of oddities in education.
- Particular from people who've taught one child,
- who had one course in psychology,
- and they give you the true gospel.
- Let's go back to the parents for a moment.
- Now you're saying, if I understand you,
- that though the parents shouldn't force
- the issue, especially to make reading distasteful,
- he should seize upon whatever interest the child has.
- And I suppose you're saying the child normally
- does have some interest in learning letters and so forth.
- Suppose then that the parent has helped his child
- to learn the letters.
- What else?
- Is there anything that he can do or might helpfully do--
- for instance, about this matter of learning sounds?
- Oh, that's a little tougher.
- You can if you want to make a plan of it.
- You saw about the Denver TV program
- for parents on how to prepare your child for reading.
- They scared me because it sounded
- as though if you don't do this, your child's bound to be bad,
- fail in reading.
- But there they suggested that you place objects
- around the room and play a game and have
- a child bring a basket and say, "buh" and a ball and say--
- this is contrived.
- Too much for me.
- But it's good.
- You can do it.
- Or on this table, I must confess that one
- of my three daughters, who was quite obviously not skilled
- in sounds about age three or four, we began to say to her,
- I see things to eat that begin with "k"--
- cookies, corn, cake.
- This is kind of useful.
- But I don't take it too seriously.
- One of the other things, by the way,
- though this is all beginning.
- Obviously, parents who read newspapers, who have youngsters
- read back to them, and who read stories to them at night,
- and who go over picture books with them and so on,
- they are obviously-- all this is to advantage.
- And the youngsters or the families that memorize
- poetry around the table, any kind of thing.
- Any exciting reading.
- Fathers that remember poems and do this.
- It always gives a literary bent.
- And I think it rather helps.
- I was going to mention the matter of poetry too.
- Around my household, we do a lot of rhyming--
- not necessarily with the intention
- of helping them with reading.
- But I should think it might actually
- afford some ear training.
- Exactly.
- It does.
- They get some sounds in mind.
- A lot of the Mother Goose rhymes and other somewhat high
- alliteration so that you get a pressing with single sound.
- All good, sure.
- But I think probably more important
- than the technical details of the anatomy of symbols
- is this business of having an interest in books, and reading,
- and library borrowing on the part of the parent.
- And they're bringing up books with [INAUDIBLE]..
- You think that is important--
- Well, of course.
- --to use the library?
- Naturally.
- Because if you don't, why bother to learn
- to read if you don't use it?
- And the key to fine reading instruction
- is excellent use of reading.
- Dr. Durrell, I'm now wondering about teacher education.
- As you know, I have some interest in the subject.
- And today at Western Washington State College,
- we are certainly putting more emphasis
- upon learning to teach reading than previously.
- And there is more interest shown in the part of students
- and returning teachers.
- I'd like to hear you talk about this for a moment or two.
- I know that you have been in the teacher education business
- now for a long time, and certainly have some ideas
- about the training, the education--
- particularly of the elementary teacher-to-be,
- or the one who is coming back for refresher work.
- What would you say about this big subject?
- Believe me, it's big.
- That's all I'll say.
- I suppose that anybody who is a professor of education,
- particularly at reading, every year
- tries some way to make his work more effective.
- And I've been working at it a long while.
- One of the big problems is that the teachers now
- are not coming into colleges.
- The teachers are coming from the homes.
- nine out of 10 teachers, in many places,
- are mothers and grandmothers.
- So that what you do in the college now
- my effect another generation, but now now.
- And many of these women are teaching in order
- to send their daughters to school.
- And then the daughters teach until the first child comes,
- and that's it.
- So we have a constantly changing profession.
- If we had a continuing professional group,
- it'd be much easier.
- Then what we do in the colleges might make a difference.
- So that I think a large part of our service
- has got to be off-campus, in-service work, done out there
- when schools are in session, and done with demonstrations.
- Because it's very difficult to convey by talk techniques as
- involved as taking care of 30 children with differing
- abilities, with different progress rates,
- different levels, and different kinds of weaknesses.
- You can tell about this, but this is merely
- an evasion of the real problem.
- You've got to be able to demonstrate it.
- So I think that demonstrations by the professor
- are going to be--
- are very important.
- And we do this.
- And rather than simply giving the general principles.
- So this should be done outside.
- I think also that there's far more learning by the student
- if he is teaching children at the time he's learning.
- And therefore, we are now at our place rotating all our juniors,
- 300 of them, through the clinic.
- So while they're taking courses in reading with me,
- they are tutoring children at the same time.
- And I find this far more effective.
- Do you?
- I had this experience of teaching half my course
- in reading before an eight-week bout of student teaching,
- and half afterward.
- The students came after the teaching just
- loaded with questions.
- And every question they asked me I
- had answered in the course prior to the time they went out.
- Yes.
- But then it wasn't meaningful at that time.
- Wasn't meaningful at all.
- And this is one of our problems of teaching
- before you're ready.
- So I think that we've got to change
- much of our professional education,
- but not reading only.
- A lot of it's going to have to be done through experiences
- with children.
- Education, I think, is going to become a laboratory subject.
- And so we're going to see much of our psychology,
- other courses, taught through laboratory approaches.
- And I suppose that in part means that some of the teaching
- is going to go on after the teacher has started to teach.
- Well, I'm sure for you and for me, I
- suppose I learn more each year than any of my students do.
- Because I'm engaging in a number of studies,
- and I can make a longer list of things
- I'm ignorant on in my field than a student can possibly
- who doesn't know he's ignorant.
- So naturally, as long as you live in the moment
- to the student, the more likely he
- is able to tackle the problems of ignorance in the profession.
- So we need a lot of research.
- Sure, we don't know how to teach all these youngsters.
- I should've said earlier when I said that some schools do very
- well, some do badly, I think that our best approach
- to improving reading is going to be in improving materials
- of instruction, that are self-directing and
- self-correcting.
- I see.
- So that you can broadcast those wider,
- to make it easier for teachers to teach well.
- I think we'll probably get farther
- in building materials that make it easy to serve a child
- well than by just telling him how.
- I take it that among those important materials
- are those afforded by the library.
- I've heard you talk about the importance of the library,
- maybe particularly for the advanced child,
- the child who has made good progress.
- The one thing, by the way--
- He needs to broaden his experience.
- I'm told here that you go in, that you have lots
- of elementary school libraries.
- In New England, this is one of the shames that we have.
- Our elementary school libraries are very poor.
- I see.
- We have relatively few schools that
- have a library in connection.
- We depend upon 30 books being sent in once a month,
- and other kinds of things which are useful.
- Of course, in the smaller towns, your public library
- is often very closely tied to the school
- and is good cooperation.
- But there's far too little in the way of library equipment
- in the schools in our area.
- The library then is the place the child
- goes to go beyond the very elementary kind of reading.
- Perhaps he becomes a [INAUDIBLE] reader.
- That's where he learns to read.
- You don't learn to read by having reading lessons anymore
- than you learn to play the piano by having piano lessons.
- It's the practice in between that makes the difference.
- And so the youngsters who spend hours and hours in avid reading
- are the ones-- that's where reading is learned,
- that's where reading speed, that's
- where reading vocabulary is expanded, by voluntary reading
- with a high degree of interest surely.
- Every good reader is a person who's read a lot,
- and has used the library and found it exciting.
- Dr. Durrell, I'm now going to make a complaint that I have
- heard from many businessmen and employers of various kinds,
- and that is about the applicants for secretary's jobs who come
- to us who cannot spell.
- Now I'm not in a position to generalize
- about the extent of this, but certainly a casual observation
- would reveal that there is a lot of very, very poor spelling
- that goes on.
- And it is a characteristic of a lot of people.
- I'm sure that this is a subject that you
- have given some thought to.
- What about the teaching of spelling, the learning
- how to spell?
- Well, the problem, of course, is found in the fact
- that English sounds have different spellings.
- So we're going to blame it on the English language now.
- Well, I think part, of course we can.
- I'll just take for example--
- it's so very easy to demonstrate the number of problems.
- Frankly, I think the men who are worried
- because their secretaries can't spell,
- that means that nobody can spell in the office.
- [LAUGHTER]
- So the secretary can [INAUDIBLE]..
- You have to have somebody that can spell.
- Spelling doesn't correlate with intelligence.
- It's bad because of the variable nature of English spelling.
- The more you think, the less sure you are.
- You ask a person, how do you spell a word?
- And they say, I'll write it and see.
- Then the next thing they say, if you hadn't asked me,
- I could have told you.
- Now I'm not sure.
- Because of course, it doesn't follow any logic.
- For example, those of us who work in this field,
- you count words, you count sounds in words.
- The linguistics boys are playing with this also.
- But take the sounds, air.
- How do you spell "air"?
- Well, I'll turn to the board again.
- The most common way you spell "air" in English
- is A-I-R. And you can spell it, of course,
- the second most common way.
- E-A-R in primary grade words.
- And the third most common way of spelling "air" is C-A-R-E.
- Well now, how do you spell "air"?
- You've got two choices.
- What's the logic behind it?
- There's no logic behind it.
- You have to have an image behind each of these words.
- So that actually phonics enables you to misspell words
- correctly.
- So this is one of the problems.
- Well, you've now demonstrated it's
- impossible to learn to spell well, I think.
- No.
- We've been playing with this quite a lot.
- You have to teach in spelling.
- You can't do it by symbolic analysis
- or by phonetic analysis.
- It's got to be done, we find, by imagery behind the word,
- as though all words were homonyms.
- Take this one.
- Same one-- "pare."
- You do it through a usage technique.
- You say, well, which of these mean two partners?
- And you have to have the image behind the word.
- Not only the form of the word, but you've
- got to have this evoke images, you see.
- How about a pear-shaped person?
- Then the image of E-A-R has to come to mind, you see.
- And if you're cutting down things, paring a budget
- or paring your nails-- because nobody pares budgets anymore.
- Washington especially.
- [LAUGHTER]
- You can see my biases.
- But at any rate, you have to have the other.
- And consequently, it is the meaning and imagery that you
- have to emphasize in spelling.
- And so we developed quite a number of imagery techniques
- to keep the meaning high.
- And it's quite surprising that this level--
- you see, part of the jokes we get in this field
- are such things as this.
- I'll see if I can think of one.
- A long stair led to the lady on the balcony.
- How did you get there?
- Which kind of stair led to her?
- I see, yes.
- Or the duke found the duchess sitting on another pier.
- There are problems there.
- So really, you have to learn almost one word at a time.
- [INTERPOSING VOICES]
- Exactly.
- And actually, the writing vocabularies
- are not so awfully large.
- Another one was, if a man has two pairs in his hand,
- is he making salad or playing poker?
- You see.
- I see.
- So the imagery has to be behind the word.
- It is virtually a learning a word
- at a time with the right image.
- That's very helpful.
- We must teach all these words as though they were homonyms.
- Thank you very much, Dr. Durrell.
- You're welcome.