PART I

Long-term Perspectives Each of the authors in this section has served for many years at the forefront of research a n d / o r educational policy; each provides a personal perspective on the progress (or lack thereof) made over the last few decades, sharing a bit of their hard-won wisdom in order to spare others a few mistakes in the future. To offset the amnesia that so freq u e n t l y marks p s y c h o l o g y and education, these essays offer the reader an opportunity to take stock, to see where we have come from, and to learn from the past as we look to the future. Phil Gough's chapter is perhaps the most optimistic of the three, for it documents forward progress in our understanding of the barriers to reading failure. Back in 1979/1980, the theoretical foundation for our current understanding of the necessary precursors to reading success was well-established, but the appealing philosophy underlying whole language held more sway than any empirical findings. In the years since, the empirical evidence speaking to the role of phoneme awareness in reading has been nothing short of remarkable and has come to influence instructional practice. At the same time, teachers everywhere acknowledge that some children need more explicit systematic instruction. Gough urges us to focus on the consensus that has been attained and to build on this momentum. He stresses the need to distinguish between rote "phonics" and the conceptual underpinnings that underlie the alphabetic principle embodied in phoneme awareness. He emphasizes the multiple pieces necessary to ensure reading skill: phoneme awareness and decoding, listening comprehension, and extensive practice with reading itself, noting that no one can fully replace another. Finally, just as he seeks to better educate all of us through this lucid introduction to the basic principles of reading, so he urges that we educate regular and special educators alike in the fundamentals of reading in order that all children have a solid foundation for reading success. As reviewed by Betty Sheffield, the strong focus on and progress in understanding phoneme awareness over the last few decades stands in marked contrast to the almost total neglect of handwriting. Given the paucity of research and the rather dramatic swings in attention paid to handwriting practices over these decades, Sheffield has done us an important service by pulling together relevant sources and possibly reviving interest in a topic that many people w o u l d just as soon not have to deal with. She makes a persuasive case that handwriting is

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an area that deserves systematic consideration and that can make a big difference for children at both the early and later stages of literacy. We can only hope that her thoughtful paper will motivate educators and researchers to begin to look more carefully at the role of handwriting in attaining full literacy. The third paper, by Sylvia Richardson, reminds us that inclusion is but a new name for an old and vexing topic, one that is fascinating for the policy stances taken over the years. Regarding the education of special needs students in regular classrooms, it seems we are destined to make the same mistakes again and again. Ironically, her saga begins thirty years ago with the delegation of inclusion to the states, which is exactly where public policy is headed today. Although encouraged by the gains that have been achieved toward including all children in regular classrooms, and by the avowed involvement of all members of a school system, Richardson remains concerned about the actual content of the instruction. What has been consistently ignored is the need to instill in regular teachers (and the m a n y others dealing with these children) the expertise that used to be the singular domain of the special educator. As Gough has reviewed, we have learned a great deal about how to remove the obstacles to reading success, and it is imperative that we share this knowledge with all who work with children experiencing difficulties in learning to read and write. Although Gough, Sheffield, and Richardson have m a d e their marks on research and practice through quite different venues, they are in solid agreement about what needs to be done today to enhance the opportunity for all children to learn to read and write. All three advocate for better teacher education, and recommend training that is guided by research and by effective practices; all three stress the need to provide this instruction to both regular and special educators at all levels of instruction. All would hope that we can instruct teachers in the understanding of w h y practices evolve, rather than simply dictating that old practices be overthrown completely to be replaced by something new.

How Children Learn to Read and Why They Fail Philip B. Gough University of Texas at Austin

The present article considers the contrast between conceptions of reading as a natural and as an unnatural act, relying on the simple view of reading as a theoretical framework (Gough and Tunmer 1986). According to the simple view, reading comprehension is a product of both listening comprehension and decoding. Here it is argued that the comprehension aspect of reading depends on those same--natural--forces that govern acquisition of spoken language, whereas decoding depends on explicit tutelage, with little evidence that children will induce the cipher from simple exposure to written words and their pronunciations (sight-word instruction). Rejecting both sight-word and phonics instruction as inadequate in and of themselves, evidence is reviewed suggesting that successful readers require explicit awareness of the phonological structure of spoken words, which can and should be taught in kindergarten, prior to formal reading instruction. Beyond this point, reading success depends on a modicum of phonics instruction together with extensive practice with reading itself. In 1980, we (Gough and Hillinger 1980) published a paper entitled "Learning to read: An unnatural act" in the then Bulletin of The Orton Society. Our paper was, in part, intended as a rebuttal to the proposal, offered the previous year by Kenneth and Yetta Goodman (Goodman and Goodman 1979) that learning to read is natural, that if you simply immerse a child in print, they will learn to read as readily as they learn to speak. Annals of Dyslexia, Vol. 46, 1996 Copyright~ 1996 by The Orton Dyslexia Society ISSN 0736-9387

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It seemed to us that the Goodmans' idea flew against some obvious facts. First, learning to speak is universal, while literacy is not. Every child learns the spoken language that surrounds him or her unless it is hidden from him by deafness or from her by a closet door. But millions of people cannot read, either because their language has not been written down, or because they have not learned to read one that has. Second, every scholar we have read believes that language appeared in our species tens of thousands of years before writing. Assuming this is true, then ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: we all learn our native langnage well before we learn to read it. Third, we know that there are many children who fail to learn to read despite having been bathed in print and .despite our best efforts to teach them. So we proposed an alternative set of hypotheses about reading acquisition that have guided my research ever since. How have these ideas fared? THE SIMPLE VIEW OF R E A D I N G One basic idea was that reading consists of two parts. One is recognizing the words on the page, the other is understanding those words once you have recognized them. We (Gough and Tunmer 1986; Hoover and Gough 1990) have called this the Simple View of reading. According to the Simple View, reading (R) equals the product of decoding (D) and comprehension (C), or R=D x C. The evidence suggests that the Simple View provides an accurate description of reading ability. It has not been widely accepted, because, we suspect, most scholars do not think that you can profitably separate decoding from comprehension. As they see it, reading is fundamentally interactive, and breaking it down into c o m p o n e n t skills is a m i s g u i d e d idea. The N a t i o n a l Assessment of Educational Progress, for example, has steadfastly refused to measure decoding separate from comprehension. It is certainly true that decoding and comprehension skills usually run together; the good listener is typically a good decoder, the skilled decoder u s u a l l y a good c o m p r e h e n d e r . Hoover and Gough (1990), for example, found a correlation between the two skills of about .5. But a correlation of .5 also means that there must be a number of children who can do one thing but not the other. The two skills must be dissociable. In fact, they can be doubly dissociated. Dyslexia counts as one such instance, hyperlexia the other. The dyslexic compre-

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hends well (in listening) but decodes poorly (Rack, Snowling, and Olson 1992) the hyperlexic decodes well but comprehends poorly in both listening and reading (Healy 1982). The simple view accords with common sense; it also accurately describes literacy. Hoover and Cough (1990) found that if you measure how well children can decode (i.e., read pseudowords), how well they can listen to stories and answer questions about them, and then multiply those measures together, you can predict all but perfectly (.84 to .91, from first through fourth grade) how well they can read and understand printed text. The simple view helps us appreciate that children start learning to read long before they go to school. One part of reading, the comprehension part, begins in the cradle. We once thought that the acquisition of language began around the first year of life, when a child utters his or her first words. But we now know that it begins much earlier. In fact, many scholars (e.g., Pinker 1994) believe that it begins at conception, that our genes carry the plans that enable us to discover our native language in the booming, buzzing confusion of the acoustic signals that surround us. By the time a child starts school, that child has all but mastered his or her native language. When does a child begin to learn the other part of reading, namely decoding? This cannot begin as early, for the infant does not have good enough vision to see print clearly (Banks and Salapatek 1983). Still, it may well begin long before a child goes to school, and even before a child has received any parental instruction. E M E R G E N T LITERACY At some point (we presume the earlier, the better) children encounter print. These encounters are often with what is called environmental print, as on cereal boxes, signs like STOP or NO SMOKING, or store windows. What do they learn about this environmental print? Students of emergent literacy (e.g., Goodman 1986; Sulzby and Teale 1991) believe children learn a great deal, they can often identify this print in context. But are they learning to read? Two studies suggest otherwise. One was carried out by Dewitz and Stammer (1980), the other by Masonheimer, Drum, and Ehri (1984). What both studies showed was that while children could readily and accurately identify many logos, they could not read the embedded words when they were removed from the logo.

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We should not demean the children's accomplishments. The fact that they cannot read these words does not mean that such pseudo-reading plays no role in reading acquisition, but it has not been shown that this "contextualized" reading has anything to do with the real thing. What is thought to be beneficial is a closer, less accidental, encounter with print, namely storybook reading. What do children learn from these encounters? They certainly learn to pretend to read. Sulzby (1985) has shown that as preschoolers grow older, their pretend reading increasingly resembles the real thing. But once again we don't know whether this emergent literacy is c o n n e c t e d to the real thing. Do children who pretend to read skillfully learn to read faster than those who do not? Perhaps so, but we should be skeptical until an empirical study shows that they do. Most of us are persuaded that children learn a great deal from parental storybook reading: "The single most important activity for building the knowledge and skills eventually required for reading appears to be reading aloud to children" (Adams 1990). But Scarborough and Dobrich (1994) have reviewed a number of studies that related amount of parental storybook reading to children's subsequent literacy. They found that the median correlation between parental reading and children's later reading achievement is only .27. What this means is that parental reading to children accounts for less than 8% of the variance in their subsequent reading ability. Clearly, there must be children who are not read to but who do learn to read, and others who are read to but who have great difficulty learning to read. This does not mean that reading to the child is a waste of time; it certainly is not. The Scarborough and Dobrich review (1994) showed that reading to children increases their vocabularies and their knowledge of the world. Reading to our children civilizes them; it just does not contribute to their reading achievement to the extent that is widely believed. Why is this relationship not closer? For one thing, it is because children pay little attention to print in these encounters. In contrast to its pictures, storybook print is colorless and small, and its letters are obviously devoid of meaning for prereaders; there is little reason for print to draw their attention. Evidence that it does not can be found in the research of Yaden, Smolkin, and Conlon (1989). They observed children during storybook reading, and recorded everything they said. The children asked about many things, but seldom about the print.

HOW CHILDRENLEARNTO READ AND WHY THEY FAIL

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What kind of reading would promote their literacy? One suspects that there are two kinds. One is repeated reading. We all know that children remember a familiar story, and correct you if you change a single word. In doing this, they may well detect a difference between storybooks and stories. Oral stories are never the same, printed stories are always so. In this way, the child may come to understand that what mother or father is reciting is connected to those skeletal objects on the printed page. Another possibility is fingerpoint reading. If the parent or teacher points to each word as she reads it, the child may begin to form connections between the printed words and their spoken counterparts. (This is probably the guiding idea behind the current use of Big Book reading in American classrooms.) At some point, children must stop pretending to read; they must start to really read, to recognize printed words. H o w might they do this?

FIRST WORDS It occurred to us that they might use the same method they evidently used to learn logos. They would look for something distinctive, something salient, something tell-tale, and connect or associate the word with that feature. The feature might be anything: the tail on the end of the word donkey, the humps in the middle of the word camel, the two moons in the center of the word moon. If this were true, Gough and Hillinger (1980) pointed out that it would help us understand a number of observations about early reading. For one thing, it would help us understand why the search for The Cue which children use to recognize words (e.g., Rayner 1976; Williams, Blumberg, and Williams 1970) has come up empty. If the selective association hypothesis is right, then there is no consistent cue that children will select. They will select whatever is distinctive about that word, relative to the others they have learned or are trying to learn. This hypothesis would readily explain w h y children learn lists of dissimilar words more easily than they learn similar words (e.g., Otto and Pizzilo 1970-71); dissimilar words offer more distinctive cues. It also helps us understand why children seem to read inconsistently when they began to read. They will read a word on one page and misidentify it on the next, evidently noticing different things about the word each time. It would certainly explain some of children's c u r i o u s - - t o an

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a d u l t - - r e a d i n g errors, like calling dinosaur "dog" or square "squirrel"; presumably, they have associated the word with a letter (or subset of letters). We b e g a n to s t u d y this p h e n o m e n o n e x p e r i m e n t a l l y (Gough, 1993; Gough and Juel 1991; Gough, Juel, and RoperSchneider 1983). Our first study attempted to show that a child who learns to sight-read a new word does it by attending to some salient feature, some distinguishing attribute. We taught 32 preschoolers individually to sight-read four words, using flashcards. But we put a thumbprint on one of the flashcards; call this the target word. Half the children were taught a list of similar words (namely BAG-BAT-RAG-RAT), half dissimilar words (BOX-LEG-SUN-RAT). Regardless of the nature of the other words in the list (i.e., whether they were similar or dissimilar), the children learned the t h u m b p r i n t e d item on the very first trial. Since it took them, on average, more than six trials (for the dissimilars) and 10 trials (for the similars) to learn the rest of the words, they correctly identified (and were reinforced for) the thumbprinted word at least five times. After the child had mastered all four words, we showed them, without warning, the target word, but this time without the thumbprint. Only 13 of 32 children could recognize it. We then showed them a card bearing only a thumbprint; 27 of 32 correctly named that (i.e., with the word that had previously accompanied it.) Finally, we showed them the thumbprint paired with another word; 26 of 32 named it according to the thumbprint. These results convinced us that we had been right in assuming that children employ selective association whenever there is any salient extraneous cue. But what if there is no salient extraneous cue? Does the child still learn by selective association? To examine this question, we taught 32 children to sight-read four four-letter words. namely FISH, DUCK, LAMB, and PONY. We could not anticipate what cue the children would select in these words. But we could anticipate that if they selected a cue in one part of the word they would ignore the rest. So after the children had mastered the four words (to a criterion of two correct anticipations of all four words), we congratulated them, and then asked whether they could recognize the word if we hid part of it. The children readily agreed, so we showed each of them, on separate and randomly ordered trials, the first half and the last half of each word. Each child thus saw the first and last halves of each of four words. For each word, they could recognize both halves or nei-

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ther, or they could recognize one half but not the other. The children overwhelming did the latter: they recognized only one half of the word, indicating that they were indeed learning these words by selective association. Now a skeptic might reasonably object that this selective association plays a role in the initial learning of the word only, that with further practice, the child would learn more about the word. An unpublished honors thesis by Dietlind Hernandez (1991) examined this question. Hernandez taught two groups of children to sight read the same four words. But after reaching criterion, she gave one group of children an additional ten trials of practice on the four words. Then both groups were given the split word test. Her results showed that overt-raining had no effect on the children's knowledge of the words; once again, if they knew one half, they tended not to know the other. Evidently once you learn how to identify something, there is no need to learn any more about it (much as I cannot tell you what is on the sides of a penny without looking). So my claim is that first words are learned through selective association. It should be re-emphasized that there is no single cue which children use; they will use whatever is useful, be it the humps in camel or a smudge on a flashcard. To make this point, Lipscomb and Gough (1990) taught four groups of children to read four words. One group learned four four=letter words, another four six-letter words. A third group learned three four-letter w o r d s and one six-letter word, the fourth learned three sixes and one four. Our results showed that the children learned the words of different length faster than the words of the same length. The reason was the odd word. They learned that on the first trial, so all they had to do on the remaining trials was learn three m0J;e.

TWO PROBLEMS Children can learn many words through selective association, by memorizing the way the word looks. This is, after all, what all Chinese, Japanese, and Korean children must do in learning their characters. But this places a heavy burden on children's memory, and learning to read these characters is painfully slow. Remembering a handful of arbitrary associations is easy, but all of us know (and laboratory research confirms) that the longer the list we must learn, the harder it is. Moreover, it follows from the idea of learning by selective association that, on average, each new item will be harder than the last.

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Recognizing this, the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans have each created a simpler, more transparent system, an alphabetic system, alongside their characters. This system is mastered very quickly. But then to read their traditional writing systems, they must m e m o r i z e t h o u s a n d s of characters, t h o u s a n d s of logographs. The Japanese ask their children to learn several dozen of them in the first grade, a couple of hundred in each of the remaining grades of elementary school, so that by the time they leave the sixth grade, they are expected to recognize less than 1200 characters. (This is about the number of new words an American child will encounter in the first year of reading.) There is a second problem confronting selective association. This is the fact of the novel word, the word not yet committed to memory. A d u l t readers s e l d o m encounter novel words, words not seen before in print. But the child constantly does so. Every child comes to the first grade with a receptive vocabulary numbering thousands of words (Anglin 1993), and every one of those words must be encountered anew in print. But knowing that camel is the one with the humps, or donkey the one with tail, will do nothing to help the child read pig or cow or horse. It is widely supposed (and to some extent true) that children use context to figure out the i d e n t i t y of u n k n o w n words. Sometimes they can. But the effects of context vary directly with the predictability of the target word. Our research (Gough 1983) has shown that context will help you with the function words most (that is, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, and pronouns), for their predictability (the proportion of readers who can correctly anticipate them) averages about .40. But children need little help with the function words; they are short and familiar. What children most need help with is the content words, that is, with new nouns, and verbs, and adjectives. But context is rarely of help here. We have found that the mean predictability of content words is only .10, and the mode is zero: not one in a hundred readers can predict the average noun or verb or adjective. So context turns out to be a false friend, helping children most when they least need it, letting them d o w n when they do. THE S O L U T I O N What is the solution? The heart of the problem is that the child has been acting as if the relation between the spoken word and its printed counterpart is arbitrary, and so the only way to mas-

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ter the connection is to memorize it. But the connection between letters and words is not arbitrary. I n s t e a d , the letters are s y s t e m a t i c a l l y c o n n e c t e d to the phonemes that make up the spoken word. We are all familiar with the idea that English orthography is a code; we often speak of children decoding print. But cryptologists divide codes into two sorts, one they (redundantly) label a code, the other they call a cipher. In a cipher, the relationships b e t w e e n the coded message and the true message are systematic, as w h e n w e might encode James Bond as kbnfl cpoe (replacing each letter of his name with the following letter in the alphabet.). In a code, by contrast, the relationships between a word and its encrypted version is arbitrary, as w h e n w e represent James Bond as 007. It should be apparent while w e can (and do) call English orthography a code (and speak of decoding it), it w o u l d be more accurate to describe it as a cipher (and speak of deciphering it.) The letters of a word are not chosen arbitraril~ but instead systematically represent the word's phonemes. It m a y not be apparent just h o w complex a cipher English orthography is. In a simple cipher, there w o u l d be one-to-one c o r r e s p o n d e n c e s b e t w e e n letters a n d p h o n e m e s . Shallow, t r a n s p a r e n t o r t h o g r a p h i e s , like F i n n i s h , K o r e a n H a n g u l , Serbo-Croatian, or Spanish are nearly one-to-one. But English has a deep, opaque orthography. The fact is, in English, every letter but v and r corresponds not just to one p h o n e m e , but to at least two (compare the a in act and that in ace, the first and last letters of bomb, the c in case and that in city, etc.) (Indeed, the p h o n e m e / v / i s spelled If] in of, a n d in the Northeast even r corresponds to two p h o n e m e s , as in the first a n d last rs of

rather.) Often, a letter combination will correspond to m a n y more than two. Take m y name. It could be pronounced "Gow" as in bough, or "Go" as in dough. It could as well be p r o n o u n c e d "Guff" as in rough and tough, or even "Goo" as in slough. But m y friends k n o w that it rhymes with cough. Take a n o t h e r e x a m p l e : t h e v o w e l s e q u e n c e ea. P h o n i c s teaches us that w h e n two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking. So it does in heat. But it does not in head, or area, or theatrical, or pineapple. These correspondences are not entirely random; there are regularities. Many of them can be d e d u c e d from the surrounding letters; they are context-dependent. (And, of course, all of

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them can be determined once the reader recognizes the word in which the letter is embedded.) Here is an example. The initial letter [c] represents b o t h / k / a n d / s / ; which one it represents is determined by the following vowel: it is pronounced / k / before [a], [o], and [u], but / s / when followed by [i] or [e]. Yet when it is followed by [h], this changes. Now it still can be mapped onto / k / , as in chemical and character. But it can also be p r o n o u n c e d / t S / , as in chat and chip, and even as / J / , as in chevron and Chevrolet. Once again, the choice of phonemes depends on the following letters. But it often takes two, or three, or even four more letters to determine that initial phoneme. One might think, for example, that chor maps o n t o / t J o r / . But then there is chord and chorus. Perhaps if we added a fourth letter, say e, that would settle it, as it does in chore. But then look at choreography. These correspondences are incredibly complex, but children must master them. Why? Because if they do, it will solve both of the problems which perplex them. It will dramatically reduce the memory problem, because instead of committing to memory arbitrary associations by rote, they need to remember only those associations that are peculiar to a given word. It solves the novelty problem because knowing the cipher will enable children to at least approximate the pronunciation of the novel word, and at least until children reach the third or fourth grade, the chances are that the word in question will already be in their vocabulary. Evidently, then, mastery of the cipher would be valuable to a child. We don't know what form the cipher takes in a reader. This is one of the most controversial subjects in the psychology of reading. Some believe it consists of a set of rules (Coltheart 1993), others believe it is an analogical mechanism (Goswami and Bryant 1991), still others believe it consists of a set of connections between simple neuron-like units (Plaut et al. 1996). But for our purposes, the answer does not matter, for whatever it might be, we know how to determine whether the child has internalized the cipher: all we need do is ask the child to read pseudowords, like clard and hush and guffle. The child who can read (i.e., pronounce correctly) these pseudowords has internalized the cipher, the child who cannot, has not (in all probability; they might refuse for other reasons). We (Gough, Juel, and Griffith, 1992; Gough, Juel, and RoperSchneider 1983; Gough and Tunmer 1986; Juel, Griffith, and Gough 1985) have amassed considerable evidence that children who have mastered the cipher read and spell differently than children who have not,

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First, children who can read pseudowords read faster and more accurately than children who cannot. One reason for this is that they rely less on familiarity: they show a smaller word frequency effect. Their knowledge of the cipher is reflected in the kinds of errors they make: they make phonological errors. By contrast, code readers--children without the cipher--make word substitutions, and those substitutions tend to be drawn from their previous reading. The difference is even more dramatic in spelling. Children who have mastered the cipher (i.e., those who can read pseudowords) spell better than those who have not. For one thing, they spell phonetically; they exhibit what Charles Read (1986) and others have called invented spelling. By contrast, children who have not mastered the cipher spell really inventively. They spell "rain" wet or wnishire or yes (Juel, Griffith, and Gough 1985). So the child who has mastered the cipher reads and spells in a different (and better) way than the child who has not. In fact, there is some indication that a failure to master the cipher is the central characteristic of dyslexia (Rack, Snowling, and Olson 1992). INSTRUCTION If the cipher is the key, where does it come from? Since the days of classical Greece, we have tried to teach it direct)6 to instill it in our children with the method of instruction we call phonics. But there are at least three reasons to doubt that the cipher the skilled reader possesses consists of the rules that are taught in phonics. For one thing, there are too many rules. A typical phonics program contains less than one hundred rules. Yet the regularities which the cipher captures must number in the hundreds or even thousands. Secondly, the rules of phonics are conscious, like "When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking." But the rules we know are unconscious. Consider, for example, thisp. A majority of readers pronounce the t h / 0 / , as in "thin" and "thick" and "thunder." But why n o t / 0 / , as in "this" and "that" and the"? The difference is that the latter are all function words, and in function words th is always p r o n o u n c e d / 0 / . But thisp cannot be a function word, for the class of function words is closed. Hence the reader unconsciously treats it as a content word, and in content words th is always pronounced voicelessly. Still a third difference between the cipher and the rules of phonics is speed of application. When skilled readers read thisp

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or clard or guffie, they do it very much faster than the child who is sounding out cat. Finally, we have some empirical evidence. As part of their longitudinal study, Juel, Griffith, and Gough (1986) repeatedly assessed first grader's knowledge of the cipher by measuring their ability to read pseudowords. Near the end of the fall semester, we measured 150 first graders' ability to read pseudowords formed from letters whose pronunciations had been taught and practiced weeks before. Despite this instruction, only 53% could correctly decode these letters in a pseudoword. So phonics failed to instill the cipher in almost half these children. Is whole language any better? It is quite doubtful, given that the whole-language teacher is led to believe that the "graphophonemic cue system" (i.e., the cipher) is of only minor importance in reading. I fear I will appear here to be taking sides in the Great Debate. It is hard not to; there is abundant evidence that phonics instruction yields better results than its competitor. But I am not satisfied with either method. I doubt whether phonics is the panacea many think it is, for it fails too often to install the cipher. In fact, there is reason to believe that the cipher cannot be installed, for there is no direct way of doing so. But while we cannot install the cipher, we can instill it. How can we do this? I maintain that we must provide our children with phonemic awareness. We must make them aware of the things which letters are going to connect to.

PHONEMIC AWARENESS The evidence is overwhelming that phonemic awareness, children's appreciation of the phonological form of the spoken word, is the foundation they need to learn to read an alphabetic language. Preschool phonemic awareness is one of the two best predictors of early reading achievement known to us; the other is knowledge of the alphabet (e.g., Share et al. 1984). But teaching phonemic awareness to preschoolers promotes their subsequent reading achievement (e.g., Blachman 1989; Lundberg, Frost, and Petersen 1988), while teaching them the alphabet does not (Ehri 1983; Ball and Blachman 1991). But what is this thing called phonemic awareness? An early hypothesis was that it was elemental, an insight that the child could acquire suddenly. It was clear that there were many ways you could measure it, but it was widely believed that they all tapped the same thing. Stanovich, Cunningham, and Cramer

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(1984) a n d Yopp (1988) s h o w e d us that virtually all of these tasks are positively correlated. But at the same time, they s h o w e d us that the tasks v a r y widely in difficulty. For example, Yopp found that 59% of kind e r g a r t n e r s could isolate a p h o n e m e , w h i l e o n l y 26% c o u l d delete one. Hence by one measure a child could be said to have p h o n e m i c awareness, while by another he or she w o u l d not. A more reasonable hypothesis is that p h o n e m i c awareness is not an insight, but a skill, a skill that a child can develop to various degrees. It m a y well begin with an insight, n a m e l y that w o r d s have a form in addition to a meaning. Young children attend, as they should, to the m e a n i n g of a word. Clearl~ they m u s t recognize the form of a w o r d in order to discriminate from other words; they m u s t recognize that cat i s / k a n t / i n order to distinguish it from hat, cut, a n d cap. But t h e y n e e d n o t be a w a r e of those phonemes, and evidently they are not. A b u n d a n t evidence indicates that the typical four- or f i v e - y e a r old c a n n o t identify, count, isolate, or segment them (cf. Yopp 1988). H o w do children develop those skills? That is an important question as yet unresolved by research. One conjecture (Treiman and Z u k o w s k i 1991) is that, h a v i n g noticed that a w o r d has form, they then appreciate that a w o r d is composed of syllables, which are in turn divided into onset and rime (but see Seymour and Evans 1994). If this is true, then p h o n e m i c awareness m a y be a dimension, a scale, rather than a unit or element. In fact, there is some evidence that they m a y form a Guttman scale, that is, a scale in which the child's score tells you exactly w h a t the child can and cannot do. Here is some suggestive evidence. We asked 78 preschoolers to answer two questions: "Can you tell me the first sound in fish? The last sound in glass?" We found that 42 children could tell us the first sound in fish, but only 18 could tell us the last sound in glass. But all 18 were d r a w n from the 42; no child w h o could not tell us the first sound could tell us the last. Evidently awareness of the first sound is necessary, but not sufficient, for awareness of the last. It appears that phonemic awareness "grows" from the beginning of words to the end, and then back to the middle, consistent with the hypothesis offered by Byrne (1992). What conclusion can w e d r a w from all of the phonemic awareness research? My conclusion is that it is at least as important to teach phonemic awareness in kindergarten as to teach children their letters. In fact, m y suggestion w o u l d be to hide the letters until the child is fully aware of the things those letters represent.

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I recognize that this is an idiosyncratic suggestion. Most scholars believe that there is a reciprocal relationship between phonemic awareness and reading acquisition (B0wey a n d Francis 1991; Perfetti 1987). But my hunch is that, in the beginning, their knowledge of letters may confuse some children. In fact, it may be more "natural" to teach phonemic awareness first. Letters are not only small, black, and skeletal; to paraphrase Horace Mann, t h e y are ghostly, if not ghastly. But phonemes are already there, already inside the child. They are the stuff of which words are made. If the child can only be led to "see" them, then letters can be connected to them. Given phonemic awareness, how do children induce the cipher? Some phonics instruction is almost certainly necessary. I suspect that only an exceptional child will figure out the system on their own. But an unanswered question is how much phonics instruction is necessary. As I argued above, we cannot hope to install the complete cipher; children must do the rest by themselves; they must induce the cipher by reading. Moreover, many children already have mastered many rules before they are taught; there is little point to teaching a new rule to someone who already has it. I wager (and here I am in agreement with advocates of whole language) that most of the cipher is acquired through reading, not through direct instruction. But some direct instruction is almost certainly required; the unanswered question is how much is enough. Is knowing the cipher enough? No. English orthography has been called quasi-regular (Plaut et al. 1996); Pei (1952) has also called it "the world's most awesome mess." In shallow orthographies like Finnish or Korean Hangul, there is a one-toone correspondence between letters and phonemes, and these correspondences are context-free. But I made the point earlier that in English these correspondences are far from one-to-one. They are instead highly variable, and highly context-dependent. The complexity and irregularity of English o r t h o g r a p h y have led some scholars (e.g., Smith 1973; Sharp 1982) to conclude that it is pointless to try to teach children its regularities. But we have evidence that there is no way around it. Gough and Walsh (1991) asked 93 children to read 36 exception words and 36 pseudohomophones of those words. In no case could a child read more exception words than their p s e u d o h o m o phones. That is, their knowledge of exception words never exceeded their mastery of the cipher. We also found that children who had mastered the cipher could learn to read (and spell) new irregular words (exceptions to that cipher) faster than chil-

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dren who did not have it. Together, these results led us to conclude that mastery of the cipher is necessary but not sufficient for mastery of its exceptions, that the cipher is the foundation on which the requisite lexical knowledge must be built. How can children acquire this knowledge? So far as I can see, there is only one way: by reading. But lexical knowledge can only be built on the cipher, and if the cipher can only be acquired if the child has phonemic awareness, then phonemic awareness is the cornerstone on which decoding is built. Is lexical knowledge enough? No, you also need automaticity. What exactly is automaticity? Is it general (i.e., does it apply across any text), or is it specific to particular words? This is an important unanswered question. The answer is probably both: most children can automatically read their own names, good readers can read everything with automaticity. But whatever the answer, how might the child develop automaticity? Only by reading. The way you achieve general automaticity is by reading so much that you polish and hone the cipher. The way you achieve specific automaticity is by reading enough that you build your lexical knowledge to the maximum. Indeed, the problem in developing word-specific knowledge is that most words occur only rarely; the only way to encounter them is to read volumes. So how, then, does a child learn to read? By gaining phonemic awareness, and then reading. I propose that we could teach all of our children to read if only we would teach them phonemic awareness first. That is not all we must do, for we know that you can acquire phonemic awareness and still not read (Juel et al. 1986; Tunmer and Nesdale 1985). But without phonemic awareness, the child has no hope of reading well. Therefore, we should make every effort to ensure that all of our children have phonemic awareness when they begin the amazing task of learning to read. References Adams, M. J. 1990. Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Anglin, J. M. 1993. Vocabulary development: A morphological analysis. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 58(10):1-186. Ball, E., and Blachman, B. 1991. Does phoneme awareness training in kindergarten make a difference in early word recognition and developmental spelling? Reading Research Quarterly 26:49--66. Banks, M. S., and Salapatek, P. 1983. Infant visual perception. In P. H. Mussen (ed.), Handbook of Child Psychology. New York: Wiley.

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Blachman, B. 1989. Phonological awareness and word recognition: Assessment and intervention. In G. Kamhi and W. Catts (eds.), Reading disabilities: A Developmental Perspective p. 133-58. Boston: College Hill. Bowey, J. A., and Francis, J. 1991. Phonological analysis as a function of age and exposure to reading instruction. Applied Psycholinguistics 12:91-121. Byrne, B. 1992. Studies in the acquisition procedure for reading: Rationale, hypotheses, and data. In P. B. Gough, L. C. Ehri, and R. Treiman (eds.), Reading Acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Coltheart, M., Curtis, B., Atkins, P., and Hailer, M. 1993. Models of reading aloud: Dualroute and parallel-distributed-processing approaches. Psychological Review 100(4):589-608. Dewitz, P., and Stammer, J. 1980. The development of linguistic awareness in young children from labe~ reading to word recognition. Paper presented at the National Reading Conference, San Diego, CA. Ehri, L. C. 1983. A critique of five studies related to letter-name knowledge and learning to read. In L. M. Gentile, M. L. Kamil, and J. S. Blanchard (eds.), Reading Research Revisited. Columbus, OH: Charles E. Merrill. Goodman, K. S., and Goodman, Y. M. 1979. Learning to read is natural. In L. B. Resnick and P. A. Weaver (eds.), Theory and Practice of Early Reading (Vol. 1). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Goodman, Y. M. 1986. Children coming to know literacy. In W. H. Teale and E. Sulzby (eds.), Emergent Literacy: Writing and Reading. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Company. Goswami, U., and Bryant, P. E. 1991. Rhyming, analogy, and children's reading. In P. B. Gough, L. Ehri, and R. Treiman (eds.), Reading Acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gough, P. B. 1983. Context, form, and interaction. In K. Rayner (ed.), Eye Movements in Reading: Perceptual and Language Processes. New York: Academic Press. Gough, P. B. 1993. The beginning of decoding. Reading and Writing 5:181-92. Gough, P. B. 1995. The New Literacy: Caveat emptor. Journal of Research in Reading 18(2):79-86. Gough, P. B., Juel, C. J., and Griffith, P. L. 1992. Reading, spelling, and the orthographic cipher. In P. B. Gough, L. C. Ehri, and R. Treiman (eds.), Reading Acquisition. HiUsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gough, P. B., and Hillinger, M. L. 1980. Learning to read: An unnatural act. Bulletin of The Orton Society 30:179-96. Gough, P. B., and Juel, C. 1991. The first stages of word recognition. In L. Rieben and C. A. Perfetti (eds.), Learning to read. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gough, P. B., Juel, C., and Roper-Schneider, D. 1983. A two-stage model of initial reading acquisition. In J. A. Niles and L. A. Harris (eds.), Searches for Meaning in Reading/ Language Processingand Instruction. Rochester, NY: National Reading Conference. Gough, P. B., and Tunmer, W. E. 1986. Decoding, reading, and reading disability. RASE: Remedial and Special Education 7:6-10. Gough, P. B., and Walsh, M. A. 1991. Chinese, Phoenicians, and the orthographic cipher of English. In S. Brady and D. Shankweiler (eds.), Phonological Processes in Literacy. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Healy, J. 1982. The enigma of hyperlexia. Reading Research Quarterly 17:319-38. Hoover, W. A., and Gough, P. B. I990. The simple view of reading. Reading and Writing 2:127-60. Juel, C., Griffith, P. L., and Gough, P. B. 1985. Reading and spelling strategies of firstgrade children. In J. A. Niles and R. Lalik (eds.), Issues in Literacy: A Research Perspective. Rochester, NY: National Reading Conference.

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Juel, C., Griffith, P. L., and Gough, P. B. 1986. Acquisition of literacy: A longitudinal study of children in first and second grade. Journal of Educational Psychology

78:243-55. Lipscomb, L., and Gough, P. B. 1990. Word length and first word recognition. In J. Zuttell and S. McCormick (eds.), Literacy Theory and Research: Analyses from Multiple Paradigms. Thirty-ninth Yearbook of the National Reading Conference (Vol. 39). Chicago, IL: National Reading Conference. Lundberg, I., Frost, J., and Petersen, O. 1988. Effects of an extensive program for stimulating phonological awareness in preschool children. Reading Research Quarterly 23:263--84. Masonheimer, P. E., Drum, P. A., and Ehri, L. C. 1984. Does environmental print identification lead children into word reading? Journal of Reading Behavior 16:257-72. Olson, R. K., Forsberg, H., Wise, B., and Rack, J. 1994. Measurement of word recognition, orthographic, and phonological skills. In G. R. Lyon (ed.), Frames of Reference for the Assessment of Learning Disabilities. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Company. Otto, W., and Pizzilo, C. 1970-71. Effect of intralist similarity on kindergarten pupils rate of word acquisition and transfer. Journal of Reading Behavior 3:14-19. Pei, M. 1952. The Story of English. Philadelphia: Lippincott. Perfetti, C. A., Beck, I., Bell, L., and Hughes, C. 1987. Phonemic knowledge and learning to read are reciprocal: A longitudinal study of first grade children. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 33:283-319. Pinker, S. 1994. The Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow and Company. Pinnell, G. S., Pikulski, J. J., Wixson, K. K., Campbell, J. R., Gough, P. B., and Beatty, A. S. 1994. Listening to Children Read Aloud. Washington, DC: National Center for Educational Statistics. Plaut, D. C., McCleUand, J. L., Seidenberg, M. S., and Patterson, K. 1996. Understanding normal and impaired word reading: Computational principles in quasi-regular domains. Psychological Review 103(1):56-115. Rack, J. P., Snowling, M. J., and Olson, R. K. 1992. The nonword reading deficit in developmental dyslexia: A review. Reading Research Quarterly 27(1):28-53. Rayner, K. 1976. Developmental changes in word recognition strategies. Journal of Educational Psychology 68:323-29. Read, C. 1986. Children's Creative Spelling. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Scarborough, H. S., and Dobrich, W. 1994. On the efficacy of reading to preschoolers. Developmental Review 14:245-302. Seymour, P. H. K., and Evans, H. M. I994. Levels of phonological awareness and learning to read. Reading and Writing 6(3):221-50. Share, D. L., Jorm, A. F., Maclean, R., and Matthews, R. 1984. Sources of individual differences in reading acquisition. Journal of Educational Psychology 76:1309-24. Sharp, S. L. 1982. The REAL Reason Why Johnny Still Can't Read. Smithtown, NY: Exposition Press. Smith, F. 1973. Twelve ways to make learning to read difficult. In F. Smith (ed.), Psycholinguistics and Reading. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Sulzby, E. 1985. Children's emergent reading of favorite storybooks: A developmental study. Reading Research Quarterly 20:458-81. Sulzby, E., and Teale, W. 1991. Emergent literacy. In R. Barr, M. L. Kamil, P. B. Mosenthal, and P. D. Pearson (eds.), Handbook of Reading Research (Vol. II). New York: Longman. Treiman, R., and Zukowski, A. 1991. Levels of phonological awareness. In S. Brady and D. Shankweiler (eds.), Phonological Processes in Literacy. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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Tunmer, W. E., and Nesdale, A. R. 1985. Phonemic segmentation skill and beginning reading. Journalof EducationalPsychology77:417-27. Williams, J. P., Blumberg, E. L., and Williams, D. V. 1970. Cues used in visual word recognition. Journalof EducationalPsychology61:310-15. Yaden, D. B., Jr., Smolkin, L. B., and Conlon, A. 1989. Preschoolers' questions about pictures, print convention, and story text during reading aloud at home. Reading ResearchQuarterly24(2):188-214. Yopp, H. K. 1988. The validity and reliability of phonemic awareness tests. Reading ResearchQuarterly23:159-77.