Issue 24: The Vanishing Act in The Balancing Act: A Move to Reject Reading Research Is a Bad Move | Harriett Janetos

I listened to Emily Hanford's podcast, Hard Words: Why Aren't Our Kids Being Taught to Read? six years ago, on the subway to Brooklyn College, where I observed Katherine Pace Miles teach her course on reading instruction. The previous day, I had met with Linnea Ehri in her Manhattan office to ask about her reading research. Traveling cross-country to talk shop with two literacy specialists is an experience I will never forget.

It's astonishing how far we've come in just six short years regarding our determination to teach all students of all backgrounds and all ability levels how to read. We know that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, so we must never forget what reading instruction was like during the Balanced Literacy era before the science of reading became a schoolyard term. We also know that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty as well as the price of sustaining change. We have made significant shifts over the past six years: mind shifts and curriculum shifts. We now know better, and we're striving to do better—or the best that we can do under given circumstances. If we want to maintain the progress we've made, we must guard against any efforts to take us back to where we were before the reading world was reshaped by Emily Hanford's reporting.

Therefore, when a book that ignores decades-long research related to phonics instruction--and dismisses the implications for instruction based on this research--enters the reading space, this is concerning. We need to remember the recent past and be vigilant about protecting the near future. The Balancing Act: An Evidence-Based Approach to Teaching Phonics, Reading and Writing by Dominic Wyse and Charlotte Hacking recommends teaching phonics contextualized within "literacy rich" lessons connected to reading "real" books, a recommendation that runs counter to the reading research conducted over several decades.

Although it is undeniably a good idea to immerse children in literature, contextualizing phonics instruction within this literature is not a good idea. It is both inefficient and ineffective for beginning reading instruction, though Wyse and Hacking claim otherwise. They contend that the following elements need to be "combined in phonics and reading lessons":

• Real texts chosen by teachers
• Teaching making connections between reading and writing
• Teaching about words, sentences, and larger text structures
• Learning about the alphabetic code as a fundamental part of the teaching

It's not that we don't want to teach "real texts" that facilitate "making connections between reading and writing" by "teaching about words, sentences, and larger text structures" in addition to "learning about the alphabetic code." It's just that we don't want to do it all at the same time. This mixing and matching morphs into a complex, convoluted process that has echoes of the film title Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: every literacy component, everywhere on the page, taught all at once. Here's an example of the complexity where the authors describe how to teach one page of the book:

There's a lot going on here!

There are three two-syllable words: Tennis, racket and jacket and three grapheme-phoneme connections:

'ck' for /k/', 'nn' for /n/ and 'e' for /i/ (note the schwa sound thrown in for good measure!).

While these are authentic representations of the complexity of the English language, is sharing this complexity with beginning readers the most efficient and effective way to help them crack the alphabetic code and use their code knowledge to read for meaning? This complexity may be authentic to rich literature, but it can also be genuinely confusing for beginning readers and provides a compelling example of cognitive overload for students and teachers alike. Education professor Pamela Snow believes that teachers are already burdened with an "unfair amount of the heavy lifting," and The Balancing Act does little to lift this burden.