Nancy Bailey writes here about the idea–promoted by NCLB, Race to the Top, and Common Core– that kindergarten children should know how to read. She says this is wrong.
Young children should be encouraged to speak and listen, she writes, which is something they do while playing and interacting with other children.
She writes:
With No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and Common Core State Standards, some adults have been led to believe that four- and five-year-old children should read by the end of kindergarten. Preschoolers are pushed to be ready for formal reading instruction by the time they enter kindergarten.
This is a dangerous idea rooted in corporate school reform. Children who struggle to read might inaccurately believe they have a problem, or reading could become a chore they hate.
Pushing children to focus on reading means they miss listening and speaking skills, precursors to reading. These skills are developed through play, which leads to interest in words and a reason to want to read.
Some children might learn to read in kindergarten, and others might show up to kindergarten already reading, but many children are not ready to read when they are four or five years old. And just because a child knows how to read in kindergarten, doesn’t mean they won’t have other difficulties with speech and listening.
When children come to schools from poor home environments, much of what they’ve missed involves a variety of language skills like speech and learning how to listen. When children have disabilities, speaking and listening skills are critical.
Forcing children to focus on reading early denies children opportunities to work on those other missing skills.
Also, there’s no research, no evidence that a child’s brain has evolved to indicate children can and should read earlier. Our culture has changed, but children have not. Even if new reading methods are developed that assist children to be better readers, there’s no reason to push children to read before they are ready.
In the drive for higher test scores, play has been minimized or eliminated. This is a crime against children.
This is a good time to recommend some reading: Pasi Sahlberg and William Doyle, Let the Children Play: How More Play Will Save Our Schools and Help Children Thrive.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Nancy, could you clarify: what exactly are “speaking and listening skills”? And what do they have to do with reading?
Sure. These language skills are connected to reading. I’m not exactly sure how it works, but it is listening, speaking, reading, writing in that order.
My understanding is that listening is first. That’s, of course, the first thing babies do. It’s why it’s so important to talk to babies and toddlers. I’m interested in the evidence of the importance of reading to babies. Jim Trelease in the Read-Aloud Book discusses this. Babies also like looking at big pictures especially faces.
Later comes that expressive stage where children hear themselves talk and chatter. Any activity where they talk is good. and why show and tell activities are important. This demands patience in adults, but children need to know their words matter.
I fear those pushing reading early forget about this stage. It is especially developed with play. Kindergartners talk a lot if all is right in their world and adults and their little friends listen. But think how horrible it must be for them to be made to sit quietly and work on tests etc. Some of that is probably necessary to teach self-regulation, but kindergarten classrooms today are way too structured and focused on rigorous instruction and reading. Some prereading activities and learning the ABCs are important, but even this can be enjoyable.
I don’t know if I helped. I’m not a early childhood specialist. I taught special ed mostly middle and high school. But observed my own child learning language which fascinated me.
As a grandparent, I have now watched the development of language and literacy skills from a different angle. My youngest granddaughter has “talked” almost from the time she was born. Even newborns are drawn to the sound of their mothers and fathers voices. She “learned” early on that vocalizing brought extra attention from her parents. I listened to her talking in the background when my son has called to talk. When we skype, she tends to get quiet and listen. At four months she has not figured out the talking picture yet. It reminds me of when my own mother would talk to my kids on the phone. It was a long time before they spontaneously spoke to her without the gentle parental nudges to say,”Hi.” We used to joke about the heavy breathers. With the technology of today, I get to watch this new granddaughter during “tummy time” talking to the big eyed toys propped up in front of her.
“Our culture has changed, but children have not.”
Arguably the best, most concise sentence that should be included in every argument against deformers.
We are trying to develop “inorganic” ways of learning to meet with future demands.
Unfortunately, reading will never be like it once was – play. There are way too many distractions to keep people from growing up to be the readers we once were. We can increase reading for some level of pastime, but never will it be like the previous generations again. My mother grew up an average student – favorite authors: Philip Roth, Toni Morrison – reads quality fiction all the time. I just don’t really see that happening today.
Plus, structured play increases every year – taking away our ability to problem solve. The positive, of course, less kids teased and hurt.
I keep saying if we are to believe the realities of climate change, a mass media where all information is equal, an ever increasing divided world — these problems will take a larger group of brighter people to solve. In addition, the job market will continue to decrease –especially routines jobs, both manual and cognitive.
We do need to have some level of change in education.
We are trying to develop “inorganic” ways of learning
LOL. That’s beautifully said!
I agree. There is an organic and an inorganic way or learning, and we are puching for the inorganic ones, citing equally inorganic research.
When I was very young my mother began reading to me every day from a large book with pictures, and I loved it. I watched the words as she read them and without trying I began to recognize a few oft them. Although Mom never asked me to read anything I became able to look at pages in her hands and match some of her spoken words to the written ones. I was not even four years old at that time but matching word sounds to their written forms became very easy for me. Years later when I became a first grade teacher I used much of what my mother had done to introduce \students to reading, and it worked well. Basically what I did was to put written pieces such as songs or poems in the hands of children while we sang or recited them and most of them began to figure out how reading worked and recognize a few words. That was the beginning of my my teaching and it was was successful. By the end of our school year all my students were able to read and enjoyed doing it.
What you describe is the type of foundational support found in many middle class homes. These students learn to read very naturally without any stress. Poor students do not arrive to school with the same background. They start off behind other students. Today, our society is hurried and so are our families. Many parents are working two jobs to put food on the table. There is less time for those precious moments you spent with your mother.
Yes, that is a primary way to introduce reading to children. Still, like Ms. Bailey says it is wrong to force children to read; with that I agree, laying emphasis on the idea of force. It could backfire and cause students to dislike reading.
For the children from poorer communities when they have some grasp of reading using picture books and allowing them to choose books which they find interesting can play a part in making reading attractive.
Really interesting and lovely. I listened to stories my mom read each night and was curious about books. I picked out words in Dennis the Menace comics,and later was proud to read a Honey Bunch novel. I moved on from Honey to Bobbsey Twins and then Nancy Drew with lots of other books in between. I chose books I wanted to read and learned early if the first few pages didn’t grab me to find another book. Getting a library card in my small town library was a huge thrill. I still love old libraries.
This is the organic way or learning to read: well motivated and without coercion.
Almost all the “grammar” that an adult speaker has acquired was acquired unconsciously, automatically, from his or her ambient spoken linguistic environment. A Japanese-speaking child, for example, learns that possession is indicated by a particle, no (の) that follows the possessor and precedes the possessed, as in watashi no okasan, “my mother.” An English-speaking student learns that it is indicated by a pronoun or by a morpheme tacked onto the end of a preceding noun /ɪz/, /s/, or /z/, as in “my mother” or “Luke’s hat.” But, of course, neither child learns, at that stage what particles and morphemes and nouns are. All this takes place automatically, unconsciously, without formal instruction. That’s how we are built to learn grammar. Even after years of formal explicit schooling in grammar, ALMOST ALL of the grammar that a person uses is of this unconsciously acquired and applied kind. The adult speaker will, for example, automatically and unconsciously apply rules for the order of precedence of adjectives (“the little, green VW microbus” is correct, “the green little VW microbus” isn’t) that he or she couldn’t begin to articulate unless he or she has had advanced classes in syntax.
This spoken language learning is an essential prerequisite to learning to read well because written language is a map to its spoken equivalent. And it’s not just grammar but vocabulary, as well, that is MOSTLY acquired automatically, without explicit instruction.
Let the kids be kids. Give them the time and space needed to learn the spoken language as they are built to learn it. And the time to learn to socialize. There will be time enough later on for reading instruction, as well as for depersonalized education software and standardized testing to make them into compliant drones in the twenty-first century workforce later on.
This is very true. I think when children find reading enjoyable they will learn the vocabulary by pictures and later by understanding the rest of the sentences. Or they will look up the words if they have access to a child’s dictionary or online program. They will want to know the word to better understand the story.
Win their hearts and their minds will follow.
Isn’t that the mandatory motto of educators at any level, Bob?
Based on my experience, so true. writerjoney’s comment above resonated with me as well. My first language was German, but I moved to the US as a young child and never had a formal German education. When I took German in college, I got the worst grades, but I was the only one in class who could read, understand dialects, and communicate with other Germans. Since I was in my early 20s, I have spoken the language with various graduations of an American accent. My writing is atrocious, reading is no problem whatsoever. But my friends there all agree, when I’ve been there a few weeks, had a few beers and don’t think about what I’m saying, my grammar is fine. It’s when I think about it that I have problems. I am also a horrendous translator because I don’t translate in my head. When I speak German, I think in German, as I do with English. I know what it means, but it takes me a while to make connections between the two languages, which is why I am in awe of professional translators, like those at the U.N.
Fascinating, Greg! Some phonemes that act as distinctive features in some languages (that distinguish between words, such as bat and pat), if not heard during a critical period when the child is young, literally cannot be heard later by people learning a language as adults. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11007/
There is speculation among linguists that in some cases, kids lose the neural circuitry necessary for learning a particular sound if that circuitry is not used early on. A lot of this weeding of neural connections happens in the first few years.
I’ve also read that this weeding of neural circuitry may play a role in the development of psychopathy. Example: Relative to non-psychopaths, psychopaths exhibited significantly thinner cortex in a number of regions, including left insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral precentral gyrus, bilateral anterior temporal cortex, and right inferior frontal gyrus. These neurostructural differences were not due to differences in age, IQ, or substance abuse. Psychopaths also exhibited a corresponding reduction in functional connectivity between left insula and left dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. Ly, Martina et al. “Cortical thinning in psychopathy.” The American journal of psychiatry vol. 169,7 (2012): 743-9.
I’m not convinced of the argument that we lose the ability to hear unused phonemes. I can hear and recognize the trilled /rr/ in Spanish, but cannot produce even close to it without major effort. I am guessing that Japanese(?) speaking people who struggle with vocalizing the /r/ sound recognize the difference between rye and lye.
I was not referring to ALL unused phonemes. In Russian, there are two liquid l sounds that are distinctive features. I’ve read that kids who do not hear these used distinctively when they are children lose the ability to learn to hear them as adults. Hearing the distinction between the r and the l is not impossible for all Japanese speakers, but it’s difficult.
See, for example, the following: “Relearning contrasts that have been lost during early childhood is notoriously difficult and effortful. Our data document that native phonemic categories are powerful attractors in that they absorb the non-native stimulus, which is a considerable stumbling block on the path to the mastery of non-native contrasts.” Dobel, Christian et al. “Non-native phonemes in adult word learning: evidence from the N400m.” Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences vol. 364,1536 (2009): 3697-709. doi:10.1098/rstb.2009.0158
And this: “Infants’ perception of speech sound contrasts is modulated by their language environment. Their perception of contrasts that are non-native to their mother tongue declines in the second half of the 1st year.” Ter Schure S, Junge C and Boersma P (2016) Discriminating Non-native Vowels on the Basis of Multimodal, Auditory or Visual Information: Effects on Infants’ Looking Patterns and Discrimination. Front. Psychol. 7:525.
It would be interesting to see the testing. I suppose you would have to have people listen to the “same” word with and without a particular phoneme sound to see if they could consistently identify the correct match to a model. As you say, there would have to be a degree of novelty not necessarily associated with all phonemes not used in a particular language. I thought the /r/ and /l/ confusion more closely approximated that situation than the /rr/ in Spanish. (As you can probably tell, I have no training in linguistics. :)) I do remember research from “way back when” about how unused sounds drop out of a baby’s babbling sometime in the first year, I can’t remember the timing exactly.
Some of the relevant research is in those papers I mentioned and in the references that those papers cite.
I think that I didn’t explain my point clearly enough, above. Children are born with or rapidly acquire, as babies, the necessary neural circuitry to perceive the distinctive features of ANY human language. Then, they hear some features and not others, and, starting at about four years old, some of the unused circuitry withers and disappears. There’s a “use it or lose it” principle at work, and this is general–it doesn’t apply only to distinctive phonemes. Synaptic connections that are used are strengthened. Those that aren’t wither and ultimately can disappear in a process called synaptic pruning. Similarly, children are born with the capacity to intuit the grammatical structure of any language and with a lot of language already hardwired into their heads. Then, depending on the language or languages they hear, some circuitry is strengthened, and other circuitry is weakened, and some new circuitry is introduced. Kids are born with a hardwired universal grammar, and then certain parameters of that grammar are set by whatever language or languages the child hears. Children from linguistically impoverished environments don’t develop a complete or standard internal grammatical model, and they need compensating spoken language interaction BEFORE they learn to read. This can happen at the same time that they are being introduced to books, being read to, etc. But all this is prerequisite to learning to read. To some degree, reading is built on top of a certain amount of spoken language competence in the phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and vocabulary of a language. Rushing reading for kids from linguistically impoverished backgrounds–for ones who haven’t, for example, routinely had the experience of CONVERSATION with adults, is a tragic mistake that comes of ignorance of this developmental process and readiness.
Yes, I understand the pruning theory. It extends to all sorts of functions summed up not entirely by the expression, “Use it or lose it.” There seem to be sweet spots in the course of our development that make mastering certain abilities a lot easier. My brother-in-law’s family lived in Brazil for a few years. Their young children picked up the basics of Brazilian Portuguese while their parents were still operating on a few well-worn tourist phrases.
I came to this country 35 years ago after I had learned English for 2 years in a grammar heavy way. I passed the highest exam in Hungary, but understood almost nothing when we landed in NY City. It was a disaster since I was supposed to teach within a few weeks. But then, we sat down with my wife and watched soap operas 24/7. That did the trick. Thank you, Robin Wright and Santa Barbara.
I learned Russian for 10 years in the same grammar heavy way. Since I didn’t watch Russian soap operas, my Russian is confined to being able to read (though understand little) and to being able to sing the Soviet national anthem.
Educators need to learn some basic linguistics so that they will understand this stuff.
Those kids whose linguistic environments have been impoverished, who haven’t learned standard grammar or much vocabulary, need prerequisite SPOKEN LANGUAGE interaction. Learning to read isn’t just about phonics. It’s also about internalized grammar in the widest sense (syntax and morphology) and about vocabulary.
Which raises the question, did this kind of thing happen to Donald Trump and Stephen Miller?
Very interesting article you posted (another example of why NIH funding should be a national priority). A few things. The caricatures Americans hold and believe about the German language are as false as anything the passes for German cuisine in this country. A few examples: the letter ö (oe) is often enunciated by Americans as the sound in “moo.” The “e” in NBA basketball player Dennis Schroeder’s (yes, he’s black, but he’s very German) name is dropped and Americans who have no clue about the language pronounce Schroder as “Shroo-der.” The correct–and not so harsh way to pronounce it–way to pronounce the vowels like saying the word “pearl” without the consonants (don’t worry about rolling the “r”, you can’t do it if you haven’t grown up with it). Or take the German soccer player who plays for Real Madrid, Toni Kroos. Americans pronounce his last name as with the “oo” sound, like “choo-choo.” But it is actually pronounced much more subtly, like “gross” (with the rolling “r”).
Germans have a big problem the the “th” sound, which is why they say is as a “z” when speaking English; “they” becomes “zay” and “this” becomes “ziss.” Many years ago, as a child, when I tried to teach my grandmother the “th” sound, I realized that the tongue had to touch the bottom of the upper incisors to make the sound. When I demonstrated it for her, her response was, “what an awful language, you stick your tongue out at people.”
Unlike American English, which has accents, German has dialects, which has different words, not just sounds. The way I have explained it to friends is that with the range of American accents, people from Mobile and Seattle can still easily understand each other; we do not have dialects. German, on the other hand, has dialects in which people from different geographical areas, often very close to each other, have difficulty in understanding each other. I can pretty much understand all but three dialects. Schwiezer Deutsch (Swiss German), which is a language onto itself. There is a network called 3SAT which, in the evenings, features national news programs from Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. There Swiss broadcast has subtitles so that Germans can understand it. Another is Kölsch, a dialect spoken around the city of Cologne, which is a hybrid of German and Dutch. One of the top German rock groups of the past 35 years, BAP, sings in Kölsch and their albums also have subtitles in German so that the rest of the country can understand it. The other one I have real trouble with is Sächisch, the dialect spoken in Saxony (Dresden and Leipzig in the southeast corner of the former East Germany). I won’t even begin to try to explain the differences, but it is difficult. I can even remember being at a soccer game years ago in Franconia (Franken), which is where I am from and is divided between upper (Coburg), middle (Nürnberg) and lower (Würzburg) Franconia, between teams from middle and lower, less than 90 miles apart from their centers. When one of the players from middle shouted out something a player that I didn’t understand, I asked my friend from lower what he said and he responded, “I have no idea.” This has changed with the homogenizing effect of television, but the dialects still exist. (Think Fiona Hill’s comment about how her accent/dialect would have held her back socially and professional in Great Britain but it has not been a problem in the U.S.)
Sächsisch. Whoops.
Interesting, Greg. And what a funny story about Grandma!
GregB, I think we start learning a foreign language properly when we stop translating from and to our mother tongue.
Although my Spanish is very weak now, I knew I was on the right road when I knew what I was saying in Spanish but couldn’t immediately translate it into English.
As it happens, kindergarteners in the Town of Brookline, Massachusetts, near where I live, are expected to learn to read before the end of the school year.
This summer the Boston Globe published two Letters to the Editor on this topic:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/letters/2019/07/11/driven-excel-kindergarten/6eMWCgiWbiO5pdstyuZ5zL/story.html
The first letter is mine.
A wonderful letter!!! Yes, kids come to school with differing linguistic experiences, and they are on differing developmental schedules, and classifying them this early based on reading ability is appalling. Doing that is self-fulfilling, an example of the Rosenthal or Pygmalion Effect. You are dead on to identify this policy as cruel and dangerous and stemming from ignorance about how kids learn.
Yes, excellent letter and right on the mark. Although I’m not a big fan of my children’s school district (5 schools: 3 elementary, 1 MS, 1 HS), I do find it remarkable that in such a small district we have more than 40 native languages represented by the families of students. The education provided by the staff may leave a lot to be desired, but the tolerance among and between the students is heartening.
I found the same to be true teaching high-school students in Trumpish Florida. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that MOST did not share the racist prejudices found among their parents. They formed friendships and even dated across racial and ethnic lines. There were a few exceptions–e.g., some junior boys who, during the last election, chanted in the hallway, “Build the Wall. Build the Wall. Hitler had the right idea.”
Aie yie yie. Such has been the influence of Trump on some of our young people.
Great letter! The drive to make kindergartners learn before they’re ready is concerning. Thanks for sharing.
Brookline! Still? I wrote about when Brookline rejected picture books in 2010. Can you believe it? I give the link to the 2010 NYT’s report about it.
https://nancyebailey.com/2015/11/16/the-power-of-picture-books-v-high-stakes-testing-common-core/
I thought they’d seen the light, but I guess not. You would think they would know better.
It’s a travesty to teach four year olds to read
It’s wrong to teach the child of four
To read and write and count
The three year old can learn much more
Without a single doubt
And two year old is better still
At language and the math
So give em books and give em proofs
When they are in the bath