HIGH FIVE LITERACY AND ACADEMIC COACHING

A review of The Balancing Act: An Evidence-Based Approach to Teaching Phonics, Reading and Writing by Dominic Wyse and Charlotte Hacking’

Reading Instruction That Ignores Orthographic Mapping and Cognitive Load Theory is a Setback for Students

Guest blogger, Harriett Janetos, Reading Specialist

Author, From Sound to Summary: Braiding the Reading Rope to Make Words Make Sense

When a pendulum swings in education, how do we track its collateral damage? If what lies in disarray under its arc is a practice informed by research, this is concerning. When systematic and explicit phonics instruction decontextualized from literature is blamed for failing to improve comprehension, do we toss out those instructional practices—or do we make sure we have equally robust comprehension-building lessons? And if we do keep those foundational skills activities, does that mean we cease to examine their efficacy? Or do we continue to monitor student progress and evaluate our instruction in light of that progress? 

Dominic Wyse and Charlotte Hacking’s new book, The Balancing Act: An Evidence-Based Approach to Teaching Phonics, Reading and Writing, recommends replacing systematic, synthetic phonics instruction with contextualized phonics embedded within “literacy rich” lessons. The book’s title promises an “evidenced-based approach,” and It is this purported evidence-base that requires close scrutiny if we are to guard against being sold more stories about reading instruction as we have been in the past.

Tug of War: Phonics Fallacies

First, it should be noted that the purpose of this review is not to refute Wyse and Hacking’s assertion that decontextualized phonics instruction does not yield the positive results claimed by its proponents—though many others have put forth such a refutation. In Jennifer Buckingham’s review, Groundhog day for reading instruction, of the Wyse and Bradbury paper, “Reading wars or reading reconciliation: A critical examination of robust research,” she cites three important studies that were left out of their synthesis. Moreover, several meta-analyses find mean effect sizes averaging .48 for decontextualized phonics instruction (12 meta-analyses comprising 426 studies) while whole language effect sizes average .09 (5 meta-analyses comprising 81 studies).

It should also be noted that Wyse and Hacking are not calling for whole language instruction. They are promoting contextualized phonics, which, unlike whole language, does rely upon systematic phonics instruction. The point is that we do have some basis for drawing conclusions about what is likely to be more effective for most students, rather than simply dismissing decontextualized phonics instruction as insufficiently studied as Wyse and Hacking do. So this itself is problematic because what is claimed is simply not the case. We have to recognize and emphasize how very misleading such an assertion is, which requires rejecting or ignoring a great deal of relevant research—even if Wyse and Hacking refuse to acknowledge it.

Regardless, it is important to emphasize that while the strength of this evidence for decontextualized phonics instruction may rest on improvement related to reading and spelling rather than comprehension, these are not insignificant outcomes and should not be ignored. Boosting comprehension can be accomplished by addressing the upper strands of Scarborough’s Reading Rope as Linnea Ehri explains in the National Reading Panel Report:

At the end of training, test results showed that Jolly Phonics children were able to read significantly more words and pseudowords and write more words than Big Book children. The overall effect size was d = 0.73. In a follow-up test one year later, the phonics group outperformed the control group in reading and spelling words but not in reading comprehension. This may have occurred because most of the students were ELL. For their comprehension to be improved, perhaps more extensive instruction to enhance competency in English syntax and semantics is required (ch. 2, p. 132).

This review of The Balancing Act will, therefore, proceed under the premise that decontextualized phonics instruction can improve reading and spelling, as Ehri states, but syntax, semantics, and other literacy components must also be included within the broader curriculum to promote reading comprehension. My goal is to examine the evidence behind contextualized phonics instruction and to situate this type of instruction within the constraints of cognitive load theory as it applies to both students and teachers. Simply stated: We agree that comprehension is the goal of reading, but we disagree about how to teach essential foundational skills that need to be mastered in order for students to become proficient readers who comprehend what they read. Wyse and Hacking favor teaching these foundational skills in conjunction with reading comprehension delivered through “literacy rich” lessons using “real” books. What is the evidence base for this approach, and what are the implications for instruction?

Relying on Research: An Evidence-Based Approach?                          

When cognitive psychologist Keith Stanovich was asked whether there was one definitive study examining the orthographic approach to decoding vs. the cueing approach, he responded:

We are in climate change territory here. There is no one study because there’s a myriad converging, partially diagnostic studies weighing against the cueing logic. That was true 25 years ago.  It’s a bigger pile now.  Just like climate change.

Because there are not any studies comparing contextualized phonics to decontextualized phonics, Wyse and Hacking offer support for their method by citing meta-analyses that look at both code-based and meaning-based interventions. One such paper, “What We Know and Need to Know about Literacy Interventions for Elementary Students with Reading Difficulties and Disabilities, Including Dyslexia” (Otaiba  et al., Reading Research Quarterly, 2023), analyzed 14 meta-analyses and systematic reviews. It concludes:

We know that explicit and systematic intensive intervention, focusing on the code and meaning dimensions of reading, and delivered one-to-one or in small groups, are likely to improve foundational code-based reading skills, and to a lesser extent, meaning-based skills, across grade levels.

Interestingly, this statement reflects Linnea Ehri’s statement cited above from over two decades earlier where she acknowledges the importance of teaching syntax and semantics in order to improve comprehension. Although many Balanced Literacy advocates claim otherwise, the push for systematic and explicit phonics instruction decontextualized from “real” books that are essential for building vocabulary, developing oral language skills, and promoting complex sentence structure, does not negate the importance of these “meaning dimensions” of reading. What’s worrisome is that Wyse and Hacking accept the assertion regarding the ineffectiveness of decontextualized phonics instruction and then extrapolate from this assertion a proposal for a method that lacks robust research support.

In light of this intransigence, rather than continue to argue about the decades of support for decontextualized phonics instruction, we can look to educational Psychologist Kerry Hempenstall’s recommendation for decision-making when reading research is non-existent, inconclusive, or under dispute. He advises:

As is often the case, when several options are available and the evidence is not adequate to clearly support one or the other, the emphasis is most judiciously placed on the alternative that is most closely related to the reading process.

So what is the “reading process” that beginning readers engage in? Here’s how neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, author of Reading in the Brain, explains beginning reading instruction in his Responses to The Reading League.

Young readers must be taught explicitly how to attend to letter strings, left-to-right, letter by letter, and how to sound them out, in order to connect them to spoken words that they already know. They should never be distracted from this task by guessing, by using contextual pictures or other ‘cues’ as substitutes for letter-sound knowledge to decode words, etc. The best guidance in instructional materials is, when coming to a word that is not immediately recognizable in a text, focus on letter-sound correspondences and decoding. Context is used only to help confirm word reading accuracy and to integrate the current word in the ongoing phrase, sentence, and discourse . . . Explicit teaching of phonics leads to the fast and painless acquisition of reading more efficiently than other methods.

Another neuroscientist, Mark Seidenberg, author of Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, and What Can Be Done About It, supports the goal of promoting “fast and painless acquisition of reading” and has simple advice related to phonics instruction: Get in, get out, move on. He emphasizes–and Linnea Ehri confirms with her numerous classroom studies—that the most efficient method for getting in is through decontextualized instruction so that there is no confusion whatsoever about how sounds, spellings, and meaning (phonology, orthography, and semantics) work together—with plenty of integrated practice of all three as needed. Though targeted, this instruction is not all-consuming. Once students gain traction with code knowledge (and this can vary depending on the student), we can get out and move on to the business of using foundational reading skills to achieve the overarching goal of comprehending grade-level text.

But let’s begin with what The Balancing Act does get right. There is solid reading research behind the book’s emphasison the importance of integrating reading and writing because, as Wyse and Hacking assert, “children’s writing supports their knowledge of how words work in reading.” Gene Ouellette and Monique Sénéchal’s research reveals how independent writing using invented spelling provides important segmenting practice that develops phonemic awareness skills to help cement phoneme-grapheme connections; and both Karen Harris and Steve Graham have done extensive research revealing the importance of writing about reading to improve comprehension. This research is solid, and the authors should be commended for emphasizing it. Moreover, Nell Duke’s emphasis on instructional simultaneity to circumvent time-constraints in the classroom speaks to the importance of integrating literacy components to the greatest extent possible.

However, the emphasis on contextualizing phonics instruction within literacy rich lessons does not have a similarly solid evidence-base, and the description in the book of a serendipitous, haphazard process does little to inspire confidence in the method. Although the authors do emphasize the importance of teaching the alphabetic code, their reluctance to do so decontextualized from literature—along with decrying the use of decodable books—yields recommendations that require all sorts of lesson-planning gymnastics: extracting examples from these works of literature, augmenting them with teacher-developed lessons, and making a point of attending to vocabulary and comprehension while simultaneously juggling code-based activities. If this sounds sprawling and inefficient, it’s because it is.

We have learned from research that ineffective phonics instruction is often characterized by silent activities like filling in worksheets or shuffling cut-out words across desktops to sort them into categories related to spelling patterns without actually reading what’s written on the paper. So the authors are right to reject these types of ineffective methods. We now understand the need to make sure that our phonics instruction is a noisy affair because we know that these types of phonology-free activities will not make learning stick long enough for these words to become orthographically mapped to memory so that they can be summoned for use in the service of comprehension-building activities. The research by Linnea Ehri and others has shown us how to promote orthographic mapping (OM) by deliberately emphasizing the union of phonology, orthography, and semantics (sounds, symbols, and meaning). For this there is solid research, which is why I devote an entire chapter (Making Sense of Words We Remember) to orthographic mapping in my instructional guide to reading. Thus, one should expect to find this research in any book about reading instruction, making clear the connection between the recommended method and how it facilitates orthographic mapping. Right?

The Vanishing Act: O.M. is M.I.A. in The Balancing Act

The absence, therefore, of any discussion of orthographic mapping in The Balancing Act (only mentioned in one sentence on one page) raises a red flag and salutes it, and this failure to reference OM is simply not OK in what purports to be a scholarly work. While it is reassuringly true that phonics instruction embedded in literature is characterized by intentional interactions between teacher and students so that it is not done in silence, this ‘serve and return’ dynamic is a feature of all good read-aloud and shared reading activities, which is why these early reading experiences are crucial for both oral language development and listening comprehension. But contextualized phonics instruction is simply not the best way to teach phonics, which is why we must guard against any attempt to sell this story to educators.

How does this happen? How does a book about reading instruction make it through to publication without discussion of one of the tenets of reading related to orthographic tenacity: the ability for words to stick in memory so that they can be automatically recognized during reading—quickly and accurately? How does concern that decontextualized phonics instruction may not transfer to improved reading comprehension call for abandoning that phonics instruction and replacing it with untested methods instead of shifting the focus onto evidence-based comprehension instruction in addition to systematic and explicit phonics instruction? That’s like saying that explicitly teaching transcription skills and sentence structure is not leading to robust paragraph writing and should therefore be abandoned. If a foundational skill isn’t translating to the purpose for laying that foundation (in the case of phonics, the purpose is to promote reading comprehension), perhaps it’s not the foundation-laying that needs changing but the blueprint for constructing the rest of the building.

Although it is always a good idea to immerse children in literature—along with providing a varied diet of text types for reading practice (a book box for each student on their desk facilitates easy access to these books)—contextualizing phonics instruction and teaching it embedded within this literature is not a good idea. It is both ineffective and inefficient for beginning reading instruction, though Wyse and Hacking claim otherwise without providing convincing evidence. 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

They conclude by emphasizing that “research does not show that discrete synthetic phonics of the kind practised in England and some other countries and regions should be first and foremost because this reflects an undue influence on one part of the balance of elements that make up successful reading” (p. 80). In fact, the Rose Report does not emphasize an “undue influence” of phonics. It concludes:

In sum, distinguishing the key features associated with word recognition and focusing upon what this means for the teaching of phonic work does not diminish the equal, and eventually greater, importance of developing language comprehension. This is because phonic work should be time limited, whereas work on comprehension continues throughout life. Language comprehension, developed, for example, through discourse and a wide range of good fiction and non-fiction, discussing characters, story content, and interesting events, is wholly compatible with and dependent upon introducing a systematic programme of high quality phonic work (Rose, 2006, p. 39).

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: The Complexity of Contextualized Phonics

Decontextualized phonics instruction does not exclude other reading “elements”—it makes them more accessible because contextualization can impose a cognitive burden on beginning readers that is unsustainable for many children. Wyse and Hacking are “combining” too many instructional elements within the vehicle of a “real” book. The authors emphasize that their approach is geared toward “typically developing” readers and claim that both the Simple View of Reading and Scarborough’s Reading Rope were developed based primarily on studies of struggling readers. They caution that “if any model is to be used to support an approach to teaching reading, then it needs to be appropriate for typically developing readers, who are the majority in schools, and also for non-typically developing readers” (p. 34). They are convinced that Scarborough’s Reading Rope is an “image not mainly informed by a review of studies of typically developing readers” (p. 37). 

But here’s what Scarborough, Gough, and Tunmer have to say about the studies that support their models. In her 2001 chapter “Connecting Early Language and Literacy to Later Reading (Dis)Abilities: Evidence, Theory, and Practice” in the book Handbook of Early Literacy Research, Scarborough outlines how her model is a composite of findings from many studies:

The strands in the model were derived from a synthesis of empirical findings on the predictors of reading achievement and on the correlates of good and poor reading performance. The studies reviewed included research on typically developing readers as well as those who struggle, spanning preschool through adulthood.

In a similar vein, in their paper “Decoding, Reading, and Reading Disability” (1986), where they introduced the Simple View of Reading, Gough and Tunmer explain:

The present study rests on an examination of the two chief determinants of individual differences in reading comprehension. These determinants are decoding ability and listening comprehension. It is our hypothesis that variation in reading comprehension is largely accounted for by variation in these two abilities. Our data are drawn from both skilled and unskilled readers, and our results indicate that both decoding and comprehension skills contribute significantly to reading performance in both groups.

In a 2019 Webinar, A Case History of a Twisty Metaphor, Scarborough states, “Even if a metaphor/model/finding is perfectly apt, putting it into practice can be challenging.” It is this challenge—the translation to teaching—where the recommendations in The Balancing Act fall short.

Wyse and Hacking emphasize that they developed their own reading model, The Double Helix of Reading and Writing, in order to address limitations in previous models. Note that in the Reading League Resource, The Reading Rope: Key Ideas Behind the Metaphor, Scarborough explains that the strands of the Rope do not develop independently, which is one of the concerns Wyse and Hacking express. They emphasize that in the center of the Double Helix is Motivation and Meaning, which form the basis for their approach to teaching phonics based on contextualizing it within literacy-rich lessons using “real” books. However, this approach lacks a solid research base and imposes a cognitive burden for many students, as we shall see. It also piles onto the existing load for the teacher by necessitating a search for representative literature to sequence the contextualized phonics embedded in it. 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.

Cognitive Overload for Students: Separating the Signal from the Noise

In my instructional guide to reading, From Sound to Summary: Braiding the Reading Rope to Make Words Make Sense, I refer to Stanford professor Claude Goldenberg’s metaphor about separating the signal from the noise. I write: We run the risk of creating cognitive overload by contextualizing foundational skills within reading authentic literature. This contextualization can be confusing to the emergent reader who has to simultaneously keep track of the story in addition to the incidental phonics instruction embedded in it. The skill is the signal but the story adds so much noise that the signal can become too faint and fade away rather than mapped to memory.

An example of a lesson from The Balancing Act is the suggestion to teach the consonant digraph ‘ck’ through the charmingly written and beautifully illustrated Lucy Cousins book Peck, Peck, Peck, which features the many pecking pursuits of a woodpecker. Unfortunately, it has only two single-syllable words ending in ‘ck,’ hardly a ringing endorsement for practice with this spelling pattern, especially in a picture book that has hundreds of words. By contrast, the following 77-word ChatGPT story contains nine words with ‘ck’ featured in a much simpler text that students can eventually access independently.

Title: Peck the Woodpecker

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Page 1

Peck is a woodpecker.

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Page 2

Peck has a red neck and black wings.

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Page 3

Peck can perch on a rock or peck on a tree.

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Page 4

Peck pecks quickly and Peck pecks slowly.

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Page 5

Peck tries to peck the stick.

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Page 6

But Peck is sick of sticks and wants bugs to eat.

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Page 7

The bugs hide in the thick bark of the tree.

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Page 8

Peck pecks and gets a snack.

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Page 9

Peck is happy. Peck likes to peck.

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Page 10

Peck the woodpecker pecks on a tree.

Is Peck the Woodpecker authentic literature? Of course not. But does it provide authentic practice reading connected text? You bet! Imagine Peck, Peck, Peck as a read-aloud to introduce the ‘ck’ spelling but not to teach that spelling. The vocabulary, comprehension-building, and writing possibilities for this story (many of which are explored in The Balancing Act) lend themselves to mining multiple literacy components without attempting to squeeze the square peg of phonics instruction into the round hole of experiencing a well-written story, which diminishes rather than enhances the effectiveness of each. While the authors remind us that “no decodable reader will provide the richness of narrative, language, and engagement” like the “real” books they recommend, that doesn’t mean we deny our students access to literacy rich lessons just because we also use decodable books. We share authentic, rich literature with them until they can read it for themselves.

Ignoring Pamela Snow’s concern about the heavy lift for teachers, the authors recommend, in addition to urging students to pay attention to the ‘ck’ spelling in Peck, Peck, Peck, that “teachers take time to assess the children’s listening comprehension and to connect the book with their own lives and experiences” through a series of questions. Following this, it’s back to phonics instruction:

This page spread offers an opportunity for the teacher to introduce how to read the disyllabic words ‘tennis’, ‘racket’, and ‘jacket’. The teacher can model how to sound these out, noting the letters NN represents the single phoneme /n/ in tennis. When the individual words have been read, the teacher should encourage the children to re-read the whole page alongside them. The children will see how the letter E in the words jacket and racket represents the /i/ phoneme when read fluently in context (p. 151).

There’s an awful lot going on here! There are three two-syllable words (tennis, racket, and jacket) and three grapheme-phoneme connections: ‘ck’ for /k/’, ‘nn’ /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 effective and efficient way to help them crack the 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; namely, the heavy, unnecessary, even counterproductive burden Pamela Snow says this type of early literacy instruction places on students and teachers.

Cognitive Kindness: Practice Makes Permanent

By contrast, using multi-criteria text, with decodability representing just one feature, can facilitate independent practice within authentic (albeit simplified) stories. I wish I had a dollar for every time one of my first-grade intervention students exclaims after at-home practice with a ‘print partner’ reading a decodable book: I love that story! Yes, they love “Shawn’s Soy Sauce” (aw, au), “Clues from Boots” (oo, ue, ew), and “Crow’s Plan” (ow, oa) because these stories simultaneously entertain while motivating children to persist in learning their spelling patterns, perfecting their decoding skills, and gaining word recognition practice. Engagement and motivation are two reasons why Wyse and Hacking advocate switching to contextualized phonics. What they fail to recognize is that repetition and reinforcement of the phoneme-grapheme connections children have been taught reduce their cognitive load by facilitating orthographic mapping through the decoding and word recognition process, rewarding students with the ability to read independently.

This is, in and of itself, motivating. Success breeds success. More importantly, it breeds successive attempts to practice reading. Engagement and motivation are the byproducts of a well-taught lesson with well-chosen materials. Neither motivation nor engagement will advance the goals of a reading lesson unilaterally if they are the primary considerations when structuring that lesson. Rather, motivation and engagement are byproducts of successful lessons that build in increased competence and confidence. To put it bluntly, there are instructional considerations related to cracking the code that are emphatically fundamental. Wyse and Hacking are right to warn about overteaching the alphabetic code but are wrong to think that decontextualized code-instruction is inherently unmotivating:

Children’s intense engagement with the multiple meanings created by an author through the special mixture of text and pictures is one of the many things that makes children’s literature, and primary teaching, such a pleasure. And it is the main reason and purpose for teaching reading. If we lose sight of this, for example, through a too-narrow focus on the alphabetic code, children will be less motivated to read and will fail to grasp the essence of reading and learning to read (p. 119).

What this viewpoint fails to realize is that engagement can definitely be accomplished through decodable texts. I know because I’ve seen it happen. In Meaningful Phonics and Word Study, Wiley Blevins explains how:

Decodable texts need to go beyond mere phonics drills. They should engage students with meaningful content, relatable themes, and simple storylines that make the reading experience enjoyable and purposeful. When students see the relevance of what they are reading, they are more likely to be motivated and successful readers. 

Wyse and Hacking want to guard against the perceived “drill and kill” of decontextualized phonics, failing to appreciate Anita Archer’s optimistic characterization related to this type of systematic, explicit instruction—how the “thrill of skill” can foster motivation as students successfully engage with the text in front of them. It’s okay—in fact, desirable—for children to read I am Sam as a first text while a more complex text like Sam Who Never Forgets is read to them. These books serve two different purposes, each engaging in its own way.

Cognitive Overload for Teachers: Multileveled Lesson Planning

Recently, I coached a first-year teacher through integrated lesson sequences that covered phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, writing, and reading connected text. Anchoring instruction in a decodable text within the scope and sequence of the phonics program allowed her to teach one or more spelling patterns by dictating ‘word chains’ (words with ‘minimal contrast’ that change one phoneme-grapheme at a time: tick to stick, stick to stack, stack to tack, tack to lack, lack to black, black to block, etc.);labeling pictures within the text; highlighting the decodable words while reading the story as a group; and finally reading the whole text with a partner and independently to practice both decoding skills and fluency. By contrast, there is no similar systematic instructional sequence for phonics if it is arbitrarily contextualized within literature that wasn’t written with the intent to introduce and practice phoneme-grapheme connections and variations of spelling patterns representing a single phoneme.

The book Peck, Peck, Peck is featured in Chapter 8: Gaining Control. This chapter begins with:

As children learn an increasing amount of letter-to-phoneme correspondences to continue to practise the essential skills of segmenting and blending words for reading and writing, their progress, confidence, motivation, and independence as readers and writers will grow. Situating this learning in the context of real texts and extended learning experiences which develop children’s understanding, as shown in the previous chapter, is the most effective approach which also brings learning to life. This learning engages children and sustains their motivation to read and write for real purposes and for pleasure (p. 142).

What teacher wouldn’t want to employ the “most effective approach” to reading instruction? Unfortunately, I do not see solid research in the book supporting the teaching of contextualized phonics, and when I repeatedly asked for citations for this research during a webinar with the authors hosted by the American Reading Company, none was forthcoming (though an ARC representative did reach out and apologize for a failure to do so). Wyse and Hacking write: “A direct comparison of the effectiveness of reading scheme texts, such as ‘decodable texts’, versus the effectiveness of using ‘real’ books and texts has not been researched using an RCT with longitudinal design” (p. 75). While we know that RCTs are not the only evidence we can rely on, if we are to radically change our phonics instruction, we need compelling reasons for doing so.

One of the studies, “Explicit vs. Implicit Phonemic Awareness Instruction” (Cunningham, 1990), that the authors offer as “robust proof of the concept of contextualisation” does not actually focus on contextualizing phonics instruction within literacy rich lessons as Wyse and Hacking propose. In fact, it explores the importance of integrated phonemic awareness instruction as follows:

In the metalevel program: (1) the specific goals and purpose of the lesson were stated explicitly at the beginning of each session and discussed; (2) the previous lesson was reviewed and its relation to the present lesson was made explicit; (3) the children were shown how the skill should be applied, along with examples of when and where the skill should be used in a reading situation; (4) the utility of the skill for reading activities was demonstrated and practiced; and (5) the teacher modeled the skill in a hypothetical reading context, whereafter the child had an opportunity to perform the skill under her tutelage. The feedback the subject received was explicit and corrective in nature.

This sounds to me like flat out good teaching where skills are integrated to the greatest extent possible without imposing a cognitive challenge on the learner. This type of instruction is not contingent upon either contextualizing phonics within real books or decontextualizing it using decodables. It’s merely an instructional method, not a doctrine dependent on the quality of the text being used—neither featuring nor lacking an aura of authenticity. Didn’t Hollis Scarborough remind us that the strands of the Reading Rope do not develop independently? This necessitates integrating phonemic awareness with phonics and text reading: integration of reading components, not contextualization of components within “real” books.

As I read through Chapter 8, which begins by teaching ‘ck’ based on the word ‘peck’ in the title and ends with teaching ‘ss’ based on the word ‘kiss’ on the final page (with a range of suggested activities in between), I find myself feeling lost and overwhelmed, unable to focus on what’s critical for promoting reading development for my students at any given point in time. It’s true that we do want to take advantage of ‘teachability moments’ as they present themselves, and there isn’t just one way to cultivate the comprehension-building possibilities in children’s literature. (We teachers have a generative gene that can inspire many engaging and motivating activities related to read-alouds!) But please don’t ask me to use my creativity to sequence my instruction of the alphabetic code! Please provide me with materials that I can readily and reliably teach so that I can help my students gain control of the code rather than haphazardly rely on a title or a tagline to teach my students the spelling patterns they need to master in order to decode, orthographically map to memory the words they’ve decoded, and then automatically recognize those words upon future encounters—so essential to becoming a proficient reader.

Wyse and Hacking are not advocating that teachers follow “a published programme or scheme” because their own model “is built on teachers developing their confidence and professional autonomy in the classroom” (p. 94). They forget that one teacher’s confidence can be another teacher’s cognitive overload. We know that we must equip our teachers with methods and materials that are efficient and effective, and then–if they choose–they can draw upon their developing confidence to augment these lessons as they exercise an autonomy built on experience and expertise.

Groundhog Day: Back to Balanced Literacy?

There is much jubilation in the Balanced Literacy community over the prospect of The Balancing Act promoting contextualized phonics instruction within authentic literature, thus uniting teaching code knowledge with meaning-making. And, just like a traditional wedding celebration, there is something old (the importance of motivation and meaning), something new (the importance of integrating phonemic awareness and phonics within writing instruction), something borrowed (the importance of systematically teaching the alphabetic code), and something blue (the recommendation to contextualize phonics instruction).

Yes, blue. I for one am feeling as blue as the beautiful shade on the cover of the book at the prospect that a well-intentioned but ill-informed way to help students learn to read is gaining traction once again. Phonics instruction contextualized within rich literature sounds appealing: Who wouldn’t want children to experience the joys of reading rich literature from the outset of their education? The problem is that the way the authors of this book envision these experiences will have the perverse effect of delaying when students will actually be able to experience those joys by reading themselves. The evidence is very clear that if done right, direct, explicit, and systematic phonics instruction is generally the quickest and most efficient road to reading competence, one that is “fast and painless,” as Dehaene asserts.

However, it is just as important that as these skills are being taught and acquired, children must also be exposed to rich literature and many other learning experiences orally, visually, and using multimedia. A rich, comprehensive literacy diet that promotes both foundational word recognition skills as well as language and knowledge development through exposure to literature, science, social studies, and the arts is the best way to promote full and joyous literacy.

If the neo-balanced literacy movement gains traction, it would mark a significant setback. Going back to Balanced Literacy worries me. The last line in The Great Gatsby sums up our ongoing saga: And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. We must beat on, even more ceaselessly, against this current.