The history of literacy theory became important for me when I chose to become a teacher, although I didn’t know that until I went back to the university after teaching for 20 years. I’m going to outline two not-quite parallel histories in order to explain why this weblog was initiated, and maybe help anyone who reads this to better understand their own literacy history.

Archaic thinking
Until the late 1950’s and early 60’s, around the time that I entered school, reading was regarded as merely a perceptual process. Comprehension was assumed to occur once the reader decoded the written symbols and reproduced them as spoken language. According to this view, the relatively simple job of the teacher was to teach children to discriminate among different letters and reproduce their sounds. To accomplish this, phonics and whole-word recognition were the prevailing instructional methodologies. A view of reading as decoding was consistent with behavioral theory, favored for instructional objectives during that historical period.

A linguistic perspective
Enter the linguist, Noam Chomsky. Chomsky recognized that since words have multiple meanings, comprehension of spoken language could not be explained as the strung-together meanings of a series of words. Chomsky’s insight was that language, though very complex, was acquired by children easily and naturally through immersion in their social environment. Chomsky helped us to recognize that human beings are “wired” to naturally acquire language from their home communities.

The psycholinguists
Psycholinguistics is a field that evolved out of Chomsky’s work. Early researchers in this field who were interested in language acquisition found that children became skilled users of language by inferring and testing out rules for language as active participants in a language community. Reading theorists took up these research findings and asked what reading instruction would look like if we assumed that children learned to read and write in the same way that they learned to talk. In 1965 Kenneth Goodman published “A Linguistic Study of Cues and Miscues in Reading.” Goodman found that oral reading errors made by children provided access to their comprehension process, and should not be regarded as mistakes to be corrected. Two years later he developed a model that defined sense-making among readers as the ability to simultaneously use 3 different cueing systems: syntactic cues, semantic cues, and graphophonemic cues. He declared reading to be a “psycholinguistic guessing game,” a claim that attracted a lot of criticism from behaviorists.

Psycholinguists pushed the study of reading comprehension into the foreground, and moved reading research away from behavioral and perceptual analytical models. Their work caused educators to question the value of isolated skills instruction, and diminished the attraction of artificially controlled vocabularies in texts for beginning readers. Reading would no longer be viewed as simply a perceptual process. The study of reading became inextricably linked with the study of thought. The Age of Comprehension had been born.

Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistic research focused on issues of dialect, and found that dialects were not poorly-formed variations of standard English, but were legitimate language systems with syntactic structures and developmental stages of acquisition for its speakers. Sociolinguists argued that dialectic differences in speech should not be regarded as deficits by educators, but should be accommodated while students learn to read and write. Sociolinguists introduced the idea that reading acquisition is a social process, much like that of oral language.

Cognitive theory
Jean Piaget was one of the major cognitive theorists. He used schema theory to explain how knowledge is acquired, and to describe stages of human intellectual development. His ideas, however, did not strongly influence thinking in the United States until the 1960’s. Schema theory, which describes the structure of human knowledge, contributed to our understanding of literacy. From schema theory we understand learning as a process in which we create mental models called schemata out of our experience. Some have described these structures as a mental filing system that is hierarchically organized. Schema theory helped reading theorists better understand the constructive nature of reading comprehension. Schema theory appealed to learning theorists as well as reading researchers. It emphasized the connections that readers - learners make between a text and their prior experience.

Constructivism
Schema theory provides a link from cognitivism to constructivism, a learning theory that serves as a kind of meta-theory since it provides us with a model for how we create mental models. Constructivism emphasizes the active engagement of learners in processes of meaning-making as they join new information to existing knowledge structures. When applied to reading, we are inclined to ask a fascinating question about where meaning is constructed. Does meaning reside in the text, in the intentions and motivation of the author, in the mind of the reader, or in the transaction between reader and text?

The discussion of constructivism brings us into the 1980’s and early 90’s. Differing views of constructivsm, however, make any single definition of it problematic. Out of a recognition that our social environment shapes our experience, constructivist thinking splintered in order to explore meaning making as it may occur in individuals, small groups, or communities. This conceptualization of constructivist theory is called social constructivism, and the work of Lev Vygotsky had a powerful influence on literacy researchers. But that story is for another time.

A new approach to literacy
The need for a theoretical framework that would encompass these various understandings and inform instructional decision-making generated a new theoretical domain for literacy education. The socio-psycholinguistic approach to reading instruction emerged in the 1980’s. More commonly known as whole language, this movement embraced meaning-making as its central tenet. Also known as process-oriented instruction, socio-psycholinguistic approaches are constructive, contextualized, learner-centered and meaning-focused.

Teachers who are familiar with language experience, word walls, independent reading, paired reading, choral reading, readers theater, readers’ workshop, reading aloud to the class, guided writing, modeled writing, independent writing, writers’ workshop, learning logs, book talks, literature circles, problem-centered learning, discovery learning, inquiry learning, and I don’t know how many more instructional strategies owe their inclusion in instructional design to the socio-psycholinguistic approach.

The story does not end there, or we’d be stuck in decades-old thinking. Nevertheless, to pursue the rest of the story would be overly tedious at this point. If you’re still with me on this, I hope you’ve found this whirlwind tour of the intellectual landscape around literacy informative if not amusing on some level.

The salient point I want to make is that although this history runs roughly concurrent with my lifetime, as a teacher and a student I had little exposure to any of these ideas. When I was a new teacher in the 1980’s, I was trained by a university faculty with a strong preference for behaviorist thinking. Whole-language appeared out of nowhere for me in approximately my fifth year in the profession. I had no knowledge of any of the theory that preceded it, and little understanding of how it was conceived as a model for instruction.

The history of comprehension is relatively new when you consider that it wasn’t even recognized as worthy of attention until about 40 years ago. Comprehension was assumed! It would be no different than if I was to say that after thousands of years, people recently realized that heat is a necessary condition for cooking food.

Literacy is also political. That is one of the additional understandings that we need to acknowledge in our history. Resistance to new theoretical conceptualizations of literacy is partially due to habits of mind, and partially due to ideological resistance to the notion that readers might construct meanings other than those intended by the author.

As a profession we are presently involved in an ideological struggle for control of our theoretical roots. The National Reading Panel’s report has misconstrued the research. Elaine M. Garan’s critique of the report, Beyond the Smoke and Mirrors: A Critique of the National Reading Panel Report on Phonics, is enlightening. The standards movement and the No Child Left Behind Act are aligned to limit and influence the thinking of teachers about the nature and practice of literacy acquisition and instruction. What we do with our theoretical history is of immediate importance. If we abandon what we’ve learned in the last 50 years, and settle for a politically derived definition of literacy, we will cease to ask the important and interesting questions that have helped us understand what learning and teaching might look like if we are open to discovery. There is no convincing evidence that schools are failing because of progressive pedagogy. Factors that may as easily be implicated in claims of school failure include unreasonable criteria for success, social conditions that schools have no direct control over, and a cultural environment that provides people with a limited understanding of the need for making a paradigm shift in how schooling should occur.

Teachers can become stewards of our intellectual heritage. We can use what has been learned in the past to help us chart a course for a future research agenda. Classroom teachers in particular are in an ideal position to inquire into what seems to work, and what does not. Our richly contextualized knowledge, our close reading of our students and our classrooms, puts us in an ideal position to ask the questions that need to be answered. This blog is a place for me to stir that pot and generate a little heat. It’s necessary to do that, I believe, when cooking a little food for thought.

Primary source for this article: Learning about Literacy: A 30-Year Journey, by P. David Pearson and Diane Stephens