Research and the Reading Wars

HOW DO researchers resolve scientific controversies in the area of early reading instruction? Leafing through a 2005 Kappan special section on reading research, one might conclude pessimistically that even distinguished scholars are unable to agree on the scientific consensus about best practices in beginning reading instruction. Indeed, I was struck by the continued scholarly debate about the implications of the National Reading Panel Report of 2000 nearly five years after its publication and by the heated exchange between researchers about the efficacy of using decodable texts, sustained silent reading, and other instructional strategies for improving children's reading skills. A cursory reading of these articles might suggest that the reading wars are alive and well in the 21st century. However, I recently reached a more optimistic conclusion. In reviewing major research syntheses on reading since the publication of Jeanne Chall's 1967 classic, Learning to Read: The Great Debate, I concluded that a broad consensus about effective reading instruction has evolved slowly over four decades. In this article, I describe how researchers have historically addressed controversies about reading instruction and explain why good research seems to have a delayed and limited impact on reading policy and practice. To conclude, I offer ideas for accelerating the communication of research to practitioners and empowering teachers to establish norms of excellent practice. RESEARCH AND EARLY READING INSTRUCTION In Learning to Read: The Great Debate, Jeanne Chall captured the essence of the reading wars. She noted that the many controversies about reading instruction in first grade boiled down to one question: Do children learn better with a beginning method that stresses meaning or with one that stresses learning the code? (1) In her synthesis of experimental studies conducted during the 20th century, Chall found that an early code emphasis produced better outcomes in word recognition in the early grades and helped children read with better comprehension up to fourth grade than did instructional practices in which children were taught to read whole words and whole sentences. Following the publication of Chall's findings, Kenneth Goodman argued that reading was a guessing game. (2) In other words, good readers used context clues and background knowledge to predict, confirm, and guess at the identification of new words. Reading scholars Timothy Shanahan and Susan Neuman noted that Goodman's study on oral reading miscues shaped the whole-language movement. Eventually, Goodman and his colleagues also influenced practice by challenging drills, word lists, and other skills-based approaches that take words out of context. (3) In the 1970s and 1980s, the novel psycholinguistic theory of reading sparked the interest of cognitive psychologists seeking to understand the processes underlying skillful and fluent reading. Some researchers used eye movement technology to see if children skipped letters and words while reading text; others began to conduct experiments to understand whether context facilitated or impeded word recognition. (4) Cognitive psychologist Keith Stanovich points out that the accumulation of research findings from the 1970s to the 1990s led to a Grand Synthesis of the processes underlying skillful reading. (5) In Toward a Literacy Society, a 1975 publication sponsored by the National Institute of Education (NIE), Chall argued that neither phonics nor sight-word approaches were sufficient to help children become skilled readers. Instead, she reminded educators and the general public that an inflexible approach may fail with a child if in the long run it plays down either of these aspects of learning to read. What is important is a proper balance between them. (6) A second NIE publication in 1985, Becoming a Nation of Readers, encouraged researchers to undertake multidisciplinary studies of reading, to examine the efficacy of diverse approaches to instruction, and to extend inquiry beyond decoding and early literacy instruction. …