Critical issues: Reading and the new literacy studies: Reframing the National Academy of Sciences report on reading

Journal of Literacy Research, Sep 1999 by Gee, James Paul

Chaney [1992] also observed that performance on phonological awareness tasks by preschoolers was highly correlated with general language ability. Moreover it was measures of semantic and syntactic skills, rather than speech discrimination and articulation, that predicted phonological awareness differences.(p.53)

What is most striking about the results of the preceding studies is the power of early preschool language to predict reading three to five years later. (pp. 107-108)

On average, phonological awareness (r = .46) has been about as strong a predictor of future reading as memory for sentences and stories, confrontation naming, and general language measures. (p. 112)

One must wonder what the Academy report would have looked like had the importance of early language abilities, and not early phonological awareness, been the driving force behind it, as it very well could have. There is a wholly different report, using all the same literature the Academy report cites, to be written here. One suspects that it was the urge to make the Academy report a "report on reading," and to speak within the frame of current public debates about reading, that led the Academy panel to stress the correlation between early phonological awareness and learning to read and to virtually ignore, or, at least, seriously background, the correlation between language abilities (of which phonological awareness is but one and not the most important) and learning to read.

The Academy report acknowledges, as I said above, that correlations do not mean causation, and, thus, that one cannot, without further evidence (which we do not have), argue from the correlation between early phonological awareness and later success in learning to read that the former causes the latter. Nonetheless, the report repeatedly calls for training in phonological awareness and overt and systematic instruction on the phonological-graphemic code. Surely, however, it is more plausible to argue that early language abilities cause both phonological awareness and later success in learning to read. At the very least, we ought to worry about just what early language abilities we are talking about and how these can be enhanced. We ought to worry, as well, about what instructional methods and interventions would have flowed from taking early language abilities seriously.

So what are these early language abilities that seem to be most importart for later success in school? According to the report, they are things like vocabulary (receptive vocabulary, but more especially expressive vocabulary, see p. 107), the ability to recall and comprehend sentences and stories, as well as the ability to engage in verbal interactions. Furthermore, what causes such verbal abilities seems to be fairly dear, though it is much less clear how to enhance them through specific school-based instructional methods, at least as far as these are construed in the current reading debates. What appears to cause enhanced verbal abilities are family, community, and school language environments in which children interact intensively with adults and more advanced peers and experience cognitively challenging talk and texts on sustained topics and in different genres of oral and written language (see pp.106108; ironically, perhaps, Catherine Snow, the chair of the Academy panel, and her students, have, over the years, done an impressive body of work that, in my opinion, shows just this).