Consider Direct Instruction, an elementary teaching methodology developed in the 1960s by Siegfried Engelmann based on his experiences working with disadvantaged primary schoolchildren in Illinois. The debate over phonics-which Flesch’s work should have put to rest 66 years ago-reflects a broader problem. Flesch noted, for instance, that the 1949 book Children Learn to Read gave a list of “seven different ways to recognize new or partly known words,” which included “the use of picture clues” and “the use of context clues” and, only last, “phonetic and structural analysis of the word.” And a number of systematic studies have found substantial benefits to phonics instruction, including for racial-minority students and as an intervention with low-performing students.
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The three-cueing system, for instance, differs only mildly from older ideas about how to teach reading through “whole language,” which Rudolf Flesch fiercely attacked in his influential 1955 defense of phonics instruction, Why Johnny Can’t Read. One would hope that this debate would have been resolved by now. Students taught with the three-cueing system, furthermore, often made bewildering mistakes while reading basic books, coming up with sentences that fit stereotyped grammatical patterns and the illustrations but diverged wildly from what was actually written. Fluent readers may not have to sound out words explicitly, but that’s only because they were so practiced at associating sound to spelling that the whole process was automatic. It was actually less fluent readers who relied more on contextual clues while reading. Primary education, the theory held, should teach students using the same process: not “sounding out” words but using only isolated phonetic components, such as a first letter, and combining these with contextual clues.Īs Hanford describes, subsequent psychological research disproved the underpinnings of the three-cueing theory. In many cases, systematic research has illustrated that common current practices could be vastly improved on, but such improvements have not been implemented widely.Ī 2019 report by Emily Hanford for American Public Media, “At a Loss for Words,” described how millions of students in the United States were still being taught to read using a flawed approach known as “three-cueing.” This method, Hanford writes, sprang from a 1967 paper that theorized that fluent readers recognized words not merely from their spellings but also from “contextual” factors such as sentence structure and accompanying illustrations. Many fields suffer from the persistence of received ideas that are unsupportable, but the problem is especially severe in American education.
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