The first thing that happened to reading is writing. For most of our history, humans have been able to speak but not read. Writing is a human creation, the first information technology, as much an invention as the telephone or computer.

—Mark Seidenberg, Language at the Speed of Sight

What is (un)natural about learning to read and write? We began our quest with this question, prompted by two references in a line in a David Share paper.

Like learning to read (English) which Gough famously dubbed “unnatural” [43], see also [3], becoming aware of the constituent phonemes in spoken words does not come “naturally”.

—Share, D. L. (2021). Common Misconceptions about the Phonological Deficit Theory of Dyslexia. Brain Sciences, 11(11), 1510.

This led us to unpack three foundational papers from 1976 to 1992 that have provided us with some surprising twists and turns and even moments, dare I say, of clarity.

Rather than spend too much time re-hashing what we’ve already covered, I wanted to take an opportunity to further reflect on what I’ve learned and on where I currently stand after all these geeky deep dives (I took a brief interlude between the 1st two papers to ruminate as well).

I believe that this debate about what is “natural” about teaching early reading is far more fundamental than it seems. For example, the “sage on the stage” vs. “guide on the side” divide surfaces in the Goodmans’ account of what effective teaching and learning should be for early reading, reflecting a deep-seated romantic tendency to elevate the status of children, wherein there is the belief that if we just allow children to learn “naturally,” they will somehow discover complex academic concepts.

This is true of social language. The swiftness with which we acquire our native language(s) as children is remarkable. Yet even here we must be careful. There are some children that do not learn and develop language at the same rate that others do, perhaps due to differences in working memory and other neurobiological reasons. This tells me that Liberman’s conjecture that speech is pre-cognitive may have been too bold.

Effortful, Rather Than Unnatural

Tracing these arguments has helped me to see more clearly that language and literacy development are on a spectrum from effortless to effortful, with another axis around the individual profile of a child that requires either more explicit instruction and deliberate practice or greater opportunities for more independent implicit learning. There are certain abilities that are more commonly effortless for most children, such as learning a first language, and others that are more commonly effortful for many, such as learning to break the code. And some children find effortless ones more effortful, and other children find the effortful ones also quite effortless (lucky them).

This applies to any skill: some kids can jump on a bike and start riding almost immediately, while others will need quite a lot of explicit modeling and practice with training wheels. Some kids can swim like a fish after a few lessons and practice, while other kids (like me) will only develop a half-sufficient dog paddle even after swim lessons, living near the ocean, and having a pool in their backyard.

The analyses of G&H and Liberman have helped me to identify more precisely where the greatest effort in learning to read in English lies: at the sublexical level—the level of phonemes and letters and letter sequences—a level that is, in their estimation, “unnatural,” because these sublexical units are “meaningless” and “artificial,” in the sense that they are “arbitrary.”

We do need to acknowledge there is an “artificiality” to written language. This artifice allows us to map “arbitrary” symbols onto our spoken language and record them for all time.

Yet I am concerned that framing learning sublexical units as completely unnatural may be a turn-off to those who would decide that teaching them is therefore antithetical to the goal of channeling the innate and “natural” curiosity and potential of children to read. I mean, there are still active and inflamed debates about phonics going on, and we’re trying to bring people on board here.

Gough and Hillinger’s analogy of learning to read to cryptanalysis is a highly useful one, but I am not convinced that warrants calling the process unnatural. Ever heard of the genetic code? Nature has its own alphabetic cipher going on!

Learning to Read is Learning to Control a Flame

Instead, I think we should focus on the fact that written language is a remarkable feat of human development, as awe-inspiring as rocket ships, as innovative as smartphones, and as individually empowering as the automobile (though with far less toxicity).

While I find Liberman’s distinction between oral language as biological in origin and written language as cultural useful, I also think it’s again more of a question of a spectrum, rather than a sharp divide. We have no biological, innate ability to create fire, for example. Our ability to create controlled flame is entirely driven by human culture. Yet fire is so deeply interwoven into the propagation of our species that it is intimately tied to our biological evolution and survival. Would we say that learning to make fire is “unnatural”?

This is mostly a matter of rhetoric, of course. The reason for G&H and Liberman’s branding of “unnatural” was to highlight the fact that learning to decode written language can be challenging, and to try and unpack exactly why that is.

So let’s instead focus on the fact that learning to break apart spoken words into little pieces of phonemes to attach them to letter sequences (and vice versa) is both abstract and effortful for many children, and also an absolutely amazing collective and individual achievement. This allows us to see that it therefore will most likely require explicit support and deliberate practice, and that furthermore it is well worth getting kids pumped up about gaining it.

This is where we also need to bear in mind the spectrum in what students bring to their first encounters with formal instruction with written language. Nancy Young’s updated Ladder of Reading and Writing is a great depiction of this spectrum, which acknowledges that there are indeed a small percentage of children for whom acquiring literacy will be mostly effortless, while for the majority of kids, a structured literacy approach is needed, with more intensity required for some.

We also know that students bring different spoken dialects and languages to the classroom, and the nature of those dialects and languages may influence the form of code-based instruction that could be highest leverage.

Let’s also remember a caution that both Gough and Goodman made in their respective papers: we can’t just hand over a codebook of rules to our kids. They must ultimately internalize the cipher themselves. What is the right balance of explicit and implicit learning, of difficulty and ease, of guided and independent practice? What are the profiles of student that we have in our classroom, and how can that guide us in determining the level of structure that we need to provide?

Well, clearly, there’s more to explore here, with plenty of controversy remaining. If you’ve stuck with me this far, I salute you! Thanks for reading.

* Liberman, A. M. (1992). Chapter 9 The Relation of Speech to Reading and Writing. In R. Frost & L. Katz (Eds.), Advances in Psychology (Vol. 94, pp. 167–178). North-Holland. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0166-4115(08)62794-6
Liberman comes strong out the gate with seven claims on why speech* is “more natural” than written language:

1. Speech is universal. Many languages don’t even have a written form.
2. Speech has been around far longer than written language.
3. For each of us individually, speech develops far earlier than reading and writing (if we are fortunate to even develop reading and writing).
4. Speech does not need to be taught; it is pre-cognitive, like seeing and hearing. Literacy is rather an intellectual achievement.
* I paused on the first part of this claim. For students with a developmental language disorder, language does need to be taught more intentionally and supported more intensively. And for the type of language that is not just everyday social language—disciplinary, academic written language—such language also needs to be taught explicitly, most especially for multilingual learners, and its acquisition certainly represents an intellectual achievement!
5. Parts of our brain have evolved to be utilized specifically for language, while reading and writing must both exploit those innate aspects along repurposing other (originally) nonlinguistic parts. This is the “bootstrapping” notion many more current reading researchers speak to based on brain scans (Wolf, Dehaene, etc).
6. This one is kinda hard to summarize, but it’s basically centered around the idea that writing systems are both constrained by the oral language they are based on, and more variable. Scripts cannot be purely sound based, as speech is — instead, they are “pitched at the more abstract phonological and morphophonological levels” and this greater abstraction requires greater conscious awareness, at least initially, on the part of the learner.
7. “Speech is the product of biological evolution, while writing systems are artifacts” — “part discovery, part invention.” Here, Liberman echoes an important point also made by Gough and Hillinger:

“The discovery—surely one of the most momentous of all time—was that words do not differ from one another holistically, but rather by the particular arrangement of a small inventory of the meaningless units they comprise. The invention was simply the notion that if each of these units were to be represented by a distinctive optical shape, then everyone could read and write, provided he knew the language and was conscious of the internal phonological structure of its words.” [bold added]

Here’s the similar quote from G&H:

“Whether recognition of individual letters causes difficulty or not, the recognition that each ciphertext word is composed of a sequence of meaningless elements must be hard for the child to achieve. The requirement that he note the same fact about the plaintext, that he recognize that each spoken word is composed of a sequence of meaningless elements, may be even more unnatural.” [bold added]

Gough, P. B., & Hillinger, M. L. (1980). Learning to read: An unnatural act. Bulletin of the Orton Society, 30, 179–196. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02653717

This point, made both by G&H and Liberman, is worth pausing on and amplifying in more depth, because it’s not only a key point of departure from the argument of the Goodmans, but furthermore a key point that underlays debates about phonics even today. For the Goodmans, as with many phonics critics since, the point of reading instruction should be that it is facilitated by learning focused on meaning. According to the Goodmans, when a teacher explicitly and sequentially teaches the meaningless, artificial components of phonemes and graphemes, they create a barrier to natural learning:

“With the focus on learning, the teacher must understand and deal with language and language learning. . . . The learners keep their minds on meaning. . . The crucial relationships of language with meaning and with the context that makes language meaningful is also vital. . . .We must focus more and more attention on how written language is used in society because it is through the relevant use of language that children will learn it. They will learn it because it will have meaning and purpose to them.

With the focus on teaching both teachers and learners are dealing with language often in abstract bits and pieces. . . . it’s a serious mistake to create curricula based on artificial skill sequences and hierarchies derived from such studies.

Our research has convinced us that the skills displayed by the proficient reader derive from the meaningful use of written language and that sequential instruction in those skills is as pointless and fruitless as instruction in the skills of a proficient listener would be to teach infants to comprehend speech.”

Goodman, K. S., & Goodman, Y. M. (1976). Learning to Read is Natural. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED155621

For the Goodmans and many proponents of balanced literacy today, a focus on meaningless, unnatural components is an impediment to the naturally motivated learning of children. And hey, they aren’t wrong — learning these abstract aspects of oral and written language is a barrier to all too many.

But we should be absolutely clear that Gough, Hillinger, Liberman, and many researchers focused on literacy fully acknowledge that these components are difficult and a tremendous potential barrier to learning—in fact, they fully agree with the Goodmans that learning sublexical units (phonemes and their haphazard letter sequences) is unnatural! The key difference is that they also argue that these artificial units are essential to reading and therefore must be tackled head on and overcome by children in order for reading to truly be successful.

But I’m taking us away from Liberman, and he’s only getting started. He takes some time to outline what he calls “the conventional view of speech.” According to Liberman, this is a view that assumes that speech is governed by general motor and perceptual systems, rather than ones specialized for language. This means that the processing of speech must therefore be cognitive in nature, as it requires translation–similar to learning the written form, it requires attaching a phonetic label to the sounds of what is heard. In this sense, then, learning language can be perceived as biologically secondary.

The reason Liberman takes time laying this out is because if we are to take this view seriously, it means we must see written language as “equally natural” to speech because it is essentially a similar process of coding that requires cognition, with the only difference being one of mode.

This is pretty much exactly what the Goodmans argued: “. . . if written language can perform the functions of language it must be language.”

The other big issue with the “conventional” view, according to Liberman, is that it means “the elements of a writing system can only be defined as optical shapes. . . [and] makes it hard to avoid the assumption that the trouble with the dyslexic must be in the visual system.” This mistaken assumption is indeed a continuing confusion for many about learning to read, as witnessed by some who attempt to teach kids to read by noticing the shapes of words (a quick aside for some nuance: some with dyslexia may have visual-spatial issues, which may become more apparent when learning non-alphabetic written languages, such as Chinese).

Here Liberman makes a key distinction: the evolution of oral language is biological, while written language is cultural. I find myself both deeply compelled by this claim, as it is useful, and also a little resistant. I resist because language is also clearly cultural. But I get that the point here is that the mechanism for learning language is baked into our brains, developing rapidly even as we are in the womb, while acquiring literacy is more dependent on cultural transmission and a significant amount of work.

“In the development of writing systems, the answer is simple and beyond dispute: parity was established by agreement. Thus, all who use an alphabet are parties to a compact that prescribes just which optical shapes are to be taken as symbols for which phonological units, the association of the one with the other having been determined **arbitrarily*. Indeed, this is what it means to say that writing systems are artifacts, and that the child’s learning the linguistic significance of the characters of the script is a cognitive activity.” [bold added]

This leads Liberman to propose what he calls the “unconventional view of speech.” I’m going to do some heavy paraphrasing here, but if you’re into speech pathology or like to geek out about the articulatory dimensions of speech, you may find this section of the paper interesting, as he lays out why “co-articulation” is a fundamental aspect of speech. Essentially, he lays out some principles that allows for the claim that “There is no need . . . for a cognitive translation from an initial auditory representation, simply because there is no initial auditory representation,” meaning that speech is processed rapidly and naturally.

And now Liberman turns to the Goodmans directly to take their full argument head on, so it’s worth reproducing this section in full:

HOW CAN READING/WRITING BE MADE TO EXPLOIT THE MORE NATURAL PROCESSES OF SPEECH?

“The conventional view of speech provides no basis for asking this question, since there exists, on this view, no difference in naturalness. It is perhaps for this reason that the (probably) most widely held theory of reading in the United States explicitly takes as its premise that reading and writing are, or at least can be, as natural and easy as speech (Goodman & Goodman, 1979). According to this theory, called ‘whole language,’ reading and writing prove to be difficult only because teachers burden children with what the theorists call bite-size abstract chunks of language such as words, syllables, and phonemes’ (Goodman, 1986). If teachers were to teach children to read and write the way they were (presumably) taught to speak, then there would be no problem.

But if we adopt the “unconventional view ” of speech, then we don’t view spoken and written language, one auditory and the other visual, as equivalents. Instead, this view allows us to see that speech is processed completely differently, and much more swiftly, and we don’t need to become aware of nor think of the sub units of sounds within a word: “there is nothing in the ordinary use of language that requires the speaker/listener to put his attention on them.”

“The consequence is that experience with speech is normally not sufficient to make one consciously aware of the phonological structure of its words, yet it is exactly this awareness that is required of all who would enjoy the advantages of an alphabetic scheme for reading and writing.”

And the specialized properties of speech, such as co-articulation, which allow us to wield and process them so efficiently, actually present us with a greater barrier in conversion to written language. Co-articulation, which is when we merge sounds together in the speech stream, “has the disadvantage from the would-be reader/writer’s point of view that it destroys any simple correspondence between the acoustic segments and phonological segments they convey.”

Thus and therefore, learning to read and write requires cognitive work, at least initially, that is not required for spoken language (Note that though I’ve taken this paper at face value with the word speech and we’re focused on those aspects specific to spoken language, many of these characteristics can apply just as readily to sign language).

Whew! This paper was a bit harder to unpack than the others, but I think it’s a very good capstone to our investigation in the series. So are we convinced that learning to read, at least initially, is unnatural?

I’ll pursue some final thoughts to wrap up some loose ends in the next post.

Yet there were some interesting parallels between the Goodmans’ and G&H’s accounts: 1) they both agreed that the initial process of learning to read in a literate environment is naturally facilitated by associative learning, and 2) that learning to break the written code can’t be taught directly.

At the root of our exploration has been the question of what it is, exactly, that is natural or unnatural about literacy. The Goodmans go whole hog into the belief that literacy development is natural, and thus claim that direct instruction on letter-sound correspondences is artificial — and thus detrimental. G&H, on the other hand, claim that gaining phonemic awareness (what they termed ‘metaphonological awareness’) and breaking the cipher of letter-sound correspondences is unnatural, and thus requires quite a bit of explicit instruction to get anywhere near to breaking the code.

I think the Goodmans are right in the sense that there is much about learning oral language that can inform learning written language, that the two are deeply and inseparably interconnected, and that the socio-cultural environment and motivation of children are critical components of reading. I think G&H are right that the alphabetic principle, and the ability to distinguish and pick apart phonemes in a spoken word and put them back together in the letter-sequences of a written word, are forged atop an artificial construction (in the sense of a human created technology). Yet I’m not entirely convinced that learning to read is exactly unnatural. We could say that riding a bike is unnatural, or climbing a ladder is unnatural, or drinking out of a man-made cup is unnatural, because such activities are based on artificial constructions. The distinction between them in terms of learning is their complexity of operation: it’s more complex to learn to ride a bike vs. drink out of a cup. Is one more unnatural than another? I don’t know if these are the greatest examples, I’m riffing here, but I think you can see what I mean. When we say something is unnatural in relation to learning, is this just shorthand for saying its more abstract or complex, and hence more difficult?

To take another spin on this, would we say running for long distances is natural? It’s been claimed that our ancestors evolved to run long distances in order to hunt. And yet, to become one who runs long distances regularly requires quite a bit of running. I am one of those people who actually enjoys it — but I well remember how difficult it was to adapt my body when I first began in high school cross country close to 30 years ago (oh dear, I’m dating myself). It only became easier after my circulatory and respiratory system and muscles adapted after a couple months of long distance running– and then it started feeling pretty good (I can even remember the very day, when my running buddy turned to me after a run, when we normally would be griping about how much it sucked, and was like, “this is kind of weird, but I actually feel good!”) And so long as I don’t let too much time pass in between runs, it keeps feeling pretty good. But isn’t that just like learning to read? Or learning to ride a bike? Or playing an instrument? Or pretty much anything that’s challenging? We have to develop a certain level of foundational fluency before a new skill becomes something we can more fully wield with satisfaction and effect. And some of us tend to be more “naturally” good at some things than others (a point we’ll come back to later).

The counter to my riffing here, of course, is: well, why is learning a native language so swift, innate, and effortless from infancy for most, while learning its written form is so very much more arduous, such that many never even fully acquire it?

In our next post, we’ll explore a paper from Alvin Liberman that goes deeper into the argument that written language is unnatural in comparison to spoken language. Let’s see if we’re convinced. . .

In our last post in this series exploring the question, “What is (un)natural about learning to read and write?,” we looked at a paper from 1976 by Ken and Yetta Goodman that argued that written language is a form of oral language and thus, learned naturally in a literate society through exposure and use in the environment.

In this post, we’ll explore a direct counter to that argument made by Phillip Gough and Michael Hillinger in 1980.

• Gough, P. B., & Hillinger, M. L. (1980). Learning to read: An unnatural act. Bulletin of the Orton Society, 30, 179–196. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02653717

Gough and Hillinger start off by laying out data that show:

“the statistically average child, normally endowed and normally taught, learns to read only with considerable difficulty. He does not learn to read naturally.”

Like the Goodmans, Gough and Hillinger (let’s call them G&H hereafter) lay out how learning to read progresses, starting with “Paired-associate Learning.” In case you haven’t come across this term before, paired-associate learning, in simplest terms, is like a set of flashcards, in which two distinct items, or stimuli, become associated in memory through repeated exposure. This could be implicit (e.g. hearing the bell means it’s time to eat) or explicit; this is the type of learning most commonly associated with learning “tricky words,” or words in English with highly irregular spellings.

In the Goodmans’ explication of reading development, they didn’t call it paired-associate learning, but they describe a somewhat similar phenomena—that children raised in a literate society start to “read” their environment and gain a functional understanding of written language. G&H agree that the initial steps of learning to read involves this “natural” process:

“The selectional paired-associate technique, the child’s natural strategy, for learning arbitrary associations will work well enough for any and every child, in the beginning.”

But for anyone who has tried to memorize many items knows, we quickly hit a limit in our capacity: “With each new word, the difficulty of finding a unique cue to distinguish it will increase,” and a child “must come to recognize that he has been trying the wrong thing, that his natural strategy will not work” for too many words.

It is here that “the child who has been treating the written language as if it were a code must confront the fact that it is a cipher.”

A Code vs. A Cipher

What?!

This is a distinction I hadn’t heard before, and it seems worth unpacking since it represents a key pivot for G&H from the notion that learning to read is “natural.”

In fact, let’s return to our friend Ken Goodman for a second. After the Goodman paper (as discussed in my last post), there’s a short transcription of attendees who heard the paper presented asking Goodman questions, and there’s an interesting discussion around the meaning of the word “decoding” and its relation to language that goes back and forth between a few of the researchers.

At the close of the transcription, Goodman states:

“Now, the problem and the confusion is that people have only treated written language as a code, but oral language is a code, too. . . Matching letters to sounds is a kind of recoding operation, because I still come out with code. That is not decoding.”

Goodman, K. S., & Goodman, Y. M. (1976). Learning to Read is Natural. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED155621

G&H seem to agree with Goodman’s account of “oral language as a code,” which they furthermore agree is learned naturally via associative learning (i.e. paired-associate learning). But where written language departs, according to them, is that it is not only a code: it is a cipher.

In our everyday use of the words code and cipher, there is little distinction between these words. But in cryptography, there is an important, if subtle, distinction.

I’ll admit I reread G&H’s illustration a few times, and found it slippery. I then looked around online, as one does these days, and found this Khan Academy explanation:

A code is stored as a mapping in a codebook, while ciphers transform individual symbols according to an algorithm.

G&H take the analogy of calling written language a cipher seriously, because according to them, the problem is that in order to learn to read, a child has to perform cryptanalysis and we can’t just hand them a codebook.

The problem is that the systematic relationship of the plaintext (oral language) to the ciphertext (written language) is highly complex. One of the interesting tidbits shared by G&H is that in 60s and 70s, there were attempts to build “reading machines for the blind,” which incorporated “as many as 577 rules” to try to map graphemes to phonemes — and even all those rules still “lead to mispronunciations of many of the most common words in English.”

One impulse, as per the Goodmans, would be to say there’s too many rules to learn to decode such mappings, so decoding should not be taught. But G&H aren’t having that:

“We cannot accept this argument. The argument that English spelling is frequently irregular overlooks the fact that the irregularities are not arbitrary. . .”

“We conclude, then, that if the child is to become a fluent reader, he must learn to decode, more precisely, to decipher. He must internalize the orthographic cipher of English.”

But we can’t simply give kids a codebook of 577 rules and we’re done. Instead, kids need their brains to become equipped with the algorithm of the cipher. They must internalize all of those systematic mappings.

But if this is the case, then the child is confronted with a serious problem, for there is no way we can give him that cipher. . . . In phonics, we try. . . But we believe that the rules of phonics bear only a superficial resemblance to the rules which the fluent reader has internalized.

… the rules of phonics are conscious and explicit — we state them in English — while the rules which the reader uses are unconscious and implicit. . . . the implicit cipher is too fast for phonics.

This is where the terminology orthographic mapping, which G&H weren’t equipped with yet, comes in handy!

The Cipher Must be Internalized

This leads to a conundrum. A child needs to be able to “break the code” but internalizing the cipher is implicit. As G&H state:

Here, then, is the crux of the child’s problem as he enters the second stage of reading acquisition: he must acquire the orthographic cipher, but he cannot get it from his teacher. [bold added]

There’s an interesting parallel here to the Goodmans’ claim that “Instruction does not teach children to read.” The Goodmans’ ALSO state: “Our contention is that we can explain both acquisition and lack of acquisition of literacy in terms of the internalization of the functions of written language by children.”

But G&H diverge substantially in what they mean. While Ken Goodman said in no uncertain terms that he would NOT teach letter-sound correspondences (as he believed it would be detrimental and inhibit natural learning), G&H, instead, are pointing out that the process of breaking the code is so difficult that a whole lot of explicit instruction will be needed to get kids to the point where they can step off on their own.

For G&H this is when things get unnatural. The process of cryptanalysis entails that a child can:

• Recognize that the printed message is an encoded version of a spoken one (‘cryptanalytic intent’)
• Recognize that the ciphertext is composed of letters
• Note each and every letter of every word
• Recognize that written words are composed of a sequence of phonemes
• Recognize that spoken words are, in turn, composed of phonemes
• Decompose a spoken word into its constituent phonemes (‘metaphonological awareness’)
• Sufficient exposure to paired spoken and written messages (plaintext and ciphertext)

According to G&H, because these four factors are unnatural, many children will require explicit teaching of them:

“These things must be explained to him, or he must figure it out for himself. . . And please note this is not a natural thing for the child to do. We confess that we cannot think of another instance in the child’s experience where the child must recognize some visual stimulus as composed of a particular configuration of commutable, permutable, elements. (This is not true of faces, or houses, or animals, or anything else we can think of.)

I think this is an important point to highlight in relation to another recent paper we investigated on language learning, in which author Michael Ramscar challenged the notion that language is learned by its parts, or compositionality, and instead is learned via computing probabilities. I think he’s right, and this echoes the “natural” argument of the Goodmans. But what G&H draw out here is that having to notice each letter and letter sequence in a written word is completely different than the type of learning that we engage with in learning language or paying attention to our environment. Furthermore, phonemic awareness (not yet terminology at the time this was written, apparently, they call it ‘metaphonological awareness’) requires an unnatural recognition and ability to decompose the parts of sounds in a spoken word.

“Whether recognition of individual letters causes difficulty or not, the recognition that each ciphertext word is composed of a sequence of meaningless elements must be hard for the child to achieve. The requirement that he note the same fact about the plaintext, that he recognize that each spoken word is composed of a sequence of meaningless elements, may be even more unnatural.”

So despite the fact that a teacher cannot just hand over a codebook, and phonics may be an artificial vehicle, G&H stress that children will need all the help they can get to be able to internalize and automate the cryptanalysis required to decipher written language.

“. . . we do not believe that phonics teaches the child the rules of the cipher which he must master. But it does provide the child a virtually indispensable tool for collecting data on his own, for discovering what spoken word goes with an unfamiliar written word.

We would note, though, that in our view, phonics is theoretically dispensable. It gives the child artificial rules by which to get the data he needs to learn the real rules.”

The field has come a long way since this 1980 paper, which is to me what makes it all the more remarkable how clear-eyed this account remains, given that G&H were riffing off an analogy to cryptography.

But this analogy gave Gough and Hillinger a firm and testable basis to counter the Goodmans’–and whole language’s–unempirical belief that learning to read could be achieved without a systematic approach to teaching letter-sound correspondences.

So in our exploration thus far in this series, we’ve looked at the argument that learning to read is natural, now countered that it is not. Gough and Hillinger have helped us to see that while the Goodmans may be right about those aspects of the written language that are most similar to spoken language, learning and applying the alphabetic principle to decipher letter-sound sequences and decompose and recode spoken words is no easy feat.

I am still left wondering: Is it that gaining an overlay of a writing system is unnatural? Or is it that it is more abstract, and thus, presents a higher bar to gain fluency with?

We will continue examining this fundamental argument in our next post, an Interlude, followed by our final paper, The Relation of Speech to Reading and Writing.

• Goodman, K. S., & Goodman, Y. M. (1976). Learning to Read is Natural. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED155621

In this presentation/paper, the Goodmans make the argument that in a literate society, learning written language is as natural as oral language because it is part of their functional environment.

“Language learning whether oral or written is motivated by the need to communicate, to understand and be understood.”

The Goodmans compare and contrast oral and written language, and I found this the most interesting section, as even today there is an unnecessary chasm between the two domains of research and practice, and I think they do make some important points about the connections between the two:

“It’s unfortunate that many linguists began to equate speech with language to such an extent that written language can to be treated as something other than language. . . . if written language can perform the functions of language it must be language. . . . Written language in use is also meaningful, contextualized and social.”

“For literate users of language, linguistic effectiveness is expanded and extended. They have alternate language forms, oral and written, which overlap in functions but which have characteristics which suit each for some functions better than the other.”

“Speech lends itself easily to here-and-now, face-to-face uses. Writing is best suited for use over time and space.”

“As language functions are extended beyond the immediate concerns, needs, and interactions of children to exploration of the real world, the world of ideas, and the world of what might be, language expands, takes on new textures and begins to transcend the immediate contexts in which it occurs.”

“The language of children expands to serve their needs as they become fully interactive with their communities. . . . We must focus more and more attention on how written language is used in society because it is through the relevant use of language that children will learn it. They will learn it because it will have meaning and purpose to them.”

Essentially, their argument that just like oral language, written language is functional within a literate society, and in this way learning it is natural. For a society that is not literate, there is little use beyond that of what might be taught briefly in a classroom, and so written language would not be functional there in the same way, and so not acquired.

They then go on to describe how a child in a literate society becomes aware of print simply by being in an environment with signage, symbols, print media, etc. “Just as oral language meanings are developed and used in ongoing everyday experiences so written language is learned through functional use.”

So what does this mean for instruction, according to the Goodmans?

Since learning language is natural, the role of the teacher is act as “guides, moniters, environmental arrangers, and stimulators to help the process happen.” Ah yes, the old “sage on stage vs. guide on the side” debate so ubiquitous in our field.

The Goodmans do hasten to caution that their position is “not Rousseauian. . . Teaching children to read is not putting them into a garden of print and leaving them unmolested.”

Yet they then go on to boldly state, “Instruction does not teach children to read. Children are in no more need of being taught to read than they are of being taught to listen.” In their estimation, since learning language is about function and meaning, a teacher needs to provide a context for children to respond to written language that is motivating and meaningful to them.

In fact, they argue that directly teaching the form of written language at the expense of function can be detrimental. They state that “it’s a serious mistake to create curricula based on artificial skill sequences and hierarchies” based on studies of proficient readers. . . ” and that sequential instruction in those skills is as pointless and fruitless as instruction in the skills of a proficient listener would be to teach infants to comprehend speech.”

Later in the open discussion section after the paper, which captures the comments of various reading researchers discussing the presentation and Ken Goodman’s responses, Goodman goes even further and says, “such instruction may actually interfere with the development of literacy, because not only does it not build on function, it actually distracts the child at an age where, according to Piaget and others, the child is likely to have trouble dealing with abstraction; it makes learning to read dependent on the ability to deal with abstraction.”

Since the Goodmans wrote this, research has demonstrated quite convincingly the important role that systematic beginning reading instruction plays for many children. So this next passage is all the more damning:

“Here we will focus on instruction for children growing up in a highly
literate society. But in passing we must reiterate our premise that literacy will not be acquired if the community and society do not use literacy to any significant degree for any significant purpose [bold added].” In other words, if a child is not so fortunate enough to be raised in an environment immersed in written language all around him, then . . . well, good luck learning to read, buddy!

They then go on to give some advice to teachers to build initial literacy, such as:

• “Take children for a walk around the school, the neighborhood, or a supermarket to get quick insights into literacy kids have already attained.”

• “there must be lots of written language pupils will need and want to read.” Helpfully, they add, “It does not mean that every chair, table or window should be labeled.”
• “Dictating a set of “Rules for Taking Care of Our Hamster”
• “create a classroom post office which delivers letters and notes between class members”

Seriously, though, I found these two pretty good:

• “Literacy development, therefore, must be integrated with the science, social, studies, math, arts, and other concerns of the classroom.”
• “Reading needs to be kept in constant relationship to writing. Wherever possible composition in written language should be related to reading activities.”

Reading Researchers of the Time Respond to Ken Goodman

The “open discussion” following the paper is fascinating to read, as various researchers either praised his argument or began pressing Goodman on some of the misconceptions he had about learning to decode.

In response to a comment from Jeanne Chall, Goodman again reiterates that “I don’t believe you can” teach people to read, and “I think all we can do with instruction is facilitate learning.”

He goes on to say many teachers “have intuitively understood the things that I have been talking about. They have intuitively understood that if reading doesn’t matter to kids, if it isn’t functional for them, they are not going to learn. Those teachers have intuitively understood that whenever instruction interferes with development, that’s the time to drop the instruction and to work at facilitating what the kids are doing.”

Or maybe it’s that the instruction isn’t actually teaching kids to read successfully, and we shouldn’t make assumptions that “reading doesn’t matter to kids”?

A couple of researchers start to pin him down on his stance that reading can’t be taught. Posner points out that learning to read signs in the environment is logographic, and that written language in English is reliant on the alphabetic principle, for which “children need additional help.” Venezky then jumps in and pushes Goodman to the ropes: “Every experiment that I am aware of that tried to induce the child to discover these [letter-sound] relationships on his own or her own failed.”

Goodman and Venezky go back and forth on this, with Venezky pushing him around the idea of refusing to actually teach letter-sound correspondences. Finally, Venezky asks: “Are you opposed to the child acquiring the ability to recognize letter correspondences?”

Goodman’s response here is incredibly revealing: “Am I opposed to him acquiring letter correspondences? Not if I believe be does acquire them, and I do believe that. If you are asking if I am opposed to his being shown letter correspondences, you bet, at any point."

So I think we can stop here. Goodman’s views on how children learn to decode words is clearly problematic and have been well-debunked, and were already being pinned to the wall even as he made such pronouncements. It’s remarkable indeed that yet somehow, his views have remained so pervasive in the field!

Perhaps it is because there is a strong logic to the Goodmans’ overall argument about language, and the strong interrelationship between oral and written language.

After reading this paper, it did get me wondering: Just what is it that is natural and unnatural about language and literacy development?

That brings us to what can be seen as a strong rebuttal from Gough and Hillinger, “Learning to read: An unnatural act.” Stay tuned for our next post in this series.

A fundamental debate related to this blog’s focus has revolved around whether learning to read and write is natural or unnatural. This may at first glance seem a trivial question, but it turns out that the “reading wars” have circled around it. And it seems to surface continuing unresolved tensions between the studies of language and literacy development today.

I wrote a post a little while ago, Our Brains Were Not Born to Read . . . Right?, wherein I somewhat naively began tugging at this fundamental thread of what is natural or unnatural about learning to read. So when I more recently read a really interesting paper by David L. Share, Common Misconceptions about the Phonological Deficit Theory of Dyslexia (more on the paper here), there were a couple of related references he made that caught my eye:

Like learning to read (English) which Gough famously dubbed “unnatural” 43, see also 3, becoming aware of the constituent phonemes in spoken words does not come “naturally”.

> —Share, D. L. (2021). Common Misconceptions about the Phonological Deficit Theory of Dyslexia. Brain Sciences, 11(11), 1510.
So I downloaded both of the references to geek out about the (un)naturalness of reading further (let me know if you are interested in reading and need access to either):

• Gough, P. B., & Hillinger, M. L. (1980). Learning to read: An unnatural act. Bulletin of the Orton Society, 30, 179–196. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02653717
• Liberman, A. M. (1992). Chapter 9 The Relation of Speech to Reading and Writing. In R. Frost & L. Katz (Eds.), Advances in Psychology (Vol. 94, pp. 167–178). North-Holland. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0166-4115(08)62794-6

In Gough & Hillinger’s paper, they also make reference to a paper/presentation by Ken and Yetta Goodman, and you’ll see from the title why I jumped into taking a look at this one as well:

• Goodman, K. S., & Goodman, Y. M. (1976). Learning to Read is Natural. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED155621

I found all three of these reads illuminating—not only in relation to the specific inquiry of whether learning to read is natural or not, which is interesting in and of itself—but furthermore in surfacing deep-seated tensions between language and literacy development and research.

Let’s take a look at each in chronological order to trace the development of some of these tensions and debates:

1. Learning to Read is Natural (So claim the Goodmans)
2. Learning to Read: An Unnatural Act
3. An Interlude: What do we mean when we say learning something is unnatural?
4. The Relation of Speech to Reading and Writing
5. A Finale: Learning to Read and Write is a Remarkable Human Feat

As I began my great awakening to the relatively extensive body of research on reading, one of the claims of reading research proponents that I’ve picked up on and carried with me is the idea that reading is unnatural and our brains were not born to read. And this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, given that oral language has been around for a very long time (though we don’t know, of course, exactly when it showed up), while writing systems only showed up roughly 5,000 years ago.

This claim is useful as a device for grounding an argument against the unfortunate “whole language” theories that have dominated education, which gave teachers the inaccurate belief that acquiring reading happens organically via exposure to read-alouds and engaging literature. We know that there are indeed many children who are able to break the cipher of writing systems on their own, but also that there are just as many who do not without explicit and systematic instruction. Furthermore, there are a subset of those children who will struggle to decode even with explicit instruction which we label dyslexia.

By claiming that our brains were not born to read, we give a strong logic for explicit decoding instruction. Furthermore, it gives us a narrative that makes sense of the complexity and interconnectedness of the brain activity of skilled readers in comparison to those who struggle to decode. As I’ve narrated in other posts, this is the story of “bootstrapping” reading onto our preexisting visual and aural and motor networks, and a further explanation of why sufficient opportunity for structured, guided practice must be provided alongside explicit instruction: so that those interconnections and pathways between disparate parts of the brain can be made and decoding can be done with accuracy and automaticity.

So you can see why the claim–that reading is unnatural–is compelling. It equips us to argue for more effective instruction, it explains dyslexia, and it synthesizes brain research with an evolutionary explanation. Experts such as Maryanne Wolf, Mark Seidenberg, and Stanislas Dehaene have made this argument, with plentiful reference to research of course, in their respective books on reading. For a really short and to the point argument on why reading is unnatural, check out G. Reid Lyon’s piece in ASCD, “Why Reading Is Not a Natural Process.”

Yet I’ve begun wondering recently if the overall claim is just a little too neat and tidy.

In my last post, I realized that some of the neat and tidy stories I had about learning and phonology prevented me from understanding the state of the research on effective PA instruction more clearly, and I think that realization made me more attuned to the danger of the mini-stories we tell that we can stick confirmatory evidence to.

It’s not that the claim is wrong, mind you. It’s that it may be oversimplifying something just a tad more nuanced. Let’s unpack it a little.

If oral language is considered “biologically primary,” while reading is “biologically secondary,” then that helps to explain why some kids really struggle to decode, and the existence of dyslexia. Except that there is a similarly significant subset of the population that struggles with language! Not only that, but many of the same kids who struggle with decoding ALSO struggle with language, and vice versa. Hmm. Why would some kids struggle to develop such a biologically primary ability? Isn’t it the WRITTEN word that is so “unnatural”?

It may be that language itself is just complex, no matter how intimately tied to our evolutionary past it may be, nor how swiftly and organically acquired by most. And as with reading, language develops our brains beyond whatever capacity they may have had in its absence. In fact, it may be that language rich interactions and environments accelerates the development of our brains, an idea supported by comparison to those who have suffered extreme isolation, abandonment, or neglect in early childhood. In this sense, then, language is a social and cultural artifact, in addition to an evolutionary biological adaptation. And because of the great variability in human development and the complexity of language, some still struggle to gain the nuanced and inferential chains of sounds, verbal forms, syntax, and meaning.

And what kind of language are we talking about when we say it is acquired “naturally,” anyway? Sure, everyday language is picked up swiftly by most, but it is the language that is more specific to academic domains and written texts, typically called academic language, that is the language that proves more difficult for some to acquire.

Writing is a more recent social and cultural development, but interestingly, it may have arisen spontaneously in three or four disparate locations at time periods not too far distant from one another. If this is so, it suggests that this technology addressed a common problem that our species needed to solve for, and hence it was adopted and scaled just as pottery and roads were across civilizations.

Are water jugs and other tools a biologically primary part of our brains? It almost seems silly to ask. No, opposable thumbs are biologically primary, and quite useful, but the tools we have developed and expanded and iterated upon in each generation are such interwoven extensions of our existence and culture that we wouldn’t normally pause to consider it.

So this invention of writing systems and hence the ability to read is a social and cultural extension of our capabilities that has accelerated our collective efficacy. And just as with oral language, developing this ability as an individual is complex, determined by our social, cultural, and environmental circumstances, and layers upon whatever biological equipment we’ve evolved for.

There is even initial brain research that complicates the narrative that our brains were “not born to read.” A 2020 study “provides the earliest possible evidence in humans that the cortical tissue that will likely later develop sensitivity to visual words has a connectivity pattern at birth that makes it a fertile ground for such development—even before any exposure to words [bold added].

We may be overselling the idea that our brains were not born to read, and that learning to read and write are so very difficult. Instead, let’s focus on how our brains are enriched and enhanced by learning to speak, read, and write language that is more abstract and complex. Learning written language expands our minds and our horizons.

But let me be clear, my caveats have nothing to do with picking things up “organically”! In fact, what I am arguing is that not only must we teach decoding explicitly and systematically, but that we must further teach academic language explicitly and systematically, because neither of these forms of language are “natural.” Yet our species and our civilizations have invented and scaled and sustained them because they bring us great power that is far beyond what we would have without them. And hence, why it is so critical that we attempt to provide this power of written and academic language to every child in our world.

So yes, we need to acknowledge the barriers that prevent children from gaining these powers, and tackle them headfirst. But these barriers are not barriers because reading is some alien thing being superimposed upon their delicate and fragile brain — they are barriers because of a lack of sufficient and coherent instructional opportunity.

So what is the new mini-story I’ve crafted here? I agree that learning to read must be taught explicitly! But I don’t think it’s fully accurate to say that our brains were not born to read. I would say instead that it is our birthright to learn to read and to speak and write and think in the language that allows us to transport our minds and hearts into worlds far beyond that of our everyday lives. And it is therefore incumbent on those of us responsible for teaching our children this language to ensure that all of them will be equipped and empowered to do so.