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Index:
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Dr. G. Reid Lyon is the former Chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch within the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) at the National Institute of Health (NIH). In this position he was responsible for the direction, development, and management of research programs in reading development, cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, behavioral pediatrics, language and attention disorders, and human learning and learning disorders. Dr. Lyon is currently a senior vice president for research and evaluation with Best Associates. Additional bio info Dr. Lyon has taught children with learning disabilities, served as a third grade classroom teacher, and as a school psychologist for twelve years in the public schools. He has authored, co-authored and edited over 100 journal articles, books, and book chapters addressing learning differences and disabilities in children. At the NICHD he was responsible for translating NIH scientific discoveries relevant to the health and education of children to the White House, the United States Congress, and other governmental agencies. He has served as an advisor to President George W. Bush on issues related to child development and education research and policies. On July 1, 2005 Dr. Lyon resigned from his position at NICHD and accepted a position with Best Associates as a senior vice president for research and evaluation. We found Dr. Lyon to be a rigorous researcher and scientist who is also an emotionally passionate champion of the well being of children.
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The following transcript has not been edited for journal or magazine publication (see 'Interview Notes' for more details). Bold is used to emphasize our [Children of the Code] sense of the importance of what is being said and does not necessarily reflect gestures or tones of emphasis that occurred during the interview.
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David
Boulton: Dr. Lyon, it’s a real pleasure and honor to meet with you.
Dr.
Reid Lyon: Likewise, delighted.
David
Boulton: Can you give us a quick sketch of how it is you’ve come to be
here and what drives and impassions you?
Dr.
Reid Lyon: I’ve been at the National Institute of Health since 1991.
Prior to that I was a Professor of Neurology at the University of Vermont, and
prior to that a Professor at Northwestern University and the University of
Alabama. I started out as a physiological psychologist, and I studied brain
development in Makak monkeys. My task was to try
to figure out which systems in the brain had something to do with the
vocalizations of monkeys. But, what I wanted to do was research that was more
applied, and I really wanted to study kids --
I had my own little one coming up then. I switched from animal models to
kid models because I also thought that kids wouldn’t bite like Makak monkeys,
but I was wrong about that.
I
got some very good advice as I started that career change: If I’m going to
study children, I need to actually go where they work and live; I need to walk
along side the kids in their job. Their
job is school. That meant I had to learn how to be a teacher, so I went back and
took education courses and became certified as an elementary school teacher and
as a special education teacher. Now, I say I took courses, but that is not to
say that I learned anything. As a matter of fact, I had no idea what I was doing
when I got into my third grade classroom other than calling the roll and recess.
What
struck me when I got in my third grade classroom was about thirty percent of these nine
year olds couldn’t read well at all, some not at all. I couldn’t understand
that because reading to me was not laborious and I took it for granted. I think
by the end of the year the thirty percent that I didn’t help had actually extended to
about forty percent because I screwed another ten percent up. I just didn’t have any idea what I
was doing.
No
one had ever talked to me about how reading develops and what you do when kids
come to it differently. I had been taught in these education courses that
reading was a natural process and that what you needed to do was provide kids
with rich, interesting literature and motivate them, and that they, in fact, would
then inculcate the principles and move right along. I was taught not to deal
with specific skills because that, in fact, would be de-motivating. I tried that
and I didn’t help anybody.
I
figured that my problem might be student-teacher ratio. I had about twenty-eight kids. So, the next year I went and taught kids with severe
reading difficulties in a special education classroom – the same kids all day.
And I didn’t help them either. Not only did I see that, I noticed a couple of
things: How reading or the lack of
reading development hurt them. I could see even with the nine year olds
that when they were unable to read it seemed to me that, even if I had a magic
bullet, they didn’t even want to try it. They
had already started to avoid print and a lot of these kids would become active
and look, in a sense, attentionally different and possibly would have been
diagnosed as ADD. But their attentional difficulties were just simple avoidance.
They would become distractable and fidgety when they had to read. Why? They
wanted to get out of it. So, that affected
me, both in my head and in my heart, to watch these tender kids who have to
perform in the most visible academic thing called reading and not be able to do
it.
What I’ve learned, after studying kids and asking kids how they feel about reading, is that kids look at reading, as a proxy for intelligence. So, when they see kids who are not able to read, they judge those kids as not as bright as they are or something like that. When kids don’t learn to read, obviously it internalizes. And that really blew me away. Actually, at this point a bunch of things were blowing me away: 1) I didn’t know what I was doing; 2) I needed to know what I was doing because my job was much more than learning how to read, it was the development of social and emotional competencies and all kind of things like that; 3) I also saw this tremendous impact on the kid’s self-awareness, self-concept and so forth.
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Dr. Reid Lyon: I began to think about what I needed to do to figure this out. Four
questions came to my mind over a period of time. The
first question was how do kids learn how to read? What
are the skills, the abilities that go into it? What
are the environments that are most influential in helping develop those skills
and abilities? What are the genetic factors that push the neurobiology that
allow the skills and abilities to develop within the context of the environment?
What kind of instructional interactions
bolster that process or in fact limit the process or impede it? That’s the
first thing that I needed to learn.
The
second thing I needed to learn was how in
the world are some kids learning to read and others aren’t? That is, which
of these skills and abilities and environments and instructional interactions
and genetics and neurobiology is getting in the way? Which factors make it
difficult for which kids?
All
of these kids that I had tried to teach and who didn’t do well had by nine
years of age already begun to avoid the reading process because they couldn’t
do it.
So, my third question was, how
can we prevent it? How can we prevent reading failure from ever raising its ugly
and deleterious face with these kids? How can we identify kids at risk
before they ever get to school, figure out what to do and bring them right up to
snuff as they come into first grade?
I
knew we weren’t going to be able to do that for all kids, and the fourth
question was how do we help kids at older
ages with all the baggage they’re carrying begin to get over the hump? How do we
begin to get over the motivational humps and the reading humps and the fact that
as they get older they’re expected to read to learn, but they can’t even read?
The learning content is coming in through print, but they don’t have
print. How
can that be negotiated? How can we adjudicate those complexities?
My own research program began back in the mid-70’s with the first two questions: 1) What does it take to learn to read? 2) What goes wrong when you don’t? Some of that work was informative, much of it was not. But I began to work with other groups of scientists who were studying these same questions, and along the way as my career moved forward, I was probably one of the few people in the country who had a specialization in neurobiology and developmental neuroscience and in education, if I can call the latter a specialization.
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Dr.
Reid Lyon: My
boss here at NICHD, at the
NIH, Dr. Duane
Alexander, is a pediatrician who is
committed and passionate about children’s learning. He knows about
children’s health, but he also knows about their cognitive, social, emotional
and academic development, and he found that we had huge gaps in our knowledge
base. So, he asked me in the mid-80’s to begin to work with his staff to
construct initiatives to close the gaps between what we know about those four
questions: 1) What does it take to learn to read? 2) What goes wrong when you
don’t? 3) How do you prevent it? 4) How do you remediate it? And what we
don’t know. How do we fill in the informational lacuna such that we can
actually move science to human beings, science to policy, science to practice?
In 1991 he recruited me here to NICHD to formulate and direct a program
that would do that with significant intensity.
What we have built is a research network composed of forty-four sites in North America,
Europe and Asia. All of the sites go after these four questions because we need
to replicate. Science, as you know, builds, and when you’re doing science in
very complex situations, social and behavioral science versus petri dishes, no
one study will ever illuminate fully what we’re trying to understand. So, you
have to have multiple converging studies with converging evidence bearing on
these questions so that we can trust the outcomes. It’s a long process. It
takes tremendous amounts of money; it takes tremendous amounts of talent and so
on.
We
have at each of these sites multi-disciplinary teams. What
I mean by that is there’s no way to answer those four questions unless you
have neurologists on board, pediatricians on board, neuroscientists on board,
educators on board, cognitive neuroscientists on board and so forth and so on.
All of the teams at the sites are going after these four questions.
They’re replicating each other, but then they also extend at their own
sites their own particular looks at specific problems they’re interested in.
What that has allowed us to do over the years is develop a body of information that does in fact address those four questions sufficiently enough that we can now inform practice and policy. (Click here to read more about NICHD Research). We could never have done that before.
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Dr.
Reid Lyon: My
toughest challenge is not so much the science anymore. The
toughest challenge we have is in moving the science to the development of
teachers and their preparation, such that what they learn is actually objective
and is based upon converging evidence rather than philosophies, belief systems,
or appeals to authority. We need
to get the information to teachers who have been, in a sense, propagandized into
these very broad and general and non-evidentiary kinds of approaches that they
use in teaching reading -- absolute failures in terms of our scientific tests
visa vi their effectiveness.
When
I was a teacher I wanted to get up every morning and make a difference in
kids’ lives, and when I saw I wasn’t making a difference in kids’ lives
that hurt the kids. But it also made me
feel dumb, foolish, embarrassed. Our teachers sometimes feel the same way, but
they can only teach what they’ve been taught, typically.
Teachers come to these very complex interactions, to teach reading for example, with a very limited set of knowledge modules, if you will, a very limited set of concepts in terms of how kids learn to read. Why is Sam having such difficulties? What do I see in pre-school, in kindergarten that might give me a red flag so that Sam is not hindered by all of the flops and problems that occur down stream from reading failure?
That’s a very difficult thing to do. The resistance in the educational community, particularly at the higher education level where teachers are trained, is enormous, almost unbelievable. When you show people objective information, non-philosophically driven research that for these kids, these interactions work very productively such that where a youngster was at the tenth percentile in reading before, and is now at the sixtieth percentile in reading, and you can show that time after time, but you still see substantial resistance from the educational community, it begins to tell us that many of these issues are way beyond the kid issues, these are adult issues. They are fascinating adult issues where human beings are latching on to their beliefs, their assumptions, their egos and their careers rather than looking very clearly at what works, what doesn’t, making sure people know what works, measuring it and getting the kids up to snuff.
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David
Boulton: Exactly where we meet. That’s the very purpose of this
series. That, without a social reframing of just how important this is and a new
understanding, a new interior framework that breaks out of the oversimplified
polarities of thought that have historically represented this whole space,
we’re going to keep this going on.
In a conversation with James Wendorf, he recounted that he was asked by somebody in an interview to summarize the past ten years of brain research and then after he did he was asked what the challenge was for the next ten years. He said, ‘Well, it’s exactly what you’re trying to do: we need to somehow take what we’ve learned, what we can see in our experiments and our research and get that across in a way that actually shifts the way we think about this as a nation, as a country, as a people.'
Dr.
Reid Lyon: Absolutely. And you know
it’s tougher than we ever thought, than I ever thought.
We’re, in fact,
trying to study the factors that maintain these kinds of dichotomous thinking,
where people polarize phonics/whole language, qualitative versus quantitative
research. Where people with little kids will grasp onto social-emotional
development versus cognitive development, which is a fascinating dichotomy for
this reason. When I talk to the president about reading he is fascinated himself
about why is it that we have a great deal of information that isn’t traveling,
particularly when human life is at stake. He views education as not just
education, but as public health. And it indeed is.
David Boulton: And national security.
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Dr.
Reid Lyon: Absolutely. Some questions are, why do people dichotomize
phonics and whole language? Why do they look at qualitative versus quantitative
methodologies? Why do they look at cognitive versus social and emotional
development? The common theme is a lack of knowledge. What pervades those
dichotomies is a lack of understanding that goes directly to how we prepare
educators in education. There is no reason why that kind of concrete thinking
should exist, but it does.
And it does so in very surprising ways. Let me give you an example. We are working very hard with little ones from age birth to five now to try to understand what they can learn: what their brains can deal with; whether or not they like to interact with letters and numbers and all kinds of cognitive things. Does that hurt them? Is that developmentally inappropriate? No. So, we’re doing a good deal of study.
On the neuroscience side we know that little one’s brains are moving much more robustly than we ever thought. As you know, at six months of age every kid who’s coming along okay in every culture, using every language, can receive and produce every consonant and vowel of every language, even if the language they will ultimately use doesn’t contain those consonants and vowels. That’s a hefty brain. We know that kids by eighteen months of age will start to learn nine new words a day, at least every day. Amazing. It’s an amazing proliferation of not only neuronal capacity, but also of the behavioral stuff that the neurons push.
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Dr. Reid Lyon: In the early childhood community, what the argument has been for many, many years, particularly in Head Start, is that what we need to do is focus on our little ones to ensure that they are socially competent… that they know how to get along with kids, that they can attend and so on and so forth. Well, of course you do, you’ve got to do that. You want the kids to feel socially competent. There’s also an emphasis on emotional health. You want to make sure that kids are attaching well to adults, kids are getting along with other kids, they feel good about themselves; the nurturing environment is built to do that, of course.
But the weird thing has been to not, while you’re doing that, provide any kind of interaction that might look at letters or letter sounds or numbers or words and reading and so forth and so on because that’s deemed developmentally inappropriate and it has been assumed that in fact will push them too quickly, push the nervous system too quickly and so on. That is absolutely not true for a number of reasons. If it is true or if people see kids being harmed by interactions to develop numbers, letters, sounds and all of the things we know that go into later reading, it’s because it is being taught incorrectly. It’s being presented to the kids in a way that may be developmentally inappropriate. You don’t work with three year olds and four year olds the way you work with a first or second grader. I think people have that in their minds.
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Dr.
Reid Lyon: But
here’s the disconnect, and this is ironic: we obviously work with a lot of
colleges and universities and we’re on campuses doing a lot of studies. One
of the things some of our studies do is look at the interactions that occur
between moms and dads and kids. When you look at professors working with
their kids from birth onward, they’re reading to those kids from day one,
typically. They are not only reading, but as they read even at six months of age
they’re pointing out the letters and the sounds. They’re getting the kids to
see the relationships between letters and sounds and vocabulary and concepts;
they’re extending language. They do it on the lap; they do it at bed time;
they do it at the dinner table. They have magnetic letters on the refrigerator.
What they’re doing is building not only a knowledge of language and print
and how all of that goes together, but they’re building brain. We can see kids
who don’t have these interactions and they show us brain development
substantially different from kids who do have these interactions.
Now
what is surprising is that a lot of these folks who interact with their kids in
a very good nurturing environment and who do a lot of good systematic teaching
from birth to five will then go into their undergraduate and graduate courses
and teach their students never to do that. They teach their students never to do
it because it’s not developmentally appropriate. That’s the disconnect.
The
fact of the matter is, when we do our studies and we identify kids at risk for
reading failure, we know that the majority of those kids who are at risk and who
will hit the wall as they learn to read are kids from poverty. They are kids
from disadvantaged families whose parents are working too hard to interact in
the ways I just described, who may themselves not read, where there may not be
books in the home; these parents may not even know they’re supposed to
interact with their kids that way.
We have early childhood programs where the kids go and develop good social competencies and emotional health, but the programs are bereft of any kinds of systematic interactions to do what middle and upper-middle class parents do all of the time, and the social and the emotional positives that come out of that nurturing environment go straight downhill once those kids get in school and do not learn to read.
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Dr.
Reid Lyon: So,
there is a fascinating set of disconnects that you see among an ostensibly
learned and knowledgeable prophesoriat. It’s one of the most silliest things
and saddest things I have ever seen. The
bottom line is for a country like America to be leaving behind about
thirty-eight to forty percent of
its youngsters in terms of not learning to read is unconscionable.
What makes it equally or doubly unconscionable is if you disaggregate those data, seventy percent approximately of young African Americans kids can’t read. Seventy percent! If you look at Hispanic kids, the figure is sixty-five to seventy percent. That means we are producing failure where it doesn’t have to be. We know what we can do to help those youngsters; we know how to get to them early; we know how to identify these kids at risk, at four or five years of age; we know how to bring to bear good evidence-based programs that if applied and implemented will move those kids all the way from the tenth percentile right up to the average range, to be concrete. We can reduce illiteracy in many of our research sites - in real classrooms in real schools with real kids at risk where ninety-eight percent are free and reduced lunch, and eighty percent are a minority. That is seventy percent of kids leaving the first grade as failing readers reducing to two to six percent when we do it right. When I’m saying we do it right that means we bring to bear what we know from those four questions.
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David
Boulton: A couple of points. You covered such a wide ground and
there’s a variety of places we could go. You said ‘avoid print.'
One
of the most powerful concepts in the emerging emotional
science of ‘affects’, is called the Compass of Shame.” Or, what
we’ve called in this series relative to reading, the Downward
Spiral of Shame. Basically what it points to is that children, like
all of us, tend to move away from what brings about shame. Moving
away from print is almost second order to moving away from feeling shame….
Dr.
Reid Lyon: Right.
David
Boulton: Which is associated
with trying to process this code.
Dr.
Reid Lyon: Absolutely. The most
visible thing our kids do throughout their early years is read. Reading is the
most frequent and visible behavior visible to peers as kids enter school.
David
Boulton: Visible because there’s a structure to it where we can see
them struggling.
Dr.
Reid Lyon: Yes, absolutely. Typically, from first
through third grades there is a lot of oral reading, and there are interactions
where the kids are expected to read out loud, orally or in round robin.
When kids are hesitant, disfluent,
inaccurate, slow and labored in reading, that is very visible to their peers and
remember the peers, the other kids, again look at reading as a proxy for
intelligence. It doesn’t matter if this kid is already a genius and can do
algebra in the second grade, reading produces particular perceptions. Better
said, lousy reading produces a perception of stupidity and dumbness to peers and
clearly to the youngster who is struggling. That is the shame. There are
very visible differences between kids who are doing well with print and
youngsters who are struggling with print. They
feel like they’re failures; they tell us that.
One of the things that is both great but also sad, is that we have had the opportunity in my job working with all of our scientists at all of our sites to follow kids from before they enter school until, in many cases, they’re now twenty-three. What is wonderful about that is we can walk through life with folks who are going to become very good readers. Sadly, we also walk through life with kids, adolescents and then adults who never learn how to read. And sadly, when we talk with these kids, adolescents and adults who’ve had a tough time with the shame of not learning to read, we find it is further exacerbated by the fact that they can’t compete occupationally and vocationally; they don’t do well in school, clearly the adolescents show us a level of pain that this society doesn’t even see. Most of society takes this for granted, but all of this begins to build up together and keep kids further behind.
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Dr.
Reid Lyon: You
know, if we just go back to the little kids we start with…now we’re starting
at birth, as I mentioned, and by three years of age kids from poverty,
disadvantaged, whatever their race or ethnicity, are already thirty to forty percent
behind in vocabulary development. Whereas your kids and my kids
are going to learn about nine new words a day from eighteen months of age onward, kids
from disadvantaged are going to learn about three. Now what happens is, they’re not learning or picking up the vocabulary,
but they’re also not getting those interactions that stimulate brain, that
help kids understand that our language is composed of smaller units, and we can
talk about how that is so important for reading development.
So, you’ve got kids coming into pre-school, kindergarten and first grade who are already behind the curve in vocabulary. Even if we could teach them to read print, what are they going to relate it to? The fact is, we also have these same kids having a difficult time understanding the code because they have not understood what the building blocks are. And again, we can visit that. Here they come, we can get them up to snuff with good instruction in terms of bringing print off the page, but if we don’t also bolster vocabulary, comprehension, which is why we teach kids to read, their learning continues to lag.
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Vocabulary Enters Through Print:
Dr. Reid Lyon: Consider the kids who we don’t get to who still are having print problems that are labored, hesitant, and inaccurate as they come up through second grade, third grade, and fifth grade. Well after fourth grade, or during fourth grade and beyond, vocabulary now enters through print. It doesn’t enter through hanging out with your friends on the corner. So, now we start to get further behind in vocabulary, such that even when the kids are accommodated for, that is books are read to them through some platform or modality and they have some type of accommodations, they still do not have the background knowledge that should have been fostered by reading from day one and we have this constant trajectory of failure with the gap widening and widening.
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Dr.
Reid Lyon: When
we ask that first question, what does it take to read, it’s neat to describe
how we’ve done the studies. There’s no way you can make sense out of kids
and their development unless you hang out with them and walk with them. You
can’t study kids on anything at one point in time and really learn anything
because you don’t know what happened before and you don’t know what happened
after. So, when I was brought to NIH and we developed the research protocols,
what we wanted to make sure of were the following kinds of things: 1) What does
it take to learn to read? 2) What goes wrong when you don’t? 3) How can we
prevent it? 4) How do you remediate it when you can’t prevent it? What’s
the best way to understand and capture the knowledge to allow us to do it?
What
we had to do was start before the kids got to school. We started at five at that
time, back in 1983. The reason we started at five rather than at three or
one was
because we didn’t have good enough measures to go lower then. We do now in
many ways. We also knew we had to look at all kids, not just these kids or
these kids, but populations of kids of every race, every ethnicity, of every
background because those four questions apply to the whole civilization. So,
we would sample large groups of kids at five years of ages that represent epidemiologically what you see out there in the
population and we would measure
all of these kids on those things that people thought were critical for reading.
There were a lot of goofy ideas and there still are about reading and how it
develops, but scientifically you can’t argue with the concept that you have to
measure it, compete the hypothesis and test it.
For
example, a five year old in our study would be measured on every part of language,
phonology, semantics, syntax, pragmatics. We’d look at attention and all
phases of attention, all types of memory. We’d go in the home and look at how
many books are in the home, how much the parents read to the kids, how well the
parents read. We’d look at genetic factors and family factors, we’d look at neuro-biological factors. The kids are pretty well assessed in fun ways, and
they like it. You know, a ‘me next’ kind of thing. We’d do that three
times a year for many of these measures and we’d do it for at least five years.
So, the minimum amount of time a kid is going to walk with us is five years, the
average is nine years, and as we talked about a little bit earlier, we’ve got a
lot of adults with us now. What’s amazing is how many of these folks stay
with us. You know there’s only been a six percent attrition rate in these samples.
Where we start, for example, in Connecticut in 1983 with Sally and Ben Shaywitz’s
study….all of those kids came from the state of Connecticut. They now live in
forty-four different states and six foreign countries and we still follow them
every year.
Now
when you do that and you measure kids across all of these things that people
think are critical for reading development, you get to see which ones are right
and which ones are wrong. A lot of folks thought that reading came naturally. A
lot of folks thought that reading was related to semi-circular canal vestibular
system things. Some people felt that reading was really dependent upon visual
perception. Some people think that’s it’s timing and sensory processing.
Some people think it’s language and phonology. Well, the only way to get to
that is to test all of that objectively, compete it and see which ones fall out
in the mix as either good, medium or poor predictors of things.
So, what you’ve got is all these kids coming along with us in the first ten years where we’re not doing any interventions; we’re following them three times a year and we assess which kids at the end of first, second, third, tenth grade, whatever it may be, read well, which ones read medium and which ones really hit the wall because reading is continuous. Then you can back up at the end of the first grade, at the end of fourth grade, at the end of tenth grade, all the way back to kindergarten and see what you measured that best predicts outcomes at each of these levels. Question number three, you can’t prevent if you can’t identify early. Question number two, what goes wrong when children don’t learn to read? Well, we’re measuring on a continuous basis so we can see those measurements of those properties or variables or factors that are most influential in learning how to read or get in the way and prevent learning how to read.
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Dr.
Reid Lyon: So,
what do we know? Number one, we know that
reading is complex and most people
give it short shrift as I did when I was a third grade teacher. I just took it
for granted. It’s one of the most
complex, unnatural cognitive interactions that brain and environment have to
coalesce together to produce. It’s amazing when you look at it.
We’ve got an alphabet that has twenty-six letters. We’ve got those twenty-six letters
corresponding to about forty to forty-four sounds. Now in
an alphabetic language like English or German or Serbo-Croatian or whatever it
may be, the job of the beginning reader
is to lay sound on top of these print characters because
it’s literally impossible to memorize all this stuff.
So, you’ve got to ask, what does the kid have to have? Well, when we say question number one, what does it take to be able to learn to read, we know that it initially takes a clear understanding that the language we hear is composed of smaller sounds. These are called phonemes, the smallest units of sound. And people say sure, you know, cat has three sounds /c/ /a/ /t/. And I can ask people all the time how many sounds they hear in big or cat and they say three. But they don’t. You don’t hear three sounds in cat, I don’t hear three sounds in cat, and our kids never get any practice with the sounds in cat because nature has given us an oral language that allows us to communicate rapidly so that when I say cat I don’t say /c/ /a/ /t/. What the hell is a /c/ /a/ /t/? What I say is cat and the minute I start to say cat that /a/ and the /t/ sound co-articulate or bundle together and come by the ear as one pulse of sound. Phoneme awareness is much more difficult because you don’t hear the sounds. The brain has to pull from that one burble or acoustic bundle the three sounds because the ear won’t. The ear never hears the individual sounds unless we spell them out.
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Phonemic
Awareness is Artificial:
David
Boulton:
So, in that sense, the whole phonemic
awareness piece of this is an artifact of learning to read, not something we
would naturally have to develop to process the distinctions in oral language.
Dr. Reid Lyon: You do not need phonemic awareness to listen and speak and hang out and talk. Why? Because I’m not spelling the words out to you, I don’t say /c/ /a/ /t/.
David
Boulton:
Yet much of our research seems to suggest that the lack of this is some
deficit in children.
Dr.
Reid Lyon: Well, it’s not a deficit in
children. It’s only a deficit if they don’t get it to learn how to read. A
deficit is only a deficit if it impacts negatively on something critical that
has to be developed.
David
Boulton:
It’s a deficit with respect to the conditioning necessary to take in
this artificial process.
Dr. Reid Lyon: Yeah, it is an artificial process, and it’s a random process. Why do some languages have more or less sounds than we do? Why do some languages have more or less or different characters than we do?
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David
Boulton:
Back to your research studies from a few moments ago, is
part of your research intention
to actually look at the difference in how many hours of instruction,
of what kind and quality,
is necessary to get children through the different kinds of orthographies out
there relative to their different ambiguities?
Dr.
Reid Lyon: Yeah, sure. We’ve studied
several kinds of languages. We study Chinese, logo-graphic languages, and we
study Japanese - a couple of forms of Japanese. We study different alphabetic
languages, some very transparent, or what we call shallow. We study Spanish
and so forth where the relationship between the sound and the letter is very
straight forward, versus English where it
gets a bit more complex. So yes, we do that, but you know, all of this
fits together in that phonemic awareness is absolutely critical, non-negotiable
to understanding how to read, to knowing how to bring sound to print because we
have an alphabetic language, but it is in no way sufficient.
David
Boulton:
It’s necessary, but insufficient, a kind of a 'placeholder' or
'formatting' that’s necessary for…
Dr.
Reid Lyon: Yes, it’s a building block.
David Boulton: Later processing.
|
Dr.
Reid Lyon: We have a lot of kids in our studies who can do good phonemic
awareness tasks, like rhyming or saying big without the /b/ sound and stuff like
that, but they still don’t comprehend. So, it is necessary, but not
sufficient. We can’t find good readers who don’t have it, but if you just
teach phonemic awareness like educators sometimes do, they’ll latch onto it
like a magic bullet, and we’re not going to get anywhere.
So,
what else does it take to learn to read? Well, it does take phonics. I’m
sorry, but it takes phonics, which is the F-word in today’s society, at least
in the education community. But phonics is nothing more than a relationship
between sound structure and a print structure. Phonics.
David Boulton: Phonics developed 400 years ago as an attempt to compensate for the underlying mess in this code.
|
Necessary
but Insufficient Building Blocks of Reading:
Dr.
Reid Lyon: That’s correct. Yes. Oh
yeah. Phonics is absolutely essential, non-negotiable. You can’t read
English without it. But it’s not sufficient. But surprisingly, a lot of people
say, ' Well, I never learned phonics, I learned by this or this or this, nobody
ever taught me phonics and I read okay.' We’ll bring them into our
laboratories and we’ll have them read a sentence and put a word in there that
they have never seen before and guess what they use? Phonics. They use it
because a lot of our kids who can learn to read under any instructional method,
no matter how cockamamie, are able to do that because they have already been
taught these foundational building blocks.
Let's
go back to age birth to five. When I was
bringing my kids up, I read to them all the time. I read to them systematically,
I pointed out letters, I pointed out sounds, I played Twinkle, Twinkle Little
Star, Eeny
Meeny Miny Mo, I read Dr. Seuss. They were inundated with all of this
information that tears language apart. So their brains are now deploying neurons
to tear things apart.
David
Boulton:
To differentiate.
Dr.
Reid Lyon: Of course, yes, to
differentiate. And once they get into kindergarten and first grade, a lot of
our kids have these building blocks already. We’ve
got a lot of five year olds who know all the letters of the alphabet,
who know quite a few of the sounds, if not all of the sounds, and they’re
ready to go. They have the building blocks. And because they have them and
they move on under any cockamamie approach, a lot of people think it’s the
cockamamie approach that’s teaching them to read. That’s how a lot of
this philosophy and belief gets situated.
The fact of the matter is most of our kids at risk are kids who did not have these interactions that built the fundamental, foundational linguistic building blocks. They come into kindergarten, first grade, and if they then get instructional approaches that don’t take advantage of what we know about the code, if they get instructional approaches that are philosophically based, holistic and so forth, they’ll never get it. Because they’re coming for clarity, and if they’re expected to discover these kinds of things without all of those previous building blocks how are they going to do it? It’s like me being sat in front of a piano listening to Mozart without any musical background and then being expected to induce these things, expected to pick it up naturally. It just doesn’t happen. So, you’ve got all these kinds of cultural, instructional language things moving at one time, which all can be helped and adjudicated by just knowledge.
