Bad science = the end of phonics.
Although educational research was in its infancy in the early decades of the twentieth century there was sufficient concern and curiosity...
Rudolph Flesch points out the elephant in the room...
By 1955, the American academic elite had come to an almost universal conclusion: phonics was dangerous. In that year the most eminent...
Virtual insanity in reading instruction - teaching reading without words.
Huey’s (1908) ‘scientific’ proof that phonic instruction was a superfluous, torpid stage of reading development resulted in a revival of...
Huey and Dewey - no Disney double act.
Edmund Burke Huey was the most influential writer on reading instruction in the twentieth century. His bestselling ‘The Psychology and...
The very peculiar case of Goodman, Smith and Clay (or why the whole language approach just wont die)
In April 1967, Kenneth Goodman presented his landmark paper at the American Educational Research Association. ‘Reading: A...
First there was the word and the word became God...but what about the letters?
The word method of teaching reading dominated instruction methods for a century with its word lists and flash cards and repeated...
How assessment and inspections ruined reading - England 1870.
However, confused and ineffective the teaching of reading had become in the United States in the nineteenth century, at least there was...
Short-term gains, long-term pain: 'The Word Method' starts to take hold...
‘It is not perhaps, very important that a child know the letters before he begins to read. It may learn first to read words by seeing...
How America helped ruin English reading instruction...with some help from the Germans.
If in England, the development of a system of teaching reading to the masses was a historic catalogue of failure then in America, the...
Universal literacy...not in England - the historical roots of a divided education system.
The worrying levels of illiteracy in England has its roots in a system of teaching reading that was heavily biased against the masses; a...