THE
EASY WAY TO REFORM EDUCATION
By Robert V. Rose, M.D.
(retired[email: rovarose@aol.com]
Historically,
many authorities on the subject of literacy instruction have stressed the
importance
of adequate practice in printing alphabet letters. Marcus Quintinianus (a
first-century Roman rhetorician) has been quoted as writing, that with regard to
becoming literate, “Too slow a hand impedes the
mind.”
In
1912, Maria Montessori wrote, in effect, that teaching young children to print
letters is easy, that it is easy to teach children to read after they have
practiced printing alphabet letters, but that it is difficult to teach children
to read if they have not practiced writing them.1 Marilyn Jager Adams noted
that prior to the onset of the twentieth century the “spelling drill” was the
principal means of inducing literacy for several millennia.1
More
recently, several published authors have called attention to the dearth of
research on the possible link between printing practice and the acquisition of
literacy in young children, but objective studies of the relationship are still
lacking.2,3,4
This
author has made the assumption that emphasis on practicing printing alphabet
letters
increases the fluency with which children can print them. It was therefore
decided to examine the relationship between fluency at printing the alphabet in
preliterate children, and their subsequent success in learning to read
well.
This
method suffers the disadvantage of requiring children to be able to recite
the
alphabet
in order to print the different letters both legibly and at a rate sufficient to
demonstrate that they have practiced enough to have become “printing fluent.”
However, it was considered superior to other methods of assessing fluency in
printing alphabet letters in young children.
Such children have limited attention spans. It was therefore decided to
measure the number of alphabet letters children write during a timed
twenty-second interval, and multiply that number by three in order to obtain a
“letters-per-minute,” or “LPM,” value for each child.
During
the early months of 2002, five first-grade teachers were enlisted from
teacher-related Internet listservs, to do a cooperative study of the
relationship between fluency in writing the alphabet, and concomitant reading
skill.
The
printing rate of each child was listed by teachers submitting classroom data,
and each was matched by the subjective teacher assessment of the child’s
relative reading skill. The assessments were A, B, C, D and E, to designate
“excellent”, “above average”, “average”, “below average” and “possible reading
problem”, respectively.
A
total of 94 children in five first-grade classrooms were studied. When the
letter grades were
converted to numbers (4, 3, 2, 1, 0), “average relative reading ability” could
be determined for subgroups of students, defined as printing at different
rates.
Among
the sixteen children who printed faster than 40 LPM, the average reading score
was
3.6. Among the 33 children who printed from 30 to 39 LPM, the average was 2.9.
For the 26 children writing at 20-29
LPM, it was 2.3. For the 21 children who wrote more slowly than 20 LPM, it was
1.6.
During
this current school year, a number of kindergarten teachers have submitted
series of similar studies on their classrooms to the k1writing listserv,
accessible at
www.yahoogroups.com. By the end of
February 2004, a total of five teachers had submitted serial data on a total of
106 kindergarten students, including data for the month of
February.
The
relative reading skills of the kindergartners were ranked according to a
three-level system:
“reading better than grade level”, “doing well at grade level” and “lagging
behind expectations”.
In the opinions of their teachers, six children were already reading at
secondgrade level or above.
Statistical
analysis of the correlation again yielded similar results. Among the eighteen
children
who printed the alphabet faster than 40 LPM, 72% were “above grade level,” and
only one was “lagging.” Among the eighteen children who wrote more slowly than
20 LPM, none was above grade level in reading skill, and half of them were
“lagging” in this regard.
A
tabulation of these findings is revealing. It is informative to look down the
column of LPM
figures for these 106 children, and observe the correlations. These data are
presented in Table One.
The
correlation between reading skill and fluency at printing alphabet letters
in
kindergarten
and first-grade is readily apparent. This correlation was known to each of the
experienced [kindergarten] teachers participating in this study even before the
study was done. The experiment, then,
was designed to answer the question as to whether this correlation is one of
causation, or merely coincident with some other unidentified
factor.
The
kindergarten teachers involved have each been able to achieve a level of
printing fluency
that is considerably above what is generally achieved by American kindergarten
students.
The printing rates of their kindergarten children are comparable to the rates of
the first-grade students in the original study, whose teachers had NOT been
previously monitoring printing rate. If the cause of the correlation were in the
opposite direction, and it is having learned to read which drives printing
fluency, then one would expect the correlation to weaken in classrooms where
printing fluency has been intentionally contrived. However, we here see the
correlation has persisted intact.
This
year, each of the kindergarten teachers has been making a dedicated effort to
induce objectively measurable printing fluency in the students as the school
year progresses. Each of the five kindergarten teachers has emphatically
proclaimed that this practice is found to be immensely helpful in turning young
children into readers.
A
number of the classrooms have high percentages of poverty and minority children,
and none of the children could read at the beginning of the kindergarten school
year. It was found that printing fluency, which we arbitrarily defined as 40 LPM
or faster, is achieved at different times by different children, and that such
fluency is an excellent indicator of when children will learn to read, as well
as indicating which children have become successful at reading at any particular
point in time.
It
was also observed that printing fluency gradually improves in almost all cases
with continued
practice writing the alphabet letters. Failure to cooperate during the time
allocated by teachers for dedicated printing practice seems to be the main
limiting factor in the development of printing skill.
None-the-less,
our data suggest that fluency in writing the letters of the alphabet is a
reasonable
goal for all normal children by the end of first-grade.
But
it appears that printing fluency does not at all correlate with reading ability
much beyond the first-grade level. One teacher submitted data on 54
fourth-graders, demonstrating no difference at all in the median
alphabet-printing rates between children who had been formally identified as
reading below grade level, and the other students.5
It
is also apparent that printing skill is by no means a necessary prerequisite for
literacy.
Many
children learn to read before they are fluent at printing alphabet letters. On
the other hand, virtually all children who lag in reading skill in K-1 are
dysfluent printers. That this lack of skill is remediable through continued
dedicated practice, extended over time, appears to be of fundamental
importance.
If
the attainment of fluent ability to print alphabet letters in the earliest
grades generally assures
early success in reading, this fact challenges some current theoretical
conceptions regarding the nature of reading disabilities.
Our
evidence suggests both that printing fluency confers the ability to name random
letters more rapidly than 40 per minute6,
and
that the ability to phonetically write words fluently, possible only after the
attainment of fluency in printing letters, confers phonemic
awareness.
Adams
wrote, “It has been shown that the act of writing newly learned words results in
a significant strengthening of their perceptual integrity in recognition. This
is surely a factor underlying the documented advantages of programs that
emphasize writing and spelling activities.”7
Montessori
also considered practice writing alphabet letters to be crucial, and wrote, “We
shall soon see that the child, on hearing the word, or on thinking of a word he
already knows, will see, in his mind’s eye, all the letters, necessary to
compose the word, arrange themselves. He
will reproduce this vision with a facility most surprising to us.”7
While
such rhetorical explanations of the value of writing practice have been seen as
nebulous
in the past, converging advances in the fields of pattern recognition by
artificial intelligence
and of the cerebral physiology involved in visual pattern recognition and
categorization
may render them more plausible.
In
2012, Marilyn Jager Adams, the world’s leading authority on early literacy
instruction, published ABC Foundations
For Young Children, in which she presented newly published proof that most
American children finishing first grade still can’t write and name all of the
alphabet letters.8
This
is a preventable disgrace, and Dr Adams emailed me these comments: “It’s hard to
learn to read if you can’t tell one letter from another”, and “It’s strange that
now, over 3,000 years after the invention of the alphabet, we still don’t know
the best way to teach literacy”.
The
best predictor of reading success in rising first-graders is the ability to
rapidly name randomly presented alphabet letters, and Rand Nelson, on his blog,
has shown that the best way to learn to rapidly name alphabet letters is to
learn to handwrite them fluently first.9
And
importantly, psychologist Rowe Young Kaple has now published her finding that
most American children diagnosed as “learning disabled” actually suffer from a
hereditary condition she calls Reverse Position Sensation (RPS) in which
children previously considered “clumsy” feel a counter-clockwise motion of the
hand as moving in the opposite direction. This often leads to difficulty
learning to write (often called “dysgraphia” by teachers) unless the temporarily
adopt a “remedial grip” of the pencil, by holding it between second and third
fingers, forcing the palm to turn downward. (Many senior citizens are appalled
that so many younger folks hold their writing implements in bizarre, abnormal
positions).10
It
is emphasized that these studies are limited and preliminary, but their
results
underscore
the pressing need to either confirm or disaffirm their apparent
implications.
The
author wishes to acknowledge the participation of the classroom teachers who did
and
submitted these comparison studies on their students. They are Libby Rhoden,
Pasadena, Texas; Sue Fisher, Kailua Kona, Hawaii; Ann Vasconcellos, Homewood,
Illinois; Helen Wilder, Middlesboro, Kentucky; Nancy Creech, Eastpointe,
Michigan; Ruby Clayton, Indianapolis, Indiana; Alice A. Pickel, Phoenix,
Arizona; Lori Jackson, Mission, South Dakota; Lalia Kerr, Nova Scotia; Jennifer
Runkle, Ohio.
TABLE ONE
Kindergarten
Students Printing Level in Letters Per Minute (LPM)
LPM
rate:
>
40 LPM 30-39 LPM 20-29 LPM < 20 LPM
78** 39** 33** 27** 24* 18*
72** 39** 33** 27** 24* 18*
66** 39**
33**
27** 24* 18*
60** 39** 33* 27** 24o 18*
60* 39** 33* 27** 24o 18*
57** 39** 33* 27** 24* 18*
54** 39* 33* 27* 21* 18 o
54** 39 o 33 o 27* 21* 15*
51** 36** 30** 27* 21* 15*
51** 36** 30** 27* 21* 15 o
48** 36**
30** 27* 21* 15 o
48** 36** 30** 27o 21* 15 o
48** 36** 30** 27o 21* 12*
48* 36* 30* 24** 21* 12 o
48* 36* 30* 24* 21* 12 o
42** 36* 30* 24* 21 o 6 o
42* 36 o 30* 24* 21 o 3 o
42 o 30*
3 o
30*
In
the opinion of respective classroom teachers:
KEY: o lagging in reading
skill
* on level
** above level in
reading
1.
Montessori, Maria. The
Montessori Method,
Dover Publications, 2002, pp.266-7.
2.
Adams, Marilyn Jager. Beginning
to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print,
MIT Press, 1990, p.388.
3.
Sofia Vernon and Emilia Ferreiro. “Writing Development: A Neglected Variable in
the
Consideration
of Phonological Awareness.” Harvard
Educational Review 69:4
(1999):
pp.395-415.
4.
Groff, Patrick. “Teaching Phonics: Letter-to-phoneme, Phoneme-to-letter, or
Both?” Reading
and Writing Quarterly 17
(fall, 2001): pp.291-306.
5.
Data provided by Marianne Morin, Watkins Glen, New York.
6.
Data on kindergarten classroom correlation between letter-naming and printing
fluency provided by Sue Fisher, Hawaii.
7.
Adams, op. cit., pp 230-231
8.
ABC Foundations For Young Children, introduction.
9.
URL for the Nelson blog is: http://peterson-handwriting.com/Blog/
10.
See URL: http://adderworld.ning.com/forum/topics/abstract-university-of-az
^^^^^^^^^^^
If this actually appears as a blog, please comment!
^^^^^^^^^^^
If this actually appears as a blog, please comment!
