by Thomas Newkirk

This blog post is extracted from the full-length essay, “The Broken Logic of ‘Sold a Story'”: A Personal Response to “The Science of Reading.” Read the full essay available in the Resources section at https:// literacyresearchcommons.org.

No part of “Sold a Story” is more central than the depiction of Marie Clay’s work—and none is so inaccurate. Specifically, Emily Hanford and others challenge the multiple strategies that Clay argues struggling readers need to employ.

The crux of the “debunking” comes down to this statement in which Hanford compares Clay’s methods to the difficulties of Dan, an adult, who never learned to read as a child, and during his service in Vietnam, was ashamed of his inability to write a letter for a dying fellow soldier—but who later learned to read through a phonics method. Hanford asserts:

For Dan, reading used to be like a detective game. Most words were puzzles and he was searching for clues. He had strategies. Look at some letters, make a good guess. That’s how Marie Clay described skilled reading. But it’s not how skilled reading works.

It’s a stretch to connect Dan’s difficulties to Marie Clay—the dates just don’t line up. He would have been in elementary school in early 1960s, before Clay had even done her work.

But Hanford is surely right that if reading is a set of puzzles and uncertainties, it can’t lead to fluent reading. Too much of our mental work will be used up in solving (or not solving) those puzzles. Once the identification of words is automatic, “You’re not using your brain power to identify the words. You’re using your brain power to understand what you read.” No reading teacher, no parent, no reasonable person would say that skilled reading should be a detective game, “look at the letters, make a good guess.”

And neither would Clay.

It is a misrepresentation of her work.  And because Hanford’s argument hinges on Marie Clay—the author of the “idea” that, according to “Sold a Story”, undermines reading instruction in the English-speaking world, it’s important to call out this misrepresentation.

According to Clay, the skilled reader processes words “accurately and quickly.” She writes:

For example, you had no difficulty in perceiving the words in this and the preceding paragraph. You did not stop to study the form of separate words. You did not analyze words by consciously noting root words, prefixes, suffixes or by “sounding them out” syllable by syllable. It is highly unlikely you consulted a dictionary for the pronunciation or the meaning of any word. Why not? Every word was familiar. You have used each one yourself in writing, and have seen it in print thousands of times. (1979, 8)

In other words, fluent reading as Clay understands it, is hardly a puzzle where we are making guesses. Hanford debunks a “reading as guessing” approach to skilled reading.

But inconveniently that is not Clay’s position.

Clay and Hanford actually agree that the goal of reading instruction is to make word recognition effortless and automatic.  But they differ in strategies. Unlike the skilled reader. the emergent learner is constantly confronting words she doesn’t know—and needs supports, what Clay calls props or what are commonly called scaffolds. An obvious example is pointing—the emergent reader may be encouraged to point to words to focus her attention, but as she progresses, she becomes able to focus without the prompt.

Clay argues for the flexible use of multiple tools, often in conjunction. Letter-sound correspondence, and learning the more stable letter combinations are part of what the reader needs—and this “word work” is part of the Reading Recovery approach. For example, Clay recommends a technique first described by Carol Chomsky where the names of students in a class (i.e. words children are naturally interested in and want to use in their writing) are used to learn sound-symbol correspondence.

In the end, Clay wants emerging readers to have a Plan B and a Plan C, to be flexible and opportunistic.  “Sounding out” is one tool, but it runs up against the irregularity of the English language.  It is a necessary tool—but if it is the only one taught, the child is deprived of strategic power. (See also Johnston and Scanlon 2021, 115)

Robert Tierney and P. David Pearson come to this very conclusion. They reject claims that “Three Cueing System” has been shown to be ineffective, even harmful for young readers (a central tenet of “the science of reading”). There is more support for providing young readers with a “full tool box” of word-solving strategies.

If the “debunking” of Marie Clay is the central hinge of the “Sold a Story” argument, it is a broken hinge.

References:

American Public Media. “Sold a Story”. Podcast. 2022.  Available at  https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

Clay, Marie M. 1979.Reading: The Patterning of Complex Behavior. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Educational Books

Johnston, Peter and Donna Scanlon. 2021. “An examination of Dyslexia Research and Instruction With Policy Implications.” Literacy, Research, Theory, Method, and Practice. Vol 70: 107-128.   Available at file:///C:/Users/Thomas/Downloads/johnston-scanlon-2021-an-examination-of-dyslexia-research-and-instruction-with-policy-implications.pdf

Tierney, Robert J. and P. David Pearson. 2024. Fact-checking the Science of Reading: Opening up the Conversation. Literacy Research Commons. https// literacyresearchcommons.org

About the author

Thomas Newkirk is the bestselling author of Minds Made for Stories along with numerous other titles, including Writing Unbound, Embarrassment, The Art of Slow Reading, The Performance of Self in Student Writing (winner of the NCTE’s David H. Russell Award), and Misreading Masculinity. He taught writing at the University of New Hampshire for thirty-nine years, and founded the New Hampshire Literacy Institutes, a summer program for teachers. In addition to working as a teacher, writer, and editor, he has served as the chair of his local school board for seven years.