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This was a pretty poor article. They never really explained what balanced literacy is, what its key positions are, or how it measured success. Nor do they reall

This was a pretty poor article. They never really explained what balanced literacy is, what its key positions are, or how it measured success. Nor do they really explain how their ideas would be better, or adress failings of balanced literacy.

leoc 3y ago
It certainly doesn't present an uncontested view of the evidence. https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/rev3.3314 https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.10... https://www.vox.com/23815311/science-of-reading-movement-literacy-learning-loss https://www.vox.com/23815311/science-of-reading-movement-lit... https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-019-09515-y https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-019-09515-y https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-social-science-of-reading-isnt https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-social-science-of-reading-i...
lolinder 3y ago
Yeah, what's odd to me reading this article and then going and reading elsewhere about "balanced literacy" (which I hadn't heard of before) is that it sounds like this parent's teachers weren't using balanced literacy at all—what they describe is just the whole language method. Balanced literacy supposedly was meant to bridge the gap and use both whole language and phonics in the same program, and the author is pretty clear that phonics didn't feature in their instruction at all. It sounds to me like either someone in the curriculum development process or the teachers themselves were anti-phonics and stripped them out of the "balanced" process, so this parent's experience may not be reflective of the typical results of a truly balanced method.
- mannykannot 3y ago
  My impression, albeit from someone who was only vaguely aware of this issue until Emily Hanford's influential podcast Sold a Story, is that "balanced literacy" is a reasonable-sounding concept that has been so widely used as to become almost meaningless, and, in particular, that there was not much balance in Calkin's method. This opinion is undoubtedly influenced by my skepticism over the reasons offered for substituting exercises like guessing the word for those involving "sounding out' a word. While practiced readers do use context clues a lot (probably too much, IMHO, to the detriment of critical analysis), it does not follow that guessing games will lead to basic competence. As for children stumbling over "spelling out" exercises, that is to be expected. They do the same with arithmetic, so should we be teaching them to guess the answer, and hope that, through doing so, they will infer how to get correct answers? And, as others have pointed out here, the premise that literacy comes as naturally as language itself seems to be empirically false and even self-contradictory (so why, then, do we need to be teaching it in schools?)

leoc 3y ago

It certainly doesn't present an uncontested view of the evidence. https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/rev3.3314 https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.10... https://www.vox.com/23815311/science-of-reading-movement-literacy-learning-loss https://www.vox.com/23815311/science-of-reading-movement-lit... https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-019-09515-y https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-019-09515-y https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-social-science-of-reading-isnt https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-social-science-of-reading-i...

lolinder 3y ago

Yeah, what's odd to me reading this article and then going and reading elsewhere about "balanced literacy" (which I hadn't heard of before) is that it sounds like this parent's teachers weren't using balanced literacy at all—what they describe is just the whole language method. Balanced literacy supposedly was meant to bridge the gap and use both whole language and phonics in the same program, and the author is pretty clear that phonics didn't feature in their instruction at all. It sounds to me like either someone in the curriculum development process or the teachers themselves were anti-phonics and stripped them out of the "balanced" process, so this parent's experience may not be reflective of the typical results of a truly balanced method.

mannykannot 3y ago
My impression, albeit from someone who was only vaguely aware of this issue until Emily Hanford's influential podcast Sold a Story, is that "balanced literacy" is a reasonable-sounding concept that has been so widely used as to become almost meaningless, and, in particular, that there was not much balance in Calkin's method. This opinion is undoubtedly influenced by my skepticism over the reasons offered for substituting exercises like guessing the word for those involving "sounding out' a word. While practiced readers do use context clues a lot (probably too much, IMHO, to the detriment of critical analysis), it does not follow that guessing games will lead to basic competence. As for children stumbling over "spelling out" exercises, that is to be expected. They do the same with arithmetic, so should we be teaching them to guess the answer, and hope that, through doing so, they will infer how to get correct answers? And, as others have pointed out here, the premise that literacy comes as naturally as language itself seems to be empirically false and even self-contradictory (so why, then, do we need to be teaching it in schools?)