There are many ways reading has been taught and is currently being taught. This article examines the “old” ways, the “new” ways and the “new old ways.” Could the old way actually be better? And what in the world has happened to reading instruction in America?
Table of Contents
- A Brief Definition of Terms
- The Old Way: Reading Instruction Prior to the 1900s
- The New Way: Turn-of-the-Century “Revolution”
- The New Old Way: Dissenting Voices & The Reading Wars
- Why This Matters
- References
Prepare yourselves for a brief history lesson today, folks. And even if you’re not a history buff, hang in there until the end because I promise what you learn here today may shock you to your core (only a slight exaggeration) and will definitely inspire you to action if you have a child who struggles with reading.
But before we dive in, let’s frontload the definitions of various reading approaches in order to better understand what has happened to reading instruction in America.
A Brief Definition of Terms
(Synthetic) Phonics: (often just called “phonics”) a method of reading instruction that teaches students to connect letters and spelling patterns to the sounds that they make and then use that knowledge to sound out words.
Look/Say & Whole Word: a method of reading instruction formed from a theory that a proficient reader “just looks” at a word as a whole and says it. This instructional model trains young readers to memorize the shapes of words as “sight words” rather than attend to a word’s individual letters.
Whole Language: a method of reading instruction that uses the Whole Word method to teach words but also emphasizes writing, listening, speaking, exposing children to a wide variety of texts through read alouds, and student-centered exploration of texts and words. There is less of an emphasis on rote memorization of words and instead teachers expose children to a wide variety of words in hopes that they will “pick up” the pattern of reading.
Balanced Literacy: a method of reading instruction that is essentially a renamed version of Whole Language. It also includes some phonics instruction, although it is generally unstructured and takes up little instructional time.
Structured Literacy: a method of reading instruction developed based on the “the science of reading”. The elements of structured literacy are phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, reading and listening comprehension and writing composition. All elements are structured, meaning they are organized by increasingly difficult level of skill. The foundational skills (phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency) take up about equal amounts of time as language comprehension skills (vocabulary, listening and reading comprehension skills, writing composition). Teachers use data and diagnostic assessment to determine what skills individual students need to work on. (Read more about structured literacy and the science of reading here.)
Now that we’ve established these approaches to teaching reading, let’s look at their stories. Where did they come from? Why are they in our classrooms now?
The Old Way: Reading Instruction Prior to the 1900s
Before the turn of the 20th century, children were taught to read using the phonics method. They were taught the letters and their sounds and progressed to more complex spelling patterns. Literacy rates at the time were very high in America, including among women and children. It was actually expected that women be literate. Part of their jobs as mothers was to teach their children how to read Bernstein, 2022).
Reading expectations during this time were also extremely high. Here is an example passage from an early reader for 1st graders:
There was once a big, white hen that had twelve little chickens. They were very small, and the old hen took good care of them. She found food for them in the daytime, and at night kept them under her wings. One day, this old hen took her chickens down to a small brook. She thought the air from the water would do them good. When they got to the brook, they walked on the bank a little while. It was very pretty on the other side of the brook, and the old hen thought she would take her children over there.... (Minnich, 1936).
This is only half of the passage but you get the idea. If you compare this to a 1st grade passage from today, you can see quite a difference (I will show you in a minute). We will get into why later.
The New Way: Turn-of-the-Century “Revolution”
The Look/Say method was developed by a teacher on happenstance back in the 1850s. A tutor pointed at the word “cow” in a newspaper and then to a cow out the window. The young child was then able to “read” the word cow and excitedly ran to show her parents (Fletch, 1955). Over the next 100 years, the “look-at-the-word-say-the-word” approach grew until it was dominant.
Reading instruction became rote memorization of the shapes of words. This was referred to as “sight word instruction” and educators believed that all words should be learned via this approach. (Research now shows that only a small handful of words should be learned through a “sight word” approach.) Look/Say instruction was even propped up by psychologists who studied adult (keyword: adult, not child) readers and determined that adults read by simply looking at the word and saying it (Fletch, 1955, pg. 51). Therefore, this is how we should teach children.
But that doesn’t really track.
Imagine a professional chef being handed a recipe for a complicated dish and a child who’s never cooked before being handed the same recipe and told, “Just do what that guy does.” It is very foolish to think that you can take a desired outcome and expect a child to somehow mimic it correctly with no training! We now know that in order to simply look at words and say them, fluent readers have to have an ingrained understanding of how letters and sounds interact before fluent, “look-say” reading will happen. Not only that, but it is not possible for us to accurately memorize the 20,000-35,000 words needed to support a basic adult reading level in English.
Meanwhile, leading turn-of-the-century educators (namely John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick from Columbia University) caught wind of this new method in the 1920s. They took it and added a flavor of constructivist philosophy. This means they shifted the emphasis from rote “look/say” drills to teaching children to construct meaning from the text. They advocated for child-centered teaching methods where the child leads the way in their learning (Bernstein, 2022, p. 33-37, 51-57). This was now known as the Whole Word method.
There are elements of this philosophy that research shows can be beneficial for learning certain subject matters (i.e. its emphasis on hands-on, project-based and experiential learning). However, the issue it creates in reading instruction is that there is only one correct answer to what a word is, and students don’t get to decide for themselves what words are on the page or construct their own meanings of words.
To demonstrate, I will quote from a whole-word advocate, Dr. Edmund Burke Huey, in his book The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading.
Even if the child substitutes words of his own for some that are on the page, provided that those express the meaning, it is an encouraging sign that the reading has been real, and recognition of details will come as it is needed… Both the inner utterance and reading aloud are natural in the early years and are to be encouraged, but only when left thus free, to be dominated only by the purpose of getting and expressing meanings. (Huey, 1908)
Essentially: It’s fine for a child to make up words as long as they understand the meaning of the text. Guessing a word that has a similar meaning to the one on the page shows the child understands the text. Silent reading and reading aloud are both good but the main emphasis should not be on accuracy and instead on getting and expressing meaning.
Yikes! What?! There are so many logic flaws here! How does a child know they have the meaning correct if they have to guess at a majority of the words? What happens when this reader wants to become a doctor and guesses that the diagnosis of hypothyroidism is hyperthyroidism. Similar words with similar meanings, but vastly different diagnoses and treatment plans!
So, Look/Say + constructivism = Whole Word. And eventually educators began to catch on that children were not recognizing as many words as were required to read the typical readers, so they pushed for smaller vocabulary expectations in each grade-level (Parker, 2021). This, of course, eventually resulted in texts like this from a 1st grade reader:
“Come, Dick. Come and see. Come, come. Come and see Spot. Look, Spot. Oh, look. Look and see. Oh see.“
I don’t know about you but… bleh! What a contrast to the first grade level text in the phonics readers from the 1800s!
I know this seems extreme, so let me strawman the opposing argument for a moment to strengthen our point. Yes, many children growing up in the 50s, 60s and 70s learned to read using these types of readers and they were effective for those individuals. Also, our literacy rates as a nation have continued to rise since the 19th century as more people of all races and backgrounds are receiving an education.
But let’s not just take the rise in literacy rates at face value. To determine what type of reading instruction works best we should look at the rates of people who received reading instruction and not include the literacy rates of those who never received reading instruction. While that’s difficult to truly determine with the information we have, let me interpret the following statistics for you.
Firstly, according to the national census, in 1890 about 50% of 5-19 year-olds (all races and sexes) were receiving formal education in a school setting (Blodgett, 1983; Snyder 1993). At the same time, the literacy rate of the entire population (all races, school-educated or not) in 1890 was about 87% (Snyder, 1993). So the literacy rate was significantly higher than the school enrollment rate! While it is not a direct parallel, I believe it implies that all people receiving formal reading instruction (in the home and out) in phonics – the method used in that time – were growing up to be literate. This indicates that phonics is so powerful that it doesn’t require a formally trained teacher to deliver it effectively.
Returning to today, a quick google search will tell you that our literacy rate is “so good” – some studies say as high as 99% nation-wide! But a deeper dive shows:
- Only 37% of 12th graders performed at or above a “proficient” reading level in 2015 (NCES, 2020).
- In 2003 the average reading level for American adults across all races and backgrounds was in the “basic” category (Kutner et al., 2005). This is two levels below proficient and interestingly, I have not been able to find results for either assessment published since then.
- Fifty-four percent of adults between the ages of 16 and 74 read below the equivalent of a 6th level (BarbaraBushFdn).
- The school enrollment rate in 2019 was 91% and has been about that since the beginning of the 21st century.
So while school enrollment rates have risen dramatically over the last century and a half, our “rise” in literacy rates doesn’t seem to correlate to prove an equally effective method of reading instruction is being used to create a literate population. It appears we may be lowering our standard for what is deemed literate to compensate.
The New Old Way: Dissenting Voices & The Reading Wars
Let’s jump back into our storyline now. In 1955, Rudolf Fletch wrote a book to American parents. In his book, he takes the time to walk us clearly through all of the research that had been done in support of the whole word method and shows how it is all essentially fake science. I won’t break it down now, but I highly encourage you to go read the book yourself!
The book inspired other pro-phonics educators to start speaking up and promoting their own research in support of teaching letters and sounds.
In response, the whole word method was rebranded as the “whole language” method. This became wildly popular because its advocates claimed that it is a “holistic approach” to literacy instruction. “Whole Language advocates believe that skills develop organically through rich, context-driven experiences” (Smith, 2021). As a result, there became less emphasis on memorizing thousands of sight words and instead on learning words through experiences with texts. This method still did not align with the pro-phonics research being put out by educational researchers.
Push-back from pro-phonics educators and parents eventually forced the Whole Language method to incorporate “analytic phonics.” Despite the name, analytic phonics is not the straightforward and useful phonics training that was desired. Instead, once a child has memorized a sight word, they are taught the sounds of the letters inside the word. It’s phonics in reverse.
Again, no real research supported this method, but that didn’t stop it from catching on. I believe this happened for three main reasons. First, it abandoned the old-fashioned and boring look-say memorization approach of the past. Second, it aligned with the belief that children should learn words through experiencing them. And thirdly, it appeased parents who were advocating for change due to dropping test scores.
The Whole Language method continued to dominate classrooms all the way up to the 21st century. This was true despite the fact that high-quality research was being done in the 70s and 80s on how the brain learns to read and what works in reading instruction, all of which supported a phonics/letters-and-sounds approach to teaching reading (Parker, 2021).
In 1997, the Department of Education commissioned a report called the National Reading Panel which examined all the research done until that point on reading. It’s job was to find and report what was most effective. This was a big undertaking. The results decisively revealed that synthetic phonics was indeed an effective method of teaching reading, as well as teacher-led instruction in phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension (NRP, 2000). These five things came to be known as the Five Pillars of Reading.
And so the educational gurus (not the researchers, but the whole language advocates) rebranded once again as Balanced Literacy. Balanced Literacy does include phonics as an instructional component, but it is still largely analytic phonics.
Now, twenty-five years later, there is an abundance of research in support of teaching children from an early age a letters-sounds approach. Yet, balanced literacy and even whole language ideas persist in classrooms. Fortunately, those ideas are mostly on the outs. They are being replaced by something called Structured Literacy. Structured Literacy calls for educators to teach phonics in a teacher-led, intentional way. Structured Literacy’s goal is to be grounded in research for all of the five pillars found by the National Reading Panel (phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension).
Why This Matters
In real life, most schools are (intentionally or unintentionally) combining approaches. Many teachers are unaware that some activities or practices they use are from the whole language or balanced literacy approaches. It may seem harmless that here or there a teacher does an activity with no scientific validity, but in the best case it is a waste of time and at worst it confuses struggling readers who need every precious second they can get of high-quality instruction in the five pillars of reading. Using these combo-approaches may delay the progress of a struggling reader.
In the majority of cases, teachers are unaware that they are doing something that doesn’t work. It’s not some big conspiracy to hold your child back, but it still matters. The resistance to research stems from the top (i.e. text book publishers, curriculum writers, university teacher training programs, etc.). Yet, these are also the places teachers turn to learn more about and get better at their craft. You can hardly blame them if the good information isn’t there.
There are a number of reasons one could propose as to why education has ignored decades-worth of quality research for so long. This is a complicated matter that we won’t untangle today; but, if your interest has been piqued, check out these resources:
- Sold A Story, a podcast by investigative journalist Emily Hanford
- Why Johnny Still Can’t Read, or Write, or Understand Math by Andrew Bernstein
As a parent, you have the right to know how your child is being taught to read and the duty to do something about it. This is A Parent’s Advantage. If you want to learn more about how to discern what is research-based and what is not, how to identify those things in your child’s classroom, who to speak with about it and even how to teach reading at home yourself, check out our course “A Parent’s Advantage for a Child with Reading Difficulties.” We would love to guide you on this journey of analyzing your child’s education and using your power to reform it!
References
BarbaraBushFdn. (n.d.). Barbara Bush Foundation. Literacy Gap Map. https://map.barbarabush.org/
Bernstein, A. (2022). Why Johnny still can’t read or write or understand math: And what we can do about it. Bombardier Books, an imprint of Post Hill Press.
Blodgett, J. H. (1983). Education in the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890. Washington, D.C.; Department of the Interior, Census Office. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1890/education-report/1890-education.pdf
Huey, E.B. (1908). The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading. Macmillan.
Kutner, M. A., Greenberg, E., & Baer, J. (2005) National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL): A first look at the literacy of America’s adults in the 21st Century. Washington, DC; National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Dept. of Education, Institute of Education Sciences. https://nces.ed.gov/naal/pdf/2006470.pdf
Minnich, H. C. (1936). Old Favorites from the McGuffey Readers. New York, NY; American Book Company. https://www.survivorlibrary.com/library/old_favorites_from_the_mcguffey_readers_1936.pdf
National Center for Education Sciences. (2020). Reading Performance. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cnb.pdf
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH, DHHS. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read: Reports of the Subgroups. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/pubs/nrp/documents/report.pdf
Parker, S. (2021, December 24). A brief history of reading instruction. ParkerPhonics. https://www.parkerphonics.com/post/a-brief-history-of-reading-instruction
Smith, T. (2021). Whole Language. Retrieved June 27, 2025,.
Snyder, T. (Ed.). (1993). National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL). National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Home Page, a part of the U.S. Department of Education. https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp