Beginning To Read And Spin Doctors Of Science - 98 edition

Summary: Noted literacy researcher and author Denny Taylor turns her attention to the reading wars in a new NCTE book, Beginning to Read and the Spin Doctors of Science. This book, Taylor tells us, started out as a short paper analyzing key phonemic awareness studies.

As she discovered that a handful of studies were cited again and again in support of intensive phonics instruction, Taylor began to question how a few researchers had come to speak for the nation on t ...show morehe subject of reading. "What if these eminent researchers got it wrong?" Taylor asks. "What if there were fundamental problems inherent in the design of the studies that they conducted?"

As Taylor probed these questions further, a short paper developed into a full-length book.

At the same time, reading legislation moved forward across the nation, and a story unfolded that had to be told.

"The contention that phonemic awareness must be taught directly," Taylor writes in the prologue, "is less of a scientific 'fact' than an exercise in political persuasion." Beginning to Read and the Spin Doctors of Science traces the pathways of this polit ical project from Texas to California to Washington, D.C. Taylor's own characterization of the book is that it is "edgy and often polemic."

In the prologue, Taylor writes, "my purpose in writing Spin Doctors is to reconstruct the underlying assumptions of the political arguments that trouble and divide us, and to discover how the arguments are conceived and how they are shaped. I want to provide those who read this book with opportunities to raise fundamental questions about the character and purpose of 'the reading wars.'"

Through its documentary account of recent events, Beginning to Read and the Spin Doctors of Science helps educators to see connections between reading research and broader issues of social equity and access to our nation's educational resources. L ike Taylor's previous books, Spin Doctors helps teachers recognize how their work matters. Urging teachers to "speak out!" Denny Taylor writes with characteristic passion about our public, as well as our professional, responsibilties.

Whatever happens with current legislation, our view of what is at stake in the "reading wars" will be enlarged as a result of Taylor's work.

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Edition/Copyright: 98
Cover: Paperback
Publisher: National Council of Teachers of Englsh
Published: 01/28/1998

View Sample Chapter

The following excerpt is taken from Chapter 7 of Beginning to Read:


Thirty years of observing human behavior has convinced me that human learning is socially formed and culturally transmitted. Watching very young children as they begin to establish themselves as readers and writers has provided me with countless opportuni ties to observe their moves back and forth between function and form, meaning and abstraction. For young children, reading and writing are social activities and their interest in the forms of written language is always purposeful. The research on phonemic awareness flies in the face of such observations, and flouts the research of some of this century's greatest educational pedagogists and social theorists.
To accept the notion that human learning moves from abstraction to meaning-in this case from mapping the smallest units of sound onto the smallest units of print, to blending pseudowords, to reading words in a controlled vocabulary-we would have to disreg ard the work of Vygotsky and Piaget.

None of the research on practical intelligence and everyday cognition would make sense. Lave, Rogoff, and Scribner would all find their theories maligned, just as Goodman's theories have been maligned and denigrated because he's a more visible target.

We could fill pages with the names of researchers whose work would have to be tossed out. Make a list. Write down some of the names of researchers whose work has informed your teaching. If Dyson is at the top of your list you'll have to cross her out.

The pedagogical implications of the "new" theories of phonemic awareness dismiss everything but studies of phonemic awareness research and the findings of other reductionist experimental studies that push reading theories into progressively narrower areas of expanding complexity.