November 24, 2004
...when a man's fancy gets astride
on his reason, when imagination is at cuffs with his senses, and common
understanding as well as common sense, is kicked out of doors, the first
proselyte he makes is himself... [Jonathan Swift. A tale of a
tub. 1704]
21 Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their
fornication, nor of their thefts. [The Revelation of
Revolutionaries generally
promise heaven and deliver hell.
The bizarre fantasies of whole languagists have for two decades controlled how reading is
defined and taught in schools, how reading failure is understood and handled,
and how reading teachers are trained and certified. The product of their
self-assuring efforts is millions of semi-illiterate students
who after 12 years in school still struggle to read the written word, spell,
write, and comprehend text. They are therefore semi-illiterate in all
subjects that require proficient reading.
Whole language promised a
revolution and it delivered.
Instead of teaching, teachers coached. Instead of learning, children
guessed. Instead of mastering, children failed. Instead of growing,
children were stunted. Instead of leaving school proudly, students
dropped out early or left demoralized. All under the banner of This is Good For You.
Of course, whole language did not
do all this by itself. It had support from its ideological
brothers--fuzziest math, multi-culty social studies,
trivialized "new speak" history, literature without Shakespeare, and
portfolio assessment (scrapbooks). All these monstrosities grew in the infected
womb of "progressivism" (child-centered, learning-should-be-fun, let
students select the curriculum), fed by Romantic modernism, postmodernism, and
the 60’s new-left critique of western social institutions and resistance to
external authority (rules for right reasoning, bodies of knowledge, and the
historic role of teacher)--all under the leadership of self-appointed gurus,
fake savants, and secular edupriests, who mistake
their flatulent eructations as the voice of God.
Even a cursory reading of some of
the main tenets
of whole language reveals them to be so stupid, so contrary to common
observation, so easily seen as the product of mental derangement, that one
wonders how whole language caught on--unless one assumes that followers are
equally stupid and deranged.
Another explanation is that the
founders of whole language disguised the essential egoism and insanity of their
"project" behind appealing phrases embedded in logical fallacies not
seen by the unwary.
Goodman's Guessing Game
Whole language proponents cite Kenneth Goodman's 1967 paper ("
Let's take Goodman at his
word. Let's examine his "more viable scientific alternative" to
see how he crafted a new foundation for reading research and instruction; to
determine whether it satisfies the criteria for a viable or even scientific
alternative; and to understand better how his ideas were so easily accepted and
spawned the whole language movement.
8 And I looked, and behold a pale
horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. [The
Revelation of
In simplest terms, Goodman presents
a conception of reading as a guessing game. He provides no logical,
empirical, or commonsensical support for this conception. He then
presents a highly selective set of passage misreadings
by a child. These misreadings are not called
errors; they are "miscues." These misreadings
are interpreted in a way that fits Goodman's guessing-game formulation
(although other interpretations--from the phonics approach that he
disparages--are more obvious and more reasonable). Goodman then uses the
misreading examples to verify his conception of reading--although the only
credible use of the examples would be a demonstration that it is possible to
misinterpret misreadings that way. The paper
ends with the implication for instruction; namely, teach children to play the
guessing game more skillfully.
The Opening
Gambit
Goodman's paper begins with
a common rhetorical device--caricature of a self-created adversary.
Specifically, he creates a false binary opposition of then current conceptions
of reading and their associated methods of teaching: "phonic
centered" and "word centered." He reduces these approaches
to a few statements that would lead readers to agree with Goodman that these
conceptions are simplistic and must be wrong. For example,
"...the common sense notion I
seek here to refute is this:
Goodman then writes, "In place
of this misconception, I offer this..."--his allegedly "more viable
scientific alternative" foreshadowed in the paper's abstract. Note
the artful way that Goodman sets up the reader.
1. He labels in a disparaging way
the phonic and word centered approaches "common sense notions,"
despite the great deal of scientific research done in support of each
one--especially the approach that advocated teaching phonics in a systematic
way during beginning reading. Yet, he does not cite this research or even
hint that there was any. These approaches are not presented as bodies of
knowledge that may have some flaws. Rather, in contrast to his
self-valorized "scientific alternative," readers are simply to take
Goodman's unsupported word and consider them mere common sense notions.
2. In contrast to standard practice
in science, Goodman presents no data that the phonic and word centered
approaches do not work. He conducts no experiments--indeed, he cites no
research at all--showing that whole language instruction (derived from his
guessing game formulation of reading) is more effective than the phonic
centered and word centered approaches he wishes to replace. And, although
he calls them "misconceptions," he does not analyze the intellectual
apparatus behind the phonic centered and word centered approaches (e.g., their
theories of reading) to show they are logically flawed.
In
other words, Goodman does nothing to (in his own words) "refute"
these common sense notions. His only claim to readers' attention--and the
only warrant for his "scientific" alternative--is an unsubstantiated
opening pitch that there are two pre-existing alternatives; that these
alternatives are merely common sense notions; and that they are misconceptions.
Goodman then presents his "scientific" alternative.
...I
offer this:
Notice
that there are at least three logical errors in Goodman's opening presentation
of his new and "scientific" approach to reading. First,
Goodman's new view of reading rests on the fallacy of reification.
He transforms what is merely a metaphor into a concrete reality.
Goodman does not say that reading can (metaphorically) be seen (for purposes of
analysis) as if it were a psycholinguistic guessing game. Rather, reading
is a psycholinguistic guessing game. It is not as if readers are
guessing at what words say. Readers actually are guessing. [The
author asks readers of this document to consider whether they are in fact
guessing at every word on this page.] However, treating a metaphor as a
concrete reality was a useful trick. It means that whole language rests
on a fantasy--a dreamy way of thinking--in which there is no boundary between
how we think about things and how things actually are. Once new teachers are
seduced into this dream world, almost any bizarre and baseless statements can
be taken as sage wisdom.
Second,
Goodman commits the fallacy of hyperbole, or over-generalization.
He does not say that reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game for certain
aspects of reading, for some readers, at some point in their learning to
read. Rather, all of reading is a guessing game for all readers all the
time. This rhetorical device enables Goodman to lay claim to all of
reading and reading instruction (word recognition, spelling, writing)--and to
call it whole language.
Third,
Goodman's definition of reading commits the fallacy of tautology.
After stating (above) that reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game, Goodman
states, "It involves an interaction between thought and
language." [It is interesting that Goodman's definition of reading
does not even have the word print in it.] Apparently, the statement
("It involves an interaction between thought and language.") is
supposed to support the idea that reading is a psycholinguistic guessing
game. However, interaction between thought and language means exactly the
same thing as psycholinguistic. Therefore, all Goodman is saying is that
reading is a guessing game that involves interaction between thought and
language. [Again, nothing about print.]
However,
all thinking uses language. Thinking means talking to yourself--in
a language. So, what could an interaction between thinking (which means
talking to yourself) and language mean? In
summary, Goodman's new definition of reading is empty. It means nothing
at all, and it certainly has nothing to do with interacting with the printed
word--the ordinary conception of reading. Goodman's full conception consists of
the following propositions--taken from his initial statement (above) and from
the summary of his "model" at the end of the paper.
1.
"Efficient reading does not result from precise perception and
identification of all the elements."
2.
3. "
4. This selecting process "involves partial use of available minimal language cues..."
5. Efficient reading results "from skill in selecting the fewest, most productive cues..."
6. These cues are at first graphic cues (p. 135).
7. These cues are "selected from perceptual input on the basis of the reader's expectation." They are "guided by constraints set up through prior choices, his language knowledge, his cognitive styles and strategies he has learned" (p. 135).
8. These cues provide "partial information."
9. The reader "forms a perceptual image using these cues and his anticipated cues" (p. 135).
10. The reader "searches his memory for related syntactic, semantic, and phonological cues."
11. This memory search "may lead to selection of more graphic cues and to reforming the perceptual image" (p. 135).
12. These cues are "necessary to produce guesses which are right the first time."
13. The reader then "makes a guess or tentative choice consistent with graphic cues. Semantic analysis leads to partial decoding as far as possible" (p. 135).
14. This partial information " processed, tentative decisions are made to be confirmed, rejected, or refined as reading progresses."
15. "If no guess is possible, he checks the recalled perceptual input and tries again" (p. 135).
16. "If a guess is still not possible, he takes another look at the text to gather more graphic cues" (p. 135).
17. "If the tentative choice is not acceptable semantically or syntactically, then he regresses, scanning from right to left along the line and up the page to locate a point of semantic or syntactic inconsistency" (p. 135).
18. "When such a point is found, he starts over at that point" (p. 135).
19. "If no inconsistency can be identified, he reads on seeking some cue which will make it possible to reconcile the anamolous (sic) situation" (p. 135).
20. "If the choice is acceptable, decoding extended, meaning is assimilated with prior meaning and prior meaning accommodated, if necessary" (p. 135).
21. "Then the cycle continues" (p. 135).
22.
The above propositions enable one to see reading as a "psycholinguistic
guessing game."
Rhetorical
Devices and More Logical Fallacies in Goodman's Guessing Game
Goodman's
new conception of reading is unsatisfactory in several ways.
It
is speculation, not science.
A defining feature of science (in
contrast to metaphysics, opinion, fantasy, and madness) is that propositions,
arguments, theories, and conceptual schemes are judged viable and scientific
not because proponents say so, but on the basic of empirical evidence and sound
reasoning. Science also requires that writers define terms--especially
when terms are new or may be misunderstood. However, Goodman's version of
science--at least in his article--appears not to require any empirical evidence
or effort at clear definition. He offers no data whatever to support his
assertions that, for example,
1.
2. Readers "select" "productive cues," and then guess at what words say and mean.
3.
"Readers utilize not one, but three kinds of information
simultaneously" (p. 131).
Nor
does he explicate the meaning of "cue," "guess,"
"thought," "language," or even "reading."
The
absence of evidence and clear definition weakens Goodman's claim that he offers
a viable scientific alternative conception of reading. Still, Goodman managed
to help fashion a new definition of science--a science with neither data
nor reasoning nor defined concepts, a science indistinguishable from
speculation and wishful thinking. However, this revisionist
science well-served later whole language teachers, writers, researchers, and
advocates who (guided by Goodman) no longer felt obliged to abide by--or even
accept the legitimacy of--traditional scientific rules about external
verification of claims via tests available to other persons (Moats,
2000). In the absence of empirical evidence, we can only assess the
adequacy of Goodman's new guessing game conception of reading by examining the
logical adequacy of his propositions, as shown below.
Goodman's conception of reading commits the fallacy of hasty generalization, or converse accident. Goodman’s paper implies that his new conception embraces all of reading. He does not say that only certain elements of reading, at some times, for some readers are part of a guessing game. Rather, "(R)eading a psycholinguistic guessing game." It is for all readers a process of selecting cues, and then guessing, confirming, rejecting, or refining tentative decisions about what sounds letters make, what a word says and means, what a period and comma imply, how words are spelled. However, such guessing, cue-selecting, and decision-making arguably apply only to
(1)
Beginning readers.
(2)
Older readers who have not been taught to read and understand text based on
solid knowledge (and the automatic application) of sound/symbol correspondence,
punctuation, spelling, subject/predicate, cause/effect, and so forth.
(3)
Skilled readers who have run into a new and difficult word.
Consider
propositions 13-21 above. Is it reasonable to assert that these
activities apply to all readers? Is there any evidence that skilled
readers guess at every word--as if reading (fluent reading) were a series of
tentative choices?
Another
example of hasty generalization is Goodman's use of reading errors--called
"miscues"--as the only evidence that all reading is guessing.
Goodman’s paper does not provide samples of fluent reading to substantiate his
propositions about selecting and guessing. This may be because fluent
reading provides no evidence of guessing. In summary, it is likely that
Goodman's guessing game conception of reading applies only to poor
readers, beginning readers, or good readers who are decoding unfamiliar words.
In other words, all that is new in Goodman’s new conception is the unwarranted
generalization that all readers guess all the time.
The
massive irony, here, is that Goodman's followers created a method of reading
instruction--whole language--that reversed the polarity of guessing.
Rather than something to be overcome because it signified lack of skill,
guessing was now considered a natural and good thing, and therefore was to be
encouraged. Systematic instruction on phonemic awareness, sound/symbol
relationships (m says mmm), word attack, and spelling
was now unnatural--a bad thing to be discouraged. Whole language teachers
therefore explicitly and systematically taught new readers the guessing
strategy used by poor readers for making errors, and called it fine.
Goodman's Conception of
Recall
that Goodman's new formulation hinges on rejection of the "common
sense" notions that (1) reading involves an almost instantaneous
recognition of whole words, or (2) reading involves an almost automatic
"perception and identification of letters, words..." Note that
whole word and phonic processes are ordinary, readily observable, mundane
actions. The reader sees and properly or improperly identifies letters
and words. Most observable identification errors have straightforward,
ordinary, mundane implications for instruction; e.g., at sounding out words.
But Goodman will offer nothing attractive to potential followers unless he
conjures a radical shift of reading from the mundane to the esoteric.
Something as commonsensical as mere skill instruction will not do.
Henceforth, reading processes and reading instruction will no longer be easily
seeable and teachable. Instead, reading processes will be located in the
mind: reading will involve "an interaction between thought and
language." Goodman now invents a mental apparatus to account for
reading skill and error--the psycholinguistic guessing game--and it consists of
selecting, deciding, guessing, confirming, rejecting, and refining.
There are two logical problems with Goodman's reified mental guessing game apparatus. First, in contrast to what we ordinarily expect of a viable scientific account, there is no way to test whether Goodman's hypothesized mental apparatus exists at all---i.e., whether readers in fact perform the elaborate guessing routine--or whether the hypothesized apparatus operates just as Goodman proposes. After all, many models of thought processes can be generated to account for the same reading behavior--just as demonic possession once provided a coherent account of psychiatric symptoms.
Second,
Goodman transforms similes and metaphors (as-if) into objects--thought processes.
However, all anyone (with a scientific orientation) can reasonably say about a
fluent reader's performance is, "Her eyes scan the words and she speaks
them as written." And all anyone can say about a struggling reader's
halting, error-filled performance is, "It is as if she is
guessing."
Yet,
Goodman's "scientific" formulation would have us believe that readers
(skilled and unskilled) actually see words, select cues, make a guess,
check the guess, reject the guess, make another guess, confirm the guess, and
then say the word correctly or incorrectly. If the guessing game is not a
convenient fiction enabling Goodman to make sense of reading, but is considered
a reality--something really happening--then a reader enacting the
psycholinguistic guessing algorithm (propositions 5-20 above) would be carrying
on an elaborate internal dialogue, as follows.
"James
said...Hmmm, that t h looks like it might be there. Okay, I'll say
there....There lion...Wait... That doesn't work. Okay, I'll try
them...Them lion.... Nope...Maybe its this...This
lion...Yeah, that sounds right. This lion..."
But
we rarely see anything like this guessing process. Even when readers make
a high rate of errors, reading is so fast it is hard to imagine that somewhere
in their subvocal thinking they perform the mental
guess work. The only thing available to the observer of the above reading
sample is the reader saying, "James said, (three-second pause) This lion."
Which
is the more reasonable account of the three-second gap between "said"
and "This" (and every other error or pause in a passage)? (1)
The reader naturally (with no instruction) repeatedly enacts multi-step
guessing routines in milli-seconds, or (2) The reader
simply needs someone to tell her, "That word is this...Spell
this.... t h i s...What word?.... this..
Good. Start the line again...James said, This
lion is big."
In
other words, Goodman's psycholinguistic apparatus (which, for science, would be
considered reified fictions, or hypothetical constructs) is either: (1)
incapable of any sort of test; and/or (2) simply impossible as an actual
activity in real time. At best, his psycholinguistic guessing game can
only be treated as a metaphor—in which case one asks if a metaphor is the
right foundation for nationwide reading assessment and instruction.
Whole Language and Upward Mobility
Goodman's hypothetical multi-step
mental guessing apparatus continues to have strong appeal. As mentioned,
Goodman helped to move reading and reading instruction out of the mundane world
of common, observable skills and into the world of esoterica.
Even simple decoding of text was now a complex mental activity involving higher
order thought processes such as selecting, testing, confirming, and
revising. Reading instruction would now require special skills giving
teachers access to the realm of thought where the hypothesized higher order
guessing game was played. Special courses, textbooks, conferences, and
education professors would be needed.
In
other words, Goodman was not merely offering an alternative to the phonic
centered and word centered approaches. He was creating an invidious
status distinction. He was offering prestige. This may have
been appealing to education professors long known to occupy positions of low status
and prestige in the university community, and to school teachers whose long
hours, lack of appreciation, and low salary also connoted low status and
prestige. By making reading and reading instruction esoteric processes,
Goodman's paper helped foster the idea that traditional reading instruction was
only for commonsense-minded technicians interested in observable skill. Whole
language teachers and professors would be much more than this; they would be
theoreticians--certainly a higher class of people. This clarifies
the facile denigration of systematic instruction, planned practice, teaching
formats, field tested materials, scripted lesson plans, mastery tests, and in
general accountability by whole language teachers and education
professors. Reading instruction was to be an art; and the reading
teacher an artiste.
The
"contemplatives" are a hundred times worse: I know of nothing that
excites such disgust as this kind of "objective" arm-chair scholar,
this kind of scented voluptuary of history, half person, half satyr, perfume by
Renan, who betrays immediately with the high falsetto
of his applause what he lacks, where he lacks it, where in this case the Fates
have applied their cruel shears with, alas, such surgical skill! [Nietzsche. The genealogy of morals. Third essay, section 26]
Miscue
Analysis and the Quasi-therapeutic
As noted earlier, the only empirical evidence
that Goodman presents in support of (as examples of) his guessing-game model
are reading errors made by children. Goodman calls these errors
"miscues in order to avoid value implications" (p. 127). For
example, the story text reads,
"So,
education was good! I opened the dictionary and picked out a word that
sounded good. 'Philosophical'. I yelled. Might as well study
word meanings first. 'Philosophical: showing calmness and courage in the
face of ill fortune. "
What
the child read was,
"So,
education was good! I hoped a dictionary and picked out a word that
sounds good. PH He yelled. Might as
well study what it means. Phizo Phiso/soophical
: showing calmness and courage in his face of ill fort future futshion."
Goodman
states, "His expected (i.e., correct. PP) responses mask the process of
their attainment (That is, how he read correctly. PP), but his unexpected
responses (i.e., errors, or miscues PP) have
been achieved through the same process, albeit less successfully applied"
(p. 127).
This
is a very interesting statement. Goodman is saying that when readers are
fluent, we do not see how they do it; i.e., we do not see any guessing
game. It is only when they err that we can make a case for
guessing. And then, with no rationale at all, Goodman states that reading
well and making errors are done via the same process. How could he
possibly know that?
But
as to incorrect reading itself, Goodman still has no direct, empirical evidence
of guessing or any other activity in the elaborate guessing game
apparatus. He does not ask readers to, for example, say outloud what they are doing as they try to read. All he
has are interpretations of alleged covert guessing processes. Goodman's
interpretations (miscue analysis) reveal that he is willing to avoid the most
obvious interpretation of errors in favor of the guessing hypothesis. For
example, Goodman says, "The substitution of hoped for opened could again
be regarded as careless or imprecise identification of letters. But if we
dig beyond this common sense explanation, we find (a) both are verbs (b) the
words have key graphic similarities. Further, there may be evidence of
the reader's bilingual French-Canadian background here, as there is in
subsequent miscues (harms for arms; shuckled for
chuckled, shoose for choose, shair
for chair)" (p. 128). [Mere delerium.]
Despite
Goodman's efforts to make these errors fodder for armchair psychoanalysis,
these errors are nothing more than examples of the "imprecise
identification of letters"--and this imprecision rests very much on the
child's lack of sufficient instruction on how to sound out familiar and unfamiliar
words based on knowledge of sound/symbol correspondence. Goodman goes out of
his way to avoid the obvious account of reading errors--the child has not
been taught word attack skills--so that Goodman can "dig beyond"
the obvious and provide a more interesting guessing game interpretation for
which there is not a shred of direct evidence--not when persons read well and
not even when they make errors.
In
summary, Goodman uses miscues as a resource for making interpretations about
thought processes in a way that suits his guessing game model. There is nothing
in the miscues themselves that suggests anything about thought processes.
But there is everything in the miscues that points directly at poor
instruction. Ironically, if Goodman's approach were in fact scientific,
he would provide a panel of impartial observers with a set of miscue examples
and ask the panel to make sense of each error or miscue, and then compare his
interpretation with theirs. In this way he could determine the
reliability of his interpretations.
Goodman's
Entire Guessing Game Model Commits the Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent.
Goodman began his paper with the claim that
his model would be an example of science--not mere common sense. However,
his argument commits perhaps the most fundamental error that the scientific
method is devised to avoid; namely, the fallacy of affirming the
consequent. This fallacy can be depicted as follows.
If P, then Q
Q (Affirming the consequent)
_____________________________
Therefore P
For example,
If there is frustration, then there will be
aggression.
There is aggression.
____________________________
Therefore, there was frustration.
The
logical problem is that aggression may be the result of many things besides
frustration. That is why scientific researchers try to identify
alternative explanations (e.g., models of aggressive behavior, reinforcement
for aggressive behavior, a history of physical abuse) and see if these
alternatives can be disproved--leaving the original proposition (If
frustration, then aggression) intact for the time being.
Goodman's
argument can be summarized as follows.
If reading is a psycholinguistic
guessing game, then readers will make certain kinds of errors--miscues.
Readers do make these kinds of
errors--miscues.
_____________________________________________
Therefore, reading is a
psycholinguistic guessing game.
Seductive,
isn't it? But is there NO other reason (besides reading being a guessing
game) why readers make guessing errors? Let's see.
I
have pointed out that miscues themselves are not direct evidence of any mental
guessing game activity. Goodman has simply interpreted them that
way. And there is no way to
"dig" into anyone's thought processes to determine whether Goodman is
right or wrong. Even so, there are other explanations for these miscues
besides an hypothesized mental guessing game.
The
strongest candidate alternative is poor instruction. At least
that is a plausible rival explanation (Hempenstall,
1999). A student makes half a dozen errors trying to sound out
"philosophical" because he was not taught exactly how to sound it
out. He is not firm on each letter/sound combination; he is not firm on
sounding out a letter or blend, holding the sound and scanning the word for the
next letter or blend. He says hoped" instead of "opened"
because, again, he is not firm on the sounding out strategy, and because he has
not had a teacher who systematically juxtaposed similar looking
words--hoped/opened--and demonstrated again and again that they are sounded out
differently.
In
summary, it may be that many reading errors are not the result of
guessing--as some sort of natural process--but are taught. A
student reads a passage and says "fort" rather than
"fortune." The teacher simply (and improperly) tells the
student, "fortune." The student repeats "fortune" and
goes on with the passage--never really learning to sound out the difficult
word. Predictably, when the student sees "fortune" again, she
says "fort"--because that is what she has "practiced" so
many times before. Or, when the student says "fort" rather than
"fortune," the whole language teacher tells the student to think of a
word that might go there--in other words, the teacher encourages guessing. The
student casts about and tries "future" and "futshion."
Predictably, when the student runs into "philosophical," the student
will not sound out the word, but will do as she was taught--she will cast about
for likely possibilities--"phizzo,"
"physical," "physicacol."
In other words, the student's errors do not reflect a natural guessing game
apparatus. They are direct effects of explicit (mal)instruction
on guessing and failure to receive proper instruction on how to sound out
words.
The
scientific test of the above rival hypothesis--Errors represent how students
are mistaught; they do not represent an innate
guessing game--is relatively easy to perform. Identify the sorts of
errors made by students taught with whole language vs. the sorts of errors made
by students taught with more focused instruction in each reading skill, in
which errors are not corrected by having students guess but by firming up the
sound-it-out strategy. The prediction is that students who are taught to
guess (and who do not know when a guess is correct), will make many more
errors.
Summary
Kenneth
Goodman's 1967 article helped to foster the whole language movement, which for
several decades has been the predominant approach to reading instruction in
many schools of education, school districts, and states. However, recent
experimental research has shown that many of the defining (and allegedly revolutionary)
design features of whole language (e.g., attempting to teach elemental reading
skills--such as phonemic awareness, sound/symbol correspondence, word
identification, and spelling--in the context of complex reading and writing
activities that require these very skills) are at odds with what is
known about effective instruction. In addition, evaluation research shows
that whole language is often less effective than its advocates claim, and is
specifically less effective than field-tested curricula that provide
systematic, explicit, comprehensive, precisely planned and logically
progressive instruction on all of the elemental and complex skills in reading.
We
have examined the "viable" and "scientific" model of
reading proposed by Kenneth Goodman--a model that has guided both the methods
used in whole language (e.g., implicit, as-needed instruction; miscue analysis)
and the ways whole language advocates legitimize and valorize their
actions. The examination of Goodman's "psycholinguistic guessing
game" model revealed that Goodman:
1.
Provides no data that support his presumption that there is any such guessing
game apparatus. This may be because the guessing game is nothing but a
metaphor.
2.
Uses a small and selective sample of reading behavior (errors, or
"miscues") as evidence that readers use the psycholinguistic guessing
game.
3.
Interprets these errors in a way that supports the guessing game model, but
fails to consider plausible alternative interpretations and offers no evidence
of inter-observer reliability of his interpretations. [See Hempenstall (1999) for a reasoned and extensive critique of
miscue analysis.]
4.
Commits the fallacy of hasty generalization by asserting that his
interpretations of some readers' guessing errors imply that all readers use the
guessing apparatus.
5.
Commits the fallacy of affirming the consequent when he reasons that errors
signify the existence of a psycholinguistic guessing apparatus, when (and more
reasonably) errors signify poor instruction.
In
summary, the whole language cult movement--with all of its publications,
assessment instruments and devices, conferences and organizations, college
courses, classroom methods, and disastrous consequences for many
students--rests on a mere metaphor (the psycholinguistic guessing game)
supported by assorted logical fallacies.
An
interesting sociological question is, What cultural
circumstances disposed so many education students, administrators, college
professors, boards of education, and veteran teachers to so easily and so
thoroughly accept Goodman's psycholinguistic guess game as a premise for their
reading curricula?
References
Daniels, H., Zemelman, S., & Bizar, M.
(2000). Whole language
works: Sixty years of research.
Educational Leadership, 57, 2, 32-37.
Chapman, J.W., Tunmer,
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