[AAACE-NLA] book review

[Daphne Greenberg]

I thought that some of you may be interested in this book review:

Purcell-Gates, Victoria, Erik Jacobson and Sophie Degener.  Print Literacy Development: Uniting Cognitive and Social Practice Theories.  Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004. 206 pp. ISBN 0674015185, $39.95 (hc)



Reviewed for the Anthropology and Education Quarterly by

Rhona Stainthorp

Institute of Education, University of London

r.stainthorp at ioe.ac.uk 



For me, this book exemplifies the statement that England and the USA are divided by a common language.  As a cognitive psychologist who has studied the development of literacy for many years and who has been professionally involved with the education and professional development of teachers, I should be sympathetic to the aims of this book.  However, it seems to me that the authors are continually claiming that they are acting as peacemakers between the cognitive and the social practice research perspectives on reading but I am not sure that they achieve their goal.  >From my perspective, the evidence from the empirical work about the importance of direct instruction in decoding as the major step in becoming a fluent, accurate word reader and thereafter an independent reader is unassailable.



Cognitive psychologists, certainly in the UK, have not engaged in making pronouncements about the materials that might be used to achieve high levels of word reading accuracy and text comprehension.  Rather, they present their evidence to inform teachers about what should be taught using the quality materials of their choice.  Though, undoubtedly, they would probably agree with Stanovich, Cunningham and West ("Literacy Experiences and the Shaping of Cognition," American Psychological Association, 1998) that exposure to print is an important element in developing reading competence.  It would be disingenuous to suggest that the UK did not experience the "phonic vs whole language" controversy with the psychological research supporting the phonics approach and the social context research advocating whole language.  However, in the end the national figures on reading performance spoke for themselves with the result that now all children in state-funded primary schools (kindergarten to grade 5) receive direct instruction in phonics and decoding with these skills being applied to the wide range of reading and writing genres.  The situation in the USA may be very different.



The aim of the book is made clear in the subtitle and reiterated throughout the nine chapters.  Namely, to try to unite cognitive and social practice theories of literacy development.  The book begins by setting the scene through the use of vignettes from a study in the USA called the Literacy Practices of Adult Learners Study (LPALS).  Much of the authors' thesis is drawn from their involvement with this project (see chapter 2 for a very brief overview of the study).  The third chapter presents an account of how print literacy develops (this accomplished in less than 6 pages).  Chapter 4 uses evidence from the LPALS work supporting the notion of literacy as social practice, which is then contrasted with chapter 5, which covers literacy as cognitive skill development. Chapter 6 is really the start of the book where there is an attempt to show that these two viewpoints, though apparently irreconcilable, can be melded together for the good of the learner.  Chapter 7, "Print Literacy Development through a Widened Lens," is where the authors address what I take to be their principle thesis, that the cognitive skills of literacy are nested within the sociocultural context.  This theme is continued in chapter 8 with a presentation of more of the material from the LPALS study on the effects of authenticity in pedagogy on learning.  In particular, the authors present some interesting findings from the LPALS study about the changes in the lives of the participants brought about through their involvement with literacy programmes.  This theme illustrates the need for adult learners' personal requirements to inform any programme they are enrolled in.  However, it also shows that these people have been failed by the system and need focused direct teaching if they are to achieve acceptable levels of literacy.  The needs of people for whom English is an additional language or who are just beginning to learn English are going to be very different.  However, all these people are adults with very different histories and levels of cognition.  There are not just pedagogic reasons for recognizing this, it is purely a matter of common courtesy.  The final chapter, like the first, closes with comments from participants in the LPALS study.

           

The fact that there are many native born Americans with English as a first language who need to attend adult literacy classes is testament to something having gone wrong in the early years of their schooling.  The same is true of the UK.  Accountants estimated that the cost to the UK economy of low levels of literacy was £10 billion per year (18.7 billion dollars at today's exchange rate).  These adults have been failed in some way by the pedagogic practices of their early schooling.

 

My understanding of the position now in the USA is that the National Reading Panel addresses concerns about literacy.  After detailed analysis of the research published in peer reviewed journals, effective reading instruction was found to include phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and text comprehension.  They identified what must be taught, but not the teaching materials.  In the UK, there was no such report from a learned panel, instead we now have a National Literacy Strategy (NLS) in place.  We have not got things right yet but the beginning readers standards have risen considerably.  Reading standards by the age of 11 years are now acceptable but writing is lagging behind.  The phonics teaching seems to be improving word reading, but as yet writing skills at age 11 years are below the nationally-defined desirable percentage level.

 

It seems therefore that both in the USA and UK there is now a recognition that the evidence from sound empirical research mainly influenced by, if not actually conducted by, psychologists is feeding into national policies on the teaching of children.  In the UK during the final quarter of the last century educationalists were profoundly influenced by a different perspective mainly from the USA.  The idea was that reading should not be seen as a cognitive skill that needed to be taught, but rather that reading was a psycholinguistic guessing game ("Reading a Psycholinguistic Guessing Game," Goodman, K.S., Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading, 1973: 497-508; "Psycholoinguistics and Reading," Smith, F., Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1976) and that learning to read was the same as learning to talk.  The recommendation was that the teaching of phonics was unnecessary and that children should be provided with "real books" which they could learn read via an apprenticeship approach.  The term miscue replaced error.  The reading of "I saw a ship" for the text "I saw a boat" was seen as perfectly acceptable.

 

Fortunately, this discredited view is no longer informing national teaching approaches to reading.  However, it was influential for too many years leading to the problems that we are now confronting.  A major drawback in the acceptance of this approach to enabling children to develop acceptable literacy levels was that direct instruction was, to a considerable extent, abandoned.  The apprenticeship approach held sway.  There was also a confabulation of different messages from the two viewpoints.  The evidence from the psychological research pointed to the need to teach about the sound structure of words and to map this knowledge onto knowledge of the alphabet to enable children to decode.  It is possible to teach decoding using any materials so the notion that teaching the skill of reading was in opposition to the use of authentic texts was false.



When Purcell-Gates, Jacobson and Degener present their account of print literacy as cognitive skill development, they use evidence from the developmental research.  They state that they are giving a "focused description" of the cognitive perspective, which suggests that they are conscious that their treatment of this work is minimal.  They also claim that they have deliberately presented a "strong" reading of this perspective in order to make a clear distinction between this and the social practice view.  This would seem to indicate that they have deliberately set up an Aunt Sally in order to present themselves as the peacemakers



The coverage of the vast developmental field is minimal and the coverage of recent studies of adult learners is almost non-existent.  Readers who are interested in this area might find it helpful to access "Scientific Studies of Reading" (vol. 6: 3, 2002).  Edited by Sabatini and the late Venezky, this journal edition is required reading because it considers the particular issue of adults learning to read essentially for the first time.  They need similar instruction at the level of the word but with materials that are directly related to their needs.  This, I assume, is the message of the book under review.



So what do I think of the book in the end?  It is well written and I believe that the authors are profoundly committed to advancing adult literacy.  If the message is that programmes need to provide direct instruction in word decoding skills based on sound principles derived from cognitive psychological research, but that the programmes should also be developed taking cognisance of the social context of the participants, then I agree with it.  However, I think a shorter more direct article in a professional magazine directing the readership to the relevant literature so that they can make their own informed decision might have served the purpose better. 



© 2005 American Anthropological Association.  This review will appear on the web site http://www.aaanet.org/cae/aeq.html, will be cited in the September 2005 issue (36.3) of the Anthropology & Education Quarterly, and will be indexed in the December 2005 issue (36.4). 



The Anthropology & Education Quarterly publishes reviews of current books in the anthropology of education and related fields.  The Book Review Editor identifies the books to be reviewed and solicits each review from an appropriate scholar.  The Book Review Editor may also consider reviews submitted voluntarily at his or her discretion, but volunteered reviews are rare.  The Book Review Editor makes the decision whether to accept the review for publication.  This policy has applied and continues to apply to all book reviews, whether published on the AEQ web site or in the paper journal.



Daphne Greenberg
Assistant Professor
Educational Psych. & Special Ed.
Georgia State University
P.O. Box 3979
Atlanta, Georgia 30302-3979
phone: 404-651-0127
fax:404-651-4901
dgreenberg at gsu.edu

Daphne Greenberg
Associate Director
Center for the Study of Adult Literacy
Georgia State University
P.O. Box 3977
Atlanta, Georgia 30302-3977
phone: 404-651-0127
fax:404-651-4901
dgreenberg at gsu.edu