- Can you read this sentence?

You've probably seen something like this on the internet before.

The letters of the words are all jumbled up, but supposedly, as long as the first and sometimes last letters of each word stay the same, somehow we can read it.

This quirky language game seems to suggest that reading is a pretty inexact process.

Our eyes skim the print, we notice the length of the word and maybe the first letter; then our brains use context clues to deduce what the word should be.

But is that really how reading works?

Believe it or not, this question is at the heart of a decades-long battle in the English-speaking world, a battle that's been raging amongst educators, politicians, and scientists about what is the best way to teach children to read?

Even as I speak, school districts across the US are facing the possibility that the whole theory they've been using to teach kids to read is totally wrong.

Whether or not this means the wars are truly over, digging into the history can teach us a lot about how our brains work, and offer a new appreciation for one of mankind's greatest inventions: the written word.

I'm Dr. Erica Brozovsky, and this is "Otherwords."

(bright whimsical music) - [Announcer] "Otherwords."

(crowd cheering) - The '60s and '70s were times of great social upheaval in the West; longstanding conventions were being challenged, and society was being reimagined to give individuals more freedom and autonomy.

Against this backdrop, a novel theory of how children learn to read was introduced by language professor Ken Goodman.

Up until this time, most children learned to read through phonics, which taught the correlation of alphabetic symbols to vocal sounds.

But Goodman's whole language theory asserted that children didn't learn to read by sounding out words; instead, the process was much more natural and intuitive.

Give a kid enough freedom and access to books, and they'll discover how to read on their own, much like babies learn to walk and talk.

New Zealand literacy researcher Marie Clay developed a teaching program based on whole language theory, which incorporated a strategy known as cueing or three cueing.

The idea is that when confronted with an unfamiliar word, the natural solution is not to sound it out but to guess it using context clues.

These clues were grouped into three categories, hence three cueing: visual, which meant the shape of the word or its spelling; syntactic, which is the sentence structure and grammar; and semantic, the meaning of the passage, which would even include illustrations.

For instance, if the child doesn't know this word, they could use the sentence structure to guess that it's a noun, the illustration to guess its meaning, and the first letter to triangulate to a solution that fits all three categories.

Clay's program was adopted by all New Zealand schools by 1983, and then imported to America, where versions of it were popularized by education professors like Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas, and Gay Su Pinnell.

An important component of the method, proponents claimed, was that reading always be perceived as a pleasurable, self-guided activity.

Lessons were brief, and students were encouraged to spend lots of time reading alone.

Phonics should be limited or avoided altogether, because it could make reading feel tedious and dull.

If you instill a love and enthusiasm for reading early on, the thinking went, kids will become skilled readers on their own.

It was a philosophy that resonated with a lot of people at the time.

And by the 1990s, cueing had come to dominate reading curricula in school districts across the country.

And yet since its implementation, America has experienced a crisis in early literacy, with less than a third of fourth graders being able to read at a proficient level.

Why?

Cognitive scientists were making new discoveries that were casting serious doubts on the foundations of whole language theory.

Eye-tracking devices showed that skilled readers, even when reading quickly, are still observing every letter in a word, not just the first one.

MRIs revealed that even when a word has been orthographically mapped, it still lights up the speech and listening centers of our brains.

This means that even when we know a word so well as to recognize its meaning instantly, our brains are still on some level connecting it with its sound.

Similarly, studies were showing that skilled readers were more likely to sound out unfamiliar words.

Guessing words through context was a strategy more often used by poor readers, and it led to more mistakes than sounding them out.

Proponents of the science of reading, as it came to be called, claimed that Marie Clay and her disciples had it exactly backwards.

Instead of decoding words to reveal the meaning of the text, they were asking students to use the meaning of a text to decode the words.

Let's revisit that sentence at the beginning of the video.

You can technically guess the words using context, syntax, and initial letters, but I can guarantee reading this sentence would be much, much faster.

Furthermore, if we start to increase the complexity and obscurity of the words, your accuracy rates will start to plummet.

Could you read a whole book like this?

Maybe, but it wouldn't be fun.

It would take forever.

You'd make a lot of mistakes, and your mind would be so taxed from trying to decipher the words you wouldn't have much mental energy left to ponder the content.

As clear as the science seemed to be, cueing was too firmly established by this time to be dislodged easily.

Most teachers had been thoroughly trained in the approach, and didn't like scientists telling them how to run their classrooms.

The gurus of the movement, Calkins, Fountas, and Pinnell had become celebrities of the educational world, making millions of dollars selling their curricula to schools across the country.

The only concession they made to the science was to include a bit more phonics in their lessons and repackage it as balanced literacy.

But scientists countered that any amount of cueing cultivated bad reading habits that could last into adulthood.

According to education journalist Emily Hanford, it wasn't until COVID hit that things really began to change.

Suddenly, millions of parents were sitting right next to their kids during their reading classes over Zoom, and a lot of them didn't like what they were hearing.

Despite being told that their child was reading at the appropriate level, it was obvious that some had just memorized the lesson.

And when confronted with a truly unfamiliar word, they lacked the skills to decode it.

Hanford's six-part podcast, "Sold a Story," which chronicles the failures of cueing as a teaching method, spread quickly amongst outraged parents and educators.

Around the same time, school districts that reinstated systematic explicit phonics instruction saw dramatic rises in proficiency scores.

Although cueing is still used in many classrooms, more and more cities and states are reverting back to what was essentially the system for teaching reading prior to 1960, and getting promising results.

Even Lucy Calkins admitted that her curriculum had failed to keep pace with the scientific evidence.

Does this mean that the era of cueing is finally ending?

Has science won the reading wars?

Only time will tell.

But it does seem clear that the theory of reading that originated half a century ago with Ken Goodman and Marie Clay had two fundamental flaws.

First, it assumed that acquisition of literacy works the same way as acquisition of speech, but our brains and vocal chords evolved for speech: a baby is hardwired to learn how to talk without any formal instruction; writing was only invented about 5,000 years ago.

Sure, there are a small number of kids who can unravel the code on their own, but the vast majority of us need to be taught.

Second, it minimized the importance of sound in literacy.

Connecting those squiggles on the page to phonemes allows us to leverage the powerful speech and listening centers of our brains.

It makes reading feel as natural and effortless as listening to someone talk.

It's weird that it took all these advancements in science and technology to bring us back to the method that had been the standard for hundreds of years.

But perhaps reading was a victim of its own success.

Literacy rates skyrocketed in the 20th century; from newspapers to advertisements to the internet, the written word has become such a ubiquitous, ever-present part of our environment.

It's easy to forget that it's actually a human invention;