Chall Book Hits Reading Methods Of U.S. Schools

A professor at the School of Education has published an extensive study which indicates most U.S. schools have been teaching reading the wrong way since the beginning of the century.

Jeanne Chall, Professor of Education, presents her conclusions in a new book entitled Learning to Read: the Great Debate. John H. Gardner, Secretary of Health, Education and Delfare, has reportedly called the work "the most important book about education in ten years."

From 1962 to 1965, Chall used a $14,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation to reanalyze data from 67 major studies on reading, to visit over 300 classrooms, and to interview proponents of various theories on the teaching of reading. She concluded that children learn to read better when taught by a "decoding method.'- on which emphasizes learning the alphabet and breaking the codes of written words in their first few years of instruction.

Most American schools, an 90 to 95 per cent of the reading texts for beginning readers, use the "meaning method"--emphasizing the content of written words in an effort to associate reading with the child's daily life.

Educators have spent decades debating the relative value of meaning methods and decoding methods, which include phonic and linguistic techniques. The decision to use content emphasis was made early in the century on the basis of very primitive studies.

Most of the research since then, Chall contends, has been "shockingly inconclusive," but on the basis of her re-evaluation she concludes that "the re-search from 1912 to 1965 indicates that a code-emphasis method ...produces better results."

In interviews with hundreds of teachers and administrators, Chall found that few referred to research in defending their use of the meaning method. "Their language," she says, "was more often characteristic of religion and politics, than of science and learning."

The tremendous financial interests of publishers have buttressed emotional commitments to the meaning method, says Chall. She quotes one editor who estimates the cost of one beginning reader series at "probably within the range of 10 to 20 million dollars."

In recommending improvements in teaching techniques, Chall calls for modification in the beginning texts now used, a re-examination of the content of reading courses, raising the educational level of teachers, better diagnostic tests, and most importantly better research into reading. No researcher, she says, can claim "the final word.