Why Gen Z Doesn’t Read
It was educational sabotage.
Jean M. Twinge on her substack Generation Tech documents the long decline of reading. She suggests that the smartphone, and before that video games, may be at least partially responsible..
I suggest another explanation. The rise of whole language reading instruction.
She writes that reading is not natural. She’s right, but there’s a relatively straightforward brain hack to make reading easier. It’s called phonetics.
The Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabets are phonetic. The individual characters have little meaning in themselves. Instead they represent, singly and in combinations, sounds. It’s not perfect. Current languages have more vowels and consonants than we can represent with single letters. The combinations of letters, diphthongs and blends, we use to represent the extra vowels and consonants are awkward. That doesn’t make phonetics useless. It does make it harder to teach. English is particularly bad because we stopped transliterating borrowed foreign words, particularly French, written in the Latin alphabet.
Sometime in the late fifties or early sixties a “new” method of instruction came into vogue. It was marketed by consultants who billed it as easier to teach and learn. It was supposedly modeled on the way expert readers read. It goes by different names. One is “Whole Language”. It is also called “Look Say”. It discards the phonetic nature of our writing system. Instead students are taught to recognize entire words as a unit. Phonetics, now called “phonics”, is reserved for emergencies, as a way to figure out which word an unfamiliar letter combination represents.
This method is arguably easier to teach. The teacher doesn’t have to suffer through days and weeks and months introducing the various sounds the letters make, singly and in groups, and more importantly drilling the students on them, so they get at least a minimum of practice. It puts the onus on failure on the students. Johnny has trouble reading? It’s not the teachers’ fault. He must be dyslexic.
It’s much harder to learn and use.
Phonetics rewires the brain to connect your eyes to your language center. You hear the words as your eyes travel across them. It gets very fast with practice. An expert reader does it so quickly that it looks as though they recognize whole words.
A phonetic reader can recognize any word they already know, and can sound out words they have never heard. It’s not perfect. Nothing is. It’s better than treating our texts as though they are imperfectly systematic ideograms.
If reading instruction wasn’t killed deliberately, it was at least negligent homicide.
I do, however, believe in teaching root words, prefixes and suffixes and the sources of those, in high school.
As a teacher and from a family of dyslexics, I disagree. I watched a TA teaching phonics to two non-verbal disabled kids. She wasn't teaching life skills, refused to budge and kept teaching phonics. I put up some word cards and was showing the kids sentences, and one of the boys grabbed the word "the" and came up to me and said "the". He recognized that it was at the start of a sentence.
I was reading at the age of four, One Fish, Two Fish. My kids were reading above grade, my son was reading 10th grade material in 3rd grade. With dyslexia. Because I read to them an hour every night. The only phonics I did was slide my thumb across the word as I read it so they understood the concept of words and how they were written. He laughed loudly when he realized how the book was the same story, over and over again and by the time he was three, he pointed out the word TOY on a Toyota.
The reason the modern method of language education is failing, is not only phonics (American phonics is based on South Carolina phonics and I had a real go round with a teacher because the palm of my hand is not a pam, nor is a boot a but) That is why phonics is a failure because of regional dialects. But it is also failing because it is making reading a chore, dissecting sentences and paragraphs, turning it into an English major's delight but a misery for those of us who prefer to read and write information instead of dissecting sentence structure. As a teacher, I found kids that said they would never pick up a book again because of what was being done to them. As a substitute high school teacher, a kid complained about how boring the book they were reading was. I asked to see it, and started reading to the class, using voices, intonations of feelings, emotions, expectations, excitement. All the kids went and grabbed that exact book because I gave it life. No one read to them and gave life to books for them!
The best way to teach kids how to read, is to read. And many kids have exhausted parents that not only don't read to them but tune out as soon as they get home.
Sight reading, learning the shapes of words, increases cognitive awareness and understanding and increases the speed at which someone can read. My kids had lousy spelling in grade school, in part because of dyslexia, but they excelled otherwise.