CLIC Speaker Abstracts

William Labov (Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania), January 28, 2000.

"Can Reading Failure Be Reversed? Some Positive Indications."

One of the most resistant social problems of the United States is the failure of the school systems to teach inner city children to read. An approach that combines linguistic analysis with sociolinguistic principles has recorded some progress in reducing that problem.

In West Philadelphia elementary schools, as in most inner cities, the reading levels of a majority of children are as low as that of dyslexic readers in clinical studies. However, standardized tests of phonemic awareness we have administered show that the West Philadelphia children are above national norms in some sub-tests and far below in others. Our analysis of reading errors shows that the inner city struggling readers have mastered sound-to-letter correspondences for simple onsets, vowel nuclei and codas, but do not use the alphabet effectively to decode more complex structures. Children have learned that short vowels are used in CVC syllables, but they have not been taught that the first vowel is never long if a second vowel does not follow.

The reasons for reading failure can be attributed in part to the weakness of instruction in alphabetic principles, and in part to the conflict between the cultures of the children and the school. An Individualized Reading Program [IRM] has been developed which systematically teaches the linguistic principles behind the English alphabet in a context that engages the children's emotional concerns and life experience. Stories that involve the conflicts in the lives of African American children are written with a vocabulary that adds only the new structures being studied to the syllable patterns that children have already mastered. A computer program that diagnoses reading errors for each child directs tutors to lessons on the alphabetic patterns that were least understood.

The IRM was used for children who attended summer school after failing the second or third grade, following the Philadelphia school board's mandate against social promotion. A significant gain in reading skills was recorded. Moreover, the advances in decoding each alphabetic structure were proportional to the amount of instructional time devoted to that structure.