Teaching literature for literature’s sake: Down for the count

A daily review of convention news from the staff of Reading Today

  “Not everything that can be counted counts—and not everything that counts can be counted,” said William Teale, paraphrasing Albert Einstein and highlighting concerns some educators have about the current dominance of database decision making in policy and legislation. He spoke at a session during IRA’s 52nd Annual Convention.

In a presentation Wednesday, Teale addressed the “current condition of early-literacy instruction in the United States,” which he sees as a cause for concern. In preschools and primary grades throughout the United States, he said, children’s reading ability is being measured by how many letters they know, their phonological awareness, and their oral fluency.

A professor of education and the chair of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), Teale is also director of the UIC Reading Clinic.

Teale told the audience that one-minute oral reading fluency tests can identify reading comprehension problems, but not necessarily reading comprehension itself. Fluency tests tell a first grade teacher nothing about how to teach her children to get better comprehension scores, Teale said.

He worries that literature for literature’s sake has been lost in many preschool/primary settings, particularly those in overly-mandated, under-resourced schools. “We should worry about comprehension, too,” he said. Literature counts because it informs ways of comprehending and builds knowledge, as well as vocabulary size and scope, Teale said. Literature—stories and poetry—should not be used to build foundational skills, but for its intrinsic value.

He peppered his remarks with several anecdotes. In one, a little boy who had trouble falling asleep at night told his mother: “All these thoughts keep coming into my head.” His mother told him to think boring thoughts and that might help him fall asleep. He said, “Oh, that’s a good idea. I think I’ll think about phonemic awareness.” The audience laughed. Though Teale found it amusing, too, he said it was telling that the boy had learned in school that he was supposed to be learning phonemic awareness, not as a byproduct of lessons that were enjoyable, but as a task or chore and that he would be tested on his mastery of phonemic awareness.

Even for educators, their art is losing its luster as the focus shifts from love of learning to making adequate progress.