07/13/2026
So, people have asked me what I think about Seidenburg's comments about over teaching phonics...only teach phonics enough so students reach "escape velocity" or can start cracking the code (or as Gough would say, cipher) on their own and a light bulb goes on. For those of us who were taught to read through the whole word approach, you either became self-taught through analogy and word memorization or you didn't learn much at all. Who are those adults now who never reached escape velocity then? The claim is that for kids who are reading novels at home, sitting through lessons about how the English language is organized makes them disengage during phonics lessons. on the contrary, interviews with students who are already readers, i.e. they could passively break the code on their own (self-teaching hypothesis), they enjoyed learning the history, the rules, the generalizations, the whys and wherefores of the language, so they didn't disengage, they were excited to learn the key to the next mystery.
The claim that over teaching phonics reduces the amount of time spent in class actually practicing reading, because after the lesson teachers claim they don't have time for students to read. This is a claim that we hear often, but longstanding research conducted way before the science of reading became a phenomenon, showed that students spent very little time during the ELA block actually reading. Most of their time was spent working independently on worksheets and the like. Another thought about time spent on actual reading - observing guided reading classes some time ago, students would sit for the majority of the class reading novels, waiting for their small group time to engage with the teacher. Students kept looking at the clock, and the reason I was there was because student achievement was in the red, so apparently, teaching too much phonics isn't the root cause for the lack of reading practice time in classrooms.
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