Moving Beyond the Reading Wars

By Deborah Duncan Owens

The following is an excerpt from chapter 4 of my upcoming book Enlightened Literacy: Providing Hope for Democracy, Global Citizenship, and the Human Condition. Chapter 4 is entitled The Science of Reading: A Clarification and addresses the real reading science that has informed literacy research and practice.

                How we use terms and phenomena is often historically and contextually defined. While the same is true when thinking about the science of reading, the science of reading is much more than a movement. Scientific research in reading is not a new phenomenon. Adrian Johns, the Allan Grant Maclear Professor of History at the University of Chicago, provides an account of the science of reading from a historical and unbiased perspective that clarifies the current iteration of reading reform and the science of reading movement.

            The origins of the systematic scientific study of reading began at the same time and location in which experimental psychology began at the University of Leipzig in the laboratory of Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt, the founder of the first Institute for Experimental Psychology in 1879. One of the researchers who worked in Wundt’s Laboratory was the American James McKeen Cattell, who engaged in eye movement research of adults as they were reading. One of his findings was that adults perceived words more rapidly than the individual letters that make up words.

            The early reading science associated with eye movement studies took place during the industrial revolution. The need for a literate society continued to increase as industrially printed media proliferated across industrialized nations through newspapers, billboards, signs, magazines, forms, and, of course, books were beginning to appear everywhere.Books for use in schools were also being printed at an increasing rate to meet the needs of students amid the expansion of schools across the country during the Common School Era. Horace Mann, the father of the Common Schools, rejected the practice of teaching reading that he was witnessing in the early years of common schools in which letters and sounds were taught prior to teaching children to read words. In 1842, he described the practice of a teacher holding up a card of a letter and asking children or a single child to name the letter and its corresponding sound. The practice goes on through the alphabet one letter at a time until, as Mann describes it, “the vertical rows of lifeless and ill-favored characters is completed” and students are remanded to their seats. Mann goes on to write,

If the child is bright, the time which passes during this lesson is the only part of the day in which he does not think. Not a single faculty of the mind is exercised excepting that of imitating sounds; and even the number of these imitations is limited to twenty-six. A parrot or an idiot could do the same thing. …

There was a market, therefore, for books that could be used to teach early reading. The most popular of these were the McGuffey readers, written by William H. McGuffey, who served as a professor at Miami University, Ohio, and President of Cincinnati College and later as President of Ohio University in Athens. Nila Banton Smith states the following about the McGuffey series author, “McGuffey must be given the credit of being the first author to produce a clearly defined and carefully graded series consisting of one reader for each grade in the elementary school.”⁷  Notably, the readers were designed with the child in mind and included appealing pictures that would motivate students to engage in reading. McGuffey readers provided sets of words suitable for the level of the reader and short sentences or questions. These were just the types of reading experiences Horace Mann envisioned for the burgeoning population of children attending common schools across the U.S.  They were distinctly different from the phonics based New England Primers and Webster’s Spellers and offered a solution to the methods Mann described in classrooms that started with letters and phonics first that he found irksome and disengaging. 

            I turn back now to James McKeen Cattell and his eye movement research at the Wundt Laboratory. He developed an instrument called the “gravity chronometer” that would become a standard piece of equipment in the lab. With this device, Cattell was able to gauge the response of readers when asked to name a character or word scrolled momentarily across the device’s window. He augmented his gravity chronometer so that he could measure and log the exact time of any spoken utterance.  As James Kim explains, the research of Cattell’s eye movement study seemingly provided a scientific basis for Horace Mann’s assertions.

            Another important scientific researcher of eye movements and reading was American Edmund Burke Huey. Just as Cattell went to Germany to investigate eye movements and reading, Huey traveled to France to work with Louis Emile Javal in the Ophthalmological Laboratory at the Sorbonne. Javal’s research demonstrated that eyes do not move in a continuous movement as they read a line of text. Eyes make brief rapid movements, called saccades, and short stops, called fixations, while reading. Huey, like Cattell, designed an instrument to gauge eye movements while reading. With his instrument Huey was able to record eye movements and, thus, had empirical evidence of the saccades and fixations that occur during reading.  Other emerging research yielded findings about the differences between oral reading and silent reading.

            Adrian Johns explains that the ground-breaking eye movement research conducted by Cattell and Huey at the turn of the twentieth century was considered the state-of-the-art science of reading. It was William S. Gray, however, that was the star of the world of “scientist-authors.” Gray was a member of the faculty at the University of Chicago from 1916, becoming the Director of Research at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Chicago, and served as the first president of the International Reading Association. According to Johns, Gray “became a lynchpin of the campaign to bring the science of reading to national attention.” He published annual surveys of achievements in the field of reading research, organized annual conferences on reading science, and published hundreds of research studies. …

(hint: William Gray brought us the Dick and Jane series. …)

Selected Resources:

Adrian Johns. The Science of Reading: Information, Media & Mind in Modern America. (Champaigne, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2023).

James S. Kim. “Research and the Reading Wars.” Phi Delta Kappan 89, no. 5 (January 1, 2008): 372–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/003172170808900514.

Nila Banton Smith, American Reading Instruction. (Newark: Delaware: International Reading Association, 1967).

Nicholas J. Wade. “Pioneers of Eye Movement Research.” I-Perception 1, no. 2 (January 1, 2010): 33–68. https://doi.org/10.1068/i0389.

More to come … Deborah Duncan Owens