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Understanding Reading: A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Reading and Learning to Read
Understanding Reading revolutionized reading research and theory when the first edition appeared in 1971 and continues to be a leader in the field. In the sixth edition of this classic text, Smith's purpose remains the to shed light on fundamental aspects of the complex human act of reading--linguistic, physiological, psychological, and social--and on what is involved in learning to read. The text critically examines current theories, instructional practices, and controversies, covering a wide range of disciplines but always remaining accessible to students and classroom teachers. Careful attention is given to the ideological clash that continues between whole language and direct instruction and currently permeates every aspect of theory and research into reading and reading instruction. To aid readers in making up their own minds, each chapter concludes with a brief statement of "Issues." Understanding A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Reading and Learning to Read, Sixth Edition is designed to serve as a handbook for language arts teachers, a college text for basic courses on the psychology of reading, a guide to relevant research on reading, and an introduction to reading as an aspect of thinking and learning. It is matchless in integrating a wide range of topics relative to reading while, at the same time, being highly readable and user-friendly for instructors, students, and practitioners.
388 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
6 people are currently reading
131 people want to read
About the author
Frank Smith
26 books21 followersFrank Smith was a psycholinguist recognized for his contributions in linguistics and cognitive psychology. He was contributor to research on the nature of the reading process together with researchers such as George Armitage Miller, Kenneth S. Goodman (see Ken Goodman), Paul A. Kolers, Jane W. Torrey, Jane Mackworth, Richard Venezky, Robert Calfee, and Julian Hochberg. Smith and Goodman were singled out as originators of the modern psycholinguistic approach to reading instruction.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
December 28, 2014
This is a stunningly good book. Frank Smith is a hero of mine, who is often accused of being a key supporter of the ‘whole language’ method of teaching reading. He disputes this, mostly for the reason that he doesn’t believe in any ‘method’ of teaching reading – only in madness. Something I fully endorse. He is scathing on ‘phonics’ – and despite so much ‘scientific’ support for phonics instruction, I have to say that I agree with his concerns and generally assume people who support ‘phonics’ are more interested in beating up on kids and teachers than they are in helping kids to learn how to read. Now, those are fighting words, but I actually do believe them to be true.
I read to my children for much longer than other people tend to – right up until they got bored listening to me and could skip had and read for themselves. The reason is that kids are able to understand by hearing people read to them more then they are able to understand by reading themselves for a longer time than we imagine. We seem to think that kids will, after a certain age (maybe 10), be able to read at the level they can understand, but this is rubbish and probably remains rubbish for much longer than we believe, I suspect possibly up until our early twenties, at least, and then only for people who actually go on reading. If you wanted proof of the failure of much reading instruction in our society it would have to be that no matter what method is employed, most people (and I mean that quite literally – as in, the vast majority of people) never read another book after they leave school. How can that be considered ‘teaching people to read’? How would it be different from ‘teaching people not to read’? Most of our education system seems to reinforce the idea that reading is something that is done as a horrible kind of work, as a way to be bored out of our minds. Worse, reading is often seen as proving we just don’t understand things – that we are not smart enough. This is a particularly cruel lesson to learn, mostly because the best way to become more intelligent is, in fact, to read, so that if people think they are not ‘intelligent enough’ the answer isn’t to stop reading, but to do very much more reading.
The problem is that reading has been defined, and defined by the defenders of phonics in particular, as a form of decoding text. But this places emphasis on what is the least interesting aspect of reading. Whereas reading is really a way of gaining meaning from texts. And we are meaning making machines. We make meaning even when there is none to be made – listen to people talking about Astrology, if you don’t believe me – in fact, it takes a remarkable amount of effort to make something completely meaningless to people – but phonics has succeeded in spades. They have written entire texts that read a bit like this, ‘the cat went splat on the mat after eating the fat rat, oh drat’ – except even that has too much ‘meaning’.
The best part of this book is where he explains why teaching kids to read every letter (which is, after all, the point of phonics – they laugh at ‘whole language’, while endorsing ‘whole letter’) can only overload their visual and short-term memories. We can only hold about 8 bits of information in our short-term memory at any one time. If that is 8 letters, then that isn’t going to be enough for us to make sense of what we are reading at a rate that will allow engaged comprehension – surely the point of reading in the first place. And it is made worse than this, because the other thing we do is get kids to focus on all of the ‘details’ of a text (by threatening to test their ‘comprehension’ after they have finished reading), thus again overloading their short-term memory. But if the kids are actually understanding what they are reading and find it interesting (god forbid…) they won’t need to find ways to stuff disconnected or unconnected ‘facts’ into their heads, the logic of the narrative itself will make remembering those details more or less automatic. We have been taught to believe learning is difficult – but if it is meaningful, learning is the easiest thing in the world. It is how our brains have been constructed. We can be trusted to learn.
So, then why does phonics always come out top of the various reading ‘methods’? Well, it is because of what we ‘assess’. If you are going to assess students on what they have been drilled to learn they are almost certainly going to do better than children who have not been drilled in that kind of reading. But is that really ‘reading’? Other people say that kids can’t read ‘interesting’ stuff until they have the skills and that they get the skills by learning patterns. The problem is that English spelling patterns make more sense on the basis of the ‘meaning’ of the words, than they do on letter patterns – words that start with ‘cir’ for example (like circumference, circuit, circumcise and so on) are based on ideas that relate to circles – where as words that start with sur (surface, surround, and even surrealism) – which, you might notice sound a bit the same, at least in my accent – don’t relate to circular things. How do you teach that ‘sound/letter’ relation? Well, generally, you don’t. People learn the difference not by being shown, they learn by experience and testing hypothesis and doing what people do when they learn anything else. But very often spelling makes much more sense because of the meaning of the words, than it does due to the sound of the letters. So, even if phonics didn’t overload kids working memories, it would still be a bad idea. As a friend of mine posted the other day, why is it that cough, through, bough and though don’t rhyme, but pony and Bologna do? Relying on sound to letter correspondences doesn’t even make sense in Finland, where the language is much more phonetic than English – even there it makes children poor readers, but it makes reading almost impossible for children in English – not least because it teaches children that the ‘point’ of reading is decoding letters to sound – rather than of making sense of text. This is almost criminal and it should be considered as such.
This book starts by referencing two reviews – one saying that the book is one insanely interesting and demands to be read. The other saying it is dangerous and should be taken off the market. Any book that inspires such differences in reaction probably deserves to be read for that reason alone. This book will change how you understand reading, even if you come away still thinking phonics is a good idea – I can’t recommend it too highly. And don’t skip the notes – you have to read the notes. Trust me.
I read to my children for much longer than other people tend to – right up until they got bored listening to me and could skip had and read for themselves. The reason is that kids are able to understand by hearing people read to them more then they are able to understand by reading themselves for a longer time than we imagine. We seem to think that kids will, after a certain age (maybe 10), be able to read at the level they can understand, but this is rubbish and probably remains rubbish for much longer than we believe, I suspect possibly up until our early twenties, at least, and then only for people who actually go on reading. If you wanted proof of the failure of much reading instruction in our society it would have to be that no matter what method is employed, most people (and I mean that quite literally – as in, the vast majority of people) never read another book after they leave school. How can that be considered ‘teaching people to read’? How would it be different from ‘teaching people not to read’? Most of our education system seems to reinforce the idea that reading is something that is done as a horrible kind of work, as a way to be bored out of our minds. Worse, reading is often seen as proving we just don’t understand things – that we are not smart enough. This is a particularly cruel lesson to learn, mostly because the best way to become more intelligent is, in fact, to read, so that if people think they are not ‘intelligent enough’ the answer isn’t to stop reading, but to do very much more reading.
The problem is that reading has been defined, and defined by the defenders of phonics in particular, as a form of decoding text. But this places emphasis on what is the least interesting aspect of reading. Whereas reading is really a way of gaining meaning from texts. And we are meaning making machines. We make meaning even when there is none to be made – listen to people talking about Astrology, if you don’t believe me – in fact, it takes a remarkable amount of effort to make something completely meaningless to people – but phonics has succeeded in spades. They have written entire texts that read a bit like this, ‘the cat went splat on the mat after eating the fat rat, oh drat’ – except even that has too much ‘meaning’.
The best part of this book is where he explains why teaching kids to read every letter (which is, after all, the point of phonics – they laugh at ‘whole language’, while endorsing ‘whole letter’) can only overload their visual and short-term memories. We can only hold about 8 bits of information in our short-term memory at any one time. If that is 8 letters, then that isn’t going to be enough for us to make sense of what we are reading at a rate that will allow engaged comprehension – surely the point of reading in the first place. And it is made worse than this, because the other thing we do is get kids to focus on all of the ‘details’ of a text (by threatening to test their ‘comprehension’ after they have finished reading), thus again overloading their short-term memory. But if the kids are actually understanding what they are reading and find it interesting (god forbid…) they won’t need to find ways to stuff disconnected or unconnected ‘facts’ into their heads, the logic of the narrative itself will make remembering those details more or less automatic. We have been taught to believe learning is difficult – but if it is meaningful, learning is the easiest thing in the world. It is how our brains have been constructed. We can be trusted to learn.
So, then why does phonics always come out top of the various reading ‘methods’? Well, it is because of what we ‘assess’. If you are going to assess students on what they have been drilled to learn they are almost certainly going to do better than children who have not been drilled in that kind of reading. But is that really ‘reading’? Other people say that kids can’t read ‘interesting’ stuff until they have the skills and that they get the skills by learning patterns. The problem is that English spelling patterns make more sense on the basis of the ‘meaning’ of the words, than they do on letter patterns – words that start with ‘cir’ for example (like circumference, circuit, circumcise and so on) are based on ideas that relate to circles – where as words that start with sur (surface, surround, and even surrealism) – which, you might notice sound a bit the same, at least in my accent – don’t relate to circular things. How do you teach that ‘sound/letter’ relation? Well, generally, you don’t. People learn the difference not by being shown, they learn by experience and testing hypothesis and doing what people do when they learn anything else. But very often spelling makes much more sense because of the meaning of the words, than it does due to the sound of the letters. So, even if phonics didn’t overload kids working memories, it would still be a bad idea. As a friend of mine posted the other day, why is it that cough, through, bough and though don’t rhyme, but pony and Bologna do? Relying on sound to letter correspondences doesn’t even make sense in Finland, where the language is much more phonetic than English – even there it makes children poor readers, but it makes reading almost impossible for children in English – not least because it teaches children that the ‘point’ of reading is decoding letters to sound – rather than of making sense of text. This is almost criminal and it should be considered as such.
This book starts by referencing two reviews – one saying that the book is one insanely interesting and demands to be read. The other saying it is dangerous and should be taken off the market. Any book that inspires such differences in reaction probably deserves to be read for that reason alone. This book will change how you understand reading, even if you come away still thinking phonics is a good idea – I can’t recommend it too highly. And don’t skip the notes – you have to read the notes. Trust me.
April 1, 2009
This book was boring as snot but the concept behind it was very interesting and important for reading teachers. Smith set out to scientifically proving how students learn to read. I wouldn't read it though, if I had the choice. I'd just like to hear a summary of his ideas.
March 15, 2017
The author discusses at length the divide between those who believe that teaching language "rules" is important and those who don't -- what the author calls "The Great Debate." This debate has been raging for about thirty years, and it remains unclear why there can't be a middle ground where students are both taught using the "whole language" approach while at the same time being taught the rules of the road using the "direct instruction" approach. From this debate, it seems that there are people who like rules and structure, and there are those that hate rules and structure. A corollary is that the former appreciate metrics of some sort that can be used to gauge a student's progress in a reproducible way (e.g., "tests"), and the latter hate tests. "Hate" is not too strong a word, as the denunciations of testing is passionate and uses very emotionally charged language (see page 315). I found it interesting that in the entire book, there was no mention of how the U.S. is falling behind other developed nations (search for "US schools compared to other nations" or see PISA or PIAAC studies). Except for this one passage, which is pretty telling:
Better just stick that head in the sand, I guess. Anyway, the book lays out the "whole language" case well, though the author clearly has an anti-rule, anti-structure, anti-test bias.
In The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools, Berliner and Biddle (1995) reviewed years of criticism, official and unofficial, on "failures" of American education, based on "evidence" that they say was either unavailable or misleadingly overgeneralized. None of the charges could be supported, they claimed, and blamed, among other things, industrialists worried about overseas competition, a long-established tradition of "school-bashing," scapegoating of educators to divert attention from social problems, self-interest of some government officials, and irresponsible actions of the media. In The Literacy Crisis: False Claims and Real Solutions, McQuillan (1998) also documented how an alleged "literacy crisis" is fabricated.
Better just stick that head in the sand, I guess. Anyway, the book lays out the "whole language" case well, though the author clearly has an anti-rule, anti-structure, anti-test bias.
September 24, 2017
I finished it! I feel extremely accomplished actually reading this whole thing. It was nice to get a background on the practices being used for reading instruction, but it is difficult to get through.
July 10, 2020
One of the best book on how reading is learned, with very strong grounding in research. Smith is a brilliant writer on language learning and learning in general. His writing is engaging and full of humor, metaphor and examples to acquaint the reader with the his take on learning theory.
July 28, 2021
I think Frank gets it wrong in the end but this is my favorite theory of knowledge writing. Check out the first few chapters if you want a new, deconstructing perspective on knowledge and learning.
May 27, 2008
the psychological basis for the whole word movement--a brilliant analysis which educators have perverted--
October 3, 2010
EDR 621
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews