Acquiring literacy is natural: Who skilled cock robin?

Abstract

Kenneth S. Goodman College of Education University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona A n old English folksong asks the question Who Killed Cock Robin?. I've parodied that question in the title of this paper because I believe that many of the problems in literacy instruction in the world today are misunderstood because learning to read has been treated as a matter of acquiring a series of skills. In the literate nations particularly America we've built a technology of reading skills. On a world basis, literacy can be easily seen to be proportionate to the need for literacy within any society or subgroup of the particular society. Even within literate societies, different ethnic, cultural and economic groups show notably different patterns of acceptance of literacy and literacy instruction. But as we've built a technology of instruction in literate societies, we've created pathologies of failure which are independent of the need for language, the nature of language or the natural learning of language. The technology we've built treats reading as something difficult to be systematically taught skill upon skill. Though this technology has no foundation either in theory or research, it has acquired, over time, a credibility partly due to pedagogical traditionwe continue to do what others have done before us and partly due to its arbitrary specificity. Skills are arranged sequentially and hierarchically and drills and exercises are multiplied and duplicated to teach the skills. Research fills the professional literature reporting experiments on the most effective ways of teaching the skills, creating the illusion that the skills themselves have a base in scientific research. Achievement tests based on the skill hierarchies become the means for determining the extent of acquisition of literacy. Performance on these tests becomes synonymous with reading itself. Low scores on tests are offered as proof of failure and a new technology is created to find the pathological causes within the non-learner's failure to acquire the skills. And more drills and exercises are multiplied and duplicated to remediate the deficiencies and teach the skills. Networks of professionally trained diagnosticians, clinicians and remediators are