Research on Learning to Read and Spell: A Personal-Historical Perspective

Abstract

Ehri delivered this presidential address at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, March 1997, Chicago. Ehri provides a glimpse of her experiences conducting research on word-reading processes in beginning readers for more than 20 years. At the outset, she proposed a theory that the spellings of individual words become bonded to their pronunciations in memory, and she conducted studies to obtain evidence for this theory. This led her into various controversies with other researchers over issues such as whether phonemic awareness is a cause or consequence of learning to read and to what extent beginning readers use visual cues or alphabetic cues to read their first words. The disagreements proving most fruitful were those that spawned additional research. Disputes considered unproductive and even harmful were those involving dogmatic views not open to empirical evidence and maligning appelations intended to implant prejudice. This recounting of her career underscores the value of a systematic line of research as well as intensive discussion with other researchers.