Reading Instruction, Word Confirmation, and Confirmation Bias

0:00Greetings. This is Andy Johnson. Host of the Reading Instruction show topic of today's podcast is Reading Instruction, Word Confirmation, and Confirmation by Spirt One, War on Penguins. In the world of literacy instruction, different terms are often used for the same thing, but also the same words are used for different things. And as you can well imagine, this causes a bit of confusion that in turn leads to all sorts of erroneous conclusions and bad reading instruction. It also creates the illusion that there's a reading war. There is not a reading war. There are, however, differing positions and assumptions based on theoretical perspectives. And within the

1:06academy, this is not a war. This is called normal. Now, these differing perspectives are called reading war because some have found it politically and economically advantageous to do so. And if these same people could make more consulting money, get larger speaking fees, and sell more products by declaring penguins to be the cause of all reading difficulties, they do so. They'd be marketing penguin tracks. Consultants and podcasters would be describing research-based techniques for penguin removal. Radial journalists would produce documentaries with scary music in the background showing elementary schools crawling with penguins. And there'd be tearful interviews of parents telling how their children could read before the penguins came. And there'd be a science

2:08of penguin removal. And the National Council on Teacher Quality would evaluate teacher education programs based on how they address the big five components of penguin removal identified by the national penguin panel. Big five are killing, trapping, irritating, scaring, and ignoring. The point is there is no reading war. There never has been the only war is the war against knowledge related to reading instruction. Certain words can no longer appear on course syllabi and teacher education programs. Post must be approved before the appear on certain websites. And reading programs in professional development for teachers must be approved by the state. And only knowledge produced by a very narrow range of research methods that has been approved by the federal government is

3:11considered to be valid. Word identification and recognition. Now quite often my online friends believe the knowledge that I put forth is incorrect. They disagree with me all well and good. Disagreement invites me to review and revisit related research, reflect and reconsider, and then either revise or reify my current thinking. This process has been very effective in keeping me learning in a learning mode for the last 40 years. I highly recommend. However, if I were only to allow pre-approved ideas to appear on my websites like the reading league, my thinking would be pretty much the same as it was 40 years ago,

4:14also like the reading league. Unless hate speeches used, I allow all ideas to appear. I even allow personal attacks up to a point. In my 16 years of online posting, I've only had the block five people. The point is differing perspectives are important in the evolution of any field, including reading instruction. Without differing perspectives, there is cognitive, imbreding, deleterious mutations and evolution again like the reading league. It's important that we disagree and have differing perspectives and that these differing perspectives be shared and evaluated using what's called academic discourse.

5:16Now recently, I put out a definition of three commonly misunderstood terms, word recognition, word identification, and decoding. These terms are often used interchangeably when in fact, are quite different. And understanding this difference is important in making effective policy and good decisions related to reading instruction. Recognizing words, word recognition, is when you encounter a word in print. It's in your lexicon and you instantly know what it is. You need minimal letter clues to recognize these in the context of a sentence. And this is similar to what Lenea Erichold reading sight words. She posits that these words are encoded into long-term memory by a process called orthographic mapping.

6:19And while there are some glaring weaknesses with theory of orthographic mapping, I agree with some of it. There are some glaring weaknesses. I would agree that there are words we see in print and we instantly know what they are. We recognize them and most adults have lots of these. Word identification, sometimes you encounter a word in print that's in your lexicon, but you don't recognize it. Word identification is the conscious employment of a strategy used to recognize a word. Erichold says this word reading strategy. Scanlan at L used the term word solving strategies. And I call it word identification. Word identification is the conscious employment of a strategy used to recognize a word that you don't immediately recognize.

7:21Erich identified three of these strategies decoding analogy and prediction. I've identified four phonics, analogy or large unit phonics, phonemic analysis and context clues. And decoding refers to using the code or the letter symbol code to identify unrecognized words. In other words, using phonics to sound out letters and identify words. Using phonics clues and decoding are the same thing. They are both word identification strategy. And with instruction and practice, this word identification strategy becomes a skill. It becomes automatic. Now a slightly different perspective. One of my online friends disagreed with me. They disagreed with these three terms. And this disagreement was based on a different theoretical perspective, which emphasized code first versus

8:28meaning based instruction and the primacy of orthographic mapping in the reading process. And my online friend put forward two different definitions based on a different theoretical perspective. Word identification was defined as using graphene and phonics to decode a word. And word confirmation, a concept I didn't recognize is using syntax and semantics to check that a decoded word makes sense. And this is a skill according to my friend that must be explicitly taught. Now to substantiate their definitions, my online friend asked that I read a blog post they wrote explaining these two terms and this I did. I found that the blog used a series of quotes taken from several well-known scholars and researchers to make a case for why their terms were

9:34correct. And my terms were incorrect. It contained a list of what other people had said. I wanted to engage in academic discourse, but how do you engage with an accumulation of other people's words? How do you respond to a series of secondhand sentences pulled out of context? The purpose of this podcast is not to try to convince anybody of the rightness or wrongness of any perspective or set of terms. The purpose is to enable readers to become more responsible consumers of information related to reading instruction. And when evaluating what people write online, the overuse of quotations should raise red flags and let me explain.

10:37Context matters. Context always matters when interpreting a letter sound, a word, a sentence, or anything else. When I looked at the sentences quoted by my online friend, I couldn't help but notice that the sentences had different meanings within the context of the entire article or chapter from they came. In fact, the authors were supporting my definitions of word recognition and word identification rather than those put forward by my friend. An individual sentence is often used in support of a larger idea. And one of the limitations of pulling the sentence out of context and commenting on it is that it can create a distorted view of what the author or speaker was saying. It can also mischaracterize the discussion or divert attention from the point being made.

11:44And this is why in academic writing, we don't rely on a series of quotes to make our point. Instead, we state our ideas, we support our ideas, and we cite our sources. This is also why we evaluate articles in books and not individual sentences. A series of quotes with a sentence or two between each is simply a list of what other people have at a specific time in the context of their larger thesis. Context matters. Confirmation bias. The overuse of quotes lends itself to confirmation bias. And confirmation bias is when you start with a preconceived belief and then select only information or data that supports that belief. This makes it much easier to miss or distort the author's idea. You find what you're looking for

12:50instead of what's there. And let the end with this responsible consumers. We live in a Wikipedia name in which anything online that looks legitimate is considered to be legitimate knowledge. People on substack and LinkedIn promote themselves as experts, consultants, specialists, authors, speakers, leaders, and innovators. Nobody promotes themselves as a loser. They write all sorts of things using important sounding words like evidence-based, scientific research, systematic, cumulative, extensive, explicit graphene phoneme connection, phenology, multi-sensory, or pro-graphic mapping, and alphabetical principle. And to open these words are used without really understanding what they mean.

13:51Distorted views of balanced literacy, the three queuing system, and research-based instruction are used to create sh-prom-man arguments. And their legitimacy is determined by how popular they are, kind of like a high school prom queen or king. The only thing that's on up to be responsible consumers of educational information. In this context, we must be wary of the overuse of quotations. This is a common technique used to distort rather than inform. This has been the reading instruction show I am your host, Dr. Antichon.