This and the next article in this series try to get at the question of how oral language and written language differ. I believe this question has been at the heart of many, if not most, of the disagreements we’ve had about how to help people learn to read. There are three principal sections, the third one started here and then finished in the next article:
• How the issue was first defined nearly 50 years ago—whether learning to read is natural or unnatural—was unfortunate and misleading.
• A suggested distinction is likely to be more productive: the difference between the two is that learning to read is harder than learning to understand oral language one is exposed to at birth or relatively soon after.
• The evidence for the difference between oral and written language (including differences in how we learn to comprehend each) comes from converging bodies of knowledge. Human evolution and child development perspectives are presented below. The next article in this series will be devoted to the neuroscientific evidence that learning to read requires creation of connections in the brain that do not exist at birth.
Learning to Read: Natural Vs. Unnatural
Nearly a half-century ago, Ken and Yetta Goodman wrote that “the acquisition of literacy is merely an extension of natural language learning for all children… [T]he naturalness of children learning to read and write comes from their active participation in the communication process—their motivation to comprehend what the printed word is trying to ‘say.’”1
They went on to describe “eight essentials of beginning reading instruction based on a natural language thesis.”
A few short years later, Phil Gough and Michael Hillinger disputed the Goodmans, countering that learning to read is an “unnatural act.” The “average child,” they wrote, “normally endowed and normally taught, learns to read only with considerable difficulty. He [sic] does not learn to read naturally…, despite his evident facility at learning and despite having previously mastered what would seem to be the hardest part of reading (i.e., learning an unknown language).”2
Thereupon followed a feature of the reading wars still with us to this day. Rob Tierney and David Pearson’s recent monograph, available at their open-access website, provides the most up-to-date example when they “fact-check” (meaning dispute) the claim that “learning to read is an unnatural act.”3
Is Natural Vs. Unnatural the Real Issue?
My online dictionary defines natural as “existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind.”
The Goodmans’ choice of the word natural and Gough and Hillinger’s direct challenge unnatural were understandable but fateful. Both terms were used imprecisely, leading to misinterpretations, miscommunication, and a source of contention in this perennially contentious field.
The Goodmans did not intend to signify that natural meant learning to read “exists in or [is] caused by nature,” without human intervention, as if it were a natural waterfall or natural selection. They explicitly disavowed this, saying their position was “not Rousseauian”:
“When we use the term natural learning, we do not regard the process as one of unfolding in an environment free of obstructive intrusions. Teaching children to read is not putting them into a garden of print and leaving them unmolested.”
Similarly, Gough and Hillinger didn’t literally mean that learning to read was unnatural like plastic flowers, or bizarre like aberrant behavior. What they meant was that “children do not easily learn to read” and that “children almost never learn to read without instruction.”
Unfortunately, natural and its direct negation unnatural were successful rhetorical tropes but advances in precision and understanding, not so much. The embattled pair took on a life of its own in the discourse and disputations surrounding reading and reading education over the past nearly five decades.
Note, however, that there was an important point of agreement between the Goodmans’ position and Gough and Hillinger’s: Learning to read did not happen spontaneously. It required human intervention. Somebody, or somebodies, had to do something for children to learn to read. Children do not learn to read, in the Goodmans’ lovely and slightly hallucinatory phrase, by “putting them into a garden of print and leaving them unmolested.”
Ken and Yetta Goodman and Gough and Hillinger certainly had very different visions of what needed to be done to teach children to read, but there was no daylight between them that learning to read didn’t just happen by itself. In this sense, despite their diametrically opposed and seemingly irreconcilable paper titles, all agreed that learning to read is not actually natural in the literal sense that reading “exists in nature” and is “not caused by humankind.”
But neither is there anything unnatural about learning to read, just as there is nothing unnatural about learning how play a saxophone, strike a yoga pose, weave a basket, or bake a cake. They all involve learning how to engage in human-invented activities. Tierney and Pearson put it this way in their online monograph:
“[L]earning to read may not be specifically wired in the same way we have come to accept the specificity of the wiring for learning one’s oral language. But, as nearly as we can fathom, it is as natural or unnatural as learning anything else we learn.”
If learning weren’t natural to humans, it’s hard to imagine how human societies could last,4 just as the failure to learn, another natural human attribute, leads to their demise. The difference between learning to understand oral language and learning to read print cannot be that one is natural and the other is not.
Is there, then, a distinction that more accurately and helpfully captures the difference between the Goodmans’ perspective on learning to read and Gough and Hillinger’s?
Learning to Read Is Harder Than Acquiring a First Oral Language, Because It Is Not Intuitive
The issue has to do with a fundamental fact (I’ll go out on a limb and call it a fact) that is not discussed precisely nor appreciated fully: oral language and written language are different. Of course they are related. But they’re not the same thing. They are acquired differently and perceived differently. These differences have implications for teaching children, or anyone, to read.
The distinction between oral and written language is particularly important for multilingual learners (MLs). When these students are in English-medium instruction, which is where the large majority of them are, they must learn to read in English as they simultaneously learn the language. The challenge is significantly greater than it is for students who already know English as they learn to read it—which, as Gough and Hillinger pointed out, is challenging enough. The situation is different when ELs are in a bilingual program where they learn to read in a language they already know. I’ll address these issues in a separate article.
The key idea that distinguishes learning to understand oral and written language is that humans are born primed and ready to make sense of oral language, aka human speech—language we hear. We are not born primed and ready to make sense of written language, aka print—language we see.
We need to learn, and generally be taught, that print carries meaning and how to “decode” it (I know this is a trigger word for some, so for now please interpret it metaphorically if that won’t interrupt the flow) in order to make sense of it. From birth, we seem to know intuitively to pay attention to human speech. At some level we seem to understand that speech carries meaning as it enters through our ears and registers somewhere in our brains. In contrast, until we learn, observe, or are taught—all three, actually—we have no idea that print is something that requires our attention or carries meaning.
As Gough and Hillinger emphasized, learning to read—that is, being able to understand written language that we must see—is harder than learning to understand oral language, which you hear and to which you are exposed even from before birth or shortly after. Learning to understand written language requires making linguistic and cognitive connections in the brain that are not unnatural, but neither are they necessarily easy to make.
Evidence for the Differences between Oral and Written Language and Their Acquisition
Several strands of evidence support the distinction I am making between oral and written language.
Begin with oral language—more precisely, human speech. Speech is not language itself but how language is conveyed orally. It’s the spoken expression of language. Human speech has been around since the human species emerged. No one knows exactly when speech5 or language6 emerged. The possible range is enormous, but a half-million years ago seems to be a roughly median estimate. Regardless, communicating language via speech is part of our human evolution.
In contrast, writing systems—“the physical manifestation of a spoken language”—appeared on the human scene much more recently, about 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia.7 (For a more in-depth, academically rigorous account, see the classic text by Jack Goody.)8 Writing is literally a human invention, not something that evolved with our species.
The first written languages—Sumerians’ cuneiform and Egyptians’ hieroglyphics— used symbols to represent tangible concepts.
Phonetic, or alphabetic, writing systems—where written symbols represented the oral language’s sounds rather than tangible objects or concepts— came along 1,500 years later. One was courtesy of the Phoenicians. If you ever talk or think about phonics, phonetics, or phonemic awareness, you can thank the Phoenicians by way of the Greeks— phonetic is from the Greek word phonein, which means “to speak clearly.”
Independently, writing also developed in China and Mesoamerica. All human societies and cultures have oral language and use speech to communicate it.9 According to the Linguistic Society of America, there are no known alingual societies.10 In contrast, although most human societies have written language, there have always been those that do not, even since the invention of writing systems around the world.
At the individual person level, we see an analogous distinction. From birth, infants will respond to human speech, meaning orient to it rather than startle (the response sudden loud noises elicit), more than to other types of sounds.11 Further, infants’ preference for attending to speech predicts their later oral language skills.
The same is highly unlikely to be true for written language, although to my knowledge it has never been tested directly. The human face is the visual stimulus infants orient to most.
Think about the implications of all this. Starting from birth, learning to understand oral language appears to be intuitive. Learning to understand written language is not.
As a result, children will usually acquire fully functional age related abilities in an oral language (as noted by Gough and Hillinger, e.g., comprehending thousands of spoken words and sentences made up of those words) simply by being in a context where they hear and use the oral language. Instruction is rarely required, but obviously modeling and feedback contribute to oral language development.
In contrast, although being in a context where they see and are able to use print helps children develop reading skills, this alone is insufficient for acquiring functional reading skills equivalent to the oral language skills acquired by being in an oral-language-speaking context.
There are certainly documented cases of children in print-rich, or at least print-friendly, contexts who read early or seem to learn to read “naturally.” But to my knowledge there is no evidence that exposure to print and opportunities to use it will, alone, typically enable children to read and comprehend thousands of written words and sentences made up of those words, in a way that is comparable to what they can comprehend orally when in a context where they hear and use oral language.
The differences are not because understanding oral language is more “natural” than understanding written language. The difference has to do with making sense of written language— reading—is more challenging to learn because it is less intuitive. Neuroscience provides a very plausible explanation for why this is so.
Notes/Links
1. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED155621.pdf
2. www.jstor.org/stable/23769975
3. https://literacyresearchcommons.org
4. www.jstor-org.stanford.idm.oclc.org/stable/177651?seq=1
5. www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/09/05/219236801/when-did human-speech-evolve
6. www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/language-in-the mind/201502/how-old-is-language
7. www.worldhistory.org/writing/#google_vignette
8. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Interface_Between_the_Written_and_th/TepXQMN6lfUC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Goody,+Jack.+(1987).+The+Interface+Between+the+Written+and+the+Oral.+Cambridge+University+Press.&pg=PR8&printsec=frontcover
9. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-esc-culturalanthropology/chapter/language/#:~:text=All%20human%20cultures%20have%20not,from%20one%20culture%20to%20another
10. https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/whats-difference-between-speech-and-writing
11. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6467219/
Claude Goldenberg is Nomellini and Olivier Professor of Education, emeritus, in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. A native of Argentina, his areas of research and professional interest have centered on promoting academic achievement among language-minority children and youth. Prior to Stanford, Goldenberg was professor of teacher education, associate dean of the College of Education, and executive director of the Center for Language Minority Education and Research (CLMER) at California State University, Long Beach.
He has taught junior high school in San Antonio, Texas, and first grade in a bilingual elementary school in the Los Angeles area. He co-authored Promoting Academic Achievement among English Learners: A Guide to the Research (with Rhoda Coleman; Corwin, 2010) and was co-editor of Language and Literacy Development in Bilingual Settings (with Aydin Durgunoglu; Guilford, 2011). He was on the National Research Council’s Committee for the Prevention of Early Reading Difficulties in Young Children and on the National Literacy Panel, which synthesized research on literacy development among language-minority children and youth.
This article and many more are available at https://claudegoldenberg.substack.com.