Never a psycholinguist
"Am I still a psycholinguist?" self-questioning Janet C. Richards, Professor of Literacy, University of Southern Mississippi, in an article on Phonics Bulletin, publication of the IRA’s phonics group.
Confessions of a Psycholinguist
by Janet C. Richards
Professor of Literacy
University of Southern MississippiI never thought I would compose a short article for a newsletter entitled The Phonics Bulletin. As my students and colleagues know, I am a psycholinguist. My convictions are secure, firm, and air tight. Concepts like multiple literacies, integrated instruction, and transmediation are music to my ears. Not many of my peers have even heard me say the words “skills” or “phonics.” In fact, a super-intendent of a school district near my university recently said, “I know there is a professor at USM who doesn’t teach phonics.” (He meant me.)
Don’t worry, Dr. Richards, you never were.
Psycholinguists are just who you think they are — nerdy psychologists and/or linguistics trying to figure out how humans (and non-humans) produce and comprehen language. Some of them use reading as a convenient proxy of language, but when it comes to teaching children to read, most of them know as much as your next door neighbor does (of course, they’d never admit that).
Dr. Richards uses the term psycholinguist to identify with the Whole Language movement, a system of beliefs and practices about reading acquisition. The unconventional use of the term came from Ken Goodman’s early conceptulization of reading as a "psycholinguistic guessing game", the idea that children (and adults) actively predict the up coming words, and that reading is a process of hypothesis testing.
There is no doubt that some predictions go on in reading, but evidence amassed in the past 3 decades is clear that conscious, strategic hypothesis testing is not characteristic of skilled, normal reading. Teaching children to stop and predict what comes next is often advocated as a pedagogy to improve comprehension, although it’s effectiveness is not obvious as its facevalue.
Even if the reader does play the psycholinguistic guessing game in reading, it still doesn’t make Dr. Richards a psycholinguist. The reader is.