March 28, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Bad impression of `Impressions’

The dissatisfaction of school officials, parents and teachers in the Bangor area with the learning-to-read textbooks called “Impressions” has come to my attention (BDN, Dec. 7). Their discontent with these basal readers appears to have been focused on objectionable content in the stories in these books.

I believe from my studies of Impressions that there is a far more serious weakness in this series. This fault lies in the unsystematic, indirect, incidental, and non-intensive manner in which these books teach children to recognize written words. Impressions assumes, wrongly, that there is no preferred sequence of word recognition skills that should be taught. Beyond this, it erroneously contends that all reading skills must be learned simultaneously, that children should guess wildly at the identity of written words, and that great latitude must be allowed pupils in deciding what authors intended to say. There can be no valid critical reading, of course, unless the reader comprehends exactly what an author wished to communicate.

Taken together, these and other shortcomings of Impressions constitute an open invitation to disaster in reading instruction. The lessons in Impressions, incredibly enough, direct children to “read” sentences before they are taught how to recognize the individual words in these sentences. This series never justifies how such an impossible feat could be accomplished.

The experimental research in reading corroborates the commonsense objections that can be made of Impressions. This empirical evidence suggests that the “whole language” plan for teaching reading that is used by Impressions is unlikely to produce the greatest reading achievement among young children that it is possible to obtain. Impressions thus presents a substandard method of teaching children to read. Patrick Groff, professor School of Teacher Education San Diego State University


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