Thread by @TheReadingApe

Whole word reading instruction was rooted in Cattell’s (1886) research. He carried out a series of laboratory studies at Wundt University in Germany utilising tachistoscopic techniques which measured eye fixation times on letters and words (Rayner et al., 2012).

https://twitter.com/MicheleCaracapp/status/1379935077094850566

Cattell (1886) discovered that in ten milliseconds a reader could apprehend equally well three or four unrelated letters, two unrelated words, or a short sentence of four words - approximately twenty-four letters (Anderson and Dearborn, 1952).

The generalisation advanced from this outcome was that words and sentences are easier to read than letters. This resulted in the deduction that humans do not read words by the serial decoding of individual letters but read whole words in their entirety.

However, he carried out his experiments on fluent readers with highly developed orthographic processing. In other words, they could already read.Thus, nearly all instruction in the 20thC was dominated by the precept that as words are read as wholes they must be taught as wholes.

Gates' (1927) research - despite a laughably tiny sample size (25) and heavily biased language, and being the only research study in the whole of the 20thC where participants outperform pupils taught using a code-based approach (Chall, 1965) concluded:

‘That it will be the part of wisdom to curtail the use of phonics instruction in the first grade very greatly, is strongly implied; indeed, it is not improbable that it should be eliminated entirely…’ (1927:226).It wouldn't have mattered...

...except that his position at the University of Columbia endowed him with significant authority, both in terms of research profile and instruction of trainee teachers, and his concepts gained impetus over the century – he was inducted into The Reading Hall of Fame in 1978.

Perhaps a salutary lesson in the necessity of viewing cumulative research. As Chall (1967) concluded:

‘Most children…are taught to read by…a meaning emphasis method. Yet the research from 1912 to 1965 indicates that a code-emphasis method -one that views beginning reading as essentially different from mature reading – produces better results…’ (1967: 307).