ABSTRACT
Historians of science are very interested in famous “doubles,” cases in which two independent workers appear to have come up with very similar breakthroughs at about the same time. Famous cases include the discovery of calculus (Newton & Leibnitz) and evolution (Darwin & Wallace). For language and literacy education, our famous double is the hypothesis that we “learn to read by reading,” presented to the world by both Kenneth Goodman and Frank Smith in the 1960s. (Many of Goodman’s works, including earlier papers, are collected in Flurkey & Xu, 2003; see also the collection in Smith, 1972, for early statements of this hypothesis.) The Goodman/Smith Hypothesis claims that we do not learn to read by first learning to isolate sounds, then learning to pronounce letters, then pronounce words, and then move on to larger units. Rather, we learn to read by making sense of what is on the page, and our knowledge of phonemic awareness, phonics, and the ability to read lists of words in isolation is the result of learning to read by reading.
