Ken Goodman

Kenneth Goodman (December 23, 1927 - March 12, 2020) was Professor Emeritus, Language Reading and Culture, at the University of Arizona. He is best known for developing the theory underlying the literacy philosophy of whole language. Goodman began teaching at Wayne State University in 1962. His research focused on reading in public schools. While at Wayne State University, Goodman developed miscue analysis, a process of assessing students' reading comprehension based on samples of oral reading. One of his research assistants in miscue analysis was Rudine Sims Bishop. Goodman taught at Wayne State University for 15 years before moving to the University of Arizona. After publishing an influential book on the subject of whole language, Goodman began to create a psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic model of reading inspired by the work of Noam Chomsky. Goodman decided that the process of reading was similar to the process of learning a language as conceptualized by Chomsky, and that literacy developed naturally as a consequence of experiences with print, just as language ability developed naturally as a consequence of experiences with language. Goodman concluded that attempts to teach rules ("phonics") to children for decoding words were inappropriate and not likely to succeed. After developing and researching the Whole Language model, Goodman presented his work to the American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference and published an article in the Journal of the Reading Specialist, in which he famously wrote that reading is a "psycholinguistic guessing game." He retired from the University of Arizona in August 1998. Goodman's concept of written language development views it as parallel to oral language development. Goodman's theory was a basis for the whole language movement, which was further developed by Yetta Goodman, Regie Routman, Frank Smith and others. His concept of reading as an analogue to language development has been studied by brain researchers such as Sally Shaywitz, who rejected the theory on the grounds that reading does not develop naturally in the absence of instruction.