Ken Goodman - Biography

Biography

After publishing an influential book on the subject, 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 children rules ("phonics") 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.