Interview with William Labov

[...]the Varbrul program which made logistic regression generally available to people back in 1969, was a major technical advance for data analysis [this was developed by D. Sankoff and others, currently available as Goldvarb: http://individual. utoronto.ca/tagliamonte/goldvarb.htm]. [...]what I found out when I was a member of the National Research Council Committee for the Prevention of Reading Difculties in Young Children was that feeling better about yourself and your language does not help you learn to read. [...]in emphasizing these decodable stories that are dealing with the same problems that people have in everyday life, we are drawing from the whole language approach their essential idea, which is thats what reading is all about. Theres evidence to suggest that it should be the other way round, that exceptions come last. Because the most important thing is for the child to get condence in the alphabet, and the existence of regular symbol-to-sound patterns. Kara Beckers data in New York (Becker, 2010) shows a retreat from all the extreme values of the classic New York City English variables, the raised /aw/ is being lowered, the // tensing pattern is being restructured in the direction of a nasal system [i.e., the vowel is tensed and raised before nasal consonants, but not elsewhere].