The Silenced Voices of Evidence: Enunciation and the Rhetoric of the 'Science of Reading

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of the epistemological and enunciative presuppositions that organize the conceptions of reading in Linnea Ehri's (2020) article The Science of Learning to Read Words: A Case for Systematic Phonics Instruction, examining how Ehri produces effects of universality and neutrality by erasing the historical and theoretical inscription of her perspective. The article assumes that every epistemological perspective is situated, including the one adopted here. The analysis is relevant to the Brazilian debate because the National Report on Evidence-Based Literacy (RENABE) reproduces the mechanisms identified in Ehri's text. The objective is to examine how Ehri constructs this authority by treating her conceptions of reading, the learning subject, and learning as universal and neutral without announcing them as presuppositions. To this end, a qualitative analysis of epistemological and enunciative orientation is carried out, centered on the linguistic materiality of the article, with attention to the erasure of the enunciating subject, the management of other voices, and the effects of evidence. The results show how these mechanisms converge toward a single effect whereby a situated perspective comes to circulate as a natural description of what science would have revealed about the learning of reading, sustaining the authority of the label "science of reading" in the educational debate. It is concluded that the articulation between epistemological critique and enunciation theory constitutes a productive instrument for analyzing scientific discourses that present theoretical and methodological choices as neutral descriptions of reality.