Just a comment, really. I worked with a fellow who had great difficulty reading “new” words. I thought he was bordering on illiterate and had suffered from the edu-fad of “social promotion” to get through school. However, I realized that he had been taught to read using “whole language” when I overheard a conversation about his Pontiac Parisienne. He pronounced it “Parseghian” which would have made Ara Parseghian the second Notre Dame football coach to get a car named after him. (Studebaker had a subsidiary named for Knute Rockne from 1931 to 1934.)
And the column is Does the “Whole Language” approach to reading work?.
All I can say about the subject, is that I learned both. A kid has to learn to love reading, and learning to read will follow. However, you’ve still got to be able to communicate with others, which means things like actually being able to pronounce new words.
I’ve had a similar experience to the OP. I think the whole language revolution must have happened just after I was done learning to read, because I know tons of people who can’t seem to pronounce words, and they all seem to be in their mid-twenties. Cecil is right that phonics won’t help much for some really small English words - “the” is a great example, but for most large words, sounding out will put you on the right track.
On the whole I think a combination of the approaches would be best, but I think a steady diet of whole language leaves the student worse off than a steady diet of phonics. There is a whole class of mispronunciations I blame on whole language - when people invert syllables, or add or subtract letters, I tend to think they are simply not looking at all the letters.
Mispronunciation is related, sometimes, to misreading. Independence … interdependence - not the same word at all - how would a whole language person distinguish them. Context? That sounds dicey … “the nations of Europe were characterized by in(ter)dependence” … what does the context dictate there? The rest of the paragraph could help, but why rely on that?
What? Considered, intelligent replies? No obscenity? People agreeing with me, more or less? I’ve been hanging out at the wrong boards!
Yes, a combination of approaches would be best. Any idea why people have to see everything in black and white, investing so much of themselves in a single answer that they cannot see how other theories would augment, not destroy, their answer? Not just in reading, but that seems to hold true in all facets of life!
As Cecil says, this is an old controversy.
I can remember when “Why Johnny Can’t Read” by Rudolph Flesch was a popular expose of “whole language,” way back in the 1950’s! Fortunately I was taught to sound out words in the Bronx school system in the late 1940’s. Nothing I have read since then has revised my negative opinion ov the whole language approach.
What I’ve been waiting for: The opportunity to post my completely uninformed opinion on the whole-language debate.
I think than any one of us who is an avid reader uses whole language. So the goal in teaching children to read is in the end, whole language. The problem with phonics is that some number of people who learn phonics never move on to whole language. Sure they can “read”, but not well, being practically illiterate since they never read if they can help it.
So, the answer the educators came up with was teach whole language first. The goal of whole language instruction is to teach you to recognize the words by themselves, not by their phoenetic components. Hence, encouraging students to “infer” (not guess!) the unknown words, and then by repetition learning to recognize the word.
But is whole language by itself enough?
You might think you know the answer, but if you think its “no”, you’re wrong. There are several very successful cultures where whole language is all that is taught because the written form is not phoenetically based! Chinese, Japanese, Korean.
On the other hand, phoenetics can be useful as a tool in languages whose written form maps to the phoenemes (which English does, of course, but not consistently, unfortunately). So, what do I conclude: 10% phoenetics, 90% whole language.
I learned to read in 1st grade, 1962-63, the old “Dick and Jane” series. Phoenetics was part of what I learned, and learning to read was slow at first. Judging by my grades for the first two semesters, I was only average. But then something clicked. I started reading whole language. Silent reading was an “of course”. (Think about it, whole language makes silent reading obvious.) I zoomed through the 1st grade books and was onto 2nd and 3rd grade on the shelves because I had learned that reading was a joy.
So, what do I want my kids to learn? Whole language.
I think wong is absolutely on the right track. The little flodnaks are bilingual in English and Norwegian. Our older son learned to read Norwegian at a Montessori pre-school. Now, Dr. Montessori was Italian, and Italian orthography is very regular. So the reading system she worked out for the children at her first school ended up being very much phonics-based. Older Son’s teachers taught him to read Norwegian that way, and it works for Norwegian, sort of. But then he wanted to learn to read English, and he was stuck. Sounding out words took too long and often didn’t help anyway. I taught him some of the tricks I’d learned as a kid, which I realize now are part of whole language, and he started reading English in a couple of weeks. Not only that but his Norwegian reading skills improved.
Now, any tips to get the kid to stop reading? At least when he’s walking down the stairs?
I taught English for many years in public schools and found, just as other people say, that an awful lot of people don’t know how to read – or write, for that matter. For one thing, you’re all saying “the whole language method,” whereas the correct name as I learned it is “the whole word method.” As far as English is concerned, it reduces to an absurdity, meaning we have several million “whole words” to learn, like the ideographs used in Chinese, for example. Doesn’t it seem a lot easier to begin with just 26 letters and learn how they combine, even though English is not really a good phonetically spelled language. Is it surprising to hear that Polish and other Slavic languages are perfectly phonetically spelled?
Two things: First, I read that Korean is widely considered to be one of the most nearly perfect phonetic languages, and everything I can find on the web shows it to be a phonetic alphabet, not pictograms.
And Second, I learned a lot of things the “old-fashioned” way. I learned arithmetic by drilling with flash cards and by memorizing multiplication tables, and I learned to read words I didn’t know by sounding them out. I love reading, and I love mathematics. So claims that those approaches teach kids to hate those subjects are completely ridiculous in my eyes.
All the new teaching methods seem to want to gain the end while not using any means. You can’t expect a kid to learn to read if he doesn’t learn the alphabet and the sounds the letters make together. Seems to me that this “whole language” approach neglects the benefits of having a phonetic alphabet. Does this mean that all the people over the centuries who learned phonetically are inadequate readers? I wonder if Shakespeare was aware that he didn’t fully grasp the langugage. hmmm…
Anyway, I tend to be skeptical of any “new” approach that claims to reach a goal of learning without emphasizing basic skills. Imagine a football coach taking a “whole game” approach to training his players instead of running drills and 2-a-days…Imagine a boxer who doesn’t know how to shadowbox and doesn’t train on a punching bag because he has a “whole fight” trainer. Do you know why there are none? Because if you don’t drill basic skills, you SUCK at the whole game, whole fight, and whole language.
Joe Kool and I are on the same side. We’ve also neglected “change for the sake of change” that occupies eager beavers in all fields, but most disruptively in the field of education. After all, what works, works, right?
Consider this a testimonial for the whole language approach to reading.
My daughter, now 9 years old, started reading in the UK in P1. They started her out with the whole language approach. Having been trained phoenetically myself, I was somewhat skeptical (and even concerned) by this approach. At first, I saw all kinds of problems with the holistic method. For instance, she was unable to distinguish between the single word ‘policeman’ and the two words ‘police car’. There were other similar examples. However, I noticed that, for the most part she was reading simple books pretty well, within only a few weeks of starting. This was amazing to me, so I decided to give it a chance. After the first year of reading and getting the students’ interest high, they came back and started training phoenetically. All in all, I’m quite pleased with the results of the hybrid approach. My daughter, when she was tested last year in 3rd grade, was reading at an 8th grade level and she loves to read!
What’s P1? I mean, where is it in relation to the A4 or the M5? Is it bigger than an L1?
To throw a bone to whole language here (not that it need me to defend it): Cecil’s description of it sounds a whole lot like a systematized version of “read to your kids, and get them to help you out.”
Honestly, how many of us learned to read because there were books around and we were read to a lot? I started reading more or less on my own at about 2 and a half and, while I’m sure there was some phonics involved in sounding words out, most of it was seeing the printed words in various books and associating them with the sounds and meanings of the words.
Of course, I’m also of the opinion that if your kids areen’t reading by kindergarten, there must be something wrong with the parents, so I may be way out there. (And let’s see if I still believe that in two or three years – my own son is just about two and a half now…)
I, for one, don’t remember ever learning to read. My parents often read to me, and by three I had memorized several of the repetitive children’s books I had. I could turn the pages and recite the words after looking at the picture. In kindergarten we learned phonetic pronounciation. I knew what letters corresponded to what sounds already because of Sesame Street. (I love that show!) I began to put what we learned together with what I memorized. It worked. Now, I think that when I read, I tend to recognize the “whole word.” I can often tell what I word is by it’s “shape” without actually registering every letter. I suppose this comes with a lot of repitition. So I agree that “whole words” are the desired result, but I think it’s essential the phonics play a part, an early part, in the process.
I mentioned that I learned both… Come to think of it, though, my older sister, at first, at least, learned pretty much soley the by the “whole language” method (mostly self-taught, I think). She was fine with children’s books, where she knew most of the words, but when she tried to read a newspaper article, she had to ask “What’s that word” several times a sentence. Upon seeing this, my parentsmade sure to teach me how to sound out words when needed, much though I hated doing it the slow way. The net result is that the first time I encounter a new word, I sound it out, and thereafter, I recognize it as a whole word. This still causes problems when a new word looks a lot like an old one, or there isn’t enough context, or I don’t consider a word new. I think I was in the sixth grade before I realized that the chip company wasn’t called “Fruit-Layo”, for instance, and I’ve misread quite a number of usernames here, not having the context for them (for instance, TheThrill instead of TheThill, or FreekFeely for FreekFreely). On the other hand, if I just sounded out every word, every time, it’d take me forever to read anything.
Oops! Sorry Boris - old habit. ‘P’ stands for ‘primary’. They don’t have a kindergarten - the kids start off in “Primary 1”. It is functionally similar to kindergarten in the US, in terms of age and academia, except not much finger painting…
So imagine that your kids can read a dozen or so books by the time they finish kindergarten… that’s effectively what we found in the UK with their reading program (or is it programme)…
My main complaint with “whole language” is that it does not allow kids to branch out and read on their own. They need an adult to explain the words they can’t puzzle out, and there are always words they can’t puzzle out. With phonetic skills a child is much more capable of randomly picking up a book that is much too hard for them, full of completly unfamiliar words, and getting sucked into it. That is how I learned to love reading.
Of course, whole language techniques are important–once you have learned to puzzle out the sounds of an unfamiliar word you often have to figure out the meaning of it from context. However, when the hybrid phonetic/whole language approach is used one can then learn copmpletly new words just from reading–it is possible to learn words no adult has ever spoken in your presence, and to recognize those words if they are spoken around you. I think it leads to a quicker mastery of both written and spoken language because your written and your spoken vocabularies are interchangeable-if you learn a word one way you can immediatly use it in the other way.
Slightly off topic, Chinese charecters have many phonetic components, and Japanese Konji is a completly phonetic system, with each charecter standing for a sylable. Mayan has turned out to be phonetic–it is beginning to look like all written languages are.
Manda JO:
On the contrary. The “whole language” method encourages the kids to simply make a guess, based on context, for words they don’t immediately recognize. That’s actually a pretty interesting feature and a cool part of the process. I listened to my kid reading aloud and I noticed on several occasions that the first time she would come to a word she might make an incorrect guess, but later she saw the word in a slightly different context and guessed it right - not only that, but she remembered that she had guessed wrong earlier in the text and she made a mental note that made it much less likely that she would repeat her earlier mistake. As I said she could read a dozen or so books proficiently by the end of Primary 1 (kindergarten) and would attempt a lot more. In fact, she would even pick up copies of Scientific American or Guitar Player Magazine that we had laying around the house and make pretty decent attempts to read those.
The anti-theory is that sounding out words is a slow process that takes the joy out of the story. Often, for tough words, the kid still fails to figure it out without coaching and by that time they’ve lost the train of thought in the story line and have no hope of retention of what they were reading.
Me too. Believe me I was a huge skeptic and even went so far as to talk with the head mistress at our kid’s school to discuss my concerns. She explained the process and discussed comparative results in detail, which made me feel a bit more comfortable about it. Since there was really nothing I could do about it, I just sat back and watched… figuring that I would intervene personally and teach my daughter phoenetically if I didn’t see adequate progress. Much to my surprise, the alternate approach showed fantastic results and my daughter loves to read even more than I ever did.
Of course, there’s no way to truely assess whether it was due to the “whole language” approach or excellent motivation from the teachers or just natural ability and desire from my daughter… probably a combination of all three. I can’t say that this is some sort of miracle cure for illiteracy, but I can say for sure that it’s not a detrimental learning method.
Dozens of books? That’s all? If a kid learns to read properly (however that is), there’s no reason, once you start to read, to not be able to read millions of books.
Chronos, how many kindergarteners do you know who have read millions of books? How many do you know who have read hundreds of books? How many do you know that read the same book 200 times in a row?
The reason they only might read dozens of books by end of 1 year is they are kids. Time. They like to run and play and crawl and jump as much as sit and read.
Back when I was in first grade we had reading contests. I seem to recall reading 60 books was excellent, and a few people read 100 to 120 books, or so.