I think both have their place but if it had to be either/or, I’d choose phonics in a heartbeat. That’s how I learned to read and it has served me well.
On the other hand, when my (now adult) son was in grade school back in the 80’s, public schools here in WA state were experimenting with whole language, and it was a disaster. An entire generation of kids grew up struggling to read.
Luckily my son had already learned to read in pre-school, and when he started first grade, he had a very good teacher who integrated both systems, and her class did pretty well.
Re: The O/P - There has indeed been a “raging debate” about phonics for decades. With the Left-wing “liberal” types being against it and those who believe in “Right-wing” education arguing it is essential to knowing the code to be able to work out the words, even those that aren’t actually real words. It is considered especially good for children who don’t naturally take to reading like a duck to pancakes. Also, some claim early on, it is too confusing to mix and match methods (but fine when they are up and running).
Pardon my questions, being an almost entirely ignorant person on this topic, although I did learn phonics as a kid:
What is this “whole language” thing about - just brute memorization? So you learn how to pronounce “slop” and “slope” just be memorizing it, as opposed to learning the rules about what having an E does to convert that O-sound into something different? Isn’t that much harder?
I’m no expert … but whole language seems to come from the idea that children use clues from other parts of the text, and looking at word as a whole, to help link to their existing knowledge of words. Most children can of course speak many more words than they can read … whole language gets children to look at the pictures, think of the context of the word and try to “guess” what the word is.
an example: … child sees the word “house” … they are reading a book about animals with pictures of animals … does it make sense for “house” to be there … or “horse”?
I’m heavily on the phonics side (synthetic phonics not just simple sounding out) as, long term I hate the thought of someone coming across a word and “guessing” … guessing the meaning makes sense (we all do that!) … but an attempt to break words into parts, pronounce those parts and then make an informed attempt based on that seems way more logical for me. The child should see the letters in the word “horse” and be able to use the sounds … because one day there will not be a picture of a horse to use as the clue and will be out of context: eg “horseradish” !!!
“Bicentennial” was a word I was teaching a group of 12 year olds who had NOT been taught phonics … they were unable to pronounce it or have any idea of its meaning (they could all spell it as it was on the spelling list they were being tested on!!!). Using knowledge of breaking words into parts, knowing what “bi” can mean “cent” etc seems to create a pathway to understanding for me.
One of the reasons it is a huge debate is that how much time is spent teaching teachers which method to use. I’ve just finished an education degree at a university that promotes whole language … most of my fellow students don’t even realise they have ONLY been taught to teach children using whole language. There was NO phonics instruction (mentioned once in a lecture!) and when I asked questions about phonics I was told by my lecturer that she would not teach at a school if they had a phonics program. Given that phonics has been shown to be more effective at teaching children to read … that’s a pretty huge thing that one of the top universities for teaching in the world rankings, does not even instruct their teachers to be able to use phonics.
Money spent on resources in a school system is also a big debate: which “system” to use? What professional development training money is used for? What resources are available? Who makes those choices? Who is to blame when children can’t read?
I’ve been a teacher for 28 years. When I went to college, the push was on Whole Language. The rationale behind it was that there had previously been a heavy emphasis on phonics instruction, to the exclusion of any other word attack strategies. Proponents argued that there was not enough emphasis on words in context and that reading is not simply “word calling”. I guess that the argument was that schools were producing readers that were simply “word callers”, and that reading comprehension lacked as a result. The pendulum swung to the other end of the spectrum, and educators were pretty much asked to ignore teaching phonics.
With the NCLB act in 2002, things began changing again. The mandates were rolled out slowly over several years, allowing schools to come into compliance gradually. Under NCLB, the “5 essential components of Reading” were stressed (phonemic awareness, phonics, oral reading fluency, vocabulary development, and reading comprehension strategies). Instructional practices had to be researched based. Under NCLB, high stakes testing really came into play. Schools had to meet AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) based on standardized test scores, and under-performing schools were at risk of being closed (we had one here).
The approach to reading instruction now is definitely more balanced, however the emphasis is far too great on standardized test, imo. Instruction is fast paced, with much attention to breadth and far too little attention to depth, but that’s a whole other conversation.
The Whole Language vs. Phonics debate has been dead among teachers for a long time where I live. I didn’t realize this was still debated elsewhere. Interesting.
I learned on a phonics-based system at a Montessori School. The problem isn’t that English is mostly exceptions. It’s simply that there are a lot of rules. I remember learning one sound for every letter, and then like 50 rules for why they might sound differently. These were still rules, however–this pattern corresponded to this sound.
Of course, with the Montessori Method, you have one-on-one teaching with lessons that build as they go, and you don’t move on until you learn. The lesson may even be repeated. This is mostly because it was first designed for “slower” children, which obviously may move at a slower pace. But it worked for other children, too.
The flaw, of course, is that they had one way of teaching a given lesson, and so some kids could get stuck–though I don’t recall that ever happening to any kid I knew. Everyone was able to do the more advanced stuff by at least third grade–copying sentences from the board and fixing them.
To be clear, whole language doesn’t suggest that if you stare at words long enough, you’ll magically decipher them. Whole language includes phonetic instruction as part of the whole. It also emphasizes understanding meaning.
For example, a kid reads this sentence, with an unfamiliar fourth word:
Yesterday, I threw a ball at a window.
Phonics instruction tells the child that “ew” can make the sound /oo/ or long /o/ (forgive my imprecise pronunciation key). The child doesn’t know, from that, what to do.
Whole language asks the child to look at the word “Yesterday” for a clue: it indicates that the word should be in the past tense. The child uses this clue to determine the correct word.
In addition to vocabulary clues, a child may look at grammatical structures (“I walked through the forest” requires an /oo/ instead of long /o/ sound in order to read the word “through” as a preposition instead of as an infinitive verb). The beginning reader also studies story structures (who are the characters? what is the setting? what is the problem? what is the solution?), nonfiction text structures (sequencing, comparison/contrast, cause/effect, descriptive, etc.), and other linguistic traits of writing.
If you’ve ever worked with a kid who can read a paragraph with no errors but cannot answer questions about the paragraph to save her life, you’ve seen the need for whole language approach. If you’ve ever worked with a kid who can barely stumble his way through a reading passage, but during read-alouds has beautiful insights into character motivations, you’ve seen the need for a phonics approach.
Different approaches bear fruit with different kids.
In the two school districts I’ve had kids in (one kid born in 1993, the other in 2005), it meant that we got a list of “sight words” sent home each week that the kid had to memorize with flash cards. The words held no commonalities that I could discern. I know there were sight words in Pre-K until First Grade; I can’t remember if they continued after that.
When writing, the kids were told not to worry about spelling. They were expected to spell their “sight words” correctly, and…then came the real problem. What to do with the words that weren’t sight words? They were told just to make them up the best they could and not worry about it. But they didn’t have any real training in phonics to do that with. All they had was some very basic instruction on letter sounds. So there were some real headscratchers as a result, and we as parents were specifically and *emphatically *forbidden from telling them how to spell a word or correcting their spelling. The rationale given was that the teachers wanted them to get used to writing their ideas, and that getting hung up on spelling would slow them down and stifle the creative process. We were assured that the kids would get to be good spellers at some later undefined date by some other unspecified method, and we should just wait and be patient.
This is whole language done poorly, IMO–or else done with ideological rigor, which I think is synonymous* with poorly.
The good part: yes, when writing, kids shouldn’t get hung up on spelling. Walk into a classroom of young children where they do, and you’ll see a bunch of hands in the air and eyes staring at teacher while they wait on how to spell each word. No matter how many times I’ve told them to do the best they can and to use their strategies and to move on, I still have kids who worry too much about spelling, and as a result get a half a sentence written in the time that other kids write a page.
And no, when you’re reading their writing, getting out the red pen and circling every misspelled word is not a good approach for young children. They need to be able to convey ideas with enthusiasm, if you want them to be prolific and competent writers.
The bad part: the unspecified spelling instruction. Kids need to learn patterns and conventions. This instruction should be systematic, and it should take place alongside higher-level-conceptual thinking. Thus I teach my kids how to write letters to city council, letters that focus on a single issue (put speed bumps on Morton Street, for example) and back up their request with multiple reasons and with evidence to support those reasons.
At the same time that I teach them how to organize and buttress their reasons, I also teach them about indenting, and I stinkeye kids who don’t start sentences with capitals, and I make kids redo the letter if they aren’t using the spelling patterns we’ve learned (“Come on, Jill, ‘walkt’ isn’t how you spell that word.”)
Phonics without conceptual understanding of writing is dry and detached, and even if it worked for some of the posters here, it doesn’t work for a lot of kids. Conceptual understanding without phonics is loose and sloppy, and it also doesn’t work for a lot of folks.
You’ve got to have both.
Holy crap, for a word game I’ve been trying for years to think of a word besides “yoyos” or “yays” with “yys” in that order. “Synonymous”!
I don’t have an easy answer. But I have some complicated ones.
In general, explicitly teaching story elements can help with fiction. You can create a worksheet using SCEPS (Setting, Character, Events, Problem, Solution), and ask a kid to complete it after reading a very short, 1-2 page, story. (I’d give you one, but I’m still drinking coffee and am sleepy). Encourage the kid to go back and reread if they’re having trouble determining the setting; work with the kid a couple of times if they’re struggling with the task.
The goal is to get to the point where the kid retells a story using these elements, something like this:
It’s not a perfect summary, because it adheres rigidly to a structure instead of being more naturalistic; but for a kid whose summary is like this:
it’s a real improvement.
Another structure is “Somebody Wanted But So Then” Tell the story that way:
Nonfiction is harder. Work on main idea on a paragraph level; encourage looking at titles and headers.
But this isn’t something with an easy fix. It’s something that teachers spend years working with kids on, with varying degrees of success.
Half the fun of reading essays by young kids is seeing how they spell words. More often than not, there is a beautifully innocent logic behind their “mistakes”!
Reading over a child’s shoulder as she wrote about a festival she’d been to, I whispered, “Honey, when you write about ‘funk music,’ ‘funk’ is spelled with an ‘n’, not a ‘c’.”
It’s been that way for a long time. I think it all stems from the old hippies of the sixties. You know the sort who spout gobbledegook when blathering on about trendy education. You know the sort that don’t believe in streaming, grammar schools, rote learning, learnings facts, firm disciple, competence in using grammar correctly etc.
The Right-wingers tend to take the opposite view. They wouldn’t be content with the masses leaving school misusing grammar like a British professional footballer.
Just yesterday, I had a student write that people who watch birds might be “inchsing” in birds. We talked about it, and she got it changed to “inchsid.” Reviewed rules about suffixes, got it to “inchsted.”
I never did figure out how to convey “interested” to her from a phonics perspective. She, like most of us, doesn’t pronounce the second syllable, slurring the “t” and “r” together, and that slur usually has a /ch/ sound. Her spelling was phonetically pretty on point.
This is another place where whole language comes in: if you read a shit-ton, you tend to start recognizing some words and becoming familiar with them.
Yup. On the one hand you have the dirty potsmokers who want to destroy America, and on the other hand you have the rationalists who take pride in education. Spoken like someone who’s really studied the issue and understands the complexities of literacy education. Thanks for your valuable insight!