I have heard that Whole Language was not adopted with good scientific evidence. You may have a point there. However, a lot of the “evidence” cited for the effectiveness of phonics-based programs is also flawed or dishonest. I just did a paper for my Master’s about how the famous Foorman study in Texas: the researchers first touted the “miraculous” results without releasing the actual data, then they shrank the sample size before publishing their peer-reviewed article. For more details about this, see G. Coles, Misreading reading:the bad science that hurts children, and especially D. Taylor, Beginning to read and the spin doctors of science.
As for positive self-image not being important to learning – what studies are you citing??? That totally goes against my experience as a teacher.
Accorrding to the US Department of Education, during phonics instruction’s prime (1970’s), illiteracy rates were at 33%. In the 1980’s when whole language was in it’s prime illiteracy rates were at 43%. In 1993 they were 42%.
Some might say that phonics is better, but in my opinion 33% illiteracy is just as unacceptable as 43%. As a public school teacher, I feel that we focus too hard on trying to find the magic bullet that will get ALL kids reading. If we could reform education in such a way that would allow teachers to critically assess what works for each individual child, and then provide teachers with the appropriate supports to do so, we could close the gap as a nation.
Someone earlier mentioned that there isn’t enough science being taught in schools. I would tend to agree. Now I do not have specific studies in front of me to back up what I am about to say, I know for a fact that studies exist that suggest hands-on, inquiry-based science instruction improves overall student achievement. I have pages of bibliographies somewhere to support this. Try this: http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/techbib.htm
Piggybacking on this, I’d like to add that the reason we are losing critical instruction in science (and social studies for that matter) is because legislators spend billions forcing public school districts to improve reading, writing and math scores or risk losing funding (see the NoChild Left Behind Act of 2001 http://www.ed.gov/offices/OESE/esea/ ). But that’s another rant for another day. Long story short, school districts are scrambling to obey government mandates and something inevitably suffers (i.e. art, music, science).
We need to be asking ourselves what kind of schools we want our kids attending, because apathy breeds drop-out rates and according to this study ( http://www.consortium-chicago.org/publications/p0a02.html ) only about 25% of students find school work meaningful.
It seems to me that when we read, as adults, we use a variety of prediction/recognition methods. When we encounter a word we aren’t familiar with, we use phonetics to figure out how to pronounce it. It seems that phonics is the basis for learning how to read new words, and a connection is then bridged to a more “whole language” approach.
Why the debate on this issue? How could one concept possibly be “passe”?
This doesn’t seem correct. According to this, the illiteracy rate in the U.S was around 10% in the 40’s, and fell to almost unmeasurable levels in the 90’s. According to this, the overall illiteracy rate in the U.S. and Canada is about 1%.
I’m another liberal who believes in phonics. I learned to read in the early '60s. If I recall correctly, we were taught that letters and certain letter combinations represent sounds. Then we were taught that there are words that are exceptions to those rules and we had to also learn those exceptions. I’m not sure if this is considered pure phonics or a combination of phonics and whole language but phonics was certainly the largest part of it. And it definitely worked. I was tested as reading at a college level while still in grade school. These were tests of comprehension, not just “sounding it out”. The idea, as I see it, is that “sounding it out” is the first step towards comprehension. You can try to skip it, and it may even work for a while but eventually limitations will become apparent. I don’t understand how people think that they can get by without the ability to “sound it out”. What happens when you encounter new words? What happens if you decide to go for a degree in biology and start encountering scads of words like “cilium”, “mitochondria”, and “intracellular”? Do you think the professors are going to spend a lot of time teaching you how to read your field’s jargon?
How can you have any hope of correctly pronouncing anything but the most common last names?
What do you do in Spanish 101?
I don’t see why this is a conservative or liberal issue. It’s common sense that letters represent sounds.
As I understand it, and I think I read this in Sykes’ Dumbing Down Our Kids, people studying adult reading habits observed that the eye movements of adult readers indicate that they don’t read by letters but take in whole words or whole phrases and move on. The idea, therefore, of the whole language method is to skip teaching the breakdown of words and go straight to teaching the absorption of words whole. The six thousand dollar question is whether the breakdown of words is an essential step up to the ability to read words whole, or if it can be usefully done away with.
At least one of the ways that whole language theorists try to skip the phonic stage of reading is by creating repetitive readers like Dick and Jane to teach whole word reading by repeatedly exposing students to the same words until they can read them as an adult does just by looking at them. This strikes me as problematic because it doesn’t really skip a step, it simply substitutes a harder learning curve for an easier one. Furthermore, it leaves students without phonics to fall back on when dealing with unfamiliar words.
I invite you to attempt to pronounce those words by sounding them out.
I’m pretty sure I was taught using a combination of methods. But there are still words that, while I know exactly what they mean when I read them, I have no idea how to pronounce.
As a slight aside, I’ve often thought that English was such a peculiarly difficult language to read because it draws from so many root sources, most notably Germanic and Romance but also many others. I wonder if it might not help kids to learn English if they learn a variety of other languages (and how they relate to English) at the same time.
Thank you for this link. My original information came from a book entited “Reading Reflex” by Carmen and Geoffrey McGuinness. It is a book teaching teachers how to use a phonetic approach to teaching reading. I can’t tell you how happy I am to see your link. It just goes to show you that “research” can be manipulated to sell just about anything. Many of the programs out there, that curriculum companies are trying to sell, are based on in-house research. Bush’s plan advocated using research-based best practices (which is a good thing). The problem with the legislation is that it does not allow for the inevitability of misrepresentation. The research should be empirical and independent. It isn’t always.
This is as appropriate a place as any to say: I’ve never, ever seen a rule one can use in knowing a priori how to pronounce the sound represented in a word by “ch”. Is it ‘k’ or is it ‘ch’? I thought I had it once, but then it seems that ‘character’ and ‘char’ undermine every effort I put forward.
I have no qualifications that would allow me to participate otherwise.
No “scientific studies” are mentioned here. It seems that “some psychologists” are just stating their opinion. Unless you can name a real study, published in a peer-reviewed journal, that says self-esteem doesn’t matter, I’m taking this with a grain of salt.
Well, not per se . It is very popular amoung the “home schoolers” and parochial schools, and is used by the religious right to attack the established educational lobby (as seen by the bogus illiteracy stats that Lady Avalon got from a pro-phonics book). (That was interesting, incidentally- throw out a good bogus “fact”, and dudes will use it to support their postion so much that the fact will lose it’s origin. Kinda like the “fact” that the key placement on typewriters was designed to slow typists down- spread by the supporters of the Dvorak keyboard).
It has been my experience here in CA that teachers are very resistant to teaching PURE phonics, and in fact I know some who roll their eyes whenever the commercials come on TV or the subject is brought up. See, many of the supporters of Phonics are “true beleivers”, and thus believe 100% in a 100% pure phonics system. Many of the educators I know do support phonics- as part of a mixed system of teaching- but that is not what the “true believers” mean when they say “Phonics”- they mean a 100% pure phonics system.
Perhaps thats part of what attracts some of the “religous right” to supporing phonics- they LIKE a “true believer” system.
That’s not the point. Even if you’re not certain of the correct pronounciation you can make some educated guesses if you know phonics. Then when you hear them in class you can probably make the connection. Certainly this method isn’t 100% effective but you have a much better chance then you would if you treat whole words as symbols with no smaller parts.
You can also look them up in a dictionary and use the pronounciation key. But when you do that you’re using phonics.
I find it interesting that you connect Dick and Jane to whole language. I was taught phonics but I absolutely remeber Dick and Jane. “See Dick run. Run Dick run!” Maybe I was taught by a mixed method?
My 12-year-old little brother’s public school didn’t use phonics, and unfortunatley, his reading ability isn’t that great. When he’s presented with a word he doesn’t know, instead of sounding it out (which he was never taught to do), he just inserts another similar-looking word in its place. Many times, he doesn’t even know that he’s making a mistake.
Also, someone brought up the Japanese writing system. It’s true that kids just memorize kanji and their associated meanings. But, it should also be pointed out that kids here can generally not read a newspaper until they are 13-15 years old. Also, there are no tonal inconsistancies whatsoever in the Japanese language. There are no exceptions in pronounciation.
English, however, is riddled with paradoxical prounciations and exceptions to rules. I wholeheartedly advocate phonics to help chldren deal with and understand our messy language.
The article refers to research done by Brad Bushman and others. Here is one on violence and self esteem: Baumeister, R. F., Bushman, B. J., & Campbell, W. K. (2000). Self-esteem, narcissism, and aggression: Does violence result from low self-esteem or from threatened egotism? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9, 26-29.
Here is a link to Jennifer Crocker who is quoted in the article as well. She has quite an impressive collection of refereed articles.
Not only is this based on questionable information about the origins of the Dick and Jane readers, as davidm mentions, it is also based on an erronenous (though common) assumption regarding how phonics relates to whole language teaching. The common assumption seems to be that whole language instruction automatically cuts out any phonics instruction.
A fuller knowledge of whole language shows this to be inaccurate. Any effective whole language instruction has to include some phonics, for many of the reasons already cited. Here’s one educator’s views as to how that can be done. There are many others.
As I said before, the point of whole language is not to find the magic method that works for all students… such a thing does not exist. The point of whole language is to incorporate as many of the necessary elements of reading, including phonics and word recognition, to best meet the needs of individual students. Assuming that whole language automatically rules out phonics instruction is simply incorrect.
