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Kenneth Anderson teaches law at American University, Washington D.C.
What is it about teaching reading that arouses such
passions in Americans?
Shall we have phonics or whole language or both? Why
this debate should
be so vehement in the political arena is not immediately
obvious. Nor is it
obvious why the issue is so important that George W.
Bush, for example,
has been running television ads prominently featuring
phonics, as though it
were a topic as central to the presidency as social
security, taxation, trade
with China or nuclear weapons. One answer is simply that
Americans are
anxious about the primary skill necessary for their
children's success. This
anxiety requires a dispassionate answer to the critical
question: How can
schools best teach reading?
More than 15 years worth of books, articles and learned
studies have
sought to declare peace in the reading wars between
various instructional
techniques, most notably phonics (which teaches
word-decoding skills
before textual meaning) and whole language (which
emphasizes textual
meaning). No peace is forthcoming, however. The reading
wars, it is clear,
are waged not on the front of technique alone but as
part of the culture
wars in which traditional versus progressive pedagogy,
and the values they
embody, are at odds in America's schools.
In the political arena, it would be fair to say that
phonics is winning.
California is the leading edge of the movement, but the
rest of the country is
not far behind. Implementation is, however, another
story entirely. Much of
the educational establishment has fought, and continues
to fight, a
rear-guard action to preserve whole language pedagogy,
mostly by
changing the names of programs without changing their
substance and
partly out of a commitment to the ideal of progressive
education.
Though any generalization does a disservice to the
complexity of the issues,
those who favor traditional values in education tend to
favor phonics
instruction, and those who favor progressive, or
child-centered, values in
education tend to favor whole language. But it is also
true that many of
those who favor phonics on the basis of its
effectiveness as a teaching
tool—especially some research scientists—are
relatively indifferent to the
larger values at issue and may have no sympathy with the
idea of
"traditional" education at all. Nor do they necessarily
have any desire to be
associated with the religious conservatives who strongly
supported the
back-to-phonics movement more than a decade ago.
The movement for a return to phonics simmered for many
years among
those philosophically opposed to what they perceived as
the lack of
discipline in whole language pedagogy; as early as the
1970s, too, a few
academics were growing skeptical of whole language
claims of reading
outcomes and achievement. The movement gained momentum
in
mainstream America in the last 15 years, however,
especially among
parents and especially in California, where whole
language was widely
perceived by the public to have been responsible for a
sharp downturn in
reading scores even among middle-class, suburban, native
English-speaking students. A causal relationship between
whole language
and reading score declines was insisted on by some
researchers and
sharply disputed by others, but by the late 1990s,
legislators had
responded in California and many other states with
mandates to teach or
emphasize phonics.
Winners or losers notwithstanding, the passions will not
go away, and
Maureen Stout's "The Feel-Good Curriculum," a scathing
polemical survey
of where American education stands today on the question
of which values
are central to the education of children, helps us
understand why. Hers is a
story that addresses the values of progressive education
in America's
public schools that have been championed during the last
100 years. Stout
chronicles the triumph of the "therapeutic" in American
schools, a trend that
focuses more on how the child feels than on what he or
she has learned,
which, during the last 20 years has crystallized as the
self-esteem
movement in schools. The ideological centerpiece of that
movement, as
Stout documents with great thoroughness and sharp
criticism, is that
self-esteem precedes achievement and is something that
can and ought to
be instilled independent of achievement.
Much ink has been spilled attacking and defending this
view, especially in
California. Though the self-esteem movement has lost
much of its initial
public acceptance and become something of a joke, it
remains
institutionalized in the schools. Its central
assumptions lie at the center of
the reading wars. Whole language pedagogy incarnates,
within one specific
part of the curriculum, the self-esteem model and
progressive education.
Stout, drawing on John Dewey's classic formulation in
"Experience and
Education" (1938), writes that it is characterized by
the "cultivation of
individuality, free activity as opposed to external
discipline, learning from
experience rather than from texts and teachers,
acquiring skills that are
deemed relevant to the individual at the present time
rather than preparing
for some unknown future, and becoming acquainted with
the world rather
than learning through static aims and old materials."
Within the dominant structure of progressive education,
phonics is
regarded as the polar opposite of whole language; it is
rigid, authoritarian
and fanatically concerned with the acquisition of skills
such as spelling.
Phonics is seen as deeply anti-democratic, and its
critics, defenders of
whole language, find it inconsistent with the abstract
values of progressive
education.
Indeed, one can detect such tones, for example, in a
recent Washington
Post editorial offering guarded congratulations to the
home-schooled,
religiously conservative children who took several top
places in both the
national spelling bee and national geography competition
a few weeks ago.
Of course these children excelled at spelling words such
as "apotropaic,"
the editorial seemed to say, because rote training,
mindless memorization
and obedience to authority are what their traditional
education (including,
naturally, phonics) is good for.
Progressively schooled children may not spell well, but
they do have
democratic, multicultural values. Or as Stout correctly
observes: "Until very
recently anyone who ventured to suggest that phonics is
still the best
foundation for teaching reading was regarded as
ill-informed or
worse—uncaring."
But the nature of the debate is changing, partly as
phonics advocates have
won the political wars and partly as scientists, who are
understanding how
written language is actually acquired, have de-coupled
the "effectiveness"
debate from the "values" debate. Today the debate over
reading pedagogy
has fractured into three main strands. First, there are
those seeking to split
the differences between methodologies and declare peace
in the reading
wars by accepting that all reading methods are important
and should
coexist in the classroom. Second, there are whole
language advocates,
down but not out, alternating between strategies of
defending whole
language on the grounds of progressive education,
"caringness" and
democratic values, on the one hand, and attacking the
scientific claims of
phonics-oriented researchers on the other. Third, there
are phonics
advocates, who understand that they have politically and
intellectually won
the war with whole language supporters but who must now
confront the
difficult and uncertain task of finding the best phonics
pedagogy to
consolidate their victory.
Ultimately, the most important and exciting debate in
the reading wars
today is not between phonics and whole language but
instead within the
phonics movement, as it struggles to create practices
that will make
phonics a tool of reading success rather than simply
another forlorn
experiment in American education.
Nowhere is the anxiety over reading pedagogy more
evident, despite an
attempt to bury it beneath the surface, than in the
long-awaited report of
the National Reading Panel, "Teaching Children to Read,"
released just a
few weeks ago.
Established by Congress in 1997 to undertake a
comprehensive review of
research on how best to teach reading to children in
America, the panel,
organized under the auspices of the National Institute
of Child Health and
Human Development of the National Institutes of Health,
consisted of 14
individuals drawn from leading scientists in reading
research,
representatives of colleges of education, reading
teachers, educational
administrators and parents. The resulting review of the
research literature is
the most comprehensive and rigorous to date—rigorous in
no small part
because it accepted only studies using standard social
science quantitative
design criteria.
Notwithstanding its methodological rigor, the panel was
structured to give a
place to all viewpoints and political constituencies in
the perennial debate
over reading pedagogy. The panel divided its review work
into topics. The
most important and politically fraught, not
surprisingly, was the argument
between phonics and whole language. Other topics
included newer
questions, such as the training of teachers and the use
of technology in
teaching reading.
The result of the political structure of the
panel—despite its close
association with the National Institute of Child Health
and Human
Development, a long-time funder of phonics-favorable
research—is a
report that is anodyne, bureaucratic, soothing and
cautious. Product of
committee and consensus decision-making, the report
attempts to pour oil
on troubled pedagogical waters but is largely unable to
reach conclusions
that are plain and robust enough to serve as foundations
for public policy.
Everything is endorsed and nothing is rejected, an "I'm
OK—You're OK"
report on reading pedagogy. Phonics is deemed critically
important, as is
the ability to apply whole language strategies to
"enhance understanding
and enjoyment of what children read." The report gives
the impression of
having been written one paragraph by one political
faction, the next by
another, with each sentence negotiated phrase by phrase;
a corporate
lawyer would instantly recognize the genre. Congress
might have done
better to have asked the panel to determine which
methods of reading do
not work or which work less well than others, in order
to force a priority of
methodologies.
Nevertheless, amid the decorous congratulations offered
to virtually all
reading methods, there is a faint but crucial ordering
of the pedagogies.
Phonemic awareness skills (the ability to "manipulate
the sounds that make
up spoken language") and phonics skills (understanding
that there are
"relationships between letters and sounds") are given a
marginally greater
endorsement than other methods. Phonemic awareness is
deemed
"essential"; the research review showed that "teaching
phonemic awareness
to children significantly improves their reading more
than instruction that
lacks any attention to it ."
Phonics strategies for reading must instill two skills:
one, the ability to
decode a word on the page and the ability to say a word
and then spell it.
In English, this is particularly difficult. The sound of
"read," for example, is
pronounced with a long E or short E, depending purely on
the intended
tense, and no amount of phonics rules will remedy that.
The spelling of
homophones (words that sound alike but have different
meanings such as
"wait" and "weight") depends ultimately on their usage.
Given the
orthographic ambiguity of written English and phonics'
inability to sort out
when "too" is "too" and not "two," it is no wonder that
educators threw up
their hands and turned to a whole language approach,
believing that the
promise of consistent mapping rules was a cruel hoax on
children. Yet it
does appear that contemporary phonics systems radically
reduce the
indeterminacy of the written language.
It is one thing to talk about reading and another to
talk about teaching
reading. Reading has no point if it is merely decoding
without
comprehension. The issue is whether the priority in
teaching reading, in the
initial stage of formal reading instruction, especially
in the first grade, should
be the teaching of phonemic awareness and phonics skills
that, in the view
of phonics instruction advocates, make reading and then
reading with
comprehension possible in the first place. This
unavoidably pits individual
word-decoding skills against the comprehension of a
whole text, at least in
the initial stages of instruction. It is a competition
that book after book,
seeking to declare peace in the reading wars, tries to
make go away but
without success, because although it is a truism that
reading requires both,
the teaching of reading inevitably begins by giving one
priority over the
other.
On this issue, the report does the public a great
disservice, first by
pretending such prioritizing does not exist and next by
wrapping itself in
contradictory platitudes about the benefits of
"systematic" phonics
instruction while simultaneously warning against making
systematic
phonics, for example, the "dominant" force in the
first-grade classroom.
Moreover, the struggle between phonics and whole
language cannot be
simply resolved, as some people might wish, by
announcing that they can
coexist within a classroom. This norm, seen as the best
of both worlds
which schools are moving to adopt as a means of
responding to political
pressure for phonics, is a mistake. Phonics and whole
language proceed
from fundamentally different assumptions, and each
claims priority on the
attentions of the first-grade teacher and reader.
"Mixed" is a recipe for the
worst of both worlds, not the best; one pedagogy is
inevitably primary and
the other secondary in the classroom, and it matters
profoundly which one
chooses as the priority for a particular grade and age.
Any reading
program necessarily does choose, and we would be better
off if the report
had said so.
The one clear conclusion that the report reaches—and it
is not
insignificant—is that without some phonics instruction,
whole language
pedagogy is not enough. Indeed, the report finds the
characteristics of
phonemic awareness training "most effective in
enhancing" reading and
spelling skills, "included explicitly and systematically
teaching children to
manipulate phonemes." Italics added.
Having reached these conclusions, however, the report
promptly qualifies
them. It cautions that intensive, systematic
phonics—the kind that parents
are wont to demand—may not be a good idea. In
particular, according to
the report, allowing phonics to become the "dominant
component" of
reading instruction, particularly in the first grade,
may be an especially bad
idea if it is at the expense of reading activities that
focus, for instance, on
meaning.
After praising the systematic and explicit teaching of
phonemic awareness,
the report then endorses exactly its opposite: "embedded
phonics
instruction," whole language pedagogy in which phonics
is supposedly
taught but only "implicitly," not systematically and,
many observers would
say, in reality not at all. Everything, seemingly, is a
pretty good method of
teaching reading if it has a powerful constituency
behind it.
Still, press coverage of the report showed that the
media were able to
grasp its modest preference for phonics. Education Week,
for example,
headlined its story "Reading Panel Urges Phonics For All
in K-6," and
numerous editorial pages around the country cited the
report as an
endorsement of systematic phonics to the irritation of
leading whole
language advocates, such as Cathy Roller of the
International Reading
Assn., who correctly pointed out the many passages in
the report that
favored whole language. One member of the National
Reading Panel, an
elementary school principal, felt compelled to issue a
minority report
essentially criticizing the panel for taking the side of
phonics over whole
language.
Whole language pedagogy has profound problems, however,
that not even
the soothing language of the report can make go away,
not least of which is
that the theories of written language acquisition on
which it is premised
appear to be wrong. Whole language theories of how
children learn to read
and write begin with the developmental assumption that
just as children are
neurologically wired for spoken language, they are
similarly hard-wired for
reading and writing. Reading, then, is a natural process
that ordinary
children will painlessly acquire without explicit
instruction, without
systematic training but instead, for example, by reading
aloud and being
read to, so-called "guided reading." Advocates of whole
language
emphasize that whole language makes reading inviting and
fun because it
begins with real stories and real characters. It draws
beginning readers into
the joy of reading, rather than numbing them into
inattention and
unmotivated boredom with the excruciatingly artificial
non-stories of the
phonics primers of the past. Whole language is able to
favor the fun and
joy of reading from the very beginning, it is argued,
because it starts from
the assumption that learning to read and write, being
natural proclivities of
children, requires no arduous intellectual discipline.
Despite all the public debate and parental clamor for
phonics instruction in
America's schools, whole language remains dogma in the
nation's graduate
education schools; it is what the educational
establishment in America still
wants to believe is the most effective strategy. At the
first-grade orientation
meeting just a year ago at my daughter's fancy, trendy
private school, I
listened in astonishment as the first-grade
teachers—many of them recent,
top-ranked graduates of some of the country's most
prestigious schools of
education—informed parents that reading is a natural
developmental
process that would unfold all on its own, in its own way
and time. Children
would teach themselves to read, without explicit or
systematic instruction,
in a process as natural, we were told, as "teeth coming
in."
I am not aware of any neurolinguist who holds this view.
I doubt any have
held it in decades. The consensus among scientists is
closer to what the
well-known cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinker has
written: "Language
is a human instinct, but written language is not.
Language is found in all
societies, present and past. . . . All healthy children
master their own
language without lessons or corrections. When children
are thrown
together without a usable language, they invent one of
their own. Compare
all this with writing. Writing systems have been
invented a small number of
times in history. . . . Until recently, most children
never learned to read or
write; even with today's universal education, many
children struggle and
fail. A group of children is no more likely to invent an
alphabet than it is to
invent the internal combustion engine. Children are
wired for sound, but
print is an optional accessory that must be
painstakingly bolted on. This
basic fact about human nature should be the starting
point for any
discussion of how to teach our children to read and
write."
One wonders what the report would have said had it been
written not by a
mixed group of educators, teachers, administrators,
parents and scientists
but instead by a group of neurolinguists. Would it have
caviled quite so
much on the question of whether phonics or whole
language is the correct
approach, or whether phonics instruction should be
systematic and
explicit?
It does seem likely, however, that a pedagogy based on
hard science
would begin from assumptions far different than those of
whole language. It
has no doubt been disconcerting for the advocates of
whole language
instruction to find that over the last decade, the
better part of expert and
scientific opinion has moved against them.
Partisans of whole language pedagogy, dedicated
educators to be sure,
have been fighting a rear-guard battle, based upon the
view that children
are not developmentally equipped for the discipline
required by phonics
instruction in the first grade and that the far greater
risk to children's
ultimate ability to read is—in a world in which reading
must compete with
television, video games and a thousand other
entertainments—boredom and
the inability to see the point of phonics drills.
Typically there is resistance
to the mandates to teach phonics issued by state
legislatures and state
boards of education. Though California is a leader among
states in the
revival of phonics, the effective consolidation of
phonics is still a long way
off and requires overcoming both the genuine
difficulties in promulgating a
new and demanding curriculum and the passive resistance
of many
educators. The easiest path is to teach whole language
and call it phonics.
Meanwhile some voices have emerged to defend whole
language
pedagogy publicly and unapologetically; one of the most
well-known is the
educational psychologist Gerald Coles.
"Defender of whole language pedagogy" is not a
characterization Coles
would always have accepted. In a 1998 book, "Reading
Lessons," Coles
rejected as inadequate the battle between phonics and
whole language.
Instead, he argued, the real issues in teaching reading
transcend the mere
pedagogy used in the classroom and are best understood
in terms of race,
equality and inequality of income and political economy
and political
power. As a consequence, "Reading Lessons" gives brief
histories of the
phonics and whole language pedagogy only to dismiss them
both in favor
of a broad discussion about poverty and money in
education. As "Reading
Lessons" says, drawing on the work of Soviet
psychologist Lev Vygotsky
and his followers:
Coles' argument is actually an argument for school
choice, vouchers and
other funds "strapped on" to students so that even the
poor might have
some part of the choices available to the rich, although
this is something the
progressive Coles would recoil from. Even without
driving toward
conclusions he would find politically untoward, however,
Coles' arguments
run the risk of promoting quiescence and passivity: If
improving the state of
reading education requires massive social changes, then
why try to do
anything as minor as seeking the best pedagogy for
teaching reading in
individual classrooms and schools?
Perhaps sensing the force of such objections, Coles has
retreated to the
robust defense of whole language pedagogy. In "Reading
Lessons," he
argued that the very debate between phonics and whole
language was
sterile; today he has become an intellectual spokesman
for whole language.
His new book, "Misreading Reading," is a crisp salvo
fired across the bow
of neurolinguists and other scientists who back phonics
instruction and the
research sponsored by the National Institute of Child
Health and Human
Development. The research is, in his view, very bad
science, and his
"Misreading Reading" is, in essence, a handbook for
whole language
educators looking for materials with which to debate
parents and others
calling for phonics instruction. It has summaries,
charts and diagrams
which, the publisher points out, can "serve many
possible uses—including
'talking points,' handouts or overheads for
presentations."
But in attacking science that supports phonics, Coles
comes perilously
close to endorsing the whole language myth that reading
and writing are
"natural."
"Whole language maintains that children's motivation for
learning written
language is similar to that which impelled their
learning of oral language: the
desire to make meaning in order to participate and
communicate within a
community of language users. Just as their making of and
communicating
with oral meaning was the overarching orchestration that
promoted their
pronunciation of words, use of words to identify
multiple objects, stringing
words into sentences, syntax, and vocabulary
development, and so forth,
making of and communicating with written meaning has
similar effects."
It is hard to imagine Pinker agreeing. Coles has fatally
conflated what
Pinker called the "language instinct" in humans for oral
language with a
"desire" to learn how to read and write. They could not
be more different.
One is a biological imperative for members of our
species; the other a
contingent social construct that has appeared only
fitfully in our history,
socially created and inculcated into children with great
effort and frequent
failure.
Still, Coles is content most of the time to reconceive
whole language
pedagogy as the modest proposition that students ought
to understand
what they read. He tells us that whole language has
suffered from numerous
misconceptions in the public mind, including the "belief
that whole language
teachers simply create a print-rich environment and then
let children
intuitively learn to read." On the contrary, Coles says,
whole language
pedagogy—citing its advocate Regie Routman—"teaches
the 'basics', but in
meaningful literary contexts; provides explicit
instruction when students'
needs and interests require it; provides rigorous
teaching with high
expectations; and is greatly concerned with learning
outcomes."
In the last few years, to be sure, the definition of
whole language has
changed to fit today's changed political environment.
Perhaps what Coles
writes is now true; under intense political pressure
whole language has
rehabilitated itself as "phonics with a happy face," an
non-controversial
pedagogy which accepts direct instruction, the "basics"
and even the notion
that children ought eventually to learn to read books
without having to
resort to illustrations to provide context. Who could
possibly object to this
reformed version of whole language—the prettified
version that figures
throughout the report—now shorn of any theoretical
pretension other than
"understanding is good"?
But many people would disagree with him. Many would say
that the
practice of whole language continues to eschew both the
"basics" and
explicit instruction, still provides little teaching
other than "guided reading,"
promotes by default the memorization of whole words in
lieu of learning
how to decode individual words and writes off the many
children who do
not learn to read under whole language methodology as
having learning
disabilities.
But ultimately, a rehabilitated theory of whole language
instruction is
irrelevant. The only real issue for whole language (or
any other pedagogy)
is whether it should have pride of place in a national
curriculum or—even
more radically—be the sole pedagogical method for
teaching reading
without having to assert a theory of how written
language is acquired.
Phonics has such a theory. Whole language had one for
decades, but it is
now intellectually discredited, and Coles is among the
few sophisticated
writers willing to defend even a modest version of it.
But if all that survives
of whole language pedagogy is that children should learn
to comprehend
what they read, then whole language loses any
distinctive pedagogical claim
and becomes secondary to the method which has an
explicit and
scientifically plausible account of how children acquire
written language.
After all, what made whole language intellectually
distinctive was not only
its "reading is natural" assumption but also its
argument that phonics,
formal rules for decoding words, do not have to be
taught. Whole language
is a pedagogical theory that excommunicates phonics as
unnecessary.
Of course, to the extent consistent with the priority of
learning decoding
skills, phonemic awareness and phonics skills should be
taught in a context
that is interesting and stimulating, with real
literature that invites
understanding. Children who do not come from print-rich
and literate
environments, who have no reason to think that reading
is important to
them and whose parents do not read to them need the
invitation of exciting,
imaginative literature to give them a reason to do the
harder work of
phonics instruction. Particularly among children from
deprived homes, the
classroom will have to make explicit the connection
between the discipline
of phonics and its eventual results in the joy and
necessity of reading that
other children will discover at home.
One of the peculiarities of whole language pedagogy is
that it takes informal
reading, which committed parents have always done with
their children,
and puts it at the center of the classroom experience,
while abandoning (to
parents, if to anyone at all) the systematic and
explicit instruction in
phonics that the classroom is far better able to deliver
than parents. A
justification for this curious inversion has been that
because so many
parents no longer undertake reading activities,
preferring to fetishize the
television rather than the book, the school must take
over that function too.
This is an unfortunate trend but not a reason for
schools to drop what they
can do best.
The rest of "Misreading Reading" is a detailed
discussion of the scientific
studies on phonics. Coles is not impressed; he argues
that it is bad science
that has been misused in public policy, pointing out
that there is a history of
phonics-oriented researchers overselling their results,
with the media
leveraging the oversell even higher. He is right to
emphasize, as he did in
"Reading Lessons," that no mere reading pedagogy will
overcome the
effects of poverty and deprivation in the reading lives
of poor children. Yet
though he has read widely and pondered details, he is
finally not
persuasive. He is useful and talented as a critic but
does not extend his
critical review of the literature to the findings made
by researchers favoring
whole language, which are even more extravagant in their
conclusions and
much weaker in their methodologies than phonics-favoring
research.
Coles seems to think that weaknesses and gaps in the
scientific studies
backing phonics instruction ought to cause a retreat to
whole language; this
does not follow. Still, he makes an important point that
within the phonics
movement, there is wide variance in theories, teaching
methods and
instructional materials and that not all of them are
likely to be good, let
alone the best. Leaving aside those who will continue to
teach whole
language while calling it embedded phonics, there are
many serious
questions about how best to teach phonics. There is no
agreement on how
to systematize, for purposes of first-grade instruction
especially, the
components of phonemic awareness and phonics skills.
Phonics has won
the intellectual debate with whole language, but that
does not mean that the
best method of phonics instruction is clear.
Nor is it clear that the way phonics was taught in the
past is the best way
to teach it today. Conservative educators ought to be
cautious in
announcing, as Diane Ravitch once did, that success in
reading means
abandoning the failed methods of whole language and
using instead
"time-tested instructional methods in reading." Research
is more likely to
point toward instructional methods that are
unambiguously
phonics-centered yet differ significantly from those of
the past. Schools
will not be saved by resurrecting the 19th century
McGuffey Readers.
The stakes in this search for method are enormously
high. Phonics
instruction works best as one-on-one instruction by
teachers, but there are
few teachers who know how to teach phonics using any
established
system. The shift to phonics requires retraining a whole
generation of
teachers without clear maps to guide them. Critics such
as Coles await,
and teachers unions, never greatly interested in direct
instruction, will be
eager to pronounce failure and call for a return to less
strenuous pedagogy.
Given the uncertainties, perhaps the most important
thing that can be said
today is that phonics instruction should be systematic,
explicit
and—contrary to the report—intensive. A great many
books offering
systems for teaching phonics have appeared in recent
years, and they vary
greatly. One that is comprehensively argued but still
pitched to parents and
non-technically trained educators is Diane McGuinness'
"Why Our
Children Can't Read," with a foreword by Pinker
expressing his views on
the differences between spoken and written language
acquisition by
children. Its aims are not modest.
The first section examines writing systems across a wide
variety of cultures
and societies to show why "children easily become
confused about our
writing system and fail to learn to read and spell." It
provides an analysis of
what McGuinness calls the "alphabet code," how the
sounds of the English
language are "mapped" to its alphabet. It examines the
scientific literature
and relays how a child might effectively learn to deploy
the alphabet code
in reading and spelling, skills which McGuinness
concludes "are highly
trainable" with systematic instruction. Finally, it
applies these findings to
pedagogy and sets out both a model program for classroom
or home use
and for remedial work with children who have difficulty
reading. The final
chapter addresses itself to parents seeking to either
avoid reading problems
altogether or remedy ones that exist.
"Why Our Children Can't Read" is not a book mired in the
past. One of its
most interesting parts is an analysis of what's wrong
with Noah Webster's
hoary 18th century "The American Speller," which has
provided the
template for numerous contemporary phonics methods.
McGuinness'
discussion of Webster's errors provides an insight into
what she thinks is
critical to phonemic instruction: "The Speller itself
consisted of word lists of
increasing complexity and syllable length. . . . Rather
than organizing the
lists by sounds (phonemes) in the language, Webster
decided to do this by
letters, word families, and syllable lengths, set out
alphabetically. In some
ways this is understandable, because it is hard to
represent 'sounds' in
print. . . . What happened as a result of Webster's
emphasis was that the
sounds of the language . . . got lost."
As a result, according to McGuinness, the problem with
traditional
phonics classrooms is that the "alphabet is taught
entirely from letter to
sound, which destroys the logic of the alphabet code. .
. . There are
diametrically opposing ways to teach 'sounds.' One way,
traditional
'phonics,' is to teach 'the sounds of letters.' The
other way, which doesn't
yet have a name, teaches the 'sounds of the language'
and how those
sounds are mapped to letters. Misunderstanding this
fundamental difference
has been the major cause of failure of reading programs
probably well
before Webster. In this century, it has been the cause
of the endless
flip-flops between whole-word methods and phonics."
McGuinness' critique of traditional methods of teaching
phonics—that they
invert the logic of mapping the sounds of a language to
its letters—is a
powerful way to understand the limitations of the many
phonics instruction
systems which do not start from the sounds of the
language. One persistent
error, in McGuinness' view—and a central feature of
many programs
aspiring to be pure phonics as well as many unsystematic
phonics-whole
language programs (and one phonics method endorsed by
the report)—is
teaching "analogies" or "word families" or, more
technically, "rimes." This
system ("The Cat in the Hat" was based on one) often
teaches rhyming
words. For instance, if the child can learn to recognize
and sound out the
letters UNCH, then the words "bunch," "hunch" and
"lunch" can be more
easily deciphered. The problem with this very common way
of teaching
phonics, McGuinness says, is that "children are taught,
or led to believe,
that these letter sequences are only one sound." This
means that if they are
taught UNCH, they may have difficulty understanding
similar sounding
endings like ENCH ("bench"), ANCH ("ranch") and even
AUNCH
("launch") because they learned UNCH as one unit or one
"sound."
" E ach word family or rime has to be taught one at a
time," McGuinness
writes, "but there are 1,260 possible rhyming endings in
English. Even if
teaching rimes was an efficient way to teach spelling
patterns (which it
isn't), phonics programs never teach more than a
fraction of them."
Her point, of course, is that UNCH is not one sound.
Fully decoded, it has
three; leaving aside technically accurate
representations of the sounds, they
are variations of U, N and CH. Full comprehension of the
alphabet code
requires training children to hear and decode those
smaller units, and mere
rhyming cannot do this.
Another popular strategy in current phonics programs
emphasizes that
"longer words can be broken up into smaller words or
word fragments."
Having discovered various letter patterns, a child may
then attempt to read
longer words by breaking up words into one or another
smaller words or
fragments, hoping by trial and error that one of them
will sound familiar and
so indicate the word being read. The child who
undertakes this phonics
strategy is described as a "part word assembler," and
McGuinness
observes that when he "reads 'hated', he sees 'hat',
'ate' and 'ted', and so
he reads 'hat-ate-ted.' He also knows he isn't reading
real words. He is
hoping that what he reads will sound similar to a real
word so that he can
figure it out. He tries different options."
Part word assembly is a phonics strategy, to be
sure—just not a very good
one. It depends crucially on guessing, and sometimes it
works; sometimes
it doesn't.
McGuinness' candid and extensive criticisms of existing
phonics programs
are her most valuable contribution. The case that
McGuinness makes for
starting with the sounds of the language rather than the
older
alphabet-based systems, including Webster's and his
numerous inheritors,
is persuasive and increasingly accepted. One sees a
growing number of
instructional systems broadly sharing this approach.
But, as she points out,
this is not enough by itself. A successful system must
teach children the
smallest units of sound in the language, the phonemes
themselves. Anything
short of that—as the examples above show—will be
phonics and yet will
ultimately be unsuccessful in teaching reading and
spelling.
McGuinness believes that starting by teaching language
sounds, and not
alphabet systems, carries a further profound consequence
for phonics. In
her view, phonics programs should start with those
smallest sounds of
language; starting instead with combinations of those
sounds—rimes or
syllables, for example—will undercut a child's ability
ultimately to learn the
phonemes themselves. McGuinness is adamant that 'mixed'
classroom
methodologies must be avoided. They encourage children
to memorize
whole words, a practice that gets more difficult, if not
impossible, as more
and more words are taught. She insists children must be
steered away from
this practice if they are to learn how to decode words
using phonemes.
"Children are unaware of phonemes in speech, and it is
easier for them to
become aware of syllables or whole words. If a child can
only hear words
or syllables, he or she won't understand how to use our
writing system. For
this reason, no reading method should ever teach
children to read whole
words, syllables, or syllable parts like 'rimes.' These
are the wrong sensory
units for our writing system. . . . Children must be
trained from the start to
become aware of the individual phonemes in speech. The
earlier this is
done, the easier it will be for a child to learn to
read."
"Why Our Children Can't Read" is not without its
controversies and
weaknesses. McGuinness overstates matters, for example,
when she
argues that dyslexia is not a "causal" diagnosis but
simply a description. She
says, repeatedly, that what is called dyslexia is
nothing more than bad
instructional methods and that teaching the alphabet
code would cause the
problem to disappear in toto. The hard science on that
issue does not
permit a firm conclusion, as Coles correctly points out
in "Misreading
Reading," although McGuinness is surely right that it
has become the label
of choice when whole language programs fail children. An
honest observer
must admit, however, that dyslexia will regrettably
become the explanation
when one system or another of phonics, whether badly
designed or badly
implemented, fails children. Faced with a diagnosis of
dyslexia or, more
generally, a learning disability, too many parents fail
to ask the school an
important question: "Well, what, exactly, did you teach
my child?" (Parents
who can afford remedial tutoring would be well-advised,
before accepting
a diagnosis of dyslexia in an otherwise normal child, to
read McGuinness'
chapters on remediation and work with a competent tutor
using a method
that systematically teaches the full alphabet code, from
sound to alphabet,
building up from the level of individual phoneme.)
The risks of today's passion for phonics instruction are
threefold. First, as
McGuinness demonstrates, phonics as currently
disseminated is by no
means as effective as it could be and, in some cases, is
probably not
effective at all. Second, the phonics movement risks
promising more than it
can realistically hope to deliver, especially to poor
children. (Phonics
systems such as Open Court, for example, have delivered
promising results
thus far in disadvantaged school districts, such as the
Inglewood Unified
School District in L.A. County, but it is much too early
to extrapolate
anything but hope from those preliminary samples. An
equally important
test of phonics as a curriculum will come in
California's suburban
middle-class schools, where the slide in reading scores
has also been
serious.) Third, critics such as Coles are right to say
that no mere curricular
reform by itself can compensate for the effects of
deprivation on poor
children. Phonics risks selling itself as a panacea for
poverty.
Reading is both an acquired taste and an acquired skill.
Taste is fed by
skill, and skill requires discipline in acquisition and
discipline in teaching.
Discipline is at issue in the reading wars; those who
insist on seeing the
reading debate as more than merely a matter of the most
effective
pedagogy and instead as something as personal as one's
values, are not
wrong. One pedagogy requires intellectual discipline as
a condition for
learning, while the other denies that this discipline is
necessary and sees it
as harmful to young minds. Yet as McGuinness makes
clear, discipline is
pointless unless used in a technically effective manner,
and we must learn
how to teach the sounds of the language as an alphabet
code that will give
children the tools necessary to read, write and spell.
The National Reading Panel, for its part, has done the
public no favor by
bestowing its blessing indiscriminately on reading
programs that are
fundamentally at odds with one another and by refusing
to recognize that,
when reading philosophies are radically, structurally
opposed, one will
necessarily assume priority over the other in the
classroom. Coles and his
colleagues in the education establishment may believe
that the debate is still
between "flexible, democratic, and creative" whole
language and "rigid,
authoritarian, and mindless" phonics, but for the rest
of us, the facts of the
world and human nature teach that a measure of
intellectual
discipline—sometimes rigid, sometimes authoritarian,
sometimes even
mindless—is no bad thing, and that in teaching the
young to read, it turns
out, is a very necessary thing.
The National Right to Read Foundation
The National Right to Read Foundation is a 501(c)(3) publicly supported organization.
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