Comparing whole language and phonetics methods for elementary reading instruction

¶ … Language and Phonetics Teaching Methods to Determine Which Is the Most Effective for Teaching Reading to Elementary Students

Participants

Method that will be used

Across the nation Americans are demanding new and better methods for the education of their children. One of the most important skills that is taught is the skill of reading. This paper will presents a study proposal to determine what the best method to teach reading is. The paper will open with an introduction to the importance of the skill of reading and the importance of teaching it well in the elementary years. It will then move into a statement of the problem which will address what the core problem is regarding the subject of the study.

In this case it is the fact that the nation's school system has used two different methods for the instruction of reading to elementary school students over the past few decades, often switching mid school career for some students. The paper will discuss why this switching back and forth can have a negative impact on the students' learning abilities. In addition the paper will address the importance of discovering which reading skill method is better between whole language and phonetics. The paper will use a literature review to strengthen the argument for this timely study because it will provide a blueprint for study's conclusion and its importance. The paper will discuss the proposed participants, methodology and other factors involved in a research study of this type. The conclusion will pull the elements of the paper together and provide proof that this study is a timely and needed one.

Statement of the problem/hypothesis

There are many methods of teaching students in elementary school how to read. There are schools of thought as to whether it is better to try the phonetic approach or the whole language approach. School districts across the nation alternate between these and other methods while the students are caught in the middle with changing skill sets and confusion.

The time has come to determine which reading method is the most successful for the elementary students around the nation. Without this understanding it is difficult to standardize the teaching of reading skills. This creates problems with the students who move within the state as well as to other states. In addition the upper grades such as middle school, high school and college are struggling to meld the various methods that have been used on the students they inherit.

Students who are taught to read with varying methods may have different academic levels of abilities as they move through the elementary school years. Students who do not use one method might find that they are missing key elements of the skill sets required for the purpose of reading as well. The problem becomes magnified as districts, parents and teachers argue over what method is the most effective and which one should be used. Many districts have alternated between several styles of teaching reading.

This can happen in a matter of years, which ultimately can cause confusion for the students who have to switch gears, styles and skills with the new methods the district adopts. The American public has been demanding improvements in education for several years, and this study can pave the way to determine the most effective and successful way to teach reading as well as allow the standardization of its implementation as well. To be able to choose which method is the best it is important to know which one is more successful. This study will answer the question as to whether phonetics or whole language is the best method for teaching reading to elementary school students.

LITERATURE REVIEW

There have been many studies on the teaching of reading to elementary school students. One such study tested the success and importance of phonetical processing abilities and their impact on early reading skills (Wagner, 1994). "As the term is used by those who study early reading development, phonological processing refers to an individual's mental operations that make use of the phonological or sound structure of oral language when he or she is learning how to decode written language. The last 20 years of research have produced a broad variety of converging evidence that at least three kinds of phonological processing skills are positively related to individual differences in the rate at which beginning reading skills are acquired (Wagner, 1994) The kinds of phonological processing skills and knowledge that have been most frequently studied include phonological awareness, phonological memory, and rate of access for phonological information (Wagner, 1994)."

The study ascertained that the ability to be sensitive to phonetic changes in words provides the cornerstone for the phonetic teaching of reading to young elementary students around the nation.

The study was formulated and performed for the purpose of measuring reading skills as related to the teaching of reading through the use of phonetics. "Also required was a more sophisticated measurement technology than had been available prior to our project, coupled with assessment of all three major areas of phonological skill (Wagner, 1994)."

The study provided evidence that early phonetic ability did in fact contribute to early reading ability however one of the drawbacks of the study is that it only studied phonetics and did not compare it to any other methods of teaching reading to elementary students.

This study did leave researchers with an understanding that phonetic sensitivity does not work with all students and for learning disabled students it can create a challenge in the grasp of reading skills (Blachman, 1994).

This study examined the effects of curriculum on the sensitivity of repeated curriculum-based measurement (CBM). Participants included 24 third-grade students who were instructed primarily in a literature- based Scott, Foresman basal series, and 24 third-grade students who were instructed primarily in a more traditional basal series (Shapiro, 1994). CBM passage probes from each basal reading series were administered to all students twice weekly over a 9-week period. Each student's rate of progress in each reading series was indexed using an ordinary least squares regression to determine the slope of the data series. Results suggested that passage probes selected from the literature-based basal series were less sensitive to indexing growth over time than those from the traditional basal series." This study concluded among other things that the measurable success of reading skills among elementary school students does in fact have something to do with the style and method used to teach the skill of reading (Shapiro, 1994).

Another study tried to determine how early readers occur. When one hears of preschool aged children reading and comprehending words one wonders what the parents did to encourage this to happen. This study explored that question as well as the way the readers were reading, be it phonetics of other methods (Huba, 1995).

The language-ability measures were found to be moderately intercorrelated as follows: verbal intelligence and general language development, r =.64, p [less than or equal to].01; verbal intelligence and phonemic segmentation, r =.48, p [less than or equal to].01; general language ability and phonemic segmentation, r =.42, p [less than or equal to].01. Thus, although the language-ability measures share common variance, each appears to measure something unique (Huba, 1995)."

The study did not define any measurable way the children learned to read but did discover that the parent's attitudes toward reading often promoted early reading among these children (Huba, 1995).

Another study did zero in on the actual style and method of learning to read among young children to determine some of the more common methods that were formed in the mind of the child (Awaida, 1995). "A sample of 236 4- to 6-year-olds was tested on reading, spelling, vocabulary, short-term memory, visual discrimination, nonverbal intelligence, phonological processing, and fluency. The children were retested 1 year later. The 5-year-olds' reading quotients were predicted by their phonological processing and visual discrimination scores 1 year earlier. The 6-year-olds' reading quotients were predicted by their previous year's reading quotients, socioeconomic status, phonological processing, and nonword reading scores. The 7-year-olds' reading quotients were predicted by their previous year's reading quotients and nonword reading scores (Awaida, 1995)."

This study determined that learning to read actually involves two connections, the orthography and the meanings of words. "This process has two aspects. On the one hand, connections are made between the letters of a word and the word's meaning. On the other hand, individual letters generate sounds that, when blended together, produce a phonological creation. This creation in turn is connected to the meaning of particular words (Awaida, 1995)." The study determined a very important factor regarding the method of teaching reading through the use of phonetics. It found that while some aspects of phonetics were important there were others such as rhyming that were totally unnecessary to the teaching of the subject of reading.

These and other studies have paved the way for this study. They have provided enough substantial evidence that phonetics as it is taught today is not necessarily the most successful reading teaching method, nor does not discount its use. This study will answer the question as to which method is the most effective. The previous studies lacked a comparison to different methods therefore could only assess each method on its own merit. This study proposes to run a comparison so that the most effective method can be identifies.

METHODOLOGY

The participants will be school administrators from around the nation. Schools will be selected from various socioeconomic groups and from various geographic areas. The schools will all be from elementary level whether that is from K. through five or K. through six. The method used for the study is going to be a survey questionnaire. The survey will ask the school administrators to submit their students' standardized test scores for reading, over the last decade. The survey will also ask what type of method is taught in their institution, phonics, whole language or some other program. When the surveys come in the first 100 that mark the phonetic box, and the first 100 that mark the whole language box, and the first 100 that mark the other box, will be taken for the study results. All others will be set aside for future study if needed. The survey will not only ask for the results of the standardized achievement tests there will be a series of questions for the administrators to answer about the teaching of reading and the attitude and cooperation of students and teachers with the district's chosen method.

The limitations of this study will include the fact that teacher attitudes, home support for students and other factors will affect the outcome regardless of the teaching method being used.

The study will be important to future studies because it will help determine the best method for teaching reading to elementary school students and possibly allow a standardization of methods across the nation so that everybody is on the same page.

CONCLUSION

This proposed study will pull together the things that previous studies have begun to touch on but have not pulled together. The nation has gone back and forth between teaching methods for reading for several decades. The confusion only adds to the public concern that the elementary school students are not getting a solid education in this country. This study provides a method by which to determine which teaching method provides the best results for the subject of reading.