The whole language versus phonics debate in American reading education

¶ … language philosophy advocates teaching children to read by exposing them to whole words in context. It often is described as learning to read in the same way that we learn to talk. It generally avoids phonic pronunciation of each word.

Teachers of this system emphasize the meaning of text over the sounds of letters. Whole language is considered a "top down" approach where the reader constructs a personal meaning for a text based on using their prior knowledge to interpret the meaning of what they are reading (Reyhner, 2008).

Whole language is a system that teaches students to look at the big picture and doesn't really give them the tools to understand what they are doing," says Ann Edwards, a 20-year teaching veteran, who is leading a class of first-graders in California (Hanson, 1999, p.2).

Learning to Read with Whole Language Ideology

Probably no other subject provoked such bizarre interactions between teachers, school administrators, and parents as the selection of beginning reading programs in American schools.

When a parent expresses anger over the lack of phonics in reading instruction or the discovery that his child cannot read, school administrators typically would say, "There is lots of research to support our approach." The "approach" of course is an "eclectic reading program" or "whole language program." The educators never produce any concrete research to back up their assertions (Jones, n.d., para.1).

History

Traditional reading education, or phonics, once began with lessons that focused on the sounding out of individual and then combinations of letters, controlled vocabulary, and short reading passages, along with skill exercises.

Remember Dick and Jane? Their admittedly bland adventures were the basis of phonics, a time-honored method of reading education that taught students to sound out words by understanding phonetic sounds. But while anyone who graduated from high school before 1980 likely remembers the drills and letter-sound awareness they were taught, a whole generation of American children does not. The truth of the matter is that they were taught to read through "whole language" and now the fact of the matter is they don't know how to read. Many people believe that a whole generation of youngsters has been lost in one of the most disastrous educational experiments on record (Hanson, 1999).

By the 1980s the phonics approach largely was shelved in favor of whole-language learning -- a reading method that stresses that children use language in ways that relate to their own lives. Students were encouraged to figure out the meaning of words by their context. They look at pictures and guess at words. With this approach, spelling is learned at a later time (Hanson, 1999).

Whole language dominated the curricula of all 50 states, as well as the leading remedial tutorial programs such as "Reading Recovery." Whole language was the central principle of reading instruction in virtually all teacher training schools, as well as professional organizations such as the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English (Sweet, 1997).

Back to Phonics

In 1999, fewer than 40% of the nation's fourth-graders were reading at their grade level, according to the National Assessment of Education Progress in Reading. The numbers increase dramatically for minority students.

Not surprisingly, a backlash against the whole-language approach swept the country, with legislators in more than half the nation's states adopting policies designed to get phonics-based reading programs back into the classroom. Since 1990, 101 bills have been proposed to mandate phonics (Hanson, 1999).

Simple Solution

There's no great mystery to teaching reading. it's as easy as a, b, c. The best approach for the overwhelming majority of children is systematic phonics, the simple concept of teaching the 26 letters of the alphabet, the 44 sounds they make, and the 70 most common ways to spell those sounds. For most children, learning this basic code unlocks 85% of the words in the English language by the end of the first grade. Although some words such as "sugar" or "friend" have irregular spellings, children of all levels of intelligence can learn to read most words simply by learning the correspondence between sounds and letters (Sweet, 1997).

Project Follow Through: The Biggest Educational Study Ever

One large study that parents really should know about is Project Follow Through, completed in the 1970s; however, the program continued to receive funding from the government until 1995. This was the largest educational study ever done, costing over $600 million, and covering 79,000 children in 180 communities. This project examined a variety of programs and educational philosophies to learn how to improve education of disadvantaged children in grades K-3. (it was launched in response to the observation that Head Start children were losing the advantages from Head Start by third grade.) Desired positive outcomes included basic skills, cognitive skills ("higher order thinking") and affective gains (self-esteem). Multiple programs were implemented over a 5-year period and the results were analyzed by the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and Abt Associates (Cambridge, MA). The various programs studied could be grouped into the three classes described above (Basic Skills, Cognitive-Conceptual, Affective-Cognitive) (Jones, What the Data Really Show..., 2004).

The program that gave the best results in general was true Direct Instruction, a subset of Basic Skills. The other program types, which closely resemble today's educational strategies (having labels like "holistic," "student-centered learning," "learning-to-learn," "active learning," "cooperative education," and "whole language") were inferior. Students receiving Direct Instruction did better than those in all other programs when tested in reading, arithmetic, spelling, and language (Jones, What the Data Really Show..., 2004).

Direct Instruction (DI) is a model for teaching that emphasizes well-developed and carefully planned lessons designed around small learning increments and clearly defined and prescribed teaching tasks. It is based on the theory that clear instruction eliminating misinterpretations can greatly improve and accelerate learning (Stockard, n.d.).