Phonics and Whole Word/Whole Language Controversies,
1948-1998: An Introductory History
E. Jennifer Monaghan
From
the mid teens of the twentieth century until his premature death in 1960,
William S. Gray towered above his colleagues in the reading profession in
reputation and influence. A key figure in the incorporation of the whole word
methodology into reading textbooks, he was already, by 1955--the year that
Rudolf Flesch published Why Johnny Can't
Read--the author of 480 scholarly publications and senior author of Scott
Foresman's best-selling Basic Readers
(Gray, 1985). Seven years earlier, in 1948, Gray had published a book titled On Their Own in Reading. His own
approach to reading instruction may be summarized by his three rhetorical
questions, to which we may supply the answers. "Shall we, in response to
public demand" (an interesting comment in itself on public perceptions
about phonics as early as 1948) "reinstate the old mechanical phonic
drills and content that inevitably result in dull, word-by-word reading?"
[NO!] "Shall we go back to the 'guessing from context' that was emphasized
in the thirties?" [NO!] "Or shall we develop word-perception skills
that are functional in the total reading act?" [YES!] (Gray, 1948, p. 28).1
Gray
proceeded to present the five approaches to word attack that were enshrined in
what Jeanne Chall would later call the "conventional wisdom" (Chall,
1967). Gray's "five major aides to the perception of words in
reading" are: first: meaning clues from the context; second, the form or
appearance of a word (usually called configuration clues); third, structural
clues (roots, prefixes, suffixes); fourth, "phonetic" clues (phonic
clues); and fifth, the dictionary (Gray, 1948, pp. 40-41). These were all to be
used, of course, as adjuncts to the prevailing whole word, or
"look-and-say" approach.
But
in 1955, as you all know, Rudolf Flesch published his searing attack on the
reading profession. It is always known by the first half of its title as Why Johnny Can't Read, but the rest of
the title was just as inflammatory, because it removed reading instruction from
the hands of the reading experts and restored it to parents: And What You Can Do About It. In his
attack on the whole word approach, Flesch charged the reading experts with
treating English as if it were Chinese, instead of the alphabetic system it is,
and he claimed that the reading profession had ignored its own research and
deliberately "concealed" the "true facts" from the public
(Flesch, 1955, p.61). He vilified the list of word attack approaches described
by David Russell (1949), which deviated from Gray's mainly by having
configuration clues in first place and phonetic and structural ones in the
last. He sneered at the "analytic phonics" that the reading profession
was advocating.
The
effect of Flesch's publication upon the public was remarkable. Parents, long
frustrated over the current system, devoured Why Johnny Can't Read. The book was on the bestseller list for over
thirty weeks. It sold 99,000 hardcover copies upon its first appearance and its
total sales topped over half a million copies (Monaghan & Saul, 1987, p.
106). The reception of Why Johnny Can't
Read by the reading community was another matter. The members of the
reading profession circled the wagons in defense of their respected colleagues,
whose scholarship had been attacked and whose motives had been impugned.
In
reaction to Flesch's book, the reading establishment remained profoundly
antagonistic towards systematic phonics and any reading programs based solely
on such an approach. Many of you may be too young to remember the effect on the
classroom teacher of the prohibition against what was called, pejoratively,
"isolating the sounds of the letters." In the American classroom of
the late 1950s and early 1960s, teaching sounds in isolation, the
"kuh-a-tuh, cat" approach, became absolutely taboo. The profession
was quick to explain why: it was dull drill that distracted the child
completely from the meaning of what she read; and there was also such huge
variability in the sounds represented by a given letter that teaching letters
as sounds was impracticable even if it had been advisable, which of course it
wasn't. Vowels were particularly hopeless: "to teach the child to speak a
particular sound for a particular vowel is at all times inadvisable," as a
textbook titled Fundamentals of Basic
Reading Instruction put it as late as 1973 (Bamman, Dawson & McGovern,
1973, p. 142).
The
reading profession said, to a man and woman, that teachers should use an eclectic
approach, because using one method to the exclusion of all other methods could
do "real damage" to the child (Bamman, Dawson & McGovern, 1973,
p. 142). Even those reading professionals who now discussed phonics openly, as
Dolores Durkin, Arthur Heilman, and Anna Cordts did in 1962, 1964, and 1965,
respectively, opposed systematic phonics. Cordts, for instance, was unalterably
opposed to "sounding out." "It has long been known," she
opined, "that sounding out a word is not only a boresome [sic] and laborious
task but it is incompatible with comprehension in reading" (Cordts, 1965,
p. 14). Instead, the call was for a "Balanced Reading Program," as
Lillian Gray put it in her Teaching
Children to Read--one that would be free from the "Rugged Phonics Excess"
of the 1870-1917 period, the following "Look-and-Say Excess," and the
subsequent "Silent-Reading Excess" (L. Gray, 1963, pp. 50-53).
In
1967, again as you all know, Jeanne Chall published her Learning to Read: The Great Debate. The key difference between
Flesch and Chall was not just one of tone: Chall was an admired member of the
professional reading community. In a careful and highly readable analysis, and
in measured and temperate prose, she reported the results of her own research
into the "Great Debate": that indeed the research, of poor quality as
it undoubtedly was, suggested not only that a change to a code-emphasis
approach would produce superior results, but that "systematic"
phonics was more effective than the "analytic" phonics of the conventional
wisdom. Publishers of basal reading programs, she said, could "play a
major role" in effecting this change by fine-tuning their programs (Chall,
1967, p. 309).
What
were the consequences of Chall's rehabilitation of systematic phonics? Her most
lasting contribution was that it eventually became respectable, even among
members of the reading profession, to suggest that M "said"
"mmm" and even that B "said" "buh." Dolores
Durkin, author of the best-known book on phonics, now conceded, in a book
titled Teaching Young Children to Read,
that there was "a need for some children to isolate sounds" (Durkin,
1972, p. 351). A few texts for teachers identified the contents of phonics
instruction in some detail, even though they retained the earlier elements of the
conventional wisdom, such as configuration clues (e.g., Bush & Huebner,
1970; Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald, 1967).
It
would also be true to say that Chall's work gave a boost to those publishers
who were already publishing what they called phonic or linguistic series, such
as Merrill's Linguistic Readers, Lippincott's Basic Reading series--which
excited much interest because Chall had used sample pages from the series as
illustrations for The Great Debate--and the Open
Court series. (Blouke Carus, the founder of the Open Court series, said that before Chall's book came out he had
had to drag people in from the aisles at International Reading Association
conventions to look at his booth; after it, teachers inquired spontaneously. Open Court ended up giving presentations
to 150,000 teachers all over the country.)2 In short, Chall's book
changed teachers' attitudes toward phonics, particularly toward
explicit/systematic phonics.
Chall's
book did not, however, result in a profound change in the traditional basal
reading series: basal readers designed along systematic phonic lines were, and
continue to be, in a tiny minority.3 Most publishers of the
traditional basals simply added supplementary phonics lessons to their
traditional look-and-say plus "conventional wisdom" readers. Chall's
own conclusion as to the effect of her book, voiced thirteen years later in a
1983 update, was that "basal readers teach more phonics and they teach it
earlier than in 1967" (Chall, 1983, p. 37).
The
great problem with phonics lessons as supplements was, and still remains, that
the phonic elements are unrelated--or at best only marginally related--to
anything the child is actually reading, whether in the readers or in anything
else. Charles Walcutt, coauthor of the systematic phonics program Lippincott's Basic Reading, summarized
the problems with supplemental phonics programs this way: "In these
programs phonics is isolated from the act of reading; it involves drills for
practice of its several principles; it is meaningless because these principles,
although occasionally applied to words that are sometimes anchored in
sentences, are seldom extended to the wider act of reading a paragraph or
story" (Walcutt, Lamport & McCracken, 1974, p. 156).
On
the other hand, a similar criticism of meaninglessness can always be charged to
the initial lessons of the phonic/linguistic approaches, in that it is almost
impossible to write meaningful prose if you have to restrict your choice of
words to those that exhibit the phonetic element that your instruction has
reached by that point. The most extreme examples are in the Merrill Linguistic Readers, "Dad had pins
in bins. He had a pin for the fan. He had to tap the pin into the fan"
(thus running a serious risk of electrocution) (reproduced in Walcutt, Lamport
& McCracken, 1974, p. 165). But you can certainly make the same statement
about the initial "stories" in the Lippincott series itself:
"Run, rat, run. Run, run, run. Run to a red sun...Run, run, run"
(McCracken & Walcutt, 1969, p. 17). The fact is that all beginning
materials based on some kind of vocabulary or phonic control will sound stilted
to a greater or lesser degree at the beginning levels. The important question,
however, is not whether this bothers the teacher (which it often does), but
whether it disturbs the child.
The Whole
Language Movement, 1980 On
Implicit
in my discussion so far is the underlying assumption that no matter what
approach basal readers take, it is they that are the purveyors of reading
instruction for American children. Whenever the Great Debate was discussed, the
answer was always couched in terms of what should, or should not, be included
in a basal reading series. In the early 1980s, however, an attack was launched
on the very concept of basal reading instruction. Patrick Shannon, in a series
of studies and analyses of the relationships among publishers, textbook
selection committees, reading experts, teachers and texts, used the constructs
of sociological theory to evaluate American reading instruction (Shannon, 1983,
1989). One of the features identified by Shannon was the
"rationalization" of the reading program into a series of sequenced
skills and subskills. Another was "alienation," in which the
compulsory use of basal series distances teachers both subjectively and
objectively from their craft, "deskilling" them in the process
(Shannon, 1989, p. 78).
The
response that Shannon and others advocate in order to dismantle the
"rationalization" of reading instruction is, of course, the whole
language movement (Shannon, 1989, 1990), one of whose major themes is that
basal reading series should be discarded and that children should learn to read
from "real" books--children's fiction and nonfiction. Key leaders in
this movement have been Kenneth and Yetta Goodman along with Donald Graves and
his colleagues; together, they have had a major effect upon the integration of
writing and reading within the first-grade classroom.
Almost
from the start, the whole language movement won wholehearted support from
thousands of teachers. Indeed, one of its most intriguing aspects has been its
growth at the grass-roots level. Teachers formed teacher cooperatives, founded
the Whole Language Umbrella (an organization that is dedicated to encouraging
networking and research into whole language), and prepared books and guidelines
for converts.
The
reason for the appeal of the whole language philosophy to teachers, against the
current of basal reading instruction, is not far to seek. Teachers consider
whole language empowering (e.g. Rich, 1985). They believe that it restores them
to their professionalism instead of reducing them to the role of executives of
the mandates of a basal reading series. It is now the teachers' knowledge about children and language acquisition that is
crucial to a class's success, not the scope and sequence dictated by whoever it
is who decides upon what goes into or stays out of the basal reader.
Whole
Language Theories
It is
important, however, to examine the theories behind the whole language movement.
(1) Reading, according to whole language proponents, involves multiple cue
systems, semantic and syntactic as well as graphophonemic; successful word
identification depends upon the simultaneous use of all these systems (Goodman,
1968). Readers do not actually see the print that they think they see,
according to Frank Smith (1973), so the orthographic element is of minor
importance. Reading is therefore held to be, in Goodman's classic phrase, a
"psycholinguistic guessing game" (Goodman, 1967).
(2) Both learning to
read and learning to write are believed to be like learning to listen and
speak, and will therefore be accomplished naturally by exposure to a rich and
supportive literacy environment. Children will spell more conventionally when
they wish to communicate more effectively (Graves & Stuart, 1985). Indeed,
"natural" is one of the movement's key metaphors (Moorman, Blanton
& McLaughlin, 1994). Both assumptions, however, have come under attack,
particularly by linguists (e.g., Liberman & Liberman, 1992).
These
theories have had profound consequences upon the teaching of literacy: each in
its own way has led proponents of whole language to downgrade the importance of
phonics and spelling instruction. Kenneth Goodman has put it as follows: we
used, he said, "to think we facilitated learning to read by breaking
written language into bite-size pieces for learners. Instead, we turned it from
easy-to-learn language into hard-to learn abstractions" (Goodman, 1976, p.
12). As a result, instruction in more than a few letter-sound correspondences
(mainly consonants) is largely discredited among the majority of those who write about whole language (as opposed,
in many cases, to those who actually use it in the classroom). Moreover, direct
instruction in individual phonic elements is frowned upon: "Learning to
make sense of print in reading or express sense in writing," as Goodman
wrote in 1992, "does not require learning letter-sound relationships in
isolation" (Goodman, 1992, p. 60).
The
small role to be played by phonics instruction within the whole language
movement can be seen in a couple of examples of how these theories are
translated into practice. Both are found in professional publications designed
to help whole language teachers and published by the International Reading
Association (IRA) or the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).
The
first is taken from one of IRA's many publications on whole language, a book
edited by Shirley Raines titled Whole
Language Across the Curriculum (1995). None of the terms "word
recognition," "word attack," or "phonics" is listed in
the index. My example comes from Shirley Raines's own contribution, "A
First Grade Teacher Becomes a Whole Language Teacher." Terri, the exemplary
first-grade teacher modeling whole language teaching, is tackling word
recognition and has already taught the children a cloze strategy for
identifying unknown words. Now she turns to the strategy of using initial
consonants. In reading Frog and Toad are
Friends (Lobel, 1970), a child is trying to decode the word porch, which he has skipped the first
time he read it. The teacher now reads aloud to him, "'Frog and Toad sat
on the 'blank,' feeling sad together.' The child looks at the picture and says,
'stoop.' Then he says, 'No it can't be stoop, it doesn't start with 's'; it's a
'p'." The teacher then reads the sentence again, and the child says
"porch" (Raines, 1995, p. 29). My simple question is, why hasn't this
child already been taught that O R is the eminently consistent spelling for the
sound /or/, and /c/ the first choice for C H, so that he can decipher
"porch" on his own, and use his syntactic and semantic skills to
verify that the pronunciation he has come up with matches a word in his
speaking vocabulary, rather than trusting to context and an initial consonant
to supply the word? What happens if there is no picture? And how can he ever
pronounce a word that is not already in his speaking vocabulary?
My
second example focuses on invented spelling and comes from an NCTE publication.
It was, until the IRA's publication of Dorothy Strickland's booklet on phonics
in 1998, the only one I have been able to find published by either the IRA or
NCTE that devoted a whole publication to the place of phonics in a whole
language program (or in any other kind of program, for that matter). It is
called Looking Closely: Exploring the
Role of Phonics in One Whole Language Classroom (Mills, O'Keefe and
Stephens, 1992). In one of its chapters, the authors trace the development over
the course of the school year of three children in this at-risk first-grade
classroom. Jessica began her invented spelling in September with random
letters. By the end of first grade, Jessica had certainly learned to treat
writing as meaningful communication, which is a tribute to her teacher. Her
last piece of writing, composed in May, reads in part, after she has written
that she is seven: "my frd is spid the nit. wei mad a plnt!" (Mills,
et al., 1992, p. 43).
My
simple question is, given that Jessica has an excellent ability to segment
phonemes and represents night and made with great accuracy in terms of her
own orthography by using the appropriate vowels, why hasn't she been taught,
after a whole year, some generalizations, such as the silent-final-e rule, so
that she can spell more consistently in standard spelling? (Children were being
taught this rule in 1596--"he is made mad" [Coote, 1596, p. 15; Hart,
1963, p. 147]). The rule would cover made
and many other words she uses, and the teacher should choose how to present the
igh of night to her--whether as "a three-letter i" (Spalding & Spalding, 1957/1990), as the rime ight, or as an exception. In fact, in
this classroom the children were more
interested in teaching spelling than
their own teacher: a group of them put rhyming words on the board, like he, see,
we, and me, and explained them to their peers!
Many
parents have reacted angrily to spelling performances of this kind. Ethel
Buchanan, a Canadian whole language advocate who has published on spelling and
believes that it is important for the child to master conventional spelling,
has identified the potentially damaging consequences for the whole language
approach. As she puts it, "I believe that if anything is going to defeat
the whole language movement, it will be the way we handle spelling"
(Buchanan, 1994, p. 181). Parents value correct spelling, and what is
charmingly idiosyncratic in a four-year-old seems no longer to be so in a
seven-year-old.
Teacher
training
But, in my view, there
have also been other factors at work that have exacerbated this situation.
There are at least six factors that have contributed, historically, to
teachers' distrust of the value of knowing about the phonology and orthography
of English and to their reluctance to communicate this knowledge directly to
children. They are, not necessarily in order of importance, first, a disrespect
for history; second, the lingering effects of the professional backlash against Why Johnny Can't Read; third, a
division in turf between the reading professionals and the learning
disabilities specialists, which is directly related to the legislation of, and
funding provided by, federal and state governments since the passage of the law
for children with disabilities (Public Law 94-142); fourth, an ironic consequence
of tossing the basal reading series out of the whole language classroom, and
with it one of the last sources of detailed information on phonics; fifth, the
split between practitioners in the classroom and researchers into the reading
process; and sixth, the failure of teacher training programs to inform teachers
about orthography and phonology (Monaghan, 1997). Of these, I shall talk in any
depth only about the last.
Long
before the advent of the whole language movement, precise information about
phonics had already been excluded from the vast majority of books written on
how to teach reading--but for different reasons, depending on the date of the
three relevant periods: (1) pre-Flesch (1917-1955); (2) post-Flesch but
pre-Chall (1956-1966); and (3) post-Chall (after 1967). If you will bear with
me, a little review of books designed to help teachers teach reading is in
order.
In
the pre-Flesch era, authors of handbooks for teachers talked very little about
the nitty-gritty of phonics, because, as we know, it ranked so low on the list
of word attack skills. However, precise phonic information was available in
works on reading remediation--where phonics was regarded as a useful tool--such
as Edward Dolch's A Manual for Remedial
Reading (1945), or Donald Durrell's Improvement
of Basic Reading Abilities (1940), or Samuel Kirk's Teaching Reading to Slow-Learning Children (1940).
In
the interlude between Flesch and Chall, the first professional reaction, as I
mentioned earlier, was to blast explicit phonics. But, as passions subsided
with the passage of time, a couple of professionals wrote books that focused
directly on the topic of phonics, such as Dolores Durkin's Phonics and the Teaching of Reading (1962/1965) or Anna Cordts' Phonics for the Reading Teacher (1965);
both of them gave considerable information on phonics within the context of
intrinsic/analytic phonics--of phonic insights gleaned from sight words. There
were also books authored by scholars outside the reading profession, who were
attacking the sight approach to reading instruction and who valued letter-sound
correspondences--people like Emerald DeChant, who wrote a book in 1964 called Improving the Teaching of Reading.
In
the post-Chall era, one would have expected an increase in discussions of phonics
in books for teachers. However, most writers for teachers in the 1970s still
did not specify the content of phonics instruction in any detail. Instead, they
routinely referred teachers to basal reading series, which they could now do
because, thanks to Chall, the basal readers had begun to include more
discussion of phonics, albeit in bits and pieces and in a disorganized way.
Authors of handbooks for teachers, who were, of course, often authors of basal
readers themselves, knew that teachers would find there, right in their own
classrooms, information on the nitty-gritties of beginning consonant blends,
silent final e's and so on and so forth. As the authors of Fundamentals of Basic Reading Instruction put it in 1973, "a
very good guide to the scope and sequence of word-attack skills is the
teacher's manual for most basal reading series" (Bamman, Dawson, &
McGovern, 1973, p. 132).
Several
books on phonics for teachers stemmed from the behaviorist movement of the
1970s--from skills-based instruction, where it was believed that reading could
be learned by having its presumed components broken up into small pieces in all
areas of instruction (comprehension and study skills, as well as decoding) and
be taught and tested to "criterion." One offshoot of this was
programmed reading instruction, and the publications of the 1980s saw a few
such texts on phonics for teachers. The most enduring of these has been Marion
Hull's Phonics for the Teacher of Reading,
which was in its fifth edition by 1989. (It should not be considered a product
of Chall's Great Debate because it first appeared in mimeograph form in 1966.)
Just
how out of favor phonics was becoming once again, however, as the whole
language movement got under full swing in the early 1980s, may be seen from a
couple of other programmed texts designed to teach phonics to teachers: they
are not typeset but appear as reproductions of typescripts (Logan, 1985; Rogers
& Palardy, 1985)! Another text of the same period, a primer called Prescription for Reading: Teach Them Phonics,
was authored by an optometrist enraged by parents who brought him children who
couldn't read, but who had perfect eyesight, for eyetests. Illustrated by his
daughter, it too was published from a typescript (Christman, 1983). Another, subtitled
Plugging a Hole in Whole Language, was authored by an advocate of whole
language, Thomas Cloer, after he had looked in vain for what he needed (Cloer,
1980/1993). These are hardly texts of the educational mainstream.
From
1990 to about 1995, there was a continuing dearth of easily-accessible texts
that explained phonics to teachers. In 1991 Pat Cunningham published her Phonics They Use (1991/1995), but it
depends heavily upon children's remembering chunks of old words in order to
decode new ones by consonant substitution, and so should be classified as an
intrinsic phonics approach. Kenneth Goodman's Phonic Phacts (1993) did discuss letter-sound correspondences, but
the work as a whole does not deviate from his earlier philosophy. One text
published in the early 1990s that both covered the content of phonics and
showed how to teach it illustrates once again how completely phonics had
slipped outside the mainstream of contemporary reading instruction: Phyllis
Fischer's The Sounds and Spelling Patterns
of English: Phonics for Teachers and Parents (1993) was published by
herself. "Missing from the current literature," she explains in her
preface, "is an overview of the structure of our written words that
provides readers with an understanding of how the sounds of English are paired
with the spelling patterns" (Fischer, 1993, p. v). The year 1995, however,
saw significant changes in some quarters; these are discussed below.
Another
reason for the lack of teacher preparation in phonics is that, not only are
there merely a handful of publications out there on phonology and orthography,
but there are also few courses that discuss them adequately in teacher-training
institutions. (If there were, there would undoubtedly be more texts published.)
A factor in this has unquestionably been the adoption of the whole language
philosophy by so many teacher-trainers. As Regie Routman, a whole-hearted
advocate of whole language, has noted, "Many of those coming out of our
universities say that they have the big picture, that they know about
literature and response, but they don't have a clue about how to actually teach
reading--the phonics, the strategies, the cueing systems. Several of them have
told me that phonics was barely mentioned in their courses" (Routman, 1996,
p. 103).
When
those who train teachers do think that informing prospective teachers about the
phonology and orthography of their own language is important, the results are
instructive. In 1995 Louisa Moats surveyed 89 teachers for their linguistic and
orthographic knowledge. The teachers averaged five years of teaching experience
among them. She found that only 30 percent of them could explain when one used
the letters ck in spelling; only a quarter of them knew that there were three
phonemes, not two, in ox; and that virtually none of them could consistently
identify consonant digraphs. When she taught them about the phonology and
orthography of English, 85 to 93 percent of each of her classes rated their new
linguistic knowledge as either "highly useful" or
"essential" in their teaching, no matter what subject they taught
(Moats, 1995).
So a
conjunction of forces, including a theoretical stance that has consistently
downgraded the importance of letter-sound relationships, has combined to
deprive teachers of important knowledge about the phonological and
orthographical features of their own language. In other words, this has led to
the "deskilling" of teachers, to adapt a Patrick Shannon term, in the
whole language classroom. Teachers today, especially the younger ones, probably
know less about the phonology and orthography of their own language than at any
other time in the long and honorable history of American reading instruction.
Moreover, not only do teachers not know about orthography, but they often don't
want to know. And why should they? They have been informed that the theoretical
underpinnings of whole language do not require them to know it.
But
even those who do now proclaim that phonics matters downgrade the importance of
knowing specific information about letter-sound correspondences. Instead, they
emphasize the standard decoding strategies of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s:
guessing from the context and initial consonants. This, for instance, is Regie
Routman's 1996 advice on how to attack unfamiliar words.
Reading Strategies for Unknown Words
·
Skip
the difficult word.
Read on to end of
sentence or paragraph.
Go back to the beginning
of sentence and try again.
·
Read
on.
Reread inserting the
beginning sound of the unknown word.
·
Substitute
a word that makes sense.
·
Look
for a known chunk or small word.
Use finger to cover part
of word.
·
Read
the word using only beginning and ending sounds.
Read the word without
the vowels.
·
Look
at the picture cues.
·
Link
to prior knowledge.
·
Predict
and anticipate what could come next.
·
Cross
check.
"Does it sound right?"
"Does
it make sense?"
"Does
it look right?"
·
Self-correct
and self-monitor.
·
Write
words you can't figure out and need to know on Post-its.
·
Read
passage several times for fluency and meaning.
Use errors as an opportunity to problem solve.
By Regie Routman (p.
198)
Almost
all the features of what Chall called the "conventional wisdom" are
enshrined in this advice. There are context cues/clues, structural clues
("a known chunk"), and picture clues. The only piece missing from
William S. Gray's 1948 list of clues, discussed earlier, is configuration
clues. Phonic clues embrace only beginning and ending consonants. Vowels are
explicitly excluded as a source of decoding insight. It is the conventional wisdom
revivified and reincarnated in its whole language dress.
Public
Perceptions
Perhaps
none of this would particularly matter if the public perceived whole language
instruction to be working. But many parents have been dismayed to discover that
their children have not learned to read. To buttress this perception, they can
now point, rightly or wrongly, to the test results of California children.
California led the country in 1987 in adopting a literature-based elementary
curriculum. No other state threw itself so wholeheartedly into whole language
and literature-based instruction. But by 1994 its fourth-grade proficiency
scores had slid almost to the bottom of the 41 states and territories that
participated in the 1994 National Assessment of Education Progress (Campbell,
Donahue, Reese, & Phillips, 1996). In fairness, it should be pointed out
that at the same time California was experiencing massive cuts in school
funding. This, however, was not what parents blamed for the decline. (For a
contrary position, see McQuillan, 1998, pp. 12-14.)
Just
as they did in the 1950s, parents have once again blamed the schools for not
teaching phonics. And not just any old phonics--they have complained about the
lack of precisely the "kuh-a-tuh, cat" kind of phonics that Flesch
had advocated--systematic, explicit instruction in letter-sound correspondences
along with blending, as opposed to the "embedded" and minimalist
phonics of whole language. Moreover, thanks to the philosophical position taken
by whole language advocates, the debate is invariably couched in a "whole
language" versus "phonics" format, as if the two, in the public
mind, were totally incompatible. When members of the whole language community
respond that of course they teach phonics, parents do not believe them.
Parents
have gone to remarkable lengths to restore explicit phonics instruction to the
schools: they have sought redress, as they see it, from their state
legislatures. Bills have been introduced mandating the use of phonics in
Alabama, California, Mississippi, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
South Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin. Of these, many have been either defeated
or shelved, but in Alabama, California and Ohio the legislation has become
state law. California's law, for one, is very specific about the kind of
phonics it wants: the "fundamental skills of all subject areas," it
says, are to be included in the curriculum, "including, but not limited
to, systematic, explicit phonics, spelling, and basic computational skills."
The section with these provisions was added to the existing Education Code and
signed into law in October 1995 as an "emergency statute." Its status
as an emergency was supported by citing the "poor performance of pupils
who took the California Learning Assessment System (CLAS) and the National
Assessment of Education Progress tests" (1995 Cal ALS 765).4
The
American press, of course, has become interested in the furor, and magazines
and newspapers alike invariably depict it as a phonics versus whole language
issue and make accurate distinctions between the kind of phonics parents mean
and the kind practiced in the whole language movement. A front-page article in
the Los Angeles Times in December
1996 characterized the phonics taught within whole language as teaching
children to "rely heavily on pictures to figure out the words. They are
encouraged to notice the first and last letters of words and to guess at those
they cannot figure out" (Duff, 1996). Other papers remark on the
ideological leanings of the participants and note that phonics, like politics,
makes strange bedfellows. This headline appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal in October 1996:
"ABCeething/ How Whole Language/
Became a Hot Potato/ In and Out of Academia/ Reading Method Ditched/ Phonics,
Won Adherents/ But Test Scores Tanked/ A Boomer-Christian Coalition"
(Duff, 1996).
The
Canadian press is also having a good time with the corresponding fuss in
Canada, which embraced whole language warmly in the 1980s. Whereas in 1988
Canada was being hailed as "A leader in whole-language instruction"
(McCaughy, 1988), by 1993 the Canadian magazine Maclean's was featuring articles on whole language and phonics
titled, guess what, "The reading debate" (Young, 1993), and by the
fall of 1995 the Canadian magazine Saturday
Night was running one titled "Why schools can't teach," with the
subhead, "Phonetics replaced by whole language learning in Canada"
(Nikiforuk & Howes, 1995). In Canada, in fact, the situation is viewed by
some as even more dire than in the United States. The results of the 1994
reading tests for fourth-graders in the province of British Columbia, where
whole language had been the prevailing approach, were so awful that they were
never released: there were so many scores that had to be
disqualified--incomplete tests or scores below 25 percent--that there were not
enough left for an adequate database (Nikiforuk & Howes, 1995).
Publishers
have also, of course, pricked up their ears. There has been a spate of
programs, often including audiotapes and video-tapes, that purport to teach
phonics. Hooked on Phonics, for
instance, started up in 1987 with a modest budget of $150,000. By 1993 it was
making $110 million a year--until the Federal Trade Commission caught up with
it and made it sign a consent decree admitting it had been running
unsubstantiated advertising (Darlin, 1996). The point is not whether Hooked on Phonics delivered what it
promised (it presumably didn't), but why on earth two million people should
spend some $250 each to purchase it, when they were already spending their
hard-earned tax dollars on having their children taught to read in the public
schools.
There
is an added twist to all this, and that is its ideological aspect. The most
vocal supporters of systematic phonics are often those of the most politically
conservative slant. From Robert Dole on down (Dole made his contempt for whole
language part of his presidential campaign in 1996), conservatives have
advocated, advertised and fought for the restoration of phonics to the
curriculum. The work of the Virginia-based, conservative National Right to Read
Foundation is well-known in this regard as a focus of pro-phonics activism.
But,
as the Wall Street Journal's headline
of "[Baby] Boomer-Christian Coalition" suggested, by no means all
those who advocate phonics happen to be conservatives. Because, however, the
conservatives have a tendency to talk louder than other groups, an ideological
split has emerged that has already become a stereotype: on the
liberal/conservative continuum, whole language is of course placed in the
liberal camp, while explicit phonics is regarded as the prized possession of
the conservatives.
The
net result is that when whole language advocates feel themselves to be under
seige, they are quick to seize upon the ideological divide to attack those who
suggest they should be doing something different (see Foorman, 1995). There is
still, just as there was in Flesch's heyday, an emotional response to the very
word "phonics." In 1985, when Becoming
a Nation of Readers was published, one of its recommendations was that
teachers should present "well-designed phonics instruction" that
presents the letters and their sounds both in isolation and in context, along
with sounding out and blending (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson,
1985, p. 118). As whole language proponents reacted to the book, they
castigated it for its focus on phonics and its lack of attention to meaning.
When NCTE decided to act as one of the book's distributors, it did so only after
much heartsearching. Whole language advocates noted how successful the book had
been politically, winning "the enthusiastic acceptance of the Far
Right" (Davidson, 1988, p. 107). Similarly, Marilyn Adams's important
summary of research on basic reading processes (1990), which led her to
conclude that reading was emphatically not a "psycholinguistic guessing
game," was greeted derisively by some whole language supporters as a
return to "a simple machine-like technology" (Flurkey & Meyer,
1994, p. 12).
The
charges leveled by some on the other side are even more inflammatory: one
writer for the National Right to Read Foundation, for instance, delights in
vocabulary like "edu-babble" and "phony phonics," invokes
the mantle of Rudolf Flesch, and encourages parents to whip their children out
of the public school if they are displeased with what is going on there (Elam,
1996).
Conclusion
and Recommendations
We have come to a pretty
pass when laypersons feel so strongly about the inadequacies of current
philosophies of reading instruction that they resort to legislation. None of us
should rejoice at this turn of events.
But
are their concerns justified? What are we to make of the findings of a recent
study that explored what some 1,200 classroom teachers thought about how to
teach reading? The study's major conclusion was that "A majority of
teachers embraced a balanced, eclectic approach to elementary reading
instruction, blending phonics and holistic principles and practices"
(Baumann, Hoffman, Moon, & Duffy-Hester, 1998, p. 611). This finding seems
to contradict all the evidence I have presented above.
Have
both the public and the press distorted what good teachers do, at a time when
teachers have resolved the "Great Debate" for themselves
pragmatically? The answer may be "yes" and "no." Good
teachers have always drawn what they liked from a given approach and
disregarded the rest, and it certainly rings true that pragmatism has won out
over dogmatism. But that is not the same as saying that the debate has been
futile. Even on the admission of some of the most ardent advocates of whole
language, new teachers have been inadequately prepared to teach phonics (on
Regie Routman's evidence), and parents have legitimate concerns over spelling
(according to Ethel Buchanan). It was parents, remember, who revolted against
the current situation, not the press; the press has simply been having a field
day ever since.
I
therefore think that we may draw three conclusions and one major recommendation
from the history of what has happened. The first is that there is still a
yawning gulf between proponents of explicit phonics and the kind of phonics
advocated by champions of whole language. The latter group does not believe
that phonics is a major key to decoding, and therefore does not teach children
much phonics. In this, there has been no shift in sentiment over the last 50
years, ever since Gray's five principles of word attack. Should we or should we
not, as well as teaching a child that the letter P "says" "puh"
(on which there is now almost universal agreement), also teach him the digraphs
and vowel combinations of the written language, so that a child can decode a
word like porch himself instead of
guessing it from the context and its initial consonant? There remains a genuine
area of disagreement and broad misunderstanding between the two sides on this
issue.
I
myself feel that we have a moral and intellectual obligation to provide
children with more phonic information than is common in most of the classrooms
of today. It is nonsense, for instance, to think that children cannot and
should not be taught at least the most important of the final silent -e rules,
the "magic-e" one that indicates the "long" pronunciation
of the vowel. Children have mastered that rule for centuries: recall the
"he is made mad" of Edmund Coote in 1596. Children like explanations.
My
second conclusion is that the great divide between whole language and explicit
phonics instruction, as it is perceived by the public and the press, is one of
the reading profession's (as opposed to classroom teachers') own making. It
does not have to be that way: it is not an either/or choice, as the respondents
to Baumann et al.'s study made clear (1998). It is perfectly possible--but only
if one teaches a child enough about
letter-sound-correspondences (LSCs)--to do both at the same time. Indeed,
instruction in a large number of LSCs is potentially the quickest route to
helping a child read naturalistic texts. A friend of mine who teaches in our
local Brooklyn public school runs through the 72 Spalding phonograms each
morning for ten minutes before devoting the rest of her first graders'
schoolday to a completely whole language approach to which she is totally
dedicated (Spalding & Spalding, 1957/1990).
The
failure of so many practitioners to teach much phonics has landed the
profession in yet another battle--over so-called "decodable" texts.
Should we offer children only texts that exhibit the LSCs taught up to that
point? (The Dad who "had to tap the pin in the fan," you will recall,
was an example of these.) The systematic-phonics Open Court readers are currently one of few contemporary exemplars
of such "decodable" texts. Their rationale is that one cannot teach
everything at once, and that children need step-by-step mastery. Again, that
this should prove to be a dilemma is a product of the reading profession's own
making, because it has recommended teaching so few LSCs and so late. Almost any
text is potentially decodable if one teaches the child enough about spelling
patterns.
My
third point, therefore, is both a conclusion and a recommendation: change will
only occur when teachers themselves come to appreciate the complexity and, dare
I say, beauty, of the English sound-spelling/spelling-sound system. For this,
we must alter how we prepare teachers along the lines suggested by Louisa Moats
(Moats, 1995). Teachers need to know much more than they currently do about
phonology and orthography--about their own speech system, and how the writing
system works. New courses will be necessary. One of the unintended consequences
of the integration of reading and writing in the elementary school--for the
first time in the history of American literacy instruction--has been the
halving of the time devoted to teaching teachers how to teach reading and
writing. In the new climate, what were formerly two courses (one each in
reading and writing) have been combined at most teacher education institutions
into one, leaving prospective teachers with a mere three-hour course in which
to master the foundations of all other instruction.
New
books will be also be needed. It is a measure of how much professional opinion
has shifted since the passage of the California law in 1995 that some promising
titles are already in print (e.g. Eldredge, 1995; Fox, 1996). For those whole
language adherents who balk at "dreary rule talk," as Lyn Wendon
calls it (Wendon, 1990, p. 4), Wendon claims that her program, first published
in England, avoids the dreariness by translating letters into pictorial metaphors,
and rules into stories about the letter characters (Wendon 1987-1994). There
are now even publications on the content of phonics from within the whole
language community (e.g. Wilde, 1997). Hull's vintage programmed
self-instructional text has appeared in its seventh edition (Hull & Fox,
1966/1998). At a more theoretical level, Richard Venezky's forthcoming Letters and the noises they make (his
revision of The Structure of English
Orthography) promises to be helpful (Venezky, 1970; in press).
There
are other signs that the professional climate is changing. Last year the
International Reading Association came out with a ringing declaration that it
had believed in phonics all along (International Reading Association, 1997),
and it has finally, after more than forty years of existence, actually
published the first book ever to include the word "phonics" in its
title (Strickland, 1998). (The work does not, however, explicate letter-sound
correspondences themselves.) The new watchword among reading professionals is
"balanced" reading instruction. (That used to mean, in the early
1960s, keeping phonics out. In a nice little historical irony, now it means
letting phonics in!) Things are looking up.
This
fuss about reading instruction is, in short, something that we in the reading
profession have brought down squarely upon our own heads. But if we provoked
it, we can also fix it. The key is not so much better taught children as better
taught teachers. The better taught children will follow as a matter of course.
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1 I would like to thank,
without implying their endorsement of my views, Linnea Ehri and Rose-Marie
Weber for their helpful comments and criticisms of early drafts of this paper.
2 Blouke Carus, telephone
communication, April 21, 1997.
3 Charles Walcutt and his
colleagues identified only eight of them in 1974 (Walcutt, Lamport &
McCracken, 1974, 156-159).
4 I am grateful to Jane
Cramer of the Brooklyn College Library for searching the web for state
legislation on this topic for me.