Phonics vs Whole Language:

The Never-Ending Debate

University of Sydney

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Many Australian literacy teachers would have been affronted by the recent Sunday program which once again polarised the argument between phonics and whole language in the teaching of reading and writing. The claim that one third of students are in danger of experiencing difficulty with reading and writing through teachers' use of a whole language approach is neither new nor based on any substance. Yet parents and the public in general were once again subjected to the argument which does nothing except further lower the status of teachers and teacher educators in the eyes of the community.

The program began with a series of generalisations so sweeping that the viewer who knew anything at all about the subject was left gasping for breath. The effect was to set up a dichotomy between those who believe that phonic understanding is important for success as a reader (referred to as "the phonics lobby") and those whom the program defined as whole language exponents.

This implied definition was itself narrow and misleading in the extreme. Teachers who really understand the children they teach will recognise this dichotomy as entirely artificial. They understand that a method is only as good as the teacher who espouses it and that rigid adherents of either side, blinkered by their theory, forget they are teaching children.

Most of the so-called "evidence" was highly dubious. Byron Harrison, who suggested the law was the only avenue left open to those appalled by the failure of whole language, is an optometrist. He designed a test using "suggestions" from teachers and administered it to 900 students attending his optometry practice in Tasmania. What credibility does such a test have? The little we were able to see of it looked like lists of similar syllables from which the children had to make choices. How would they have fared on meaning based tests? Why were they seeing an optometrist? Presumably they had vision problems which brings a whole, new, unexplored dimension into the debate.

The group of students apparently selected from Chris Nugent's clients thought that spelling tests and knowledge of grammatical terminology would make them literate. The interviewer seemed to agree. Teachers all know that it is easy to give a test. The real challenge is to teach the knowledge which is to be tested. The program showed Chris Nugent giving tests which required students to spell strings of unrelated words. There is no way of knowing, on the basis of such testing, what the results would have been had the students been writing with purpose, with the facilities to re-draft and check. In the working world such facilities are always available when important written text is being created. It is also interesting that the debate about the relationship between spelling and reading was not examined. There are many avid readers whose spelling is not perfect.

Martin Turner of the Dyslexia Foundation in the U.K. has done a survey which shows reading age has declined by six months since the introduction of "whole language". The implication is that `reading age' is a constant against which expertise can be measured and entirely reliable results obtained. Any teacher would recognise this for the nonsense it is. A factor as simple as which test is chosen can skew results very satisfactorily for the tester. There is no such thing as an infallible reading test. Some are phonics based, some semantically based, some are contextualised, some are lists of words. It is very simple for a tester to select or design a test which will reinforce preconceptions. None of the evidence which suggests that children learn to read by reading was presented to counter the one sided argument being developed.

Brian Cambourne, accepting the program's distinction between phonics and whole language approaches for the sake of making his point, said, "Some, but by no means all, whole language teachers have stuffed up badly just as some, but by no means all, phonics teachers have stuffed up badly". He said he was prepared to make this admission whereas the phonics ideologues were not. The Sunday program certainly showed such phonics exponents making authoritative statements about having no failures. Their claims conveniently ignore the fact that many children with reading problems graduated from a rigid, decontextualised, phonics- based system in the "golden days" of the baby boomers and before. Rosie Wickert's research 1, for example, demonstrates that many of those functionally illiterate in our community are over fifty.

The strength of the whole language approach is that it is "whole" and the expert teacher will make use of `real books" to develop decoding skills as well as to foster pleasurable, purposeful reading. The "some, but by no means all, whole language teachers who stuff up" are either failing to take the step into systematic analysis, which alarms the phonics lobby, or are giving it a precedence which inhibits the enjoyment of texts as literature, which would worry exponents of whole language . It was disturbing, in this connection, to hear Joy Tull, of the "Learning Difficulties Coalition of NSW" speak about the frustrations experienced by parents and teachers who found themselves at odds with school principals who were exponents of "pure whole language". Such a remark points to a serious misunderstanding on the part of some people, perhaps some principals, about what is meant by "whole language".

The program, despite its obvious bias, conceded that Lorraine Wilson, the consultant at Moonee Ponds West, was succeeding in teaching children to be literate, using the whole language approach. The program failed to examine why, despite the fact that she made it quite clear when she stated that the initial focus of all reading should be the making of meaning. She explained that such a focus did not preclude phonic, or other analytic, study but simply preceded it. What phonics fanatics fail to grasp is that, in a genuine whole language approach, the one could, and often does, follow the other very quickly indeed - sometimes in the same session.

To take a very simple example: a teacher could read Libby Gleeson's The Princess and the Perfect Dish 2 to a class, making use of prediction. It is perhaps important to point out that the purpose of prediction is to aid comprehension not, as Chris Nugent implied, to develop perfect decoding accuracy. No exponent of whole language would suggest that readers should employ prediction to read a street sign or a name in a telephone book as he suggested. After one or two readings the teacher could discuss the text, relating it to her/his students' actual and vicarious experiences, and then move on to recognition, and student production, of "P". (Not only is the princess perfect but she spends her time happily with pets and playthings, smells the perfume of the fruit, is shown portraits of princes by her mother . . . and so on.) Even the "patterning" strategy so strongly advocated by the Fitzroy Community School would not be precluded, though there is some research which suggests that the particular example shown on the Sunday program is not a good approach for reinforcing l. to r. orientation. 3 There are widely used phonics programs whose suggested teaching strategies are based on this research:

The children must be taught that there is one, and only one place to attack a word and that is at the initial blend. Always draw a child's attention first to the beginning of a one-syllable word, not to the middle or the end. Just as a line is read from left to right, a word is sounded from left to right. This will help pupils develop, smooth, natural pronunciation - which leads to fluency in reading. 4

It is clear that Reading with phonics, a reputable program based on sound research which is widely used in Australian schools, does not advocate the practice of recognising end patterns. Should a teacher decide to use it, however, s/he would find, for example that "and", "land" and "hand" all occur in the text, thus providing a contextualised basis for study of the "and" pattern. "Manufactured" tales containing such gems as "we ran then we swam" where, incidentally, the pattern being taught is not immediately apparent, are poor fare indeed by comparison.

Phonics exponents, like those who appeared on this program, maintain that the first step in learning to read is decoding. It is, more simply, a matter of what is recognised or acknowledged as the first step. Maybe interest, motivation and understanding come before decoding. Whole language exponents would not want to quarrel with the fact that decoding is a vital skill for successful reading. They would almost certainly want to quarrel about the type of materials used to teach decoding skills in a pure, patterned phonics program. An intelligent teacher, with knowledge of the sounds of English and sensitivity to the texts used in the classroom can teach phonics systematically, using the language of real books. This is obviously one of the elements of Lorraine Wilson's acknowledged successful program at Moonee Ponds. It is, however, not the whole program. Her students are also working with real language in real situations and are being empowered to make decisions about the language they will employ in these situations.

The Teaching Kits issued by the NSW Board of Studies in conjunction with the K-6 syllabus provide an easily accessible model for the implementation of the whole language approach. These kits, though variable in quality, are based on a genuine whole language philosophy using "real texts" rather than "constructs" manufactured to illustrate patterns. Far from avoiding the teaching of phonics, which the Sunday program would have us believe is the hallmark of whole language, they make specific reference to it in outcomes statements and suggested teaching strategies. Amongst the reading outcomes of the Stage 1 Teaching Kit entitled Grandma and Grandpa are:

Uses and integrates reading processes such as:

* knowledge of sound/symbol relationships

* knowledge of the visual features of words

* sounding out words

* drawing on semantic information

* drawing on contextual information 5

The first three reading processes listed require specific phonic skills. Their inclusion in the outcomes for the kit means that teachers are expected to facilitate their acquisition by all students. There are, however two more processes on this particular list and they require other semantic or contextual reading skills. Their inclusion means that teachers are expected to teach these skills as well. It is not an accident that all these processes are listed together but a reflection of the genuine whole language approach which underpins these kits.

Amongst the writing outcomes listed for this kit is the National Outcome: "Usually attempts to spell words by drawing on knowledge of sound/symbol

relationships and of standard letter patterns." 6 Activity 18 of the same kit suggests teaching strategies by which this outcome might be achieved. It is a discussion and amongst suggested classroom activities such as discussion of weather, activities, and clothing associated with a particular season, the production and labelling of posters and a classroom display are:

* Write on the board or on chart paper some of the words that are central to each group's report - for example, snow and rain, coats.

* Draw students' attention to the spelling patterns of these words.

* Pay particular attention to the blending of onsets such as `sn" in snow or rimes (sic) such as `ain' in rain

* Encourage them to think of other words that have similar spellings.

* Encourage students to memorise some of these spelling words as personal spelling words. 7

Here we see quite specific attention to spelling placed in the context of the language the students are using. This activity also prepares the way for Activity 20 which deals with poetry about the seasons. The whole language approach, properly implemented, will always deal with spelling, despite the implication of the Sunday program that it does not. It will not, however, require students to learn or reproduce long lists of words free of any meaningful context.

Materials such as the above mentioned kits which offer sound suggestions to busy teachers about whole language teaching strategies are readily available. Individual teachers and schools are also preparing their own resources so that their students have the benefits of even greater immediacy and relevance. No examples of such teaching materials were considered on the Sunday program and the two advocates of whole language were allowed no time to present a counter view to the sensationalist one being promulgated.

Teachers, denounced once again by the media and so-called experts in reading, are now left to defend their practices without the opportunity of presenting their approaches to teaching literacy in a coherent and logical manner. Viewers too are denied the opportunity of making a reasoned judgement based on a cogent presentation of both sides of the debate. The phonics vs whole language polarisation shown in this program is largely a myth yet it continues to provide the media with a never ending story.

References

1 Wickert, R. (1989). No single measure: Summary report: A survey of Australian adult literacy: Canberra: D.E.E.T.

2 Gleeson, L. & Greder, A. (illust.) (1995). The princess and the perfect dish: Gosford: Ashton Scholastic.

3 Stott, D. H. (1968). Roads to literacy: Edinburgh: Holmes McDougall Ltd. pp 23 & 57

4 Hay, J., Wingo, C. & Hletko, M. (1984). The new reading with phonics: Teacher's edition: Philadelphia, New York, San Jose: J. B. Lippincott Co. vol. A p. 65.

5 NSW Board of Studies (1994). Grandma and Grandpa: English K-6 teaching kit, stage 1: North Sydney: B. of S. p.4.

6 ibid. p.5

7 ibid. p.26

This page was last updated 19 July 1996

Enquiries/Comments to: mteach.IT@alex.edfac.usyd.edu.au