(from The Primary Educator, 6,3, 2000, pp. 8-15)
Whenever I think of this debate, I remember the rhyme that was quoted at a conference many years ago. You no doubt know it:
The rhyme was supposed to prove that teachers were wrong to teach children the "skills" of reading, and should rather concentrate on reading as a whole. Over the years, speakers advocating wholistic approaches to the teaching or reading have also satirised teachers who taught children sound-symbol relationships, and how to blend sounds to form words, by likening the process to learning to ride a bike. The only way to do it was to get on and have a go. You might fall a few times, but you would never do it by learning first to pedal, then to steer, and lastly to balance.
No doubt this sounds ridiculous to you, and it did to me then, but that was the basis on which "whole language" was sold to teachers in those days. It was not hard to counter the analogies by asking about people learning to play the piano simply by imitating concert pianists, or the absurdity of telling learner-drivers just to get into the car and "go for it" in an authentic traffic situation!
We’ve gone a long way since then, and a lot of research has now made the issues clearer. A lot of classroom experience has also taught us a great deal more than we ever knew about teaching language (reading and spelling in particular). The greater freedom of exchange of ideas through teacher journals and other publications has assisted the process.
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Yet many teachers still wonder, "Am I doing the best for my children?" and the media still regularly demonstrates public concern about reading failure.
At the beginning of the 90s, a large conference of teachers in Sydney considered that question: how to prevent failure in reading. One paper advocated a balanced approach to reading instruction. (Whiting, 1992). It advocated what might be called a "whole language, integrated skills approach". It was not a typical academic attempt to straddle two camps, but an attempt to reconcile the situation that had developed. The whole language movement which had virtually swept the western educational systems by that time, had taught us much about children’s reading and writing. In the process, however, it had for many teachers, abolished the teaching of some indispensable skills which, for a large minority of children, are not learned naturally (Tunmer & Nesdale, 1984).
These skills are the ones that you would teach if you based your teaching on the nature of the English language and what one needs to learn to master it. English is fundamentally an alphabetic language. It uses a limited number of arbitrary symbols (26 plus combinations) to represent the sounds that are combined to make words (about 44). One cannot possibly learn by sight all the words one wishes to read and write (in excess of 20 000 for most of us), let alone all the unknown words we may encounter. The only effective way of mastering the writing code is to learn the representations of the sounds, and how to run them together to recreate the words on the page. On this basis, you would teach the child the sound-based system of English.
Of course, in reality it’s not that simple. The history of the English language soon teaches us that the spelling (orthographic) system has been complicated in many ways. Nevertheless, it is a system, and can be described quite clearly in most of its peculiarities.
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When we look at the research on initial reading teaching, a series of summaries over the past 30 or 40 years have demonstrated clearly that if one teaches children this system effectively, they will (almost all of them) be able to read and spell (Adams, 1990, 1997; Chall, 1966, 1983, 1997). Children need to be taught the code, and not just encouraged to guess from context. The significant report of the Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children (USA) (Snow, Burns & Griffin, 1998) supports this conclusion, and emphasises the importance of learning about the nature of the alphabetic system, and being exposed to frequent, regular spelling-sound relationships.
Why then has the whole language movement been so important, and why did it appeal to teachers? Here is Kenneth Goodman’s summary of the features of whole language. They make obvious the appeal of the movement:
There were other principles that made the movement attractive. Watson(1989) listed reading of untampered texts (this came to be referred to as "authentic" texts); telling stories; student-generated writing; making personal and social connections to meaning; student choice and responsibility for learning; acceptance of errors; and an emphasis upon meaning. Learning language was "natural" and so learning to read should be natural, too. Later, there was a literature base to the movement.
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Popularly, reading was thought to be (to use Goodman’s famous phrase) "a psycholinguistic guessing game" (Goodman, 1976). Context and prediction were thought to be all-important to success. As Yetta Goodman phrased it in an instructional film for teachers, "Tell the children, "When you come to a word you don’t know, say "Moses" and go on.""
These principles, while not defining whole language (defining it is usually said by its proponents to be contrary to the grass-roots nature of the movement) are obviously important to teachers. But they do not tell us much about the content and sequence of teaching beginning reading. These are decisions that are left largely to teachers.
In addition, some of the principles were problematic. It is true that children learn to speak naturally in social situations. It is not true that all children learn to read in the same way. Indeed, the majority of the societies in the world did not have a written form of their language until recently, and then only because of the efforts of Christian missionaries wishing to translate the Bible. Written language is a human invention, especially those languages that are alphabetic. Reading could hardly be said to be natural. Some intelligent children and adults never achieve effective reading in a lifetime of trying. Yet some children come to school already reading, without having received any direct instruction, as far as one can tell.
What do we now know about effective initial instruction in reading? We know that it should accord with the principles of good teaching, for a start. Westwood (1995) has summarised the research-based principles of good teaching as follows:
The effective teacher
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These principles are clearly a combination of direct instruction responsibilities and whole-language principles. According to Westwood, the best teaching involves both.
Now, whole language proponents, while denigrating direct instruction in the skills of written language, do not deny their importance. Goodman himself has written,
"Whole Language does support the learning of phonics to the extent that phonics is a set of relations between the sound system and the orthographic system of written language. . . .However, there is abundant research to show that direct instruction in phonics is neither necessary nor desirable to produce readers" (Goodman, 1989, p.215). Unfortunately, but characteristically, he does not cite any of this research.
There is, however a large body of research showing the effectiveness of direct instruction, and some of it is included in the references already given.
Can whole language principles and direct instruction co-exist? Teachers now believe that they can. The NSW State Literacy Strategy documents provide for "a balanced reading program" which includes provision for teaching the conventions of print, sound, letters and words, and writing and spelling (NSW Dept of School Education, 1997). The difference is that these matters ("skills" to use the old language) are addressed in the context of meaningful texts. So, for example, after the text is read, the teacher writes a sound blend from the text on the board, and asks the pupils to search for the sound blend in the text. As they find occurrences, the words are written on the board. Other words are suggested. The list is read aloud.
While the proponents of "phonics first" would argue that this process is too incidental and does not allow sufficient reinforcement, others would contend that that is a matter of teaching method, and should be left to the professional judgment and expertise of the teacher. Teachers are left with the responsibility of knowing what kind of instruction in the written code will ensure that all the children acquire the requisite skills for independent reading.
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There is also some careful research demonstrating that systematic instruction in phonics can and does take place in some whole language classrooms, and that it is effective in improving reading outcomes (Dahl, Scharer, & Lawson, 1999). It is possible to have the best of both worlds, it seems: the interesting, lively, engaging world of whole language, and the instructional, logical, sequenced world of skills development.
Chall (1983) outlined a sequence of instruction for the stages of beginning reading that is helpful in this regard. Children need to begin with motivation to read. Adults foster this by sharing their personal interest in reading, and making attractive materials available to children. At this stage it is also the role of the adult also to draw children’s attention to the features of print as the conveyor of the "story". Classroom activities should therefore be designed deliberately to focus children’s attention on the existence of "sounds" in words.
The next stage emphasises the structure of stories in interesting reading materials, but also teaches children letter-sound correspondences and how they may be combined or blended to form words. Children are helped to read simple texts that have a high proportion of regular words that illustrate the alphabetic principle. Writing is integrated with this teaching of reading and spelling.
As children develop confidence, they are introduced to more complex spelling patterns, and visual as well as auditory information is utilised. This is done through the reading of more complex material and attempting more ambitious writing.
The importance of this scheme is that it is developmental and sequenced &emdash; not rigidly, but in such a way that instruction recognises the developmental stage of each child, and proceeds in an orderly fashion. Once again, teachers need to determine the extent to which their children need this instruction to be direct, sequenced and individualised. This is in contrast to teaching that relies on opportunities that may or may not come up, and in that sense may be haphazard.
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Once again, the Prevention of Reading Difficulties report reminds us that effective initial instruction in reading, should "integrate attention to the alphabetic principle with attention to the construction of meaning and opportunities to develop fluency" (Snow et.al., 1998, p.vii).
Why not just begin by teaching all children the facts they need to know about language in a carefully constructed and sequenced program in which all participate? Since some children come to school unable to understand how the written language "system" works, and since for them conventional instruction is insufficient, it seems reasonable to ask this question. There are some popular systems being used in Australian (and overseas) schools that do this. The "Spalding" program is one, where children are taught, by rote, the phonograms that make up the orthography of English, together with the variant sounds they represent. They are then in a position to decode words containing those phonograms by trying first on, then another of the possible alternatives. Most remedial programs use some such system. The Alpha to Omega program would be an English example of such a remedial program that was essentially based on the pioneering work of Samual Orton in USA. (Hornsby, 1993) Teach everyone the basics and then no-one will miss out. Insofar as these programs provide children with the technical information they need to know to decode words, they are helpful, especially to children having difficulty.
The only problem with this is that not everyone needs to be taught those basics. Years ago, a system of teaching reading commonly used in Australia and UK was called Breakthrough to Literacy. It was not often used as it was intended by the authors (who were linguists) &emdash; mainly because it was difficult to do so. But where it was used well, it enabled children to come to understand how the written language system "works". Children did not learn all the facts about language (who could?), but at a point in their experience of using language, they "broke through" to literacy. The breakthrough occurred because they were led through a process of experiences of language and its structures that followed the developmental path of learning that we know from research. It began with whole words and their distinctive visual features, and moved on to teach children how words were structured from sounds, and then to demonstrate to them how plausible alphabetic spellings differed from actual orthography. By this sequence, children came to understand how the system works. At that point they began to move from being dependent learners to becoming independent learners of language.
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Some children come to school already independent learners in language. They need teachers to facilitate that learning, to guide it and to extend it. Other children quickly become independent learners after beginning school. But others do not. They, more than the others, need direct instruction or, to use a more acceptable phrase, "explicit teaching". Numerous studies have shown that when students are taught how to think about sounds in words, are taught how to decode words before they fall behind their peers in reading, the rate of failure to learn to read well is reduced (Blachman, 1988, Cunningham, 1990).
In the research on phonics in whole language classes (Dahl et al, 1999), teachers taught children foundation concepts of phonological awareness, phonemic awareness and phonemic segmentation. Vowels and consonants were taught and continued to be used in sounding out words. Children were given strategy instruction; that is, they were taught how to use their knowledge strategically in reading (e.g. self-checking, recognising known orthographic patterns, monitoring letter-sound relations in writing/spelling). Even in whole language classrooms, it is the instructional approach of the teacher that most affects children’s acquisition of reading strategies (Sears, 1999).
There can be no doubt now that these kinds of knowledge and skills are indispensable to success in learning to read. The old, free-wheeling version of whole language will not do. Tom Nicholson summed it up like this:
"…the great debate seems to be settled. Reading is not a guessing game. Yet without the debaters we may not have faced the issue so squarely. It has indeed been an exciting show to watch." (Nicholson, 1986)
Yet the same research summaries that have demonstrated so conclusively that knowledge about how written language works is indispensable, also shows us that reading teaching is better when there is an emphasis on meaning, and when children have frequent and purposeful opportunities for reading. Increasingly, teachers in whole language classrooms are realising this, as articles in recent teacher-publications show (Kane, 1999; Moustafa & Maldonado-Colon, 1999; Groff, Lapp & Flood, 1998; Price, 1998). Stacey & Wheldall (2000) conclude that for all students (including low-progress readers) to acquire reading successfully, we need a well-developed phonic word-attack program, opportunities to acquire high frequency sight words, and regular practice in reading meaningful, connected text in a supportive context.
The most effective beginning reading programs provide a whole language framework for teaching children the knowledge and skills they need for success in reading. The two approaches teach different things, but complement each other to provide the basis for really effective programs in teaching beginning reading.
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References