Thoughts on the Unfortunate Continuation
of Whole Language Practices
in the Phonics Classroom
I have been puzzled at the number of tutoring students coming to me for help with reading problems from school that claim to teach phonics. This includes school that teach Saxon Phonics and the new SRA/McGraw-Hill Imagine It! (Open Court family). My remarks here are not meant to cast suspicion on those highly regarded phonics programs; although, I suspect that the programs are more complicated than many teachers are able to manage. What I am exploring in this blog is the possibility that previous teacher training in whole-language (including Guided Reading and Balanced Literacy) is adding instruction that actually interferes with students’ success with phonics.
I taught for 21 years in public school classrooms, retiring in 2006. During those years, my fellow teachers and I sat through hundreds of hours of whole-language training. I suspect that the theories and pedagogy we were taught may linger on in many classrooms to the detriment of good phonics instruction.
I was prompted to start this page because of my recent experience reading Stanislas Dehaene’s excellent 2009 book, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read
Stanislas begins, “Every child is unique…but when it comes to reading, all have roughly the same brain that imposes the same constraints and the same learning sequence. Thus we cannot avoid a careful examination of the conclusions – not prescriptions – that cognitive neuroscience can bring to the field of education (218).” [Several of my elementary principals argued that we need to teach both whole-language and phonics because different children learn to read differently. I think that recent advances in neuroscience have exploded that common myth.]
He proceeds to discuss the, “Reading Wars: Cognitive psychology directly refutes any notion of teaching via a “global” or “whole language” method. I have to stress this point forcefully because pedagogical strategies of this kind were once very popular and have not lost their appeal for some teachers. These methods teach children to recognize direct associations between written words or even whole sentences and their corresponding meanings. The technique involves the child’s immersion in reading, and the hope is that he will acquire reading spontaneously like a natural language. Extreme advocates of the whole-language or whole-word approach explicitly deny the need to teach the systematic correspondences between graphemes and phonemes. They claim that this knowledge will appear by itself as the result of exposure to the correspondences between words and meanings (219, 220).” [It may come as a surprise to many that even handwriting instruction was largely eliminated by whole language advocates. Pace The Administrator's Guide to Whole Language by Gail Herald-Taylor.]
Concerning the instructional consequences of whole-language, Stanislas continues, “Although its postulates may seem strange, the whole-langauge approach was grounded in a generous principle. It refused drill, which was though to turn children into automata who could only drone out silly sentences like “Pat the cat sat on the mat” The whole-language movement was vigorously opposed to phonics because it considered that his training detracted from understanding text, which was the primary goal of reading instruction. Whole-language advocates places primary emphasis on text comprehension by quickly giving children access to meaningful stories. The claim was that children found it more fun to discover phrases than words, spelling rules, or boring letter-to-sound decoding. They would empower if they could “build their own learning environment” and spontaneously discover what reading as all about: never mind if they initially played at riddles and read “the kitty is thirsty” instead of “the cat drank milk.” For the supporters of the whole language approach, the child’s autonomy and the pleasure of understanding was what counted most, over and above accuracy with which individual words could be decoded (220).” [I was told that children who were taught to sound-out words would become "mere word-callers," able to sound out thousands of words without understand anything. Concerning the need for accuracy, I had one teacher tell me that some of her worst oral reader were her best students because they could answer the questions on the state's multiple choice reading assessment. I asked her about enjoyment poetry and appreciation of expressive prose. I was told that those things were not on the test so we didn't have to worry about them.]
Reflecting on the lingering effects of whole-language, ” The whole-language approach today has been officially abandoned. Nonetheless, I suspect that the issue is still alive in many a teacher’s mind because whole-language advocates are stills firmly entrenched in their positions. They are convinced that their approach is best suited to children’s needs. In France as well as in the United States, efforts to reconcile the two camps have lead to the adoption of an unhealthy compromise called “mixed” or “balanced reading” instruction (220, 221).” [This is the paragraph that first caught my attention concerning the topic of this blog. I highly suspect that the lack of phonics knowledge of students coming to me for help from reputedly phonics classrooms may be accounted for by the classroom teachers previous training in whole-language, which leads them to compromise the phonics instruction by the inclusion of a significant amount of whole-langauge pedagogy. The confused teachers are confusing their students.]
The author then observes, “A great many teachers are so confused by the constant swings back and forth from one educational approach to the other that they borrow at random from all the existing methods. Whole-language has been officially scorned, but either out of inertia or habit it is still surreptitiously present in reading manuals and teacher instruction programs. Even if the grapheme-phoneme correspondences are now the main focus, activities dating back to the whole-language approach are sell present in the classroom. These include paring of a word with an image, recognition of the overall contour of words, and sigh word recognition of the child’s first and last name (221). [I believe this is the source of the confusion that is keeping teachers phonics successfully in their classrooms. This is basically the sight-words memorization technique that is present in practically every classroom in my district, and probably yours. Virtually every tutoring student who comes to me has been subjected to intensive sight-word training at school and in the homework the teachers send home. I would urge, in the light of recent advances in neuroscience, that schools cease requiring whole-word memorization of sight-words, including the Dolch List.]
The author goes into a detailed analysis of whole-language in the remainder of the chapter on whole-language (Chapter 5), which we will leave to our reader to pursue.
After this somewhat theoretical discussion of why some teachers today are less than completely successful teaching children to read well with phonics, let me end with a some solid, practical suggestions:
- Cease all sight-word memorization instruction.
- Do not require students to read predictable books (including Accelerated Reader books) UNTIL they have learned all the basic sound-to-symbol correspondences. Requiring students to read any kind of sight-word (predictable text) BEFORE they have some grasp of the symbol-to-sound correspondences requires them to guess.
- Add 10 to 30 minutes of daily Blend Phonics instruction to the daily classroom work, regardless of the district’s formal adoption. Blend Phonics is more of a technique than a specific program. It is also know as “sequential or cumulative phonics” because of the way the words are built up one grapheme at a time. Directional guidance is built into the program, and whole-word guessing is purposefully excluded.
