I have no particular axe to grind in the war between advocates of whole language and phonics as methods of teaching reading. In the spirit of wishy-washy compromise, I suspect that both have their place.
But it strikes me as a rather odd feature of the debate that advocates of phonics should also be the ones most concerned about spelling. The vast majority of spelling errors arise from the use of the obvious phonetic spelling rather than the “correct” spelling that is part of the whole language. So one of the costs of the phonic approach is the need to learn, by rote, the vast number of exceptions and special cases that make spelling English such a miserable experience for the uninitiated.
Phonics phans never seem to recognise this.
Here, for example, is Kevin Donnelly in today’s SMH
Advocates of whole language argue the critics are wrong and that the overwhelming majority of students are successful readers. Often cited are the results of the PISA literacy test in 2000, which covered 32 countries, in which Australian 15-year-olds came out at the top of the table.
But students were not corrected for faulty grammar, punctuation and spelling. One Australian researcher involved with the study stated: “It was the exception rather than the rule in Australia to find a student response that was written in well-constructed sentences, with no spelling or grammatical error.”
Whole language advocates also point to the apparent improvement in the numbers of students reaching the reading benchmarks as evidence that all is well. In 1996, the first year of the national benchmarks introduced by the Howard Government, 73 per cent of year 3 students reached the set standard; by 2000 it was 92.5 per cent.
However, such standards represent minimum acceptable standards, and raising the success rate from 73 per cent to 92.5 per cent in just under four years is somewhat suspicious. There is some evidence to suggest that the education bureaucrats have simply lowered the bar by redefining what constitutes an acceptable standard.
This piece is riddled with logical errors, and unsupported factual claims. What relationship is there between the way a student was taught to recognise words and their capacity to construct a grammatical sentence? Following Donnelly’s approach, it seems reasonable to blame his incapacity to construct a logical argument on the way he way was taught to read. I’m guessing he was taught phonics.
John Quiggin 
But you have to learn them anyways, whereas phonics makes it easy to get the meaning of a word you have heard but not seen in print.
Whole language is the Marxism of language teaching.
A bad idea, surreally defended by those who profess to care about helping children to read.
It’s like George W Bush’s presidency. If it wasn’t real, it would be pretty funny.
I think the correlation is just that educators inclined to teach in phonics will also be inclined to also teach the ‘hard way’ about the rules of grammar, etc. Coming from Malaysia (where our English schools failed to pick up the latest fads from the West and we continued to learn English the old fashioned way) to Australia at the age of 15, I found most Australian students to have both terrible spelling and grammar. It was quite ironic, really. I think students from former British colonies in Southeast Asia do get better education in English at least up to senior high.
I acknowledge that learning by rote is terribly boring but you need to be proficient in the fundamentals before you can be creative.
I’m just a bystander in this debate too, and a big fan of teachers everywhere. As far as I can understand it, I think phonics is seen as being a more analytical approach, and thus harder. Advocates say it teaches children how to handle words they haven’t seen before. I think it’s also correlated with greater rigour in grammar, as others have pointed out, although I don’t know why.
Some whole language advocates apparently reject the claim that the two approaches are mutually exclusive. They claim they teach both phonics and whole language. One interesting point for phonics is that it involves less rote learning since words can be constructed, whereas whole language requires that the entire language be learned by rote. One discussion suggested whole language approaches can be uncomfortable for analytically oriented learners.
I would be interested to better understand the clear ideological alignments behind this debate.
As a tangent, this debate always makes me wonder: if phonics is “the way”, what are reading rates are like in languages that don’t have a (semi-)phonetic alphabet?
From my experience as a parent most children can learn to read by the whole-word but all children can learn by phonics.
One of my children was getting behind in reading and we had to change schools twice before we could find one who would (could?) teach my child using phonics. Within 9 months of extra tuition the child’s reading had reached normal level for age.
It seems that the wishy washy approach is the reality in schools and I suspect Adams satire (is it – so hard to tell these days) is closer to the driving force judging by the way the argument has been presented by the government. Suffice to say, there is no one size fits all solution to language learning for all people at all times and having taught people with exceptional grammar knowledge and poor communication skills, too much of an emphasis on one direction, has costs elsewhere. Most of my (non-crappy typing skills) spelling errors, btw, come from the unvoiced vowel sound of the schwa so prevalent in Australian and British accents (seperate/separate yesterday – sheesh).
John, your points are good. Donnelly very unhelpfully blurs the issues of reading, writing and grammar. They are distinct skills, and you can’t blame whole language techniques for bad spelling and grammar.
But when you speculate that phonetics contributes to bad spelling, you are committing the same crime as Donnelly. Phonetics is first and first foremost an approach to the teaching of reading. It’s meant to arm beginning readers to tackle unfamiliar words. Bizarre as English spelling may be, it’s a very long way from being arbitrary. And even if some sounds are represented by arbitrary groupings of letters like ‘ough’ and so on, kids can still learn to associate the group as a whole with a particular sound, or even a choice of two or three sounds.
It makes no sense to measure the success of phonetic reading techniques in terms of spelling outcomes. Spelling in English is always going to require rote learning no matter how you teach reading. But at least with a knowledge of phonetics you have a head start.
Grammar is another story altogether. For that we might need to bring back the cane for a start.
Ron, in the CT version of this thread, DM says
This is maybe one reason for the vigour with which the debate is fought out. Lots of people will have had experiences like yours, but in opposite directions.
Dr Ann Castles is probably the foremost academic leading the charge back to phonics outlined here
Whole language is great for middle class kids whose parents read to them prolifically. In fact many of the books they read are based on phonics, which blurs the whole language advocacy argument itself(Dr Seuss books like ‘Hop on Pop’ and the like)What is clear to teachers like my wife who use phonics is that this approach fails a large subset of kids, for whom this parental guidance is largely absent. What you also have to appreciate is that phonics teaching aids have progressed enormously since Observa was a lad. My wife teaches JP using the British based Jolly Phonics with stunning results compared to most of her WL compatriots. Indeed a grounding in phonics is most advantageous at the JP level, but is being used with great results in Seconday for remedial literacy. Also the middle class performers just love adding another string to their strong bows.
Whole language reading is a bit like teaching a teenager to drive. You say watch me as you drive around the paddock and then flick them the keys to have a go. Still lots of farm kids learn that way. For quite some time now teachers like my wife have been using phonics with stunning results and showing their oblivious workmates. There is still a lot of resistance by the 70s trained cohort, who don’t know any better. Her best apostles are her student teachers with open minds, as well as the parents of course. Me, I’d put my house on the wife being able to beat say a Mem Fox at teaching JPs for a year or two and compare the results. But then the wife isn’t into writing and flogging nice stories for kids and parents. Sounds like the wife’s about to become flavour of the month in the yo-yos and hula hoops policymaking fads of public education.
Try Ann Castles views here http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/08/15/1092508262234.html?from=storylhs&oneclick=true
Hmmmm – on one hand, I was educated in the 70s in Queensland before the educational 70s hit – so we were doing phonics at primary school and Latin roots and grammar from grade 5 to grade 8. Had that not been the case, I would probably not be able to use the subjective case correctly.
On the other hand, I was having dinner with a friend of mine the other week and helping her 7 year old son with his homework. Try explaining to a 7 year old that Wednesday has two syllables and where to insert the break and then you might get some picture of the practicalities of learning English from its orthography.
Until my retirement five years ago I was an adult/vocational educator (TAFE) in ‘community and aged care’ – communication, health sciences and care skills. Over the years I must have taught many hundreds of adult learners, from the ages of 17 through to late 50s. Some were school leavers; others were mothers returning to the paid workforce, after years at home bringing up the kids, to new careers – often forced on them by the dictates of Centrelink; others were upskilling, reskilling, new skilling; some were men following manufacturing redundancy, to fresh careers in the care industry – you can picture what I mean.
Let me tell you, there was no golden age for reading, writing, grammer, ever!
Indeed, when I was young, after WW11 in England (a very few kids had passed the 11+ exam and gone to Grammer School, another few had gone on to ‘techical high’ school at 13, and the rest of us, the majority, were sent to a ‘secondary modern’ school.
The majority of those students were going to either work on farms, in manufacturing, in shops or stay at home with Mum and Dad, engaged in home duties till their early marriage and 3-4 children – and, again, the vast majority left school at age 15.
A few of us were going to work in offices (some going on to secretarial college, as I did).
Here, I would say that a large percentage of those young people did not have a good grasp of reading, whether they had been taught ‘phonics’ or ‘whole reading’.
I was lucky, I had a mum – from an Irish/Welsh coal mining family, who started her working life at 13, as a tweeny maid in a big house – remember Upstairs and Downstairs? – who had a passion for education and the need for her kids to READ, write and better oneself. I also didn’t need a second bidding, I just loved to read, grammer, and to write. I also had to leave school at 14 – but that’s another story.
Personally, I didn’t get the opportunity to receive a tertiary education until, as a migrant to Australia, I was able to get a free university education, per favour of (the now strangly much maligned Gough Whitlam, the Australian tax-payer, the mature age entry and a truly (believe me) ‘fair go’ culture.
You know, we have become such a black and white, good and bad, moral and immoral, right and wrong, you say tomato, I say tomaato society. You just have to go back over the last few blogs on this site, with regard to the election here and in the US – it almost became Lord of the Flies.
As a good teacher – and remember there aren’t those hundreds of thousands of jobs left where you don’t need to be a reader/writer – you use any skill/ability that you have in your lexicon to get people to read and put their thoughts down on paper/computer/audio tape, etc. etc. etc.
Personally, I wouldn’t be excoriating/maligning any primary or high school teacher about the way they teach. I just thank God, that there are hundreds of people deciding to pay fees to learn to become teachers, to work for at least one degree, and get paid $35,000 less than a back bencher – and support them, pat them on the back, and help them with the skills to be bold, versatile and courageous, and thank them for wanting to teach our next generation to think outside the square.
There has been some wonderful, thoughtful, knowledgeable blogs here this week, on this thread and on Monday Bulletin Board.
Australians are beaut people, just looking a bit inwards at the moment, but ‘I learn Mr. Fawlty, I learn – even-tually’.
Thanks
Tony, there are no obvious ideological differences between preferences for phonics or whole word. It’s like choosing between Ford and Holden. People hold strong opinions, but it’s often hard to fathom why. However Kevin Donnelly is an educational ideologue who consistently rants that the whole education system has gone to rack and ruin since hijacked by the education unions and left wing curriculum designers. Donnelly is a prominent member of the Liberal party, used to consult to state Liberal governments on education and now is chief of staff to Kevin Andrews. Donnelly’s thinking is probably no more sophisticated than since whole word is part of the modern curriculum it therefore is bad and if we revert to the way things were done in the good old days that will necessarily be good.
As for which of phonics or whole word is actually a better way to teach children to read, I have no idea.
I was concerned to see that the leader of the teacher union was prepared to go on TV news to criticise the government for wanting to look into the issue. I reckon that is a sure way to get parents offside. The union should be concerned with weages and consitions, not the curriculum.
Teachers, if they have a view, should express it thru the relevant professional organisation.
Why can’t they represent their members on these issues if that’s what the rank and file want them to do?
In any case, aren’t the lines between a professional organisation and a union considerably more blurred than you make them out to be? In my (admittedly very limited) experience, professional organisations tend to be unions for professions whose members mainly vote Liberal (doctors, police, engineers).
Robert’s right – teachers’ unions aren’t just industrial bodies but also perform functions usually associated with a professional association – in a similar fashion to what the NTEU does for academics.
(posting quickly, hope this makes sense!) I think part of the problem is that there are different varieties of ‘phonics’. The one that has been shown to work best is not widely practised in Australia—this is the kind developed by Diane McGuinness, a linguist who has done very detailed research on this question. She has shown quite clearly that most ‘phonics’ instruction proceeds in the wrong way and is based on a poor understanding of ‘language’. As a linguist (someone engaged in the scientific study of language) I feel it’s a great pity that my profession hasn’t done a better job of communicating its findings to the wider public. Every day we see examples of utterances in the media on language, ‘grammar’, ‘phonetics’, reading, etc. but almost always totally uninformed by a serious analytical grasp of the subject. It’s also true that the so-called ‘whole language’ approach is very diverse, and in fact most teachers in Australia would be consciously employing what is commonly referred to as an ‘eclectic’ approach which draws on insights from both ‘phonics’ and ‘whole language’, using more of one or the other with different ages, abilities, etc. Some things to keep in mind are: reading standards in Australia are probably higher than they have ever been; the level of reading skill required in day-to-day life in Australia is probably higher than ever before; and, some kids have to be at the top end of the rankings and some at the bottom.
Wbb:
I didn’t hear what the Teachers Union leader said, but I think the point is that the near incessant public questioning of teachers’ competence must have a crushing effect on their morale. Taxi drivers and dentists might cop it once in a decade, but the accusation that teachers are 180-degrees misguided when it comes to this or that apsect of learning, seems almost relentless. And when the federal Education Minister, who should be behind the profession, uses it as yet another excuse to grandstand at the expense of state education departments, a reply is warranted.
The issue doesn’t relate to Weages but, on a broad interpretation, it does go to consitions.
Donelly is a Liberal party hack who spouts out nonsense on anything vaguely educational in Victoria. I wasn’t aware he roamed wider. He is the Andrew Bolt of education.
My big surprise with this one is that there is still a debate with serious advocates on each side of the fence. I recall that there was a “whole language” fad back in the early 70s, but the debate was fairly quickly settled in favour of the need for a phonics base, but some words would simply have to be learned as ‘sight’ words. One forgets that teachers trained in the early 70s are still around in the classroom.
There is no one sure-fire way of teaching all kids, however, and most experts seem to recommend that teachers use a range of techniques. Even so reading is not a natural activity in the same way as speaking and unless you have exceptional teachers, such as observa’s missus, some kids fall seem to fall through the net in every classroom.
Sandy McCutcheon had a session on the topic yesterday (Australia Talks Back on RN). The most sensible comment I heard between the transmission breaks we had here from a wonderful thunderstorm was the woman who stressed that the real need is to do something about giving kids enriched language experiences in early childhood before they go to school. Mark Latham’s reading books to kids is a bit simplistic and tokenistic, but he’s actually in the right ballpark.
If there is an ideological faultline I think it is around the “back to basics” movement, which seems to be based on arch-conservatism, which in turn seems to distrust human creativity.
Molly makes some excellent points.
The literacy demands are greater today than ever before, those with the strongest views on “good” methods are usually the most ignorant and teachers will try hard to find the method that works with the individual child.
Parental input is probably less than a generation ago and this is the key factor in learning to read. Houses with books will usually have children who learn to read – although if there is domestic violence it will be much harder.
Teachers in public schools are berated for failing to teach children to read who have come to school hungry, tired and with enormous difficulties in their home life. They also fail with children who have aberrant behaviours.
There are some poor teachers but unlike a bad doctor they don’t bury the evidence. In general they are under appreciated, bullied by people like Brendan Nelson and work hard to impart a love of learning in an increasingly strident world where there are many assumptions made and which give them little credit for the variety of their approaches.
In addition the problems with spelling is exacerbated by spell checking on computers as many children think that all they need to do is learn how to use that tool. Computers are a different kind of literacy but teachers are required to teach that too – and keep the kids active, etc.
It is time to take a deep breath and stop taking the bait thrown out by Howard’s haters.
As most of you know, there was a terrible train crash at Ufton Nervet in England earlier this week.
I have previously never heard of this town, nor seen its name written.
However, I know the PHONIC basis of written English, and so I am quite confident in reading that name aloud.
What would a “whole language” person do, when confronted with such a new word, and no ability to ‘sound it out’.
pogmahone, that’s why I’m surprised there is still a debate.
James makes a good point. I walked past Education House today in town and wondered how the people who have expertise in curriculum feel about all the nonsense that is now tossed around as a pawn in Howard and Nelson’s culture war games. Not to mention teachers at the coalface. Surely the time has come to call a halt to this ludicrous denigration of professionals and public servants and the propensity to debate public policy in hysterical and absurd terms. The media, and in particular The Australian are highly culpable in all this as well.
Mark and James, I agree. I did hear the Teachers Union leader on the radio. Her point was, write a letter and hey presto we have an enquiry without, it seems, any exploratory consultations. Under these circumstances you have to worry about how the enquiry will be set up, who will be on it etc.
The problem teachers have always laboured under is that the profession is not respected as much as in many other countries and every-one has an opinion about education based on their personal experience.
Jill, Molly makes a valid point that we’ve all come a long way from the good old days and to a large extent are arguing about perhaps getting the remaining 20% up the stairs nowadays rather than the 80% in her day. Now my son plays footy(shared with netball and soccer)at a brick aircond, carpeted Fox TV and dining/bar facilitied clubrooms, on turf where in the 1920s his grandfather changed in a corro, dirt floored shed and cold showered on duckboards. So?
So you think any concern about literacy by your govt is just Howard’s haters do you? Never mind Latham was trotting about with that silly middle class twit Mem Fox in tow. A woman who has been responsible for keeping thousands of SA children downstairs while she got out of the classroom and upstairs as quick as she could to flog her stories. Noone denies the challenge of the classroom nowadays, least of all my wife. However she does challenge the blinkered thinking of those who are oblivious to smarter ways of teaching, because of the blinkers placed on them by the Mem Foxes of this world. Working smarter not necessarily harder Jill. Presumably Dr Ann Castles is one of your Howard’s haters too eh Jill?
My wife was fortunate enough to strike an ‘old school’ phonics flash cards JP Head on her first appointment after exiting Mem’s brainwashing colleges in the 70s. When she stumbled across Jolly Phonics by chance in Canberra she gave it a go with good results. When Jolly himself came out to Aus some years ago he made a special trip to Adelaide then to visit my wife, after hearing about her efforts. He demonstrated how extraordinarily rapidly JP kids could absorb his methods, as well as updating her resources. Her results with R-1s speak for themselves. One mother in particular had 3 similar boys with ‘Learning Difficulties'(thick as bricks for non PCs) go through her school, the youngest with my wife. Have a guess which one was the only one to read and which teacher was instantly idolised? And yes of course mum got directed to the resources so she could teach the older two to read at home.
Haven’t seen Higgins or Doolittle before whole language kids? Bad luck, because the phonics kids get it, even if many teachers don’t. There is a time and place for reading lovely stories to kids, but it aint all the time, particularly for R-3 spongebrains.
If Brendan Nelson et al are targetting teachers, perhaps it has something to do with the blatant political agenda of the teachers unions. After their misleading ad campaign about Commonwealth Government funding for private schools, I suspect it is payback time. The sooner we have one teachers union representing teachers at both public and private schools, the better. Perhaps then they will start to focus on the really important issues. While we’re about it, how about vouchers for education funding, so that parents will have a real choice? And why does the government need to be involved in running schools anyway, beyond setting broad curriculum guidelines (which is all they do for private schools). If private schools can do a better job (which is what the market seems to be telling us) why not let them get on with it? The public school teachers (or their unions at any rate) seem to be degenerating more and more into grubby rent seekers. I am very grateful for the work they do as individuals (my sister is a very hard working and capable teacher in the public system) but their behaviour regarding the funding issue is nothing short of disgraceful.
Private schools do well enough with good students, however, throw them the problem students that public schools have to deal with and they won’t do so great.
Those annoying “bad students” cost significantly more money to teach and hence reduce profit.
I’ve never understood why the Government would subsidise private schools. Should they be subsidising fedex (so people can “choose” something other than Australia Post), Sydney harbour cruises (so people can “choose” something other than the sydney ferries), Coca Cola (so people can “choose” something other than tap water to drink)?
I’m all for private enterprise and the free market, but the Government shouldn’t be subsidising it at all. If enough people take up the private school option then public schools will have less students so they can sack some teachers close some schools, spend less money and lower taxes. Seems more effective then taxing people only to directly transfer the money to the school of the tax payers choosing… Plus people who don’t have childen benefit from lower taxes too. Equity all round 🙂
And they should sell the roads while they’re at it. Let private enterprise buy them and run all of them as toll roads. Do the same with public transport and we might actually see just which group has really been sucking on the Government teat all these years.
But that’s a rather large tangent… Reading wise different people might just perform better with different teaching styles, maybe one size doesn’t fit all and forcing it to is doomed to failure.
For some 10 yrs after returning from Canberra, my wife did one year teaching contracts at a number of schools before her current permanency. You get to see a lot of different teaching methods as well as management styles. One of the best heads she had, took the view that his teachers were the most important asset the kids had and it was his paramount role to protect teachers from all the bullshit from head office and to keep it to an absolute minimum. Staff meetings once a week were kept on track and never more than 30 mins. Agendists were given short shrift and it was generally agreed the staff would not try and reinvent the wheel with every edict from head office. Time was too precious to jump to every passing fad, they all worked on the KISS principle and the staff loved it. There were many schools that didn’t as the principal played to the gallery at head office for political gain, usually to get away from the coalface and into policymaking. Just recently on the news I heard that SA public ed now has a growing problem attracting enough principals and deputies who want to put up with all this beauracratic bumpf. The private sector has no such problem.
Perhaps here an example of how beauracratisation can make life difficult for teachers. School reports for the wife used to consist of her being able to do them at home at her leisure with MS Word and Excel and some general cut and pasting of comments, etc. After all how many ways can you politely imply Johnny is a little s… and so forth? Now the SA Ed Dept has their own, you beaut, one size fits all, master reports system. Only problem is, when all the schools teachers need to get their reports out they have to do it all at once on the school’s computer system and software. Why? Because you can’t load any external disk on the system in order to protect it against viruses. So it’s a case of you mind my class this morning and I’ll mind yours this arvo.
All you really need to do is set some benchmarking via Basic Skills Testing and let the professionals get on with getting the kids over the line.
“Reading wise different people might just perform better with different teaching styles, maybe one size doesn’t fit all and forcing it to is doomed to failure.”
And that’s largely the point of the phonics advocates sholden. For too long WL has been the one size fits all.
“As most of you know, there was a terrible train crash at Ufton Nervet in England earlier this week … I know the PHONIC basis of written English, and so I am quite confident in reading that name aloud.”
1. Don’t try this with Brisbane (or Sydney or Melbourne or Canberra).
2. I can read it aloud without breaking it down into phonemes first. This seems like whole language to me. Similarly, I can recognise an ungrammatical sentence more quickly than I can specify the grammatical error, and in some cases without being able to specify the error.
It’s a long time since you were in R-3 John, where the educational outcomes foundations are often laid for non middle class kids. Interestingly enough phonics may suit boys better and girls vise versa. Al Bundy’s related experience over at Ken Parishes might point in that direction. Must ask the missus if she notices a gender bias for phonics.
Anyway as long as we all understand this community debate is not about either/or but about getting the balance right. It may well be that the balance is different for the genders. Gawdelpusall if the analysis concludes we need to stream approaches to reading.
“Similarly, I can recognise an ungrammatical sentence more quickly than I can specify the grammatical error, and in some cases without being able to specify the error.
John, when I was studying German at university the lecturers talked about something called Sprachgefuehl (feeling for the language). It comes from usage/practice and immersion, also the basis of understanding idiom.
I recall that when Mark started school 15/25 of the kids in the class could already read. This happened largely because of their early language experience, reading books with their parents like Dr Seuss etc in a middle-class area. Mark had all these experiences (sorry mate for tales out of school as it were!) but was actually one of the 10. As soon as the code was unlocked through structured teaching he took off like a rocket.
Some kids have good oral language but have decoding problems. It’s not my area of expertise, but I understand ‘dyslexic’ people have a distinctive brain scan that is different from ‘normal’.
So my take on it is that good teaching programs will have a phonics or rule-based component, but will also use WL techniques. Good programs will cater for individual differences and will include the diagnosis of specific learning difficulties. Good programs will offer rich and varied language experience and will involve significant immersion in language experience. But the out-of-school environment, especially the home, is also important and kids from homes with non-standard, nonparticipatory and sterile language environments can struggle.
I can read it aloud without breaking it down into phonemes first.
I don’t believe you. I suspect that you recognise four separate phonic buliding blocks – ‘uf’, ‘ton’, ‘ner’ and ‘vet’ – each familiar from other common words, and then put them together; and that this happens so quickly and automatically you are not conscious of it.
But that’s not my main point.
The more I hear about this, the more I become convinced that ‘phonics’ and ‘whole language’ is a false dichotomy. Whole language, from what I’m hearing, just means encouraging children to look for meaning, and who could deny the importance of that?
To give an example: I am confident that I could read aloud an article from a biotechnology journal with perfect fluency without having a clue what it’s about. For that matter, I could read a German newspaper article quite convincingly without understanding a word of it because I happen to know the phonetic rules of German and even understand the syntax. In the same way, I can easily imagine a child could be taught to read a story fluently without grasping the meaning at all. And what would be the point of that? I suspect that whole language is about making sure kids don’t get into that habit.
So learning to read words and learning to understand meanings are not conflicting objectives, except in the trivial sense that they compete for time in the curriculum.
The true opposition, as far as I can see, is between phonics and sight words. These are true substitutes, alternative means to exactly the same end. If it were the case that children could easily recognise whole words like Chinese characters, then maybe the tedium of phonics could be skipped and time could be saved for some other activity, be it for learning about meaning or for sport.
Or perhaps it wouldn’t. Only research and experimentation could resolve this question. But it sounds as though that’s exactly what has happened. As a result of the research and experimentation of the last few decades, we now know that some words, like ‘laugh’, need to be learned whole in any case, and that for some kids this might be the best way to learn lots of words. But for most kids, as Observa has observed, a thourough phonics training is probably a good investment.
So to recapitulate: ‘phonics versus whole language’ is a phantom issue; ‘phonics versus sight words’ is a real issue; and ‘phonics versus sight words’ is basically a pretty dry and technical issue that really should have nothing to do with ideology, culture wars, or left versus right.
There. Sorted. By pure introspection, too. Not a single minute wasted actually researching the question.
John. Back to your original, wishy-washy point:
They do both have a place. But phonics is the sine qua non of early reading instruction and the basis for development of independent reading. Whole language can provide some supporting strategies for decoding words during the initial stages when phonemic processing is not yet automatic. It takes a while for some children to learn the letters, understand the alphabetic principle that underlies print, and learn the letter-sound relationships. Phonics also involves teaching that words can be broken down into phonemes and that these sounds can be represented by letters and groups of letters. Phonics requires careful and systematic teaching but in the long run is a powerful method. Once kids are proficient in processing basic, and then increasingly difficult, orthographic patterns, subsequent reading becomes instant word recognition. They can then concentrate on interpreting and thinking.
Another effective method in early instruction, best used in conjunction with phonics, is direct teaching of commonly occurring sight words (some, the, mother) to facilitate easy reading of sentences and little books. Kids quickly acquire a bank of instantly recognised words. They get hooked when itâ?™s easy, and they read lots of little repetitious books that provide practice in the skills they are learning.
In the whole language method, readers are advised to â?œlook at the pictures, look at the first letter, predict, and have a go.â?? If this fails, they should read on or read back. The next resort is to ask a more competent reader. These strategies to work out text are laborious and often inaccurate. They are best used to monitor accuracy or to check whether a phonemic attempt at a previously unknown word makes sense. Over-use of prediction can result in wild guessing and frustration. Since some children never work out for themselves how the letters relate to the print, repeated reading often takes on the form of rote reading.
Although Australian teachers have adapted the theory and injected some common sense, whole language advocates initially eschewed direct teaching. In a quaint interpretation of Dewey, they promoted the notion that children should discover reading skills for themselves and that the teacherâ?™s role is one of facilitation. Hence the reliance on â?œthe teachable momentâ??. Which is why the systematic teaching of spelling was so enthusiastically abandoned through the eighties and nineties.
You were right, John, to assume that phonics canâ?™t deal completely with the idiosyncrasies in English spelling, although there are far more patterns in English than exceptions. Spelling requires systematic teaching and lots of practice, especially for children with poor visual memory. When we taught phonics, we never for a minute imagined that the traditional spelling lesson was dispensable. Funnily, the one place that whole language allows phonics is in creative writing, and the main source of childrenâ?™s â?œdiscoveryâ?? of how script works is in their early attempts to â?œinventâ?? spelling. A lot of this invented writing goes uncorrected. Emphasis is on the content of the story. However, students often persist with the wrong spellings throughout primary school, or until some desperate grade four or five teacher takes on drastic remediation. But spelling instruction doesnâ?™t guarantee correct grammar, style or logical thought. Like comprehension, these skills have to be intentionally and systematically taught.
In some states, other problems associated with the introduction of whole language in the late seventies were: the abrogation of responsibility for research, lack of provision of curriculum guidelines and literacy targets, and no central monitoring of standards. Some education departments went along with the resistance of whole language advocates to the use of standardised testing. Inspectors having just been abolished, this left many newly trained teachers with an ineffective method and no compass. Oh, and I forgot to mention the abolition of the traditional supporting reading materials. These were replaced by commercial books (so-called authentic literature) in various levels, in sets of six or so, to cater for the whole language preference for learning in small groups. Having only six copies of a particular book made systematic teaching of reading skills simultaneously to a whole class of children virtually impossible. It doesnâ?™t take a mathematician to work out that reading instruction time was divided by five.
I started teaching in 1954 and have just retired. I taught early literacy in primary classes and classes of students with specific learning disabilities, and I acted as learning support or â?˜remedialâ?™ teacher in a number of primary schools. When whole language appeared on the scene I took time off to find out where it had been, what made it tick and how it was being used in a sample of schools in metropolitan Brisbane. (Glad you can decode that word, John!)
Whole languageâ?™s major contribution has been to stimulate an enormous volume of research into the reading process and the efficacy of various methods. It was, in my opinion, a North American solution to problems that Australia never had. And it was far more than just a reading method. In the schools I personally experienced, most teachers eventually arrived at a sensible mix of approaches; but a significant number who graduated during the late eighties and nineties were short-changed by tertiary institutions and education departments that uncritically promulgated an untested learning theory, since widely discredited. Some of these teachers still hold beliefs that lead to ineffective practices.
So to recapitulate: ‘phonics versus whole language’ is a phantom issue; ‘phonics versus sight words’ is a real issue; and ‘phonics versus sight words’ is basically a pretty dry and technical issue that really should have nothing to do with ideology, culture wars, or left versus right.
James, that is all very logical. It is just the Donnelly calls the ‘whole language’ approach “look and guess”. I remember it from 30+ years ago as “look and say”. So if I remember rightly what they call ‘whole language’ was simply treating every word as a sight word. It was a way of getting into the experience of reading quicker and, as you say, experiencing the magic of meaning in a literary context.
But in doing so I guess the children were expected to pick up the phonic significance of letters along the way. So at its simplest in the phrase “The cat sat on the mat” it’s easy to pick the correspondence between letters and sounds.
But phonics emphasises mechanics and WL, as you say, emphasises meaning in context. No bad thing. Yet I think it’s also easy to see that a bit of time spent on the mechanics is rewarding in that it shows the children how the whole business works and allows them to advance into new territory themselves. I imagine the WL approach would require a lot of checking by the teacher, at least with the less apt students, and would require lots of practice within a familiar experiential field until a reasonable level of competency is established.
I thought research and experimentation had sorted the whole thing pretty well a long time ago. Nevertheless there’s no reason why we shouldn’t enquire into current practice and the state of play. There is no good reason to do it in the conflictual and political way that Nelson is adopting, however.
For those of you interested in how far phonics has come you might like to browse here
My wife as a JP teacher is particularly well versed in the phonics aspect of ‘Jollylearning’, but there are a number of others. Jolly Phonics is largely about phonemic awareness which has a strong correlation to reading performance. Phonemic awareness doesn’t occur when learning to talk and isn’t necessary for understanding spoken language. Many regard it as important for learning to read and write. Jolly phonics certainly does
Jolly phonics in particular, is a multisensory approach to phonemic awarenes, through sight sound and action. As such it is particularly suited to boys whom the wife agrees with the conventional wisdom, learn kinesthetically. Let me describe a simple phonemic word like cat for you with the c,a and t phonemics. Now with the c the children can raise their rounded arms upward like a c on its side and click their fingers like castanets saying the sound, while observing the written letter. For the a phonemic they do likewise but fold their arms over flat with their fingers running along their forearms like ‘a’nts. For the t they move their heads from side to side like watching ‘t’ennis and the t sound is like the ball hitting the racquet.
Simple phonemes like these we take for granted, but they may be difficult for young children to grasp because they are abstract forms of spoken language and carry no meaning. It is the words they already speak and hear that carry the meaning, but they will have to grasp the connection between the written word and its linguistic meaning, in order for them to read and ultimately write. This is the very hard task for some, which phonemic awareness and then phonics can unravel. If you don’t make this leap early on with your peers, your whole academic learning experience is threatened.
I agree with all that, Brian. And with Observa’s comments as well, on the whole, even if I can’t quite relate to his obsession with Mem Fox.
But my reflections were just guesswork, and I’m happy to defer to my mother on this topic, whose above comment seems to me just about the alpha and omega on phonics and WL.(You’d take a pretty dim view, I imagine, of families congregating in comment boxes).
The true opposition, as far as I can see, is between phonics and sight words. These are true substitutes, alternative means to exactly the same end. If it were the case that children could easily recognise whole words like Chinese characters, then maybe the tedium of phonics could be skipped and time could be saved for some other activity, be it for learning about meaning or for sport.
Back in 1953 when I started to learn to read, I can remember doing “sight words” – (we didn’t call them that).
The first page had “a for apple, e for egg, i for ink, o for orange, u for umbrella”.
Later on I can remember “look and say: school”.
Learning an logographic writing system would not relieve the ‘tedium’ of phonics.
The Chinese learn their writing system by CONSTANT REPETITION, which takes hours and hours and hours. By the end of 10 years of school, Chinese children are expected to recognize 7,000 characters.
A literate adult can learn to decode Korean script in less time than it takes to learn 100 Chinese characters.
James, if I’d seen your mother’s comment before I posted I would happily have left it to her (hi Margaret).
But phonics is the sine qua non of early reading instruction and the basis for development of independent reading.
Beautifully put! That really has nailed it I reckon. I was hoping some-one who really knew what they were talking about would come along. observa was batting pretty well, but there is no substitute for some-one who’s done it at the coalface and understands what they are doing. It makes Dr Nelson’s burbling sound even more pathetic.
James, do you reckon you could get one of your kids to comment? Now that would be impressive!
James,
It was Mem Fox who drove the SA Ed Dept push for teaching WL exclusively. You have to appreciate that some in the teaching profession who began to seriously question reliance on this approach, were really chuffed to see her hanging around Latham’s election shirt tails, as he promised to handout (some of her?) books to the kiddies with taxpayer funding. It was all about the needs of the kiddies James. Honest!
Yes on checking Margaret, the wife’s experience concurs with your history about WL. As you say many new teachers were left to flounder with WL, although the better ones soldiered on with the benefit of peer networking and the experience of elders. Looking back, my wife has tended to the view that WL was manna from heaven to the inevitable slackers in the education system. I think many parents began to recognise this with the push for Basic Skills Testing.
Brian
I should have added that I take your point that, contrary to my claim, whole language does seem to be bound up with the sight word approach. I guess the connection between comprehension and ‘sight word’ reading is that, if the reader knows and cares what’s happening in the story, the more likely he is to make an effort to figure out words from the context, and the faster he will acquire a sight-word vocabulary. So, in the case of words that don’t lend themselves to sounding out, and for children who are better at memory than analysis, an emphasis on comprehension provides extra motivation.
Hangul
That’s very interesting. As I tried to make clear, I wasn’t advocating that we invite children to treat words as logographs. Just trying to separate the issues.
Observa
We have a casette in the car of Mem Fox telling her stories. It might cheer you up to know that when she gets to the refrain, ‘Koala Lu, I do love you’, my boys drown her out with their alternative, ‘Koala Lu, we do hate you!’.
Margaret Farrell makes a very convincing case against the Whole Language method. So why are the teacher unions coming out to attack any proposed inquiry. Either the issue is important and an inquiry may help to sort things out or it is not. But to attempt to stifle the debate simply because it has originated from one side of the ideological fence seems to be politically motivated and naive.
The right-wing have done a very good job recently of taking owbership of issues that they can end up winning on. Why die in a ditch for a lost cause just because you’re political antagonism renders you unable to work in a bi-partisan way on seomthing that has at bottom no ideological content at all.
wbb, I think you’ve got a point. Anna Bligh, the QLD minister, just said, yep, we’ll cooperate. End of section.
Nelson is consistently offensive and IMHO has an inflated notion of the role of the Commonwealth minister in the scheme of things. As did Dawkins before him. So people tend to have a knee jerk reaction.
This arvo my wife and I had a cuppa with and old lady who was a chalkie. She’s 91, sharp as a tack and still drives a car. She spent the last 11 years of her teaching career teaching Yr1 in a large suburban primary school in Brissie. She said phonics, for sure, and she reckons they don’t get enough repetition these days, especially the weaker pupils. Drill them, she said. They’ll thank you for it. She says these days people are too worried about the kids being bored.
Actually she’s a lovely woman and the kids would have loved her. I can’t imagine a single child ever got past her. She said they used to give her all the hard cases.
From what has been said here and at Troppo there does seem to be a residual problem there and if some kids are failing there can always be improvement. I do wonder, though, what Dr Nelson is going to do at the end of his inquiry. String up the offending teachers on a handy flag pole perhaps? Changing practice in classrooms is notoriusly difficult.
And what if University lecturers are leading teachers astray with the WL approach? You can’t get them to change tack by sending them a memo.
btw observa, my missus says they use that Jolly thingie at her school and they love it. Apparently it’s English and more culturally appropriate here than the stuff you would get from some lab in Oregon.
There aren’t too many pure WL classes any more. Nor do many teachers rely solely on phonics or look and say. That’s why it’s such a confusing issue. But one point I’d like to pick up on is the difficulty experienced by children who dont have the luxury of parents with literacy know-how and who have not been read to or taught the alphabet.
Many of these kids have no idea how print works and the chances of them figuring it out without explicit teaching are low. For a long time WL espoused the idea that learning to read is natural like learning to talk, and that just exposing children to good literature would be enough. Natural Learning, as it was called, ignored the fact that a great many of the things kids and babies do, even the smart ones, is modeled and coached by parents. In other words, pretty explicitly taught and practised. One good example is parents teaching a baby to say Bye Bye and wave. And what about learning to talk for that matter.
As somebody said above, most middle-class kids come to school already knowing the alphabet and some sight words. Others arrive for their first day with poor articulation, few world experiences and scarcely able to sit and concentrate through a story being read to them. Left to the WL theory that the pennies will drop in good time, these kids get further and further behind and they never catch up. What disadvantaged kids need most is deliberate and precise intervention. Teach them language and concepts. Help them understand what a word is (spoken and written). Show them what a letter is. Help them hear the phonemes in the word etc. Read to them of course, but realize that the print looks to them like Arabic looks to us.
During the late eighties and early nineties at U of Q, the Speech Therapy department picked up the ball that teacher education had largely dropped. With phonics being virtually a dirty word, they developed an intensive therapy program called Phonemic Awareness and taught the essential early literacy skills for students who were falling behind. They have been making a mint ever since helping students aged between six and late teens who can’t read. Thankfully they are also doing a lot of inservice in schools and have done a great job getting home the message that reading is a very complex and difficult skill that needs to be carefully taught.
I would have to differ with John when he says US research in the eighties produced no winners. Perhaps one of the most comprehensive commissioned reports was produced by M.J. Adams and has been summarised in readable form by Stahl, Osborne and Lehr. Easy reading for anyone interested, fair, but unequivocal.
I should also confess that I borrowed my well received latin from David Share (1995) Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition. Cognition, 55. – another impressive summary of research for anyone really interested.
If the large scale adoption of WL has failed a particular group of students for a couple of decades, then there is a lesson for us all here. Firstly large systemic failures or shortcomings can have large consequences. Perhaps small competitive units does have some appeal here. OTOH as Margaret notes the withdrawal of the strong inspectorial system, no doubt due to cost cutting, allowed the systemic problem to go unnoticed for too long. By the time the university professors noticed a drop in literacy standards, the damage was done, particularly to those already disadvantaged. We should support periodic Basic Skills Testing in schools now, to identify problem teachers and teaching methods, now and in future. The good news is forums like this and the internet research capability generally, means we now have access to the best thinking and research. If you do have a child who in all respects is bright and intelligent, but doesn’t seem to ‘get’ reading, you should get them into a decent phonemic literacy programme pronto.
Perhaps there are big differences between states. What got me hot under the collar was Tuesday’s SMH article that cited as evidence of the need for reform, a survey of teachers and teacher trainees in Queensland. Apparently only half of them knew what a syllable was. But I knew this couldn’t posssibly be true in NSW, as both of my kids learned to count syllables in Kindergarten. I asked one the teachers that morning whether it was possible that any teachers in the school didn’t know what syllables were and she looked at me as if I were a lunatic.
She also said that whole language was just one theory they learn about in their training, but the curriculum draws on a wide range of ideas. And above all, they are trained to figure out methods that work best for each child. In any case, phonics seems to be at the core of the approach here as far as I can see.
As I said earlier, there is nothing ideological about how to teach reading. But I think it’s pretty obvious that right wing politicians and columnists enjoy scoring points off public sector teachers, and what better way to do it than to paint them as slaves to a crackpot theory invented by lefty academics.
The difficulty with an enquiry is that it is an expensive exercise unlikely to shed light but certain to attack teaching methods identified as “left wing”.
observa seems to have a mania in regard to Mem Fox who has her point of view but has been out of teaching teachers for a long time
She is correct in her belief that children need to love literature in order to conquer literacy. Children can be very technically competent for their age but lose interest in gaining further skills because the literature they read does not engage them.
My experience of teachers is that they are a dedicated group of people who are bowed down by bureaucracy but have a diversity of approaches needed to engage children who are thus able to learn to read and predict new words in spite of the chosen methods.
Howard’s haters have been remarkably good at introducing more bureaucracy but the most interesting tests in terms of ability and learning are not the basic skills tests but those run through the University of NSW.
In riddling the learning of reading with partisanship the children are the losers as it makes it harder to bring in any needed change because of the heightened emotion deflecting pedagogical concern.