Many years ago, in the 1990s and the early years of this century, I was a vigorous participant in what was known as “the reading wars.” I supported phonics and opposed whole language. I was influenced by the work of Jeanne Chall at Harvard, who described the ebb and flow of reading philosophies. I wrote many articles explaining why phonics was crucial and why whole language was deficient. In my book, “Left Back” (2000), I wrote an overview of the reading wars and showed the deficiencies of whole language.
In 1997, Congress created the National Reading Panel, composed of literacy experts who mostly supported phonics. Its report in 2000 strongly endorsed explicit phonics instruction. In 2001, No Child Left Behind included a program called Reading First, which gave large sums to districts that gave preference to phonics. Phonics was winning, for sure. Proponents of whole language (which valued meaning over the mechanics or reading) began calling their program “balanced literacy” to remove the implication that they opposed phonics.
By 2001, it seemed clear that phonics had won the war. But in 2006, the Reading First program blew up; not only were the evaluations unimpressive, but there were allegations of self-dealing and conflicts of interest as some phonics promoters were pushing their own textbooks. And the “war” itself lost steam.
As for me, I no longer think this “war” is a worthy cause. Reading teachers understand that students need both phonics and meaning. They know that children need to be able to sound out words but that it is boring to do that for weeks on end. Children need meaning. They get it when their teachers read to them, and they get it when they learn to read by themselves.
I am no reading expert, but I can see good sense in both approaches. I have seen balanced literacy classes where children were enjoying reading. I understand the importance of phonics as a tool to help children get off to a strong start. Wise teachers know when and how to use the literacy approach they need. Children’s needs are different. Good teachers know that and don’t need to be told by legislators how to teach. (And for older children, I love grammar, spelling, and diagramming sentences).
I read recently that NYC Chancellor Carmen Farina was reviving balanced literacy in the New York City schools, and some of my old allies wrote to ask if I was outraged. No, I was not. Balanced literacy can co-exist with phonics. Children need both decoding and meaning. Most important, they need to learn the joy of reading. It unlocks the door to the storehouse of knowledge.
I am no longer a combatant in the reading wars. What matters most today is the survival of public education. We must stop nonsensical curriculum wars and stand together for equitable funding, stable staffing, and community support for community schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I would say the same for “the math wars”. Those that support “the good old way” of teaching mostly algorithms without conceptual understanding, and those that support a truly, constructivist-only approach, hardly exist. Good teachers know that students need both. Now is the time to fight for PUBLIC education, without which neither of the “wars” will really matter anyways.
Agreed!
Sounds like what we really need is common sense
(aka wisdom, patience, understanding, and experience)
I agree completely! Teachers with these qualities are truly master teachers.
Careful about that. The “reformers”/neoliberals have made an art of presenting their poison as “common sense”. Welfare “reform”, “free” trade, “students first” and many others all just sound like good ole down home common sense. What we need is to reject the sound bite and argue for the deeper, more complex meanings in life.
Most people in the trenches everyday don’t have the luxury of aligning themselves on one side or the other of the curriculum wars. We have to choose what works based on the needs of the kids in front of us. The curricula wars are for those on the sidelines, who stand to profit from consultancies and workshops and “new” materials. Teachers have never asked for one true path for all and when one is imposed, we find ways around it.
Thank you for your wise comments, Diane, and your exceptional leadership by example.
The erroneous history here is that Whole Language, which was imported from New Zealand and Australia, lacked a phonics component. In fact, it did not lack phonics as practiced in those two countries. The U.S. just left phonics out of the Whole Language Package when we imported its ideas. Re: Meaning—Reading and writing are abstractions of experience. Young children need real life experiences in order to find and create meaning in what they read and write. They also need the opportunity, denied them with CCSS, to take their various experiences and practice the first level of abstraction: PLAY!
Play is the cognitive tool young children use to understand the world. Without this tool of play, children are denied the basic cognitive structure to comprehend the world and are thrust immediately into levels of abstraction, reading and writing, that are developmentally inappropriate. So the flow goes something like: experience, play, stories, reading and writing. And like all good learning, it is a recursive process, not linear. Later in life, play takes many forms: creative writing, dance, film making, art, music, science, math etc.. One wonders about the future of creativity with CCSS. But as for phonics, it always was part of the original Whole Language Package. And, like all tools for decoding, it can be tremendously useful for many children. Not all, but many. Reading teachers know you need many tools in your tool kit to reach the individually wired minds that come to us.
The erroneous US history is that all teachers who implemented Whole Language left out phonics. I have never known an educator who thought that word attack skills (or any other skills) were created from osmosis.
Thank you, Melissa and ECE! Many educators misinterpreted Whole Language and were misguided. They thought phonics was inappropriate. But WL came along because there was too much emphasis on phonics as the main decoding strategy. We were neglecting to teach other strategies.
As more research on the reading brain was done, we learned that other strategies were equally important and were working in conjunction with phonics knowledge.
I was part of the WL movement and those of us who really understood it DID teach phonics as a reading strategy. There is a time and place for a reader to use grapho-phonemic information. As Worried says below, it is as important as semantic cues and grammatical cues. Those are the three decoding strategies we should teach. It is balanced. Semantic/contextual -Does it make sense? Grammatical- Does it sound right? Grapho-phonemic- Sound it out. Let’s not forget WL also emphasized JOY!
Melissa:
Here’s a 2006 article by Carol Gilles that includes a history of whole language from the point of view of a classroom teacher who became a professor, along with excerpts from interviews she did with ten key leaders of the movement:
http://inased.org/ijpev2n2/gilles2.htm
The article doesn’t support the idea that whole language was “imported from New Zealand and Australia.” Other than that, I have to agree with everything you say. And I think you’re right . . . “Phonics” instruction was never dismissed outright by the advocates of whole language. (Otherwise, how could it be called “whole”?)
It’s a good read for anyone who really wants to know what the whole language movement was and why it lost favor.
Balanced literacy encourages kids to use phonics/visual cues, but it also encourages kids to use syntax/grammar and meaning/context to identify unknown words. Kids may be better at using some cuing types than others. This approach also focuses on reading to understand, learn, and explore interesting books. There probably is no significant disagreement among most literacy folks. When textbook companies got involved, the wars began. Because it was all about the money. The bottom line was textbooks don’t teach kids to read, teachers teach kids to read.
Dr. Ravitch, I’ve been meaning to ask you “Left Back. As I’ve read through the book for its historical contents, I’ve wondered if there are any particular views that you expressed as a historian that you feel differently about now.
For example, has your view on progressive education changed since the time you wrote the book? You mention that anything called a “movement” should be avoided, and there was a progressive movement. So I’ve always wondered about this since you wrote about changing your mind in “Death and Life.”
Thanks for your post above! I’m going to print it out and put it with my copy of “Left Back.”
(correction) …meaning to ask you about “Left Back.”
Left Back has always been one of my favorite books. I often make the claim that it is the single best education book ever written. There is much wisdom, insight, and erudition in those pages! And she tells a gripping story.
When people start throwing around terms like “progressive education,” that raises a red flag for me. Use of such terms is the sign of the ideologue. Diane Ravitch is neither an ideologue nor a demagogue. It’s been wonderful, over the years, to watch her great mind at work, wrestling with these issues. She is a great historian of ideas. In Left Back, she championed a content-rich curriculum in literature, languages, science, and history, and I think that she has been consistent about that through the evidence-based changes in her thinking about other matters like mandated, one-size-fits-all standards.
Thanks for your response Bob. I’m curious, in what ways does the term “progressive education” raise a red flag for you? An ideologue in what way? The use of the term today seems almost vague (at least in my experience). I’m not sure what to make of it as I read about it; I find it rather confusing.
Than of course, there’s Dewey and so many things written about him that I pretty much like to stick to his writings (which express different views at different periods, or seem to). Obviously, I’m not a Dewey scholar. But it seems like some people (some neo-conservatives perhaps) categorically despise him, whereas others seem to mention his statements as gospel.
I also enjoyed “Left Back” as well, and refer to it often. Maybe I’m due to re-read it again.
Thanks for your comments, Joe. What I meant (I wasn’t very clear) is that when people start using these ideological labels, they usually intend by them some straw man version of someone else’s belief system. People on the right often use the term progressive education as a catch-all covering all that they loathe–constructivist/discovery approaches, student-centered education, critical pedagogy, theory, whole language, skills-based instruction, Summerhill-type democratic education, Marxist or feminist or post colonial critique–you name it. The term becomes so broad and vague as to be meaningless. It becomes simply an epithet. The same is typically true of terms like Socialist and Libertarian as they are typically used. If the writer does not define the term–what he or she means by it in a particular context–then I generally discount what he or she says heavily.
Progressive Education
Why It’s Hard to Beat, But Also Hard to Find
By Alfie Kohn
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/progressive.htm
ECE Professional:
You beat me to it. I don’t think Alfie Kohn, though opinionated, is either an ideologue or a demagogue. Yet has has no trouble defining and using the term “progressive education.” It’s an umbrella term, and it’s useful. And when Kohn advocates progressive education, he’s very clear about what he’s advocating.
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/progressive.htm
I think the problem has to deal with pedagogical demagoguery. An education professional should be able to pick and choose from many different learning approaches as is needed in the students and classroom before him/her (yes good teachers are professionals who are always keeping abreast of different educational approaches). One HUGE problem is that professionalism has been taken away from teachers and they are told what to do at every turn. One program becomes IT even if it does not benefit all the students in a classroom (and in fact now often these programs are detrimental without much benefit). I remember Reading First well and it was hideous and very cookie cutter. Teachers had the teachers manual on their laps so they could follow step-by-step prompts because veering away from “the program” was taboo. Veteran teachers rolled their eyes at this. I remember when balanced literacy was the “in” program du jour. It was detrimental to title one students who were Ells and/or lacked so much background knowledge that the daily writing in journals and peer to peer review was an exercise in “blind leading the blind”. Would they have benefitted from this once they had a knowledge of English… yes. But it was mandated.
The moral of this story is TEACHERS ARE PROFESSIONALS AND NEEDED TO BE TREATED AS SUCH. They need to pick and choose so as to foster and encourage love of learning in their students.
yes yes yes!
Ideology sticks to the eye. It blinds. How refreshing to read this account by someone who, in this cases, did NOT allow ideology to obscure her vision.
I’ve long been interested in WHY people hold the views they do about whether we should teach traditional grammar and whether we should emphasize whole language or phonics. Rarely, I think, do these views have much to do with the actual evidence.
Given the overwhelming evidence of the value of BOTH phonics instruction and use of whole, authentic literature with students, one has to wonder why anyone would ever have thought that the former should be eliminated. Here are my hypotheses about that:
1. Many verbally gifted folks–the sort of folks who grow up to read a lot and to become ELA experts–learned to read using a look-say method, sitting on their parents’ knees, long before they went to school and in the absence of formal and explicit instruction. I’m one of those folks. But such people are outliers, and that method is spotty and inefficient and gets supplemented later on in ways that people forget about.
2. Many whole language ideologues (the ones who insisted on an exclusively whole language approach) misunderstood the Chomskian argument that language is automatically and unconsciously acquired. Chomsky and those following him in the generative language tradition were studying the acquisition of the formal rules for SPOKEN language and NOT the acquisition of an understanding of sound-symbol correspondences. The former does, in fact, happen automatically. The brain has innate, dedicated mechanisms for intuiting phonological, syntactic, morphological, and semantic structures, automatically and without explicit recognition of these, from the ambient spoken linguistic environment. However, it does NOT have such innate, dedicated mechanisms for learning sound-symbol correspondences. For the most part, those have to be explicitly taught. Where sound-symbol correspondences are, in outlier cases, learned automatically, nonspecific pattern recognition mechanisms are involved. This makes sense, if you think about it. Spoken language is an ancient inheritance. There has been a long, long time for the development of those dedicated mental mechanisms for intuiting, unconsciously, those structural rules for spoken language. But writing is a recent cultural invention–a different matter altogether.
So, most people benefit from early phonics instruction. However, they ALSO benefit from falling in love with reading, and they benefit from having spoken language environments that are both engaging and SYNTACTICALLY RICH AND COMPLEX (ones that make use of the full range of syntactic forms of the language). All three are part of a well-designed early reading program.
The ideologues on both sides of the reading wars were wrong.
Many people now understand this. They look back on the ideologues on both sides of the reading wars and say, “A plague on both their houses.”
There’s another moral to be drawn from that experience: When we have vigorous discussion and debate and lots of scientific research, the truth emerges. The way to get at the truth is NOT to have some ideologues form a centralized curriculum commissariat and ministry of truth to enforce their will on everyone. That’s a sure recipe for NOT making any progress.
Thanks for your wisdom on this issue, Diane.
cx: How refreshing to read this account by someone who, in this case, clearly did NOT allow ideology to obscure her vision.
Robert, it’s great to see you back again writing. Many of us missed your commentary. . . . we figured you were on vacation, or whatever.
Hope you are well.
Welcome back.
Thanks, Robert. Warm regards to you!
Wow, I always learn from your posts Bob. Thanks for writing this!
Bob,
I am a product of the sitting on the lap approach to learning to read. My students are generally not read to and do not have access to books at home. They need a lot of intensive work on developing phonemic awareness.
Another issue is the weak literacy foundation my kids have in their native languages. English language acquisition for them is like building a house on a slab instead of a proper basement.
Bob Shepherd: this reminds me of when I was a bilingual (Eng/Span) TA in the early 1980s.
Speaking strictly from personal experience (proviso: I feel I was in a good school/situation) I came to the following startling conclusion—
There is no one-size-fits-all teaching and learning approach for young non-native speakers of American English. No panaceas. No magic bullets.
In today’s terms, no equivalent of 100% charter graduation rates or taking students from the 13th to the 90th percentile in one year—rheeally!
I saw it work extremely well for a few, well or adequately for most, not well for a few. Shocking, I know.
😱
Once you’ve recovered, perhaps we could discuss the merits of monocultures in education?
Oh, right, you’ve already covered that…
😏
As always, thanks for your comments.
😎
Bob Shepherd:
“However, it does NOT have such innate, dedicated mechanisms for learning sound-symbol correspondences. For the most part, those have to be explicitly taught.”
Charles Dickens might not agree . . .
“Much of my unassisted self, and more by the help of Biddy than of Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt, I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been a bramble-bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by every letter. After that I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who seemed every evening to do something new to disguise themselves and baffle recognition. But, at last I began, in a purblind groping way, to read, write, and cipher, on the very smallest scale.
“One night I was sitting in the chimney corner with my slate, expending great efforts on the production of a letter to Joe. I think it must have been a full year after our hunt upon the marshes, for it was a long time after, and it was winter and a hard frost. With an alphabet on the hearth at my feet for reference, I contrived in an hour or two to print and smear this epistle:—
‘MI DEER JO i OPE U R KR WITE WELL i OPE i SHAL SON B HABELL 4 2 TEEDGE U JO AN THEN WE SHORL B SO GLODD AN WEN i M PRENGTD 2 U JO WOT LARX AN BLEVE ME INF XN PIP.’
“There was no indispensable necessity for my communicating with Joe by letter, inasmuch as he sat beside me and we were alone. But I delivered this written communication (slate and all) with my own hand, and Joe received it as a miracle of erudition.
‘I say, Pip, old chap!’ cried Joe, opening his blue eyes wide, ‘what a scholar you are! An’t you?’
‘I should like to be,’ said I, glancing at the slate as he held it; with a misgiving that the writing was rather hilly.'”
How about that? Dickens was a whole language advocate. He even anticipated “invented spelling” more than a hundred years before literacy researchers saw the value in it. And don’t forget, young Pip grew up to be a brilliant writer, invented spelling and all.
Just who are those “whole language ideologues (the ones who insisted on an exclusively whole language approach)” and “misunderstood the Chomskian argument that language is automatically and unconsciously acquired”? I didn’t follow the “Reading Wars” very closely. I was too busy teaching high school English. But I know enough about the whole language movement to say that the main advocates weren’t in favor of eliminating phonics. As Jerome Harste writes in an overview of “multiple perspectives” on reading, “there is no approach to the teaching of reading that I know of that does not see phonics as an important cueing systems in reading.”
I don’t think Harste, one of the founders of the whole language movement, qualifies as someone who misunderstood Chomsky. Harste has uploaded a thorough review of the insights that various disciplines have contributed to the understanding of reading. (The article contains a few typos and style problems, and I haven’t been able to identify a final publishing venue, if any.) Still, it is well worth reading for background on issues that were oversimplified or simply ignored in the controversy Diane wrote about in her post. He offers a few caveats, too.
Click to access Understanding-Reading-Multiple-Perspectives-Multiple-Insights.pdf
The various perspectives Harste identifies are Linguistic, Psycholinguistic, Cognitive, Reader Response, Sociolinguistic, and Critical. Whole language advocates tend to embrace all these perspectives, whereas the opponents of whole language focus only on certain aspects of the Linguistic perspective. Of the linguists who studied reading, he notes, “It is not surprising that their work, when translated by reading educators, resulted in a building block or skills approach to teaching reading (often containing 3 skill areas –first, phonics; second, grammar; third, comprehension). While individual reading lessons typically included work in all three areas, it is important to remember that the underlying framework is hallucinated by adults studying language in the abstract rather than from observing how children become readers on their own without the assistance of formal instruction.”
This is a key observation. You don’t find out about how kids learn to read and write by musing on the subject, you get down on the floor with the kids and do language with them. It isn’t surprising that the favored research methodologies for whole language advocates were things like miscue analysis (which requires a child to read out loud) and ethnographic studies (where the researcher makes note of actual behavior). By the same token, some of the most basic whole language pedagogy involves children listening to and reading stories, and telling and writing stories of their own.
Forget the worksheets, forget the standardized tests. Do real and meaningful things with language. That’s whole language. Whole language is NOT the elimination of phonics.
Some of you speak disparagingly about that fabulous woman from New Zealand, Marie Clay and her philosophy. Marie Clay gifted the literacy world with her insight on how to teach reading. For Marie Clay, conditions necessary for learning included a happy environment, freedom to explore, confidence, feeling of success, a challenge that can be met, hands on, modeling and utilizing all senses. She developed a three-pronged cueing system that went beyond just the phonics and sight vocabulary. She utilized semantics, syntax, along with phonics. Marie Clay’s approach focuses on supporting active learners engaging all the senses, interacting with the the text and responding to the text. (A phonetic approach emphasizes that meaning is found in the text- not in the interaction with the students’ experience and background.)
Marie Clay taught in the primary schools and then did post graduate study in Developmental Psychology at our prestigious University of Minnesota on a Fulbright Scholarship and completed her doctorate at the University of Auckland with a dissertation entitled “Emergent Literacy.” She believed in teaching to a child’s strengths, not to their weaknesses, viz, connecting their experiences and background to the text. She initiated the conversational tone with emergent readers while placing new vocabulary in their ear as she did her “Picture Walks.”
Children with an auditory discrimination problem are at a loss with the phonetic approach. They can’t blend to save themselves. Plus the phonetic approach is a great way to of turning the children off to reading; it gives them the wrong impression what reading is all about. Phonics only helps if the words are already in one’s hearing vocabulary: reading to children from birth on, will lay the ground work for reading in general and phonics specifically. Phonics is more important for spelling than it is for decoding. Phonics has its short comings. Every rule is broken at some time; e.g., I no sooner tell the children when there is only one vowel in the word between two consonants the vowel is usually short. The next word invariably will be kind, find, mind, wild, or mild. I no sooner tell the children that when two vowels come together the first vowel is usually long. The next reading invariably will have eight or grief. ea has three sounds like in eat, bread, break etc. etc. etc.
A “balanced approach” has a different meaning to different people. To me balanced approach includes Shared Reading, Familiar Reading -easy reading, Guided Reading, Read-Aloud, Literacy Responses including WRITING, and Independent Reading. Paramount to reading is the interaction with the text, teacher, and reader; students must be active learners. An active learner necessitates the interaction with perceptual and conceptual which includes background knowledge along with knowledge of the language structure: semantic, syntactic, and phonics system. It is a selective process bringing together experience, knowledge, skill and abilities. One must bring meaning to print before once can acquire meaning from it according to Frank Smith. It is a strategic process- strategies used before, during, and after reading to achieve goals.
Yes, it is a “language experience” approach, using the children’s own language is always a good way to embark on a reading program along with the repetitive, and predictable books. From their stories phonics is developed. (Children need only know five letters of the alphabet to begin teaching them how to read.) The use of songs and poems are also a great tool. Poems are great to develop the story structure, phonics, and to delight the minds of the readers. The poems are appealing to children because they are short, have rhythm and repetitious.
There are many components to the reading process-the perception of a child has of himself/herself, the teacher’s approach, types of readings etc. It reminds me of Ed Young’s Seven Blind Mice. The mice found out that there were many parts to that elephant they encountered.
Yesterday my four year old grandson was listening to Willian Steig’s Doctor DeSoto. When we got to the end, he turned back to the page where Dr.DeSoto did something so the fox couldn’t open his mouth. He was puzzled about what happened. Do you think a phonetic approach would incite such interest? A phonetic approach makes a child proud of the fact that he/she could decode all the words- oblivious to the fact that print carries meaning.
In my former NYC school and I imagine others schools as well, the principal decided to cut both the remedial math and reading programs. Students who need remediation are no longer being serviced.
There is really nothing wrong with any reading or math program as long as it is taught at the level of the students, and this is not happening. Principals call for differentiation, but in practice with over 32 students in the class, it’s a nightmare. Years ago many schools practiced “leveling”. It allowed teachers to work with students on their own levels in reading and math. Each grade would have a heterogeneous classes, but would group their students for reading and math within the grade. The students would go to different teachers on the grade for ELA and math instruction and meet back in their own class for the rest of the day. The difference was, I didn’t have to follow the curriculum as written and could teach basics first then delve into the curriculum and understanding of the concepts. I could pace my instruction to meet their needs and even incorporate games. By the time testing rolled around, our students would be ready. But this was before quarterly Pearson assessments, so now this would be difficult to do.
Do you know WHY remedial services have been cut. According to the Common Core there is NO SUCH THING as remedial, unless a student qualifies for special education. There are only two levels: grade level, and above grade level. My son has a non-verbal learning disability, which means he struggles processing visual images. However, because his grades aren’t low enough (because we get him extra help), he doesn’t qualify for special education. BUT, he’s not grade level either. We have all worked hard to get him through math, but I know he’s not learning very much. There are a lot of kids falling into this gap. The district special education supervisor told me that special education referrals have skyrocketed since CC took hold. It’s ludicrous.
Threatened,
You are right on target. All the positions that provided remedial assistance have been eliminated. It is thought that my ESL students will perform on grade level in English. Advocating for my students is like talking to the wall. The administration does not want me to tailor my instruction to meet their academic needs. Thanks so much for your comment.
Many reading & math interventionists can’t help your child either. They haven’t had enough training to understand reading, writing, math disabilities. Special ed. has also been compromised by the implementation of CCSS. The scientifically researched direct instruction prog have been replaced with supplements of the gen ed curriculum.
Yes, the “reading wars” and “math wars” seem almost quaint by comparison to the current reformista agenda, but I don’t think we should discount their role in spawning that agenda, especially the “classical school” branch of that agenda that is guiding a number of charter schools around the country. Driven by ultra-conservative politics rather than economics, “classical education” aims to wipe out most, if not all, modern education theories and practices advocated by 20th-century reformers.
According to its advocates, bringing back Latin, Greek, and focusing solely on lots of dead, white, male authors will cure the alleged ills of contemporary education. A small, but influential force in the classical charter school movement is Hillsdale College in Michigan, the darling of ultra-conservatives because it accepts no federal or state monies, even in the form of student financial aid. It does however support the use of taxpayer money to fund charter schools. Hypocrites!
I am a proponent of classical education, and I am firmly on the left of the political spectrum. Progressive education leaves low-income kids largely ignorant and disempowered. A true leftist would support classical education because it imparts knowledge, not fuzzy woo-woo.
For “Ghits and Srins” equate Sorcerer with Thinker…
Is the description upheld by your “Reason”, or by your “Will”?
Carlos: “We are perceivers. The world that we perceive, though, was created by a description that was told to us since the moment we were born.
We, the luminous beings, are born with two rings of power, but we use only one to create the world. That ring, which is hooked very soon after we are born, is reason , and its companion is talking. Between the two they concoct and maintain the world. So, in essence, the world that your reason wants to sustain is the world created by a description and its dogmatic and inviolable rules, which the reason learns to accept and defend.
The secret of the luminous beings is that they have another ring of power which is never used, the will . The trick of the sorcerer is the same trick of the average man. Both have a description; one, the average man, upholds it with his reason ; the other, the sorcerer, upholds it with his will . Both descriptions have their rules and the rules are perceivable, but the advantage of the sorcerer is that will is more engulfing than reason . You must learn to let yourself perceive whether the description is upheld by your reason or by your will . That is the only way for you to use your daily world as a challenge and a vehicle to accumulate enough personal power in order to get to the totality of yourself.”
The totality of yourself maybe another perception…Self-Actualisation
Schopenhauer would have agreed with you. 🙂
“Schopenhauer would have agreed with you”
Art might have agreed with me if he was a poor reader.
If I’m not mistaken, he was into a world will concept as opposed to an individual will concept (Carlos).
My Carlos quote seems to be a lame attempt at endorsing D.R.
SEEING the light,projecting the light, (Luminous Being) on the Reading Wars.
In my make-believe world, schooling is about order, education is
about questioning. Education is the GPS (the lay of the land) in
plotting one’s course. Education is the consciousness that counteracts
marketing or propaganda. Schooling enables it.
Should schooling be viewed as a continuation of negligent action
(malice), support for the GAGA tribe would be reduced and expose
them as the naked emperors they always were.
None the less, birding me as a Schopenhauer feather was clever…
As always, I relate to best practices management processes which have been scientifically proven to be the most effective in given environments.
For generations the authentic Montessori schools have had as a foundation resource the Bob Books, a uber user friendly early phonics reader.
Ages ago, it was some trouble to source these jewels as no publisher would touch these exceptional early phonics readers written by Bobby Lynn Maslen and illustrated by her husband John Maslen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Books
Getting these back in the 70s involved making a $5 order through one’s local Montessori school who would send the money to Bobby and John Maslen, who self-published these incredibly effective early readers in their home in the forests of Oregon.
I approached Bobby and John Maslen back in the 90s to make these incredible resources available to every family in Texas who had access to a fax machine through the generosity of a company that had developed a predecessor to the World Wide Web, the fax-back, and who was seeking to build awareness of this innovation.
Bobby and John Maslen chose not to participate in this proposal, which would have involved a payment from the State of Texas directly to them for their intellectual property rights.
This was a loss for the families of Texas, but I wanted to respect the developers of this book, whether or not they had copyright protection.
Now is it is simple to get the Bob Books in any chain bookstore or Amazon. There are three different sets now, blue, yellow and red with each costing around $15.
Two different factors determine those naturally evolving as leaders as kindergarten classes form:
a ) those who can read the most effectively, and
b ) those who are most effective at sports techniques such as dribbling a soccer ball
Those who evolve as leaders early in life tend to take on an different perspective, which can be present thoughout one’s entire life.
If you accept this theory, you can thus help that preschooler that you care about by getting a blue set of Bob Books and by taking the time to teach them to dribble a beginner’s tiny soccer ball.
Incidentally, both our kids were advised by their respective managers earlier this year that they had never in their management careers ever given such high marks on a performance appraisal as Rachel and Eric has just earned from their different companies.
Schoolgal, your statement said soooo much! “Principals call for differentiation, but in practice with over 32 students in the class, it’s a nightmare. Years ago many schools practiced “leveling”. It allowed teachers to work with students on their own levels in reading and math. Each grade would have a heterogeneous classes, but would group their students for reading and math within the grade.”
By differentiation I assume you mean individualization. John Dewey stressed the importance of individualizing instruction but he didn’t mean one-to-one instruction as some school are still trying to do with reading in the primary grades. (Ugh!!!!!!!) John Dewey meant teaching at a child’s level -common sense. Just as you mentioned that teachers use to group. If it is a heterogeneous group, how pray tell can you meet students needs if you don’t group!!!!!! Even if it is a homogeneous group, grouping is still necessary.
I love to recall an ESL student whom even the Hispanic psychologist evaluated as very likely mentally challenged. After sitting in my class for days on end he finally uttered a word – a word that told me he understood. We went flying after that. I met with his father – his older son served as an interpreter. I sent home read alongs. With each read along I asked that his son listen and follow along, repeating the exercise five different times. As his skills improved the stories sent home were more challenging. I also used Mare Clay’s methodology when teaching him. From a non reader in second grade he advanced to a beginning-third-grade- level-reader in just one academic year.
The whole school needs to put heads together to set up a reading schedule- there are many ways to solve the problem of meeting individual needs. A little creativity goes a long way such as having the same leveled groups go to gym with another classroom/rooms while the other children remain in the classroom for reading instruction. Politicians haven’t a clue.
As a veteran kindergarten teacher (44 years) I have always subscribed to the theory that everything works. Of course kids need to know than “m” says “mmmm.” They also need to come to love reading which is what whole language advocated for. Why there was ever a dichotomy or war is beyond me. Could it be that the publishing industry had great need to denigrate whatever the old system was so that they could sell new stuff? Just wondering.
Yes, I believe you are correct! If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. I absolutely love reading and that is my number one goal for my students. It is so exciting to watch that happen. Unfortunately that doesn’t sell new materials from publishers.
“Reading teachers understand that students need both phonics and meaning. They know that children need to be able to sound out words but that it is boring to do that for weeks on end. Children need meaning.”
True and I think that it also applies to owners of private schools. Clarke Woodger, owner of Utah’s largest private ESL school, fired one of his employees for writing a blog on homophones ( words that sound the same but have different meanings for different spellings) for an educational website. His reason?
“This blog about homophones was the last straw. Now our school is going to be associated with homosexuality.”
http://iwritetheblogggs.com/2014/07/24/the-homophones-got-me-a-record-of-a-recent-firing/
My view: Children are different, learn differently. Some teaching techniques work for some very well but less well or not at all for others. The great teacher understands his/her children works to try to help each student with what works best for that student and indeed he/she him/her self has different skills which work best for him/her and so when people look for the “magic bullet” which works for everyone, it won’t happen.
Great teachers need flexibility to respond to the needs of their specific children.
That is the antithesis of what is happening now.
The “wonderful wizards of Washington” are too ignorant or too inept to understand what they are doing TO education.
When politicians usurp the rights of educators this is what one must expect. God help us.
Where would we be now had we listened to the politicians who demanded that we emulate the great Russian school system when sputnik made its appearance or even emulate the great Japanese school system [which when utilized mitigated the Japanese traditional ethic of working together] which appeared when the Japanese started making superior cars and Detroit disintegrated? This Japanese take over of the auto industry happened because an AMERICAN, Deming – trained and educated in AMERICAN schools – was cast aside by Detroit but accepted by the Japanese.
Have we completely lost our national reason?
This does not allay my fears that the curriculum wars do, in fact, matter for my children.
They do, in fact, matter for your children because sometimes ideologues are in charge.
Here’s one problem from an idiot parent’s perspective. I’m told that “balanced literacy” is being revived in NYC schools. I’ve read the diatribes against balanced literacy as used in NYC’s schools a decade ago. I’ve heard teachers rant about how bad it was. And I will say that I found those rants compelling. So when I hear that “[b]alanced literacy can co-exist with phonics,” my question is, ok, but will it?
“Most important, they need to learn the joy of reading. It unlocks the door to the storehouse of knowledge.”
As others have mentioned, phonics is a tool that must always be paired with meaning for the student.
Dr. Ravitch, your quote (above) is the most important of all. (Love it!)
Are you sure you aren’t a reading expert?
Diane. It’s about time. It’s an interesting subject, especially for those who teach young children, and maybe also about learning in general. Piking the “one right way” is absurd. Ted Chittenden and colleagues at ETS wrote a great book describing the continuum of ways that children enter reading. Looking for the one best means pushing other children into their weakest mod e of learning, etc, etc. One advantage of starting formal instruction later (7 or even 8) is that probably half or more will already have figured it out using their strongest learning style. Ted et al compare it to how kids learn a song, build in the block area, etc. Some learn by surrounding it others step by step, some by making lots of guesses and others who can’ tolerate mistakes. I wrote the introduction to the revised version (the first was very scholarly and long). Figuring this out helped me understand my difficulty “reading” music for the piano. I not a one-step at a time learner and I never heard the phrase, looked ahead, etc. I’m better after having taken lessons as an adult as a way to help me better understand what some kids were experiencing.
And then it became a LEFT/Right issue. Absurd.
“I’m better after having taken lessons as an adult as a way to help me better understand what some kids were experiencing.”
Years ago I was fortunate enough to hear John Holt speak. He said that if he could leave us with only one piece of advice, it would be, “Study something that is difficult for you, as you are now, to learn, so that you can develop some empathy.” He had taken up the cello at his advanced age. When I heard Jorge Luis Borges speak he was in his eighties and teaching himself Anglo-Saxon.
“if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”
Teachers need to have a lot of tools in their toolboxes to choose from, in order to be able to reach all students.
(If every doctor had only a scalpel, all physicians would be surgeons and patients would be treated with invasive surgery for a cold.)
It’s been my 21 year experience that phonics balanced with VOCABULARY and SCHEMA development, often done through robust and engaging language and concept frontloading, has always been the best approach for reading.
In come cases more of one is needed than the other, and the proportions always varies depending on where each student comes in at. That’s why it’s important for us teachers to really get to know our students using multiple lenses.
Moreover, with English language learners, frontloading language to teach reading becomes often even more prominent than decodiing, encoding, and phonemic awareness. But of course, everything is kept in balance per each student’s needs.
We must beware of having very young chidlren master phonics and becoming hyperlexic. There is a risk that comprehension will be overlooked or minimalized, and that spells disaster for critical thinking. A second grader pronouncing fluently and clearly a fourth grade text or even a text on level but not understanding what the text signifies is somewhat of a disaster, I think. Yes, fluency has high correlations to strong comprehension, but it is absolutely not always the case. Beware.
Fortunately, there are only a million programs, pieces of research literature, and associations to consult when learning how to teach reading in a balanced way. Reading Recovery is probably THE most effective method used, but it’s also the most expensive and cost-ineffective, especially given the tenor of capitalism generated by our stupid, stupid politicians in D.C.
Yes, I used the word “stupid”. Call the police. Sue me.
But Fountas and Pinell and even the ever opportunistic scheming, wheeler-dealer Lucy Calkins have many empowering prescriptions, for lack of a better word, to give to us teachers, and I recommend anyone to read their literature and really listen to what they have to say. They can be empowering.
Who needs a reading war. It’s such a silly idea.
I think the only war out there is the lack of financial committment from our state and federal governments to really fund the resources for chidlren who fall behind in their reading. FInland does an excellent job of doing just that, and we can learn much from them.
But then you get morons like Nancy Pelosi (a democrat? really?) and Paul Ryan (who’d sell his mother to further destroy the public commons) who either are silent on the issue of such funding or or vocally against it, looking to a new privatized America . . . . I can see many of these politicians having roles in “The Purge” . . . . . Talk about typecasting.
“Yes, fluency has high correlations to strong comprehension, but it is absolutely not always the case.”
A few examples: I had a Jr. High student who was a painfully slow reader. The school required that we do timed readings in a formulaic practice that was supposed to increase speed and fluency and therefore comprehension. Forget that this procedure was simplistic for a moment. My student continued to read very slowly and yet consistently scored very high on comprehension which was contrary to the accepted model. On a whim(educated guess), I had her cover one eye, her reading rate rose dramatically. I explained to her mother what I thought was going on and suggested that her child see an ophthalmologist. She had an eye convergence problem that was corrected with glasses. When I taught reading in high school, I had many ESL students. They had internalized the idea that decoding and speed were the key to good reading. If you listened to them read, you would have sworn they were good readers. In too many cases, however, they had no idea what they had read! My last example is of a boy who was severely dyslexic. His family was able to provide private teaching with a well known phonics program. His mother asked if I would be able to use it at school. I had a small self contained group for English with a rich literature based program. I told her that it would be better for him to continue his private instruction (that was obviously necessary), but that he would benefit from the literature based class that was also tied into their social studies curriculum. If I had had to give him a phonics based program, he would have missed out on the rich content that supported social studies. He was fortunate that his family could afford outside support.
The topic “Reading Wars” constantly brings up phonics. The following passage exemplifies the fact that phonics is only part of the decoding process. It illustrates the importance of syntax and semantics. The first and last letters are correct.
O lny srmat poelpe can raed tihs.cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm.
Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!
I am sure no one had a problem decoding the passage. You didn’t have to look at each letter in the word much less blend them.
No more than 25% of a lesson should be spent on phonics instruction and that should be more indirect teaching than direct using the Socratic Method- asking a series of questions guiding students to a new phonic rule or sound of a phonetic element- that’s not teach talk; it’s guidance.
More emphasis should be placed on the discussion following the silent guided reading. (Round Robin reading is for the birds; it causes more harm than good.) At this time teachers guide students in making connections with text, another text, and their environment. It is during the discussion that a teacher guides them in making applications as well as stimulate their imagination. When a student can apply information gleamed from the text the student then comprehends.
It takes a very perceptive, insightful teacher to discern a humanistic value in the text studied and guide the students to noticing and applying it to their lives. The primary goal of good literature is (to quote Goodlad:) successful problem solving; sensitive human relations; self-understanding; and the integration of one’s total life experience.
A balanced reading program keeps all components in balance.
What you say is true for people reading your text, but that’s because we already know how to read. As you say, reading is a combination of sound recognition and sight recognition. As an early educator, I do know that children learn both by knowing that letters produce sounds and that whole words are recognizable by sight. Discussing the text is equally important ,because comprehension is what we’re after, That’s why kids in early ed should be read to daily. Then they can be guided into a discussion of the text. Silent guided reading followed by discussion can only be done by those who can actually read. Literacy counts heavily on verbal development and listening skills.
Cheryl: I agree as you pointed out beginning readers. They do need to know their letter name and sounds. Comprehension at that point is understanding through pictures and correlating them to words, then expanding to snytax and semantics. A balanced literacy program is for teachers to understand the reading components and to apply them to each individual reader. Not all readers fit on the continuum. Skilled teachers also can identify reading disabilities and know what to do. Reading goes hand-in-hand with writing as well which lots of kids struggle with. So while many can decode by using first and last letter (visual), writing depends on spelling, structure and meaning and so does comprehension. There are kids I’ve had who can comprehend but can’t read or writing fluently. So many think that the goal of reading is comprehension, but I think writing must be in the mix.
Thanks, Jon. Listening. speaking, reading writing. It hasn’t changed.
Phantasmagorical, Robert Rendo!
Why, (thank you?), Ms. DeFalco. That’s some adjective . . .
I like your website, by the way.
The Igor-like David Coleman may be right in his quest for close reading, but understanding the writer’s (and only the writer’s POV) is a first step toward the inevitability of using the text to relate to the self in problem solving. We read literature to apply it, and its application has many purposes. Coleman is dead wrong when saying that no one gives a _______ about what we are feeling or how we relate to the literature.
The idea of the CCSS is not the worst thing, but I do wish the reading levels on the tests were more developmentally appropriate (oh no, it’s that phrase again!) and that in general, the skills were revamped.
The idea of having every state adhere to the same standard (save for maybe ELLs and IEP children, who need a different means and time frame to achieve any kind of standard) is a very appealing one. Why should a child in Tennessee in kindergarten have to count up to 30 orally while in New York, the same age child has to count to 100? Unification is a good thing, but exactly how these CCSS were written, by whom, and under what “other” motivations. . .that’s a tale waiting to be told. Just don’t vomit while you’re telling it.
The idea of a common core for reading is a superb one, but designing the content is a formidable task, and real experts and people in the trenches were virtually omitted from the process.
(RIght, Mercedes?) . . . .
Anyway, Mary, keep on posting, as I’ll keep on reading.
With the help of common core and prescribed curriculum by publishers dictated by plutocrats there will be more at-risk kids. The dictated curriculum will result in teschers losing their pedagogical skills. It will enable teachers to rely on the prescribed curriculum, so that teaching becomes robotic. Teachers through no fault of their own will not have a Plan B when Johnny can’t read. Reading research done over past decades are obsolete according to the current experts dictating education. We are in a new era of war–the takeover by corporate America.The American dream only applies to a few.
Having a full toolbox at the ready is key in teaching reading – much needs to presented and absorbed by the students to reach them in their individual circumstance. We primary teachers have been yanked from here to there by reading wars and reading programs. In reality it takes a village of reading skills, methods, ideas, strategies to reach students – and tops is the pure joy of reading. I started teaching at the tail end of whole language then we flipped straight to a scripted phonics program. At various times in my career I have been told not to do phonics, not to do read alouds, not to correct spelling, not to do small groups, not to do a word wall, or whatever item is now passe depending on said new program and then later told to do them or again not to do them -again depending on new revelations by new reading guru same as the old reading guru.
Diane, thanks for that thought-provoking post. It fits right in with the issues of teacher autonomy and empowerment you’ve been covering recently.
In her 2006 article titled “The Future of Whole Language” Carol Gilles shows that whole language started as a grassroots movement, not a set of dictates from professors of education or school administrators. It had a lot to do with the empowerment of teachers and children, with professors offering their theory and research perspectives and sometimes looking on. It went further, though, with teachers becoming the researchers, curriculum experts, and creators of methods and materials within their own classrooms.
It was no longer just teachers doing what the ed schools, textbook publishers, and tradition told them to do. The way I look at it, the attack on whole language was also an attack on the growing professionalism of teachers. But anyone not practicing whole in the classroom would have realized this, or would understand it even now.
The defeat of whole language in the US more or less coincided with the formulation and passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, which has had the effect of dis-empowering teachers. Gilles documents how the deck was stacked against whole language in the push for control over the professional lives of teachers:
“Last, on the national level, whole language was first caught in the standards and then in the assessment and accountability push. California attempted to adopt a holistic language and literacy program. When the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test scores were revealed in 1994, California’s scores were low. The fact that California had no whole language staff development, the largest class sizes in the nation, severe budget cuts and the largest immigrant population in the country was ignored; nevertheless, whole language was singled out as the reason for the low test scores (Freeman, D, & Freeman Y., 1998).”
Then, as a precursor to NCLB… “In 2000 the National Reading Panel published their meta-study of reading research (http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/nrp/smallbook.htm). Narrowly defining “scientific research” to include only deductive, positivist, empirical research, the panel ignored a large set of data. They concluded that phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension were crucial to reading success. Since whole language was meaning-centered, founded in the belief that the smaller parts of language were learned in context, the NRP report was a blow to WL curricula.”
Gilles reports that as early as 2004, Ken Goodman, credited as one of the founders of the whole language movement, believed that NCLB was a “conservative movement to privatize American education present[ing] itself as a reform movement” (K.Goodman, Shannon, Y. Goodman & Rapoport, 2004, p. 5).
Fits right in with your last two books, and this blog. The whole article is worth a read for anyone who wants to know what the whole language movement really was about.
Diane, this additional change is almost (almost, not completely) as important as your shift in “The Death and Life…” I taught books and writing to (mostly) Chicago inner city high school students from the late 1970s until I was fired and blacklisted by Paul Vallas for exposing the facts of the CASE tests in 1999-2000. During that time, we had to endure the “reading wars” even though they were, at bottom, a pas de deux of “branding” and “rebranding.” So beware of “balanced literacy,” because in a way it’s just another branding.
Our struggles here in Chicago went all the way back to the original Rudolph Fleisch nonsense in “Why Johnny Can’t Read.” Based on those oversimplifications, many people here in Chicago (including one of my friends in the NAACP) decided we were “teaching wrong” by “neglecting phonics.” It became difficult (some would say impossible) to have the conversation, since on the one side we were facing Fleisch’s monstrous oversimplifications and on the other side we were teaching “word attack” skills as necessary and books always.
My own experience was mostly teaching 9th, 10th and 12th graders in Chicago’s “worst” high schools. Ironically, I picked up one of the most useful tools of my career from one of the most useless (and expensive) gimmicks of the late 1970s — a “reading lab” that included lots and lots of “phonics” and “phonemic awareness” stuff. Expensive stuff.
But the lab also utilized a thing called the “Reading Interest Inventory,” which I picked up back at Collins High School in 1976 and 1977 and modified every year (mercifully, on the computer after the mid- 1980s when I got my first Macintosh) as reality in my classrooms evolved.
Two questions were central for me to that document:
— How many books are in your home? and
— What was the most important experience in your life?
I quickly learned what Stephen Krashen has researched better than anyone: poor people don’t have books in their home (or other reading materials for that matter). The kids would have to answer my survey on the first day of my class (or whenever they arrived; this being Chicago, some years I’d get a half dozen kids in mid-October, and for them the school year would finally have begun…). And at least one would ask: “If Playboy a book?” or “Does the Bible count?” I learned that in many homes, the only book was a bible and the only magazines were Playboy (and beyond).
As to the most important “experience”? I continued asking that question, but by the late 1980s I had to add another question:
— Have you ever seen another person die?
I’ll explain more if anyone is interested in how all this relates to the abstractions and professorial nonsense that became the “reading wars.”
The problem with the reading wars is that the “experts” are so busy slanging each other that they don’t have time to teach people to read.
I trained in Orton-Gillingham at the Massachusetts General Hospital Reading Disabilities Unit, whose motto was “We believe every student has a right to be taught in the way he or she learns best.” Good reading teachers learn to use every tool out there, so they can teach students with the tools that work best.
Thank you, Dr. Ravitch, for your commentary about the Reading Wars. I am a professor of literacy education. I am a former elementary teacher who has been through the supposed wars. While teaching in Mississippi – a state notorious for high poverty rates, the marginalization of minority citizens, and (not surprisingly) some of the lowest test scores in the nation, I came to realize that ideology regarding reading instruction was meaningless. The only thing that truly matters is teaching young children the alphabetic code and then teaching them to apply that code to meaningful reading and writing tasks. If one only teaches phonemic awareness and phonics, reading is meaningless. If a teacher assumes that students who come to school from impoverished homes and communities will, upon their first encounters with children’s literature, naturally become literate through a whole language approach without direct instruction of the alphabetic code, then he/she will be disappointed and students will suffer.
Reading instruction has been a favorite weapon of conservatives for many years. The reading curriculum has been examined and re-examined and represents early attempts to federalize curriculum. And proponents of phonics instruction won the battle, in particular with NCLB and Reading First. Nonetheless, they are not satisfied and continue to resurrect the old battles. While serving as an associate professor of reading at Arkansas State University in 2012 I was asked to respond to a commentary by Dr. Sandra Stotsky in the Arkansas Times in which she resurrected the Reading Wars. I respect Dr. Stotsky’s professional record on many issues. However, she simply got it wrong on this issue.
In short, I stated:
“Stotsky is more like a voice from the past, according to Deborah Owens, an associate professor of reading in the Department of Teacher Education at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro. After reading a recent article by Stotsky, headlined “Reading teachers should pass a phonics test,” Owens told the Arkansas Times, “I thought I’d somehow been transported back to 1955, when Rudolf Flesch published his book ‘Why Johnny Can’t Read and What You Can Do About It’ … For those who earn their living in the arena of reading and literacy education, Flesch’s book signaled the politicization of reading instruction that would endure for decades.”
But today, Owens said, “the ‘Whole Language/Phonics wars’ are dead. Teachers across Arkansas and the United States have devoted their professional lives to children, not to fighting some non-existent ideological war over methodology. Let me also say that, while I think there is far too much emphasis on testing, a phonics test for pre-service teachers does not bother me at all. ASU graduates are prepared.” (http://www.arktimes.com/arkansas/sandra-stotsky-calls-for-reading-teacher-reform/Content?oid=2322078)
I continue to work in the field of literacy, although now at a different institution. I am responsible for ensuring that my undergraduate students are prepared to teach children to read and write as well as preparing my graduate students to serve as literacy leaders, reading specialists and coaches. I have abandoned any label for what reading instruction should be. We have 26 letters in the alphabet that represent the sounds of our language. Many children come to school knowing something about the code through various literacy experiences. Other children must be directly instructed from the very beginning about how to use the code to decode (and encode) written language. The entire point of teaching students to break the alphabetic code is to open the door of literacy to them and enable them to become readers and writers. Then they can sit at the table and partake of the feast that is available to all, whether they are reading Junie B. Jones, the Harry Potter series or Charlotte’s Web – or reading the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., articles from the National Geographic, or discerning truth from fiction when reading blogs on the internet.
Respectfully,
Deborah Duncan Owens
Yesterday Jon stated that he agreed with Cheryl, that emergent readers need to know their letter name and sounds. Comprehension at that point is understanding through pictures and correlating them to words, then expanding to syntax and semantics. A balanced literacy program is for teachers to understand the reading components and to apply them to […]
I am sure that I am not alone when I say that emergent readers do not need to know the entire alphabet names and sounds before they start reading. Children can be taught to read with as few as six letters. With each new story another letter is pulled out to study as well as a new word. True, picture reading is the first step to reading which three year olds begin to do at home but reading words begins on day one of formal reading instruction. (Some of course come to school knowing how to read words- I am not talking about them.) The teacher needs to begin with the child’s own language. The teacher letters the child’s/children’s sentence and then points to each word showing how their oral language looks like in print. Many programs begin with labeling pictures with one or two words but is that the same as understanding through pictures? Don’t pictures reinforce our understanding of words. Words used with emergent readers are already in their hearing and understanding. Pictures become one of the support systems but the children read words- not pictures- from the beginning of formal instruction. That is why it is crucial that beginner readers point to each word as they read – to be reassured that they are reading the print. They come to school reading signs in their environment. It is not far fetched that they can begin to recognize words in a sentence from day one. The sounds that they already know is a support along with meaning and syntax.
I am also behind on commenting on Melissa’s statement. Too much activity happens in between. Melissa, I know I am being picky but you stated that Whole Language was imported from New Zealand and Australia. Whole Language is not the same as the Reading Recovery program. Whole Language grew out of Kenneth Goodman’s research. Reading Recovery was developed by Marie Clay from New Zealand. Both Reading Recovery and Whole Language had/have a phonetic component.
I don’t think anyone negates the needs of phonics instruction but the degree and how it is taught is debatable. Phonics is needed more for encoding than decoding.