Charles M. Richardson, Founder/Chairman, The Literacy Council March 6, 1997
PRESENT-DAY TEACHER PROBLEMS
"But we DO teach phonics!" The question is, "Do they believe and understand it well enough to teach it competently?" What phonics a child may be taught can be nullified by teacher policies which penalize his using it. In a whole-language school in Mahopac, NY -- where they proclaimed, "But we DO teach phonics" -- in the spring of '95, a student was penalized for sounding out words by having his desk put out into the parking lot!
Since Orton's time, the intervening years of public-school teacher training opposed to phonics has led to the deficient condition of our teachers as described in an article, "The Missing Foundation in Teacher Education," by Louisa Cook Moats (Moats, 1995). She writes, ". . graduate level teachers are typically undereducated for the very demanding task of teaching reading and spelling explicitly. . . state certification standards must be upgraded nationwide. Teachers could not . . meet the diverse needs of students who are at risk for reading/writing failure on the basis of current minimal requirements in teacher education." She goes on to describe the specific knowledge for which a group of volunteer teachers were tested and found wanting.
A similar conclusion about teacher-trainer ignorance was reached in 1988-92 research at the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, U.S. Department of Justice, by Michael Brunner, during studies on literacy problems of juvenile offenders and surveys of college professors of education. (Brunner, 1993) He found that 70% of what is being advocated as teacher training is contrary to education's own best research.
NIH LEARNING-DISABILITY RESEARCH
Still more recently, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) released results of its long-term studies on learning disabilities and how reading ability develops. (NY Times, "Teaching Johnny to Read," 1-25-97) NIH found that fewer than 10 percent of teachers actually know how to teach reading to children who don't get it automatically, a fraction NIH puts at 40 percent. NIH states that both literature and phonics practice are necessary for all children, but vital for that 40 percent.
The above figure of 10 percent means that if an educator says, "We DO teach phonics," the chances are one in ten that he knows whereof he speaks, or can do it right.
BUREAUCRATIC "STONE-WALLING" of RESEARCH
At an August '94 NIH conference on learning-disability (LD) research, evidence surfaced that political suppression of truth about the role of phonics in reading has reached new depths of infamy: The data keep showing that WL is failing children - that children need the "phonological awareness training" that good phonics programs deliver, early and intensively. And the education bureaucracy is ignoring/ rejecting the evidence! (See Foorman, 1994) Several of these superb researchers said that they felt like "outsiders," and expressed dismay that their results are not incorporated in mainstream education curricula! Their research papers are rejected by mainstream reading journals! (e.g., "The Reading Research Quarterly") Data which should be in the hands of every reading teacher have to appear instead in psychological journals, which teachers seldom read. Here is current proof that political agendas govern public education without regard for children or science.
LONG-TERM DAMAGE TO CHILDREN
It seemed for a time that, even though the two philosophies conflict, that what a child learns FIRST would become what he uses automatically: So, teaching a child phonics first should ideally have been like a shield -- protecting him against damage from other methods. BUT -- new evidence of WL-environment damage to phonics-taught children shows they DO SUFFER DAMAGE to their reading performance while being in a WL environment:
On Long Island, some mothers have withdrawn their children from public school upon observing that (even after solid early phonics teaching) their oral reading accuracy had deteriorated: substitutions and omissions had markedly increased.
In a North Carolina WL school, researcher Edward Miller tested 46 children twice, 2 years apart, using a new oral reading test having two selected lists totalling 520 words. During the 2-year interval, more than half the children REGRESSED IN ACCURACY! Ironically, the worst losses were among the initially BEST readers -- those with 99% accuracy the first time!
NEW TEST QUANTIFIES THE DIFFERENCE!
The test used above was the Miller Word Identification Assessment (MWIA), a new test which can tell whether a reader tends to be "objective" or "subjective" (See "Background . ." above), whether his "reflex" in "looking at" words is a phonetic or a holistic one, an indication of what he was FIRST taught: A reflex once established is resistant to change.
Of the MWIA's two lists, one is of the high-frequency sight-words repeated ad nauseam in non-phonic reading texts, tend-ing to be memorized – NOT decoded. The second is of alphabetically-regular one-syllable words NOT on the high-frequency list. If a person is an objective phonetic reader, he reads both lists with equal fluency. If he is a subjective whole-word reader, he slows down and makes more mistakes on the second list, even though the words are easier than many sight words, such as "could," "would," "should," "anywhere," "somewhere," etc.
Though the test is all first-grade words, it measures an effect that is long-term, maybe permanent: In one study with high school seniors, the error count on those first- grade words was found to correlate strongly (- 0.6) with the students' verbal SAT scores! A coefficient of 0.6 is a significant correlation; the minus sign means that as word error counts INcreased, SAT scores DEcreased.
OTHER TENETS OF WHOLE-LANGUAGE
When subject to critical analysis, every single tenet of whole-language fails to be scientifically provable. Marilyn Jaeger Adams (1991) analyzes clearly the precepts of WL. She effectively skewers the arguments of the two leading WL gurus, Ken Goodman and Frank Smith: They both argue that processing individual words is neither necessary or productive. Smith (1971) asserts that (1) decoding skills are used only to a limited extent, and only then because such methods are imposed on children; (2) the alphabetic principle is irrelevant to fluent readers; (3) such readers rely on their word knowledge and context clues and decode only as a last resort; (4) such readers do not visually process every word -- perhaps not ANY word -- but pick up enough detail to correct/corroborate their hypotheses about the message of the text.
Adams points out that in the 20-odd years since Smith's first edition that "science has consistently, firmly, and indisputably REFUTED ALL THE ABOVE HYPOTHESES." (!) (Emphasis added.) She characterizes Smith's fourth (1988) edition as "permeated . with polemic conjecture, name-calling, and . .willful misconstruals!" In his 1988 Preface (p.ix) Smith says, "Cognitive science has not led me to make radical changes in matters concerning theories of reading . " Translation: "My mind is made up! Don't confuse me with facts!"
WL tenets that collect the most criticism are its "immersion" theory – that children learn to read naturally, just as they learned to speak, and "invented spelling." The immersion theory has no basis, and is soundly debunked by Liberman, (1990) as totally without foundation: The human brain is "pre-wired" for speech, every culture has oral language, but the alphabet is a man-made convention whose principles must be taught systematically. An analogy would be teaching kids to swim by pushing them off the diving board: Some will drown, and even those who make it to shore will be less able swimmers than if they had been taught effective strokes.
Researcher Keith Stanovich (1993) says:
"That direct instruction in alphabetic coding facilitates early reading instruction is one of the most well-established conclusions in all of behavioral science . . . Conversely, the idea that learning to read is just like learning to speak is accepted by no responsible linguist, psychologist, or cognitive scientist in the research community."
"Invented spelling" is another unproven fad flying in the face of experience that says what a child learns first is hard to undo. There is no research supporting it, and copious observation and theory against it.
OUTRIGHT LIES
Then there are the outright lies, like the claim that New Zealand is the most literate country due to WL. New Zealand HAD a high literacy rate 30 years ago -- BEFORE WL! Today their newspapers and magazines are as full as ours of complaints that children cannot read and spell. The June '93 issue of a prominent New Zealand magazine, NORTH AND SOUTH, carried a long and detailed article entitled "Our Illiteracy," by Jenny Chamberlain, who characterizes their linguistic plight as "a ball and chain dragging down the performance of a nation."
PHONICS AND COMPREHENSION
The claims that phonics degrades comprehension have been shown to be false by Dr. Jeanne Chall (1967, 1983) and others. The "establishment" muddied the water still more during the '70's with research on comprehension that failed to show decoding as a factor in comprehension. Chall (1992) took the establishment to task for the way the research subjects were selected: they
were all good decoders! The establishment "cooked the books" to prevent the need for better decoding (phonics) to show in the test data! She also points out that WL's "good literature based" claim is deceptive because phonics programs generally have a greater depth of literature -- AND THE CHILDREN CAN READ IT! (For good literature, take a look at the Spalding reading list.)
Closer to home, Suffolk County's ASTOR literacy program for youth on probation teaches only phonics -- but measures comprehension as a yardstick of progress. And the clients are gaining.
If whole language is all that great, why do its advocates find it expedient to lie?
"NO ONE BEST WAY"
To cover for their shortfall in real insight and scientific integrity, WL gurus have a favorite cliche: "There's no ONE best way to teach reading!" That sounds so erudite, with its snobbish implication that the process is so involved that none but professionals can possibly grasp its alleged complexities. But when you look back at how they have re-defined reading -- being anti-phonics -- you can see the way WL people use the cliche muddies the water of discussion to the point of being outright deceptive.
To the typical parent, "READING" EQUALS PHONICS -- the recovery of SOUND from print -- practiced to automaticity!! And yes, there are a lot of good ways to teach PHONICS so that it can be reasonably said that there is no ONE best way to teach it, and the consumer gets lured into agreeing with the cliche. BUT -- here is where the deception enters -- when an advocate of WL or any other non-phonic system says there's no one best way, he/she opens the flood gates to psycho-linguistic predicting (guessing), structural analysis (judging the length and shape of the word), substituting, skipping, memorizing words or parts, bringing one's own meaning to the task, etc., a view according all those non-reliable guessing games the same status as accurate decoding, a distortion which falls somewhere between a half-truth and an outright lie! We're talking two different meanings of the term "reading!"
Try explaining the above distinction to an unwary parent or school-board member (who might not be a phonetic reader himself), or a teacher-product of a WL training school! Also ask yourself if you would be comfortable using a doctor, lawyer, tax advisor or airline pilot who reads by context-guessing! What will tomorrow's professionals be like?
RESULTS FROM THE FIELD
The principal of Barclay Elementary, an inner city school in Baltimore, fought hard to remove WL and import the phonics-based program used in the prestigious (private) Calvert School nearby. With the Calvert curriculum in place for four years, test scores have soared from the 30th to 60th percentiles, and special-education "refer-rals" have gone down by three quarters!
Former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch visited Barclay last May. Writing in her "News & Views" publication, she raved about the inspirational academic accomplishments and learning atmosphere she saw, then took a journalistic step back and said, "What struck me is that everything going on here is the direct opposite of conventional wisdom in schools of education!"
The above is consistent with NY experience reflected in a 1-13-97 NY Times editorial, "Betrayed in the Classroom: Learning Disabled -- or Curriculum Disabled." It quoted an experienced private-school director as being "incensed by the whole-language system of reading," and affirming that children who experience difficulty thereunder are not "learning-disabled, but rather "curriculum-disabled!"
A "BALANCE" Of PHONICS AND WHOLE-LANGUAGE?
Referring to the discussions about the two types of readers and "cognitive disso-nance," above, phonics teaches and demands the skills for accurate identification of each word, with well over 100 studies as proof of effect. Conversely, WL teaches just the opposite: "Predicting" (guessing) is encouraged as opposed to "sounding out," "Pony" is allowed if the print says "horse;" "house" can pass for "home,"etc; use of context clues, substitutions, etc., relegating accurate decoding to a last resort! All with NO BACKUP RESEARCH!!! Think what such distortions can do to a science passage, or a math problem! The trail of emotional problems and attention deficit diagnoses speaks loudly. What's this "balance" illusion?
Given the above findings on teacher deficiencies, literature or no, if WL advocates are in charge of a district's reading instruction, the likelihood of a child receiving adequate reading instruction is virtually zero! Even if "mixing" or "balancing" were possible, the evidence casts serious doubt
on the system's judgement of what constitutes "balance." Can I interest anyone in a "balanced" nutrition program of equal amounts of vitamin C and arsenic?
Another WL philosophy is that children should not be subject to any reading tests or evaluation except teacher observation -- and of course by the one who's doing the teaching! This explains why teachers love WL, but does it give a warm feeling of accountability?
READING RECOVERY (TM)
The "remedial" program by this name is a product of the same thinking as whole-language. It has been misrepresented and oversold. A new report, "Reading Recovery: The Claims vs The Facts," is available from the National Center to Improve the Tools of Educators (Grossen, 1996).
FOLLOW THE MONEY TRAIL
"The Beginning Reading Instruction Study" is the title of a 1993 U.S. Department of Education report examining the phonics content of the fifty most widely used reading systems, AND their cost-per-student (Stein, 1993). The costs vary over a 100-to-1 range with the phonics books being consistently the cheapest. On page 120 is the statement, ". . many programs provide handsome books with beautiful illustrations for the children to read, but fail to provide the instruction that will permit them to read the words in the books."
The increasingly-expensive special reading books have made billions for publishers, who founded the International Reading Association, the controlling organization since 1956. With all the special-education materials and "dumbed-down" science and history texts you see that everybody on the inside has found a money tree. But millions of children have been relegated to the academic scrap-heap, labeled with some sort of disability.
SUMMARY: WHOLE-LANGUAGE (WL) MUST GO!
Every facet/tenet of WL fails every test of validity or effectiveness. It damages children, even good readers, and promotes ideas that are false/unproven. Since WL is anti-science, co-existence with any science- based program is illusory. Its literature choices violate children's decoding ability, so "trial & error" take over. Would you let your child learn street-crossing by trial & error? We must let science decide. (Stanovich, 1993-4)
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