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9486 in the collection
Two Views of What School Offers
Posted below are a call for balanced reading and a parent's response.
Balanced, Individual Reading Programs Most Effective
by Kathy Buley
C-A-T. D-O-G. Now try to read the rest of this sentence in the same manner, letter by letter, and you will have a glimpse of what reading phonetically might entail. Try larger chunks of letters -- JAR-GON. Not much better.
It is time for some straight talk about phonics, whole language, and the place of each in reading instruction. Unfortunately, the Free Press Nov. 17 editorial, "Better, but not enough" does little to shed light on the history of the debate or current practice. Phrases like "proven phonics methods" and "faddish whole language approaches" may serve to clarify the opinion of the editor, but do little to inform.
Phonics instruction, in simple terms, is teaching words by assigning sounds to letters. When a child is told to "sound it out," a phonetic approach is being employed. Whole language, on the other hand, intentionally focuses on a variety of reading components, and relies more heavily on comprehension-based strategies (word patterns, rhythms in language) than on sounding out words.
The debate has raged for decades now over the perceived advantages and disadvantages of each method, with one side or the other gaining favor as test scores rise and fall. To a large extent, this battle has always been one of degree. Most proponents of phonics instruction recognize the importance of students comprehending the meaningful whole, just as whole language advocates recognize the value of students having the ability to apply letter-sound associations when learning new words. It has more to do with the order and percentage of time that students are engaged in each activity that has created the "reading wars."
Ultimately, fluent readers don't read letter by letter or even word by word. We read in meaningful phrases, and use a variety of strategies from phonics, contextual clues, inference and prediction to get meaning from print.
The NAEP scores being quoted in the editorial are certainly not testing how well students are sounding out words. They are testing how well students are reading and comprehending the meaning of the text. While phonics might help them to get there, too heavy an emphasis on letter-sound associations in early instruction, at the expense of comprehension, simply creates bad habits that have to be broken further down the road to fluency. The English language, once one goes beyond very simple word forms, simply does not follow predictable enough phonetic patterns to make this strategy useful for long.
A more accurate picture of current best practice in reading instruction would focus on the concept of "balanced literacy instruction." As the name implies, this method recognizes that reading is a complex and active process involving the orchestration of many skills and strategies. The comprehension elements of the whole language approach are coupled with an appropriate use of phonics in order to meet the needs of all learners.
For some students, a more intensive percentage of time spent on visual aspects of print and comprehension strategies is the more successful approach. For others, a program grounded more heavily in phonics is necessary. Either way, individualization of instruction that is geared to the needs of each student's learning style will produce the most successful result. We are fortunate that this is the direction that most public schools in Vermont are headed in, and the hard work of students, educators and parents is beginning to bring good results.
Finally, if there is an important message to be heeded in the editorial, it is the importance of parents reading with their children and children reading at home. Every teacher knows that a child's most important teacher is his or her parent. And, after all, no matter what the method, practice makes perfect.
Kathy Buley teaches second grade at Chamberlin School in South Burlington. She holds a master's degree in reading and language arts from the University of Vermont.
Children Benefit from School Choice
by Stephen Farrington
South Burlington teacher Kathy Buley's My Turn of Nov. 26 offers a helpful synopsis of two controversial reading instruction approaches. But by trivializing the complexity of the arguments and championing an irrational compromise, it exposes critical flaws in the prevailing public education philosophy and bolsters the case for school choice.
Reading skill develops in successive, overlapping phases. Speed-readers are acclaimed to grasp all the nuance of an entire page at a glance, but first they learned to decode words, then sentences, then paragraphs, until each level became automatic and subconscious.
Ushering a child who can breeze through "See Spot Run" into whole language instruction under the premise that phonics will hamper him is like offering algebra to a child who has memorized a few multiplication tables without grasping the principles of computation.
Because children will fall ahead or behind, the establishment deems them all best served by an amalgam of methods dubbed balanced reading instruction, claiming it will "meet the needs of all learners." Like teaching a partial multiplication table and a couple of steps of long division along with algebra, this proves a poor substitute for a strong foundation and appropriate sequencing.
Balanced reading instruction is an overdue attempt by the education establishment to back away from the failures of whole language without losing face.
Whole language instruction implements the faulty assumption that a child immersed in written language should infer the rules of spelling, just as one immersed in spoken language infers the rules of grammar. Myriad contra-indications notwithstanding, most people recognize that disclosing a rule like "c sounds like k unless followed by an e, i or y" to a child is a lot more effective than hoping incidental see-hear exposure will "induce" this rule in his consciousness. Oddly, in the current paradigm, children who are not quick to discover such rules on their own are labeled learning disabled.
In contrast, a child given each rule and practiced in applying it soon recognizes at a glance the role of "c" in sounding a word, and will never again consciously consider either the rule or its context. As a bonus, she can spell. Far from the impediment its opponents claim, thorough phonemic-based instruction is an indispensable foundation for fluent reading and writing.
True, danger can arise from half-hearted phonics implementations, insufficient to capture much of English's complexity. But dismissing phonemic-based instruction on the basis that our language "does not follow predictable enough phonetic patterns to make [phonics] strategy useful" is disingenuous.
If spelling were unsystematic, technologists would never have achieved convincing speech synthesis. Anna Gillingham's pre-1940 distillation of roughly 80 percent of English pronunciation into 70 letter combinations and 29 rules under-laid numerous successful phonics methods. But recognizing this success would have left Ed Schools little justification to invent subsequent prescriptions.
Pandemic emphasis on early reading, with insufficient consideration of writing, further encourages the adoption of short-cut methods that fail to serve best in the long run. Demanding that teachers tailor balanced literacy instruction to every student individually is like asking them to make size 5 shirts fit every child when most wear 4's and 6's. However unfair to children and teachers, the current monopoly public school system does just this. By geopolitically enforcing which child goes where, it requires every school, no matter how small, to be a Wal-Mart of instructional methodology. None can do so economically, and few should aspire to.
Teachers, children and taxpayers should be freed from irrational expectations. Instead, schools and teachers should be allowed to offer more focus, and families should be free to choose the offerings most appropriate to their children's learning styles, developmental stages and interests; athletics and the arts notwithstanding. If we truly want to leave no child behind, the freedom to shop for the best fit can no longer be restricted to the privileged.
And if defenders of the status quo are secure in the superiority of their methods, they have nothing to fear from alternatives. All parents must be free to choose their child's school.
Stephen Farrington is a parent in Stockbridge.
— Kathy Buley and Stephen Farrington
Burlington Free Press
2003-12-08
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/bfpnews/editorial/3000h.htm
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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