Charles M. Richardson, Founder/Chairman, The Literacy Council March 6, 1997
WHOLE-LANGUAGE vs PHONICS EXPLAINED
Language wars are "bustin' out all over" to the bewilderment of observers and even some of the participants. This article will attempt to clarify the issues by walking the reader through the basic ideas and terms, some of which, unfortunately, have been grossly distorted by the "education establishment" (EE). References are given for those who would dig deeper, hopefully to shorten the explanations herein.
TERMINOLOGY/VOCABULARY
Comparing and contrasting what are per-ceived to be two methods of teaching reading will be a bit tricky, since whole-language (WL) claims to be a "philosophy" rather than a method of teaching reading; and phonics -- sometimes regarded as a method -- is really a body of knowledge which needs to be acquired in order to read and spell our alphabetic language accurately. These distinctions become important in understanding why the arguments continue: the opponents are talking past each other – almost speaking different tongues! We think we're debating methods of teaching reading, and we're really pitting a philosophy -- which is not a method -- against a body of knowledge -- which is not a method! No wonder confusion persists! (See "No One Best Way," below)
WL is the latest embodiment of the anti-phonics side of the phonics-vs-anti-phonics war existing in some form in the U.S. since the 1830's. The anti-phonics terminology has evolved through "whole-word," "look-say," "sight-words," "meaning-emphasis," "language experience," "eclectic," "psycholinguistics" -- and now "whole-language" or "literature-based." Central to the anti-phonics crusade are claims that letter-sound teaching is dull and tedious, and delays "real reading." In such wars vocabulary is a critical weapon. When you want to control a movement, a process, a social change, you need to control the VOCABULARY of the institutions, professions and consumers involved. Thomas Sasz captures the power of this idea in his book, The Myth of Mental Illness, an indictment of his own profession:
"Where is the illness? In the eye of the beholder -- and the power of the definer . . . Ever since Moliere, critical thinkers . . have known that it is difficult to treat diseases that exist; which is why "psychiatrists" prefer to treat diseases that do not exist. To cure them, all they need is control of the vocabulary, of the taxpayers' . [or the insurance company's] . money, and of the patient's liberty."
THE ESTABLISHMENT RE-DEFINED "READING"
There are striking parallels between Sasz's view of psychiatry and the practices of the reading "profession" and its allies. They have quietly re-defined reading in ways that not only abet empire-building but also have permitted them to gradually degrade children's reading proficiency while hiding their perfidy in a smokescreen of bewildering (to themselves sometimes!) jargon. The way "comprehension" is treated has muddied the water between the two different process of "learning to read" (phonics), and "reading to learn" (comprehension).
From the time the Phoenicians practiced alphabetic concepts for encoding the sounds of language, communication in the Western World outstripped that of the Orient: You didn't have to memorize a separate pictorial ideograph for every meaning, all you needed was the two or three dozen connections between symbols and the language SOUNDS they represented. Reading, from then on, consisted of recovering the sounds from the groups of symbols. Then you garnered meaning, or "comprehended," to the extent that you understood the words/ language that had been written down.
The above shows the path from the written symbol to understanding the message (comprehension) to be a TWO-STEP process, requiring two distinctly different kinds of knowledge. "Reading," or "decoding," is the first step. I have two different collegiate dictionaries published 30 years apart, each with several definitions of reading, but a common listing of "rendering into speech that which is written or printed" as separate from "interpreting mentally the meanings of the words." When I was growing up, "reading" you did from the Bible in Sunday School involved faithfully pronouncing a lot of words the adults could make sense from even if I could not. But I knew I could read anything I chose to because I had the key to recovering the sound from the print -- the set of organized rules about vowels, consonant-blends, syllables, etc., we gather under the umbrella term "phonics."
The two-step process is evident when you read to another person; what part of the "reading-for-meaning" process are you providing? Only the SOUNDS! You do not "comprehend" for the other person (unless you provide additional interpretation), the person comprehends out of his own knowledge, vocabulary, and language sophistication. If you were ill and asked a doctor friend to read to you, it would be fine if he read from a novel or maybe an article on education. But if he started reading from a book on brain surgery you'd complain, "I don't comprehend any of that stuff!" Whereupon he might say, "I'm reading every word correctly. What's the matter with your comprehension?!"
There's many a phonics-trained third-grader who can read a medical book aloud such that his doctor-father can comprehend, though the child cannot. For such a child to comprehend the medical book, would you send him to a reading teacher for "compre-hension skills" or to medical school?
Another testimony to the "two-step" nature of reading for meaning is the very existence of the Kurzweil-Xerox reading machine that will "read" a book to a blind person via optical character recognition, phonics programming, and a synthesized voice. The machine doesn't comprehend, the person comprehends. The machine "reads."
THE BIG SWITCH
In 1931, the reading "establishment" decided to change all the above by fiat, and make reading a one-step process: The "Dick and Jane" sight-word readers were born, and America was told that "phonics is out," "whole-words," "sight-words," "look-say" by whole-word memorization is the "progressive" way to teach reading. The switch was said to be to "meaning-emphasis" (as OPPOSED to SOUND emphasis), or "comprehension-oriented,"whereas phonics was "mere word-calling without compre-hension." Comprehension being the obvious PURPOSE of reading, it now must be inseparably INCLUDED -- even for beginners -- in a ONE-STEP PROCESS going directly from PRINT to MEANING without a "SOUND" intermediary step! (See "Phonics and Comprehension," below)
No matter that the beginner, practicing sentences such as, "Matt sat on a fat cat," couldn't care less about meaning: His concern is, "Did I get it right?" To avoid sound, children are encouraged (required) to remember and visually connect the configuration of every word to its meaning -- just as if it were Chinese! "Reading" had been re-defined!
BACKGROUND: THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WERE DOING!
To understand the perfidy of that 1931 "big switch" (and deal with WL psycho-babble), you need to know that way back circa 1910 education leaders recognized that the two different ways of introducing children to print produce TWO DIFFERENT TYPES OF READERS -- the methods impart two different ways of "looking at" words, and that those ways tend to be mutually exclusive. (Rodgers, 1981) (See "New Test Quantifies the Differencey" below.)
Phonic readers were called "objective" readers, as they analyze the INTERNAL structures of words for pronounceable syllables, calling each syllable as it is, assembling words therewith. Whole-word readers were called "subjective" readers, as they must scan for meaning-bearing parts of words from EXTERNAL features (length, shape, or whatever they can remember), relying on context clues to "predict" (guess). Many guesses about unfamiliar (unmemorized) words must be verified by context, re-examined and revised as necessary.
The subjective reader's comprehension suffers because his attention is divided between comprehending the passage as a whole and using the context for word identification. By contrast, the objective phonic reader can achieve virtually automatic decoding, freeing his entire conscious attention for comprehension.
One of the illustrations used to aid early debates was a triangle with the corners labeled "PRINT," "SOUND," and "MEANING." (Suzzallo, 1913) "Print" was at the top, "sound" at the bottom left corner, and "meaning" at the bottom right. (Rodgers, 1981)
The objective phonetic reader "traverses the triangle COUNTER-CLOCKWISE" from print, to sound, to meaning -- the two-step process described above. Conversely, the whole-word subjective reader goes CLOCKWISE, directly from print to meaning, and, if necessary, then to sound. But from print to meaning is one (?) step.
DR. ORTON CITES THE DAMAGE
During the '10's and '20's decades, enough experiences of whole-word failure occurred that Dr. Samuel Orton, legator of the Orton Dyslexia Society and the first American physician to study children with reading difficulties, published (1929) an article containing the following:
"a very considerable part of my attention has . . extended over a large series of cases from many different schools . . and the observations garnered therefrom seem to bear with sufficient directness on certain teaching methods . .the sight method of teaching reading . . the strictures . do not apply to the . . sight method as a whole but only to its effect on a restricted group of children for whom . . the technique is not only not adapted but . an actual obstacle to reading progress . . . the group is of considerable educational importance both because of its size and because faulty teaching methods may not only prevent the acquisition of academic education by children of average capacity but may also give rise to far reaching damage to their emotional life.
". . some lag . in acquiring visual memories, but I regard these as . . physiological variations and not . . pathological conditions. . . our own figures indicate that the number of children who show a significant handicap in reading is . . related to the teaching method. . . the specific reading disability formed an entity of much greater numerical importance than had been recog-nized before but that it was . physio-logical . . and that therefore adequate methods of teaching should correct it.
"Of two communities of about the same constituent population, in one we found about two percent of the school population . . to show the specific disability, while in the second we found more than double this percentage. In the community with the lesser number, when the children did not progress by [the sight] method they were given help by the phonetic method. In the town with the larger number, no child was given any other type of training until he had learned ninety words by sight.
" . . this strongly suggests that the sight method not only will not eradicate a reading disability . . but may actually produce a number of cases.
" Our studies [showed] . . the effect of this unrecognized disability upon the personality and behavior of the child. Many children were referred . .in the belief that they were feeble-minded, others exhibited conductdisorders and undesirable personality reactions, which upon analysis appeared to be entirely secondary to the reading defect and which improved markedly when special training was instituted to overcome the reading disability.
" . . the number [of children] in whom the disability exists to a sufficient degree to be a serious handicap to school performance and to wholesome personality development is . of real numerical importance and . . . even those who make a spontaneous adjustment without special training, and thus learn to read, may never gain a facility in accomplishment commensurate with
their ability in other lines."
(Since 1931, whenever critics cited the problems arising from the lack of phonics, the establishment has been able to "pull its wagons into a circle" and deflect the arrows from Flesch and Walcutt in the 50's, Chall and Trace in the '60's, Blumenfeld and Yarington in the '70's, etc.)
A COGNITIVE DISSONANCE
How right Dr. Orton was! The "emotional damage" noted by Orton arises not only from the self-deprecation from failure but also from the "mixed signals" reaching children about identifying words. Although he did not mention "cognitive dissonance" (he was a neurologist, not a psychologist), he certainly recognized the emotional damage from mixed signals about reading. The phonic letter-sound-connective information is always subliminally present, some children using it more than others. If teachers encourage "predicting" (guessing) from context and penalize the student who starts "sounding out," a mix of those contradictory messages reacting in a child's brain says that either phonics works and he should be allowed to use it, or it doesn't work and the teacher should supply an alternate tool of equal reliability. The child is caught in an emotional squeeze of the kind that is known as a "cognitive dissonance," which has known use in "brainwashing" types of mental torture, producing emotional disturbance.
SIXTY-FIVE-PLUS YEARS LATER
Almost echoing Dr. Orton, NY pediatrician Dr. William Campbell wrote in 1996 about the predicaments of children subjected to whole-language reading. They were being referred for Ritalin for behavior problems and "Attention Deficit Disorder" (A.D.D.) labels, and were/are BEING CURED BY PHONICS tutoring (Campbell, 1996, published in previous TLC newsletter). Referring to the plight of such children in a WL environment, he wrote, "No neurological diagnosis, behavior therapy, or drugs can give the child the cognitive ability that is systematically being destroyed every day in school."
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