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The hottest educational issue of the past 10 years
has not been whole language versus phonics. It runs much deeper than that, primarily
because whole language and phonics can be taught concurrently,
if allowed. What, then, is the disparity that has widened the
chasm within the educational system? In order to fully understand,
we must analyze the issues carefully.
It began with
this premise: children have a language base, thus reading should
be predicated on a child's natural language usage. Therefore,
reading books that do not sound like the natural language of
a child should be avoided. (Good-bye basals, hello literature.)
As children are involved in print rich literature, they will
automatically pick up the phonemic patterns of speech, so phonemic
awareness does not need to be taught directly. (Good-bye phonics,
hello sight vocabulary.) In connection with this, if children
are listening to print rich literature and are writing authentic
student text, children will naturally pick up the spelling patterns
in the written word. (Good-bye spelling, hello high frequency
words.)
The only thing
that was forgotten in this whole decade of "natural education"
was the child's brain and how it processes information. It does
not like random information and stores it poorly.
The educational
field allows more pendulum swings than any other profession.
Perhaps it is our constant search for new ideas that leads us
to drop one teaching method or program to follow another. With
the whole language movement, we have virtually thrown the baby
out with the bath, rather than artfully combining all the wonderful
aspects of whole language and phonemic awareness. (It really
wasn't "whole" without phonics.) You don't have to
negate a child's language base and self discovery because you
highlight and teach a certain phoneme in your lesson plans.
It is easy to
see that the whole language movement has had a positive impact
on several areas in curriculum development: it forced us to become
more imaginative as teachers, to integrate the curriculum and
to provide children with authentic reading and writing opportunities,
rather than "busy" work. It also helped us move away
from inane little stories and, instead, brought wonderful books,
rich with vocabulary and artwork into the children's experiences.
It is upon this
positive literature-based foundation that we must build excellent
curriculum and teaching strategies. Our job, then, is to, 1)
be trained to integrate the concepts of whole language and direct
phonetic instruction so children have the advantage of both schools
of thought. 2) be aware of how children learn most efficiently,
and implement effective teaching in the classroom, 3) masterfully
teach, reaching young minds so that they fully understand all
concepts taught, not neglecting one skill for another.
Jeanne Chall
(1992/1993) said it so well: "Both the direct instruction
and whole language models are concerned with enhancing student
achievement in reading. Both are equally concerned that the students
develop a love of reading. Both want children to read good literature
as well as expository texts. Both combine reading and writing.
Both want all students to achieve their potential, and both want
to reduce the number of students who fail. Whole language proponents
tend to view learning to read as a natural process, developing
in ways similar to language. Therefore, like language, most whole
language proponents say it is not necessary to teach reading
directly. Direct instruction models, on the other hand, view
reading as needing to be taught, and taught systematically. Indeed,
an often used rationale for the need to teach reading is that
all people on earth speak a language while, according to UNESCO,
nearly a billion are illiterate, mainly because they do not attend
schools where reading is taught and learned.
This is where
we need to start:
1) We must take
back our profession. We are educational experts and know (or
should know) how children learn best. If something does not feel
right, we must be strong enough in our convictions and training
to speak up. Never again should teachers see themselves as only
facilitators or implementers!
Research (Chall,
1967) shows us again and again that the teacher is a major variable
in how well a child learns to read and spell. We must
fully research the premises behind each educational philosophy,
and cognitively assess the long term effects it will have on
students' academic progress.
2) Our schools
must adopt methods and strategies that handily teach children
how to read and spell through a curriculum that presents the
richness of literature, creative and informative writing, critical
thinking and phonetic analysis at the same time. There must be
harmony and continuity of thought in order for changes to be
implemented at all levels of the school system.
3) We must teach teachers to become reading and spelling experts.
College requirements must be restructured, adding many specific
classes in these areas. They need to learn how to teach children
phonetic skills to decode and encode text with books that are
readable, in addition to exposing them to the joy and enrichment
of fine literature. Teachers must learn the various sounds of
every phoneme in the English language in order to teach it, as
well as how to tie it into the reading and writing curriculum.
a) Teachers must
understand the nature of language acquisition. Children are in
a language acquisition mode both before and after birth, and
language development is crucial to their reading and writing
success. Speaking to them, asking and answering questions and
reading to them is essential to their future literacy. So important
are hearing and perception in this endeavor that if language
is delayed, so is literacy.
Guessing what
the words are and struggling to find meaning within context is
not an efficient way to read. Give them the phonetic code to
the language. The sounds that they have heard from birth can
be decoded and later, written down
b) Teachers must
be taught how to reach EVERY child in the classroom, not allowing
any child to slip through the cracks. All teachers must have
the tools, materials, strategies and training similar to special
education training. We no longer have the option of homogeneous
classrooms. Our classrooms are cultural, social, economic and
academic melting-pots, especially with more and more full-inclusion
taking place. Our teachers must be highly skilled in pacing the
academic work load, creating lesson plans that reach 100% of
the children, regardless of language or ability.
c) Teachers need
to fully understand how a child's brain functions. From birth
to around seven or eight years of age, a child must, approach
text using right hemisphere strategies. Research (Flehmig &
Stern, 1986) found that, "The principal components of
the potentials, while analyzed in relation to a number of independent
variables, revealed significant associations between reading
proficiency and right hemispheric activity at early ages, to
shift to significant associations between reading proficiency
and left hemispheric activity at later ages." (p. 355)
Based on this research we must reach young learners through methods
that easily teach the concepts needed for literacy. Traditional
approaches passed down from generation to generation have often
put up educational road blocks, unwittingly, for the child, because
of t heir abstract nature.
Since the alphabet
is made up of symbols, which are abstract and left- brained,
how do we reconcile this with four, five and six year olds whose
brains are not yet ready for assimilating this type of information?
To make matters worse, we expect a kindergarten child to not
only know the letter names (a), but we expect them to recognize
them by sight, know the sounds they make (a), and know their
upper and lower case counterparts, (A, a). This is just too much
information for most five year old children to handle.
4) We must commit
to the education of pre-school children. (Anderson, Hiebert,
Scott, and Wilkinson, 1985) Continuity is needed with feeder
pre- schools, Head Start and K-3 grades throughout the school
district. We can do this by encouraging feeder pre-schools and
Head Start Programs to tie into the local school curriculum and
to participate in staff and curriculum development. In the long
run, there would be fewer children in special education and Chapter
One programs and other federal and state funded categorical programs.
5) We must help
parents to learn how to work appropriately (playfully and non-stressfully)
with their children, readying them for the language arts process.
If pre-school children enter kindergarten with essential pre-
reading, spelling and writing skills, the kindergarten teacher
could then continue readying them for the academics needed as
well as to prepare them for first grade.
Some Problems
with the Traditional Approach:
1) Too much information
is given: When we say to the child, "This is a capital "A,"
this is the lower case "a," the letter name is "a"
and the usual sound it makes is "a," the child, becomes
confused and does not fully understand, because the information
holds little, if any, meaning. Now multiply these tasks by the
26 letters of the alphabet and the child becomes overwhelmed.
2) Not enough
information is given: When we fragment the alphabet, children
do not see the alphabet as a whole entity. Unless they see the
complete alphabetic picture, they will not understand its purpose.
If they do not understand, they cannot utilize the information
in reading or writing.
3) Children are
expected to learn from abstractions: We give children abstract
symbols which they should understand and relate to a specific
sound. Additional obstacles are found with similar letter shapes:
show a child a "b" and a "d." Can you imagine
visually distinguishing this at five years old? Try these: "p"
and "q." Or, try to distinguish auditorily the difference
between the sounds of "e" and "i"? |
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