Whole Language Vs Phonics

Introduction

The worldwide debate about reading concerns not just when to teach reading, but also how to teach it. There are two main schools of thought – the whole-language school (which emphasizes the recognition of whole words), and the phonics school (which emphasizes the development of the skills needed to decode words).

Traditionally, children were taught phonics – they would learn the alphabet and the sounds made by the individual letters followed by letter combinations. This would enable a child to sound out any word she encountered. From the time reading first appeared in American schools until the second quarter of the 20th century, this is how reading was taught.

In the 1930s, the whole-language movement was born. Advocates abhorred the drudgery of phonics and spelling drills. Instead, they said, children should be raised to love reading and literature. Teachers should emphasize the meanings of words over the need to sound out each letter, with phonics “mini-lessons” given on an ad hoc basis. As the new movement gained ground, phonics lessons were progressively eliminated from American schools.

In the 1950s, an unusual book appeared on the US best-seller list – and stayed there for 37 weeks. Written by Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Can’t Read: And What You Can Do About It shocked parents and teachers by pointing the full finger of blame for the country’s falling literacy rates at whole-language instruction. Flesch’s book describes the nightmarish scenario of a classroom of children who must rely entirely on memory and guesswork in order to read:

The child pays no attention to the word, but notices some other condition which serves as a cue. For example, a child who had successfully read the word “children” on a flash card was unable to read it in a book. He insisted he had never seen the word before. He was presented with a flash card of the word and was asked how he recognized the word as “children.” He replied, “By the smudge over in the corner.”

Over the next several decades after the book’s publication, scientific research would consistently show that children need phonics to read fluently. Yet, whole-language instruction would prove difficult to shift from the American classroom. It is only recently that phonics has begun making a comeback. And while whole language and phonics are often pitted against one another, it is possible to combine the two in teaching your child to read.

Whole Language Vs Phonics

Why teach whole language?

The advantage of teaching whole language is that it enables you to give your child exposure to the written word from as young as three or four months of age. By stimulating the reading pathways of your child’s brain from babyhood, you can give him a head start in reading that will make him a more fluent reader for the rest of his life.

Robert Titzer, an infant researcher and the creator of the Your Baby Can Read (YBCR) series of books and DVDs, taught his daughters Aleka and Keelin to read as babies. His video of Aleka gesturing to indicate the meanings of words at the age of nine months is as amazing to watch today as it was at the time of its release in 1992.

Titzer believes reading should be taught in babyhood because that is when it’s easiest to learn. His research shows that adults who read poorly have improperly connected neural circuitry, suggesting that the reading pathways of the brain were not activated early enough in life. Titzer has also witnessed firsthand a young child’s ability to deduce the rules of phonics without being explicitly taught them:

Around 18 months I actually thought I would teach [Aleka] phonics, because she knew hundreds and hundreds of words. So I wrote down a “b” – and I had not taught her the alphabet yet – so when she saw the “b” she said “buh.” Then I put down a “t” and she said “t,” and then when I put down “tion” and she said “shun,” then I knew that she’d actually figured out phonics.

In the cases of Aleka and Keelin, the long-term benefits of learning to read in babyhood are clear: each maintained 4.0 GPA averages in school and skipped at least one grade. Aleka is now in college, having begun her sophomore year at the age of 16.

Whole Language Vs Phonics

Why teach phonics?

While Aleka Titzer may have deduced the rules of phonics by herself, it is not safe to assume that every child will do so. (Indeed, Aleka’s father never assumed as much.)

Whether or not a child learns some first words by sight, there will come a point when she needs to know the sounds made by the letters of the alphabet. In order to progress to the level of a competent reader (with a vocabulary of 50-75,000 words), the ability to sound out new words is a must.

Around the world, whenever phonics is removed from the reading curriculum, literacy rates go down. It’s a phenomenon that prompted the French government to ban pure whole-language instruction in 2005 (although some mixing of the technique with phonics is still permitted). Another European example is mentioned by Charles Sykes in Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why America’s Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can’t Read, Write Or Add:

In Britain, educational psychologists first noted a drop in reading scores in 1990, and a government report confirmed the falling scores the next year. The exceptions were schools that employed intensive phonics programs. As a result of the ensuing outcry over the dropping reading scores, phonics instruction is once again being included in England's national curriculum.

Samuel Blumenfeld, author of many books on education, including The New Illiterates And How To Keep Your Child From Becoming One, makes the controversial claim that whole-language instruction actually causes dyslexia:

Holistic readers are indeed handicapped by the way they are taught to read. They are taught to look at words as whole pictures, which means that they are not bound to look at a word from left to right. They simply look for something in the word-picture that will remind them of what the word is. Thus they may actually look at a word from right to left, which accounts for the tendency of dyslexics to reverse letters and read words backwards.

Phonetic awareness makes all the difference between a good and a poor reader, notes teacher trainer Louisa Cook Moats in her 2000 paper, Whole Language Lives On: The Illusion of “Balanced Reading” Instruction:

Most of the variability in reading achievement at the end of first grade is accounted for by children's ability to decode words out of context, using knowledge of phonic correspondences. The most common and fundamental characteristic of poor text reading is the inability to read single words accurately and fluently. Skill in word reading in turn depends on both phonological awareness and the development of rapid associations of speech to print.

Phonics lessons have also been shown to work wonders for children beginning school with poor reading skills. In 2005, psychologists Rhona Johnston and Joyce Watson published the results of a seven-year longitudinal study into the reading abilities of Scottish schoolchildren. Comparing a group of first graders in a phonics-based reading program to two groups enrolled in whole-language programs, they concluded:

At the end of the 16-week training period, the [phonics] group was reading words around 7 months ahead of chronological age, and was 7 months ahead of the other two groups. The [phonics] group’s spelling was also 7 months ahead of chronological age, and was around 8 to 9 months ahead of the two [other] groups. These groups were spelling 2 to 3 months behind chronological age. The [phonics] group also showed a significant advantage in ability to identify phonemes in spoken words.

Whole Language Vs Phonics

The dyslexia debate

In response to the wholesale damage wrought by whole-language reading programs, educators around the world are increasingly calling for a “phonics-first” approach to reading instruction. This means keeping reading materials away from a child until he has learned the alphabet. This will depend on his ability to deliberately vocalize the individual letter sounds, so the earliest children can be taught phonics is around age two.

For parents who want to stimulate the reading pathways of their child’s brain in infancy, there is no need to risk the child reading words in the wrong direction, or no direction. While teaching whole words, it is still possible to teach babies to look at the text they’re reading from left to right – hence the arrow running under the words in YBCR (as Titzer explains):

For dyslexia, the most common reading disorder, a lot of the children do not look at words from left to right. [The YBCR DVDs] can help prevent that problem, because they’re being taught, as babies, to look at words from left to right.

Another way to teach reading directionality from babyhood is to point to the text in books as you read to your child. This is a technique recommended by Timothy Kailing, computational biologist and the author of Native Reading: How To Teach Your Child To Read, Easily And Naturally, Before The Age Of Three. Kailing posits that some cases of dyslexia could be prevented by teaching “native reading” – that is, enabling children to absorb the written form of the language at the same time as they are naturally absorbing the spoken form:

[Many dyslexics] can do as well as anybody at such complex tasks as properly conjugating irregular verbs and correctly using complex syntactical forms. In contrast, distinguishing a “d” from a “b,” a fundamentally simple task, can be bafflingly difficult… The problem is that they are already masters of spoken language by the time they encounter writing. Their brains do not expect to have low-level novelties of language introduced at this point in their development.

Whole Language Vs Phonics

The voice in the head

Some whole-language advocates believe that subvocalization – that is, hearing the words in your head as you read – hampers the reading process, at least as far as speed and efficiency are concerned. Says Janet Doman, director of the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential (and daughter of Glenn Doman):

[At school] we are literally trained to read and talk at the same time. And this is not a good way to teach, because when you and I go to read a book, we subvocalize. We actually are talking, and it means we read very, very slowly. [A baby] will just take in the word, and as you teach him to read and he gets to be a better and better reader, he’s not subvocalizing.

The Domans emphasize the ability of babies and young children to learn with the right hemisphere of the brain (which is dominant in children up to the age of three and a half). Children can rapidly and effortlessly absorb large amounts of information this way. However, as Sykes explains, we should not confuse the desired end with the means of achieving that end:

As many of his successors would do, [proto-educationist James] Cattell confused the "attributes" of readers (or in later edspeak, "the expected behaviors" or "outcomes") with the appropriate way of acquiring those attributes. Of course, skilled readers did not stop to sound out words; long practice had made that unnecessary. It was thus an "outcome" of learning to read; the mechanics of reading, including the ability to sound out words, enabled the reader to achieve that outcome. But since the actual process of sounding out words is not the desired "outcome," educationists decided that they could dispense with it.

Mark Seidenberg, psychology professor and coauthor of a 2004 study that used a computer model to mimic how children learn to read, agrees. “It’s very clear that in the early stages of beginning to read, the model – and child – learns more rapidly if the connections among spelling and sound and meaning are established,” he says.

Later, having learned homonyms such as “there” and “their,” the reader begins to rely more on sight recognition, which is faster than sounding out individual letters. But, explains Seidenberg, “You can’t go straight to that end point. Learning to read words visually is hard – it takes a lot of practice because the mapping between spelling and meaning is almost arbitrary… Sounding things out gradually strengthens the visual process until it becomes more efficient and does more of the work.”

So subvocalization has a role to play – for fluent readers as well as children learning to read. Both children and adults find it easier to comprehend the meaning of a word while hearing the familiar sound it makes. In other words, good readers simultaneously blend their knowledge of spellings and sounds during reading.

Whole Language Vs Phonics

Earlier is easier

By now, you will have realized that it is better not to rely on whole-language instruction alone to teach your child to read. Does the fact that your young baby can only learn to read whole words therefore mean that you should hold off on teaching her to read?

It is important to distinguish between whole-language reading instruction in the absence of phonics instruction, and whole-word reading (or sight-reading) in general. With so many irregular spellings in English (as well as other languages), everyone needs a certain number of sight words in their reading vocabulary. Rote memorization is what enables us to read words like “one,” “age” or “was” without stumbling over their arbitrary orthographies time and again.

Most children spontaneously learn their first words as whole words – whether or not we teach them to do so. By seeing certain words on a regular basis (such as the “Stop” of a road sign) and learning to associate the word they see with the sound they hear, children build up an early vocabulary of sight words. There is nothing wrong with this.

It is also not uncommon for young children to go through a phase of exhibiting dyslexic-like tendencies while learning to read. During this time they may misread similar-looking words that they have memorized by sight. They may confuse the letters “b” and “d,” or “p” and “q.” There is nothing wrong with this.

The difference between the children who sight-read words and confuse letters who go on to be good readers, and the children who sight-read words and confuse letters who go on to be dyslexic is when and for how long these habits occur.

By exposing your child to the written form of language from a very young age, you can effectively avoid the scenario of an older child being tripped up by rudimentary complexities of spelling, as Kailing explains:

What unites [the aspects of written English that dyslexics typically find difficult] is that they are problems that have no analogy in the spoken language. They are problems at a basic, building-block level of language – a level that, in the spoken language, five-year-olds have already mastered.

We believe that the sooner a child is exposed to the written word, the better. We also recommend that you teach your child phonics as soon as she is able to deliberately vocalize letter sounds. By doing so, you can ensure that your child is a practiced phonetic reader long before she enters first grade. Children who rely on whole-word reading alone tend to experience problems with the technique from around third grade. There is no reason why any child of this age should be without a knowledge of phonics.

Why is it that baby Aleka Titzer worked out the rules of phonics while some third graders fail to do so? Leaving aside natural differences in language ability, it is highly likely that babies will find it easier than children to figure out the rules of phonics for themselves. Just think of the way babies deduce the rules of grammar without their parents ever teaching them, while older children struggle with the new grammar rules of a foreign language. The younger the child, the more gifted he is at language.

Whole Language Vs Phonics

Summing up

Whole language is often pitted against phonics – but that needn’t be the case. You and your child can enjoy what each have to offer. Since your child will naturally learn her first words by sight, you can take advantage of the time when her memory is at its most powerful to teach her a large numbers of sight words. You will be amazed at how smart your baby is, as she begins showing that she can read, even before she is able to talk.

At age two or even younger, you can introduce your child to phonics. Play letter games with him, building words and asking him to see if he can. Sound out any real as well as nonsense words you each build. Most toddlers love word games of this sort, and find the sounds of the nonsense words particularly hilarious!

Once your child becomes a skilled reader, she will naturally blend her knowledge of spellings and sounds to make reading most efficient. The strengthening of the neural pathways for reading, and knowledge of whole words gained in babyhood will always be an asset.