Posted by
Joe on Monday, April 07, 2008 8:55:54 PM
Below is one of the most informative and detailed articles I’ve come across regarding the whole language fiasco. The Weekly Standard’s “Read it and weep” by Charlotte Allen is far too long to print here. Key excerpts include:
American young people are also significantly behind their counterparts in other developed and even some developing countries. On the Progress in International Reading Study (PIRLS), a multinational test for fourth-graders administered in 2001, the United States placed only 9th out of 35 participating nations, trailing top-rated Sweden, the Netherlands, and England–despite spending more per student on education than any other nation in the world. On the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a test of 15-year-olds in 2003, American students ranked just about in the middle in literacy skills, way behind their coevals in top-ranking Finland and a score of other countries including South Korea, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It is an educational commonplace that children who cannot read at grade level by the fourth grade are unlikely ever to be able to read well enough to tackle the specialized textbooks they will encounter in science, history, and other subjects as they move to higher grades. More likely, they will fall further and further behind in school, eventually dropping out in many cases.
It would seem obvious, too, that learning how to read involves real learning–receiving and internalizing step-by-step instructions on how to decode the symbols on the page, fit them to spoken sounds, and then link those sounds to meaning. Hence vocabulary lists and the old-fashioned technique of having novice readers “sound out” words by reading aloud in class in order to associate sounds and letters. Children also need to learn how to make all those connections quickly and almost unconsciously, or reading will always be difficult and unpleasant for them, which is why fluency and comprehension are key measures of reading skill. Learning how to read would seem analogous to learning how to play the piano, in which practicing scales, mastering fingering technique, decoding the notes, and developing a feeling for the rhythm and beauty of the music are simultaneous but separate components of the process.
All this common-sense intuition–much of which underlay the famous phonics-intensive McGuffey Readers of the 19th century–is in fact supported by decades of 20th-century scientific research into how people actually learn how to read, starting with the work of Jeanne Stern licht Chall, a psychologist with a special interest in fostering the literacy skills of poor children who founded the Harvard Reading Laboratory at Harvard’s graduate school of education in 1966. Starting in the 1970s, a flood of reading studies–an estimated 10,000 in all–applied quantitative analysis and experimental, control-group-based research to identify the instruction strategies that teach reading most efficiently. The researchers included not only specialists in education and early childhood development but also experts in such fields as linguistics, psychology, neurology, genetics, anthropology, and sociology.
The resolutely apolitical NICHD, part of the National Institutes of Health, has been funding studies of reading development since 1964, and has sponsored longitudinal studies of 44,000 children in more than 1,000 schools since the early 1980s, tracking some of those children and their reading progress for more than 20 years as they grew to adulthood. It was all that research which led the NICHD to identify the five components that appear in Reading First’s enabling legislation (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension). The value of these studies, their proponents argue, is that like all scientific studies, they are based on rigorous methodologies–assessments, for example, not only of how well children can read using various instruction strategies, but even how they move their eyes as they scan a printed page. And, like all valid scientific findings, the results can be replicated.
“We know how reading is acquired,” says Louisa Cook Moats, a protégée of Jeanne Chall’s at Harvard and director of the NICHD’s Early Reading Interventions project from 1997 to 2001. “It’s learning to process very specific kinds of linguistic information and build networks that coordinate phonological processing to the patterns of printed symbols that the eye sees, and it’s also connected to meaning and the building of vocabulary. When I explain how the process works to teachers, I compare it to an unraveled rope with the strands sticking out. The strands are all those beginning skills to be woven together in the rope.” Reading looks automatic and natural, Moats explains, but only because skilled readers are practiced enough to decode the symbols at lightning speed.
There are many causes for the resistance of the education establishment not only to the conclusions that Moats and others have drawn about reading instruction but to the research that underlies those conclusions. One bedrock philosophical principle, however, unites all those who oppose the step-by-step teaching of literacy skills: the notion that learning how to read is not at all like learning how to play the piano. Instead, the proponents of “whole language” instruction contend, it is a natural process akin to learning how to speak–something that children don’t have to be taught formally but pick up automatically if exposed to a sufficiently print-rich environment. Stephen D. Krashen, a professor emeritus of education at the University of Southern California and self-described “staunch defender” of whole-language strategies, explained in an email: “[A]ny child exposed to comprehensible print will learn to read, barring severe neurological or emotional problems.” Or, as Krashen amplified in a telephone interview: “Kids learn to read by reading.”
Hence the antipathy of the whole-language proponents to having children read a story out of a reader such as Houghton Mifflin’s; that doesn’t count as “real reading,” to borrow a phrase from Krashen’s email. Indeed, textbooks or any other kind of formal instructional material are eschewed. In elementary-school classrooms across the country, reading instruction typically consists of what is called “shared reading.” The teacher reads a story aloud to the class, often from a “Big Book,” an oversized, large-type edition of an illustrated children’s book of the teacher’s choosing that is propped up on a table or on the floor in front of the class. The teacher might read the story out loud several times, pointing out words that may be difficult, and then have the class read the story aloud in unison while the teacher turns the pages. There is almost no individual reading aloud, and the sounding out of words phonetically is actively discouraged as tending to turn youngsters into rote parsers of syllables who fail to understand what they are reading.
As for phonics per se, both Krashen and Yvonne Siu-Runyan insist that they indeed incorporate phonics instruction into their reading strategies, but only in elementary fashion and on an as-needed basis–”basic phonics,” as Krashen puts it. Whole-language instruction also typically includes periods of independent silent reading–”Drop Everything and Read” is the name for these impromptu sessions–in which the children pick out and peruse material of their choice from a classroom library of “leveled books”–that is, books that the teacher deems appropriate for their reading level. During these sessions the teacher typically “models” the process by dropping everything and reading silently from a children’s book, too, on the principle that seeing other people read encourages reading. As for vocabulary, whole-language classrooms typically incorporate a “word wall”–an ever-changing collection of large-letter words written on posters that the children chant together cheerleader-style and then write out.
The instructional principles behind whole language–light on formal content and heavy on assumptions that children will learn to read by feeling enthusiastic about reading–are far from new. Indeed, they date back to the end of the 19th century, to the educational theories of John Dewey (1859-1952), the pragmatist philosopher and educational theorist who held that children learn best not by directly absorbing instruction from their teachers in specific subjects such as mathematics or history, but by interacting with the real world. School, in Dewey’s thinking, should offer a simulacrum of real-world experience in which learning takes place obliquely as the child explores his or her surroundings under the guidance of a teacher. Dewey was in turn influenced by the romantic philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that children were naturally perfect and that education ought to consist of allowing them maximum freedom to develop their innate talents.
In 1904 Dewey joined the faculty of Columbia Teachers College, regarded then as now as America’s premier education school (U.S. News currently gives Columbia Teachers its No. 1 rating). From there Dewey’s “progressive” theories of pedagogy profoundly influenced several generations of American teachers and school boards, right up until the Sputnik launch of 1957, when it suddenly looked as though the Soviet Union, whose Communist leaders had kept in place a decidedly non-progressive education system dating from czarist days, had the United States over a barrel in science and technology. The Dick and Jane readers widely used in American elementary schools from the 1930s through the 1950s were offshoots of a branch of Dewey-ism that held that phonics instruction was backward and proposed that the way to make children literate was to expose them to simple words repeated interminably. (”See Dick. See Dick run. See Dick run fast.”) This so-called “look-say” pedagogy (a forerunner to whole language in its emphasis on context and meaning rather than sounds and letters) met its end after Rudolf Flesch published his bestselling Why Johnny Can’t Read in 1955, two years before Sputnik. By the early 1960s it looked as though progressive education had run its course in all but the most outré private schools. Jeanne Chall’s 1967 book Learning to Read: The Great Debate, proposed a return to thorough grounding in phonics, but in up-to-date combination with interesting children’s literature.
Then came a revolution in pedagogy that swept through the K-12 grades in the 1970s and 1980s as thoroughly as its college-level sister, postmodernism, swept through the academy. The revolution was called “constructivism.” Like postmodernism, it had its grounding in arcane Francophone theory: the ideas of the Swiss cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget. Piaget proposed that children progress through distinct developmental stages during which they acquire knowledge not simply by learning it from the outside but by “constructing” it from within, building upon and reflecting upon what they already know in order to rise to new levels of knowing. In Piaget’s theoretical dialectic, the subjective process of learning was more important than any particular content learned. Indeed, Piaget argued, it was crucial that the developmental process taking place within each individual child’s mind not be interfered with, but rather nurtured and encouraged by the child’s teachers. As the ubiquitous mantra of Piaget-influenced educational theory later put it, the teacher should be “a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage.” The essential constructivist principle is that teachers should teach nothing directly, but rather function as coaches while their students basically teach themselves.
This was Dewey’s progressivism with a new, fashionably Continental face. “The idea is that education is growth, education is development, and that children grow all by themselves,” said Diane Ravitch, an education policy analyst and author of Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform, a mordant critique of constructivism. “The idea is that children figure everything out for themselves,” Ravitch added. “There’s no authority.”
Piaget acquired an army of American apostles at education schools and elsewhere. Chief among them were Frank Smith, an Australian journalist-turned university instructor, and Kenneth Goodman, an education professor at the University of Arizona. Smith, whose 1971 book Understanding Reading derided the teaching of phonics, and Goodman are credited as the creators of whole-language theory. In a 1967 article in an education journal, Goodman had described the process of learning to read as a “psycholinguistic guessing game” in which children decipher words on a page, not by decoding them phonetically as Chall maintained, but by following “cues.” The cues, Goodman maintained, can be the individual letters and sounds in the word–or they can be the larger context of the story in which the word appears, the artist’s illustrations, or even (and perhaps especially) the child’s own previously acquired knowledge. Like Smith, Goodman argued that phonics instruction was useless at best, downright harmful at worst. “Matching letters with sounds is a flat-earth view of the world,” he declared in a 1986 book, What’s Whole in Whole Language. Dramatically turning centuries-old principles of reading instruction on their heads, Goodman maintained that “a story is easier to read than a page, a page easier to read than a paragraph, a paragraph easier than a sentence, a sentence easier than a word, and a word easier than a letter.”
Both Smith, who had never taught reading in an elementary-school classroom, and Goodman, who had, derided the use of textbooks, worksheets, and other formal instructional material. Smith’s 1986 book, Insult to Intelligence: The Bureaucratic Invasion of Our Classrooms, complained about children being forced by their elders to memorize mountains of useless data. (Memorization is generally considered in constructivist theory to be developmentally inappropriate for elementary school.) In whole-language theory, the teacher’s job is to identify the child’s errors–or “miscues,” as they are called–and nudge the child in the direction of the correct cues. “Drill and Kill” is their derisive term for pedagogy that emphasizes the systematic teaching of content.
Thus began the practice, now a bedrock of whole-language pedagogy, of teachers’ encouraging beginning readers to look at the first letter of any difficult word they encounter in a story and guess the rest, or if that strategy fails to produce results, simply to skip the word and return to it later. Although Goodman refused to be interviewed for this article, stating in a pair of dyspeptic emails that he