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From the Chalkboard: Reading wars
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Anonymous user Tue Sep 19, 2006 10:12:26 PDT
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0 responses 0 comments Over the decades, administrators, teachers and educational “experts” have engaged in continuing debate over the most effective method for teaching children to read.
There are two schools of thought on this issue and both offer compelling arguments for their side of the issue.
Whole word (or whole language) advocates believe reading is a natural ability that can be taught by reading to students, giving them access to quality literature while instructing them to use meaning clues to unlock pronunciation of new words.
The competing school of thought is the phonics approach. Phonics advocates argue that reading is not natural and that it should be taught by breaking words down into parts. The phonics approach teaches  the sounds or building blocks of words that makes it possible to sound out (decode) words according to consonants, vowels, digraphs and dipthongs. Sight words are memorized for the body of words that do not follow these rules.
This argument, which eventually became known as “The Great Debate,” has continued to the present day. Beginning in the mid-19th century, some American educators, prominently Horace Mann, argued that phonics should not be taught at all. This led to the commonly used “look-say” approach used in the “Dick and Jane” readers popular in the 1950s. However, phonics resurfaced as a better method for teaching reading, with Rudolph Flesh’s popular book, “Why Johnny Can’t Read.”
The argument continued unabated, prompting the National Research Council to examine the question. The results were published in the “Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children” (Snow, Burns and Griffin 1998). Their findings revealed that phonics was the most effective method to teach children to read, more effective than whole language where phonics was taught very little or not at all.
A subsequent attempt to determine the best approach was undertaken by the National Reading Panel (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2001). Their analysis of hundreds of studies confirmed the findings of the National Research Council that phonics was the most effective way to teach children to read. They found that phonics had particularly strong benefits for students of low socio-economic status.
Increasingly, groups like the International Reading Association, the National Research Council and the National  Association for the Educating of Young Children are advocating a balanced approach that blends phonics and whole language. Most educators believe that systematic phonics instruction should take place early, no later than first grade. Many schools, including nearly all private schools, begin in kindergarten with superior results.
Recent research is making it increasingly clear that a phonics-based approach to reading is best. However, teachers need not be exclusively phonics-oriented. It is important that phonics be supplemented with great literature, sight words, word comparisons and writing skills to make language relevant. This combined approach is often called “balanced literacy.”
So ... which approach then wins the debate? Phonics or whole language?
Increasingly, reading experts are contending that neither approach by itself is effective all the time, but both possess merit.  A successful reading program should employ part whole language and part phonics and should take into account each student’s learning style, strengths and weaknesses. Regardless of which approach is employed, parental involvement is vital to success. Parents can be  a strong ally by stressing the importance of being a good reader and being proactive in assisting the school by reinforcing skills at home.
E-mail Dick at: dferris@bakersfieldfirst.com

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