By Charles Richardson
I once said that phonics and whole-language (WL) could co-exist, even though the two philosophies markedly conflict, because indications were that whatever a child learns first becomes what he uses automatically. Thus, teaching a child phonics first would be like insurance -- protecting him against damage from other methods. Now, however, new evidence about phonics-taught children shows they do suffer damage to their reading performance while being in a WL "environment."
Damage to Children WL encourages children to "predict" (read "guess") from context "cues," using phonics only as a last resort. Some NY mothers have withdrawn their children from public school upon observing that their oral reading accuracy had deteriorated, substitutions and omissions had increased.
Reports of sagging reading/writing scores are increasing. In a North Carolina WL school, researcher Edward Miller tested 46 children twice, 2 years apart, using word lists that totaled 520 words. About half of the children regressed in accuracy; and ironically, the worst regressions were among the initially best readers -- those with over 99% accuracy the first time!
WHOLE-LANGUAGE DECEPTIONS
WL was all non-science and deception from the start, thrust on a trusting teacher corps by an intransigent bureaucracy, rife with politics and conflicts of interest.
The political drive behind WL led teachers and the public to assume that it must be backed by research, when such is in no way true! It's all theories and no proof. And even the theories have been roundly debunked by scholars such as Liberman, Adams, Chall, and Stanovich.
Then there are the outright lies, like the claim that New Zealand is the most literate country due to WL. New Zealand HAD a high literacy rate 30 years ago--BEFORE WL! Today their newspapers and magazines are as full as ours of complaints that children cannot read and spell. The June '93 issue of North and South, a prominent New Zealand magazine, carried a long and detailed article entitled "Our Illiteracy," by Jenny Chamberlain, who characterizes their linguistic plight as "a ball and chain dragging down the performance of a nation." The same can be said of the US with our 90 million illiterate adults; but our plight is aggravated by our media refusing coverage because of conflicts of interest.
WHOLE-LANGUAGE CLAIMS
The language "immersion" theory that "children learn to read as they learned to speak" is totally without foundation: The human brain is "pre-wired" for speech, but the alphabet is a man-made convention whose principles must be taught systematically.
An analogy appropriate for WL is teaching kids to swim by pushing them off the diving board: Some will drown, and even those who do make it to shore will be less able swimmers than if they had been taught effective strokes. The claims that phonics degrades comprehension have been shown to be false by Dr. Jeanne Chall and others. Chall also points out that WL's "good literature" claim is deceptive because phonics programs generally have a greater depth of literature--and the children can read it! WL must go! Get WL out of your schools!
Contact The Literacy Council (TLC) for more information.
Charles M. Richardson, Chairman, TLC
P. O. Box 2845, Huntington Station, NY 11746
Tel/FAX 516-424-1039