Creech, 7:39 a.m.

"Whole language has invited some degree of controversy in recent years. Does this approach to literacy successfully teach children to read?"

Of course it does, would be the short answer.

Below is an excerpt from an email I got yesterday from a girl I had for two years in second and third grade who is now in ninth grade. It made me smile because of the obvious spell check error and its meaning. And of course it is always great to hear from a former student who is now successful. I hope it makes others smile too.

Dear Mrs. Creech,

I’m sorry I haven’t talked to you in a long time, high school seems to be more trying then I expected. I miss you so much, school just isn’t as fun when you’re not teaching me. Although I have some really good teachers, right now none of them can compare to you. You should try teaching high school. I think you have just the right amount of patients. I’ve been getting all good grades nothing lower than a B, and of course that would be my algebra grade. Math still seems like Greek to me but I try hard and at least pull off a B so I’m pretty proud of myself. English is by far my favorite class. We are currently reading Romeo & Juliet and I’ve been asked to recite Juliet’s part of the balcony scene. I’ve already memorized all my lines and am really excited about it. My reading and comprehension skills are really high. I’m the smartest in my class.

Before I get to a lengthier response to the question posed, I would like to tell you a little about myself, the debater, and how I came to my current belief system about the teaching of reading. I think it is important to get a sense of one another, because my hope is that this debate will become a source of increasing understanding for both whole language and direct instruction advocates. It is important to reflect on why we believe what we believe in regard to reading. I totally admire direct instruction practitioners for their passion, tenacity and courage and I think we have much more in common than many people would care to admit. For sure, we are both constantly getting beat up.

I am a kindergarten teacher. I wasn't one of those wide-eyed little girls who admired her teachers all through school and always tried to please them. I wasn't one of those women who always knew that she wanted to teach from the time she started kindergarten. Basically school was something I had to do, and when I graduated from high school, I swore I would never enter a place like that again. I hated it. I did know I wanted to help children though, so I majored in social work in college. I dropped out just before graduation, got married and held a variety of jobs. I didn't become interested in teaching until my daughter started school 15 years after I got married. In exploring a variety of schools for her to attend, I noticed a huge difference in culture and philosophy and realized I didn't have to teach the way I was taught.

In second grade she started at a new school. Her new teacher called me in a panic. She was coming to second grade knowing few letters and letter sounds. They were going to have her "tested." They called me in for a meeting. The Title One teacher had given her an assessment called the Botel Word recognition test and she had scored significantly below grade level. For those not familiar with the Botel, it is basically a list of words at different difficulty levels. At that time I was taking my first “real” education class at the university and I took this information to my professor in frustration...the school personnel had made me feel this was definitely a problematic situation in regard to my 6 year old. The professor told me to take the word list home and put the words in a sentence. I did, and she not only could read the words from the list, but the entire sentence I had made up for each word! That was the beginning of my belief system. It made me recognize the importance of syntax and semantics for beginning readers. I also believe in the importance of phonics instruction. Yes, Whole Language Teachers recognize the importance of graphophonemics.

I told my daughter's story to Reid Lyon the first time I met him. He was standing right in front of me. He looked back at me and said, “Well, that is true for some readers, but not all readers.” Robert Slavin (1998) says that 50% of children can learn to read in any instructional environment, up to 40% more are teachable if willing with good instruction, less than 10 % are tutorable and only 1-2% of children are truly dyslexic. So let’s address those “other readers."

Do I agree that poor children in rural and urban areas are getting the shaft as far as reading instruction goes? Of course. Do I think they need more than they are getting? Of course. Do I think the answer is spending millions of dollars on basal readers so that publishers and politicians can fill their coffers and salesmen can line their pockets with commissions? Absolutely not! They need energized teachers who know how to teach children to read and are confident that they are teaching children in the best possible way, by assessing for teaching and making thoughtful decisions as to appropriate instruction; They need classroom libraries that are overflowing with wonderful books that give them opportunities to read; And they need lots of opportunities to read and write every day.

Okay, I suppose now the DI folk, although they often use anecdote, are saying in their statistical, mathematical minds, show me the numbers. We can toss numbers back and forth. This has been going on for years. I agree the Follow Through results have impressive numbers. I have read Project Follow Through reports, I have read Cathy Watkin's monograph summarizing the statistical results, and I have read Siegfried Engelmann's book (and enjoyed the video), and I'll tell you what jumped out at me, how often he talked about exemplary teachers, excellent aides and wonderful administrators (It sounds like every teacher in a K-2 DI classroom has an aide! I have NEVER had an aide). You don't think that made a difference in the Follow Through results? Jeanne Chall in her book Learning to Read: The Great Debate (1967) found that it was the teacher, not the program that made the difference. Even though teachers were given the exact same program there was a big difference in results. Richard Allington also has pointed to the importance of the teacher using what he or she believes will work, being more important than any program.

Rather then bickering back and forth about DI and WL, I think we should be working on making sure that all children have teachers who know what the child in front of them needs to know to learn to read, good school libraries, and that they come to kindergarten with the knowledge and support they need to succeed.

I am getting well beyond my 800 words. And I would like to pose a couple of additional questions to Mr. DeRosa.

1. What do you think reading is?
2. What do you think Whole Language is?
3. Why do you think DI is not accepted if it is “the answer?”
4. If you had 30 kindergarten children in the A.M. and 30 in the P.M (picture them in your living room) how would you begin to bring them to literacy?

De Rosa, 1:59 p.m.:

The reason why whole language is controversial is due to the Shoichi Yokoi problem.

But before I get into that, I want to make it clear that phonics is merely a tool, not an obligation. If a child comes into school reading well, having gotten there by whatever route, then that child probably does not need additional phonics instruction (at least not for reading, spelling may be another matter.) However, many children do need instruction in phonics to learn to read proficiently. Those children should get the phonics they need without prejudice. And, I believe that the way phonics is taught in whole language reading programs is, unfortunately, incompatible with proper phonics instruction.

To understand why that is so, I’ll take Nancy up on her request and define “whole language.” (I will get to Nancy’s other points and questions in future posts.)

Whole language falls within the class of meaning-emphasis reading programs and has incorporated Goodman and Smith’s psycholinguistic guessing game approach to reading. Goodman’s theory is that readers try to figure out the meaning of a text by using a variety of partly redundant cuing systems. There are three types of cues in this guessing game: semantic, syntactic, and graphophonic.

The graphophonic cues are the reader’s general knowledge of spelling-sound relationships. Syntactic cues are knowledge of syntactic patterns and the markers that cue these patterns, such as function words and suffixes. Semantic cues are knowledge about word meaning word meaning and the topic.

In fact, whole language instruction relies heavily on the student’s experience with language. Students are encouraged to guess words that are presented in the context of short stories and the main motivation is to make reading fun for the student.

To accomplish this, whole language uses “authentic literature” as the instructional text, as opposed to decodable text. The belief is that the knowledge necessary for skilled reading, including knowledge of phonics, will develop naturally, like spoken language develops, if children are exposed to good books. Therefore, explicit teaching of phonics should be eschewed since it is not a natural extension of learning and has the potential to do harm by boring or frustrating the student. Moreover, because phonics represents just one of the cueing systems, if a student fails to learn some piece of phonics knowledge, other cueing systems will compensate when the student actually reads.

In this reading-as-a-guessing-game or hypothesis-testing activity theory, it is thought that readers engage in a cycle of activity in which they generate an hypothesis about what the next word would be, move their eyes to that word, quickly confirm their hypothesis, and then generate a new hypothesis about the next word. Under such a view, the reader’s processing is mostly contextually driven. This approach also suggests that a bottleneck forms when a reader is acquiring visual information into the brain’s processing system.

This has proven not to be the case.

Since this theory was first proposed in the early 1970’s, there has been a large amount of research on skilled reading which has led to the replacement of this hypothesis-testing theory of reading by one in which the processing activities involved in reading occur very rapidly, so that the visual information needed for reading gets into the processing system very quickly without the formation of a bottleneck at the visual input stage. Research on eye movements during reading also indicates that skilled readers identify words quickly with little help from context, though context does play an important role in interpreting meaning of identified words. It is this misapplication of context for identifying words, rather than for ascertaining the meaning of words which has proven to have the most pernicious side-effects on naïve readers.

Reading is not a guessing game. Phonological information is critically important in word identification. In fact, the three cueing systems are not equivalent in determining what word is actually read; the graphophonic mechanism plays a highly prominent role, particularly in reading acquisition.

Furthermore, learning to read is not a natural process like learning to talk. Learning to speak is effortless and automatic for almost all children brought up surrounded by other humans speaking their language. Reading is not and often requires some explicit instruction in the alphabetic principle. Almost no child needs to be taught the phonemes of his language, but almost every child needs to be taught the symbols that make up his writing system. That’s why there is an alphabet song, but not a phoneme song.

(See How Psychological Science Informs the Teaching of Reading (2001), Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky, and Seidenberg, for elaboration and omitted research cites.)

Which brings me to Shoichi Yokoi.

Shoichi Yokoi was a Japanese soldier in World War II who was stationed in Guam and went into hiding in 1944 when the American forces conquered the island. Yokoi hid in a jungle cave for 28 years, fearing to come out, even after he had found leaflets declaring World War II to be over.

Unlike Yokoi, whole language proponents still refuse to leave their pedagogical cave, even though the phonics wars have been over for quite some time. And, while the cognitive science reading research has shown that the meaning-emphasis approach to reading to be wrong, classroom practice has yet to adjust to this reality.

It is not a question of just doing phonics. It is a matter of doing phonics right for those children that need instruction in phonics. For many children this means that phonics must be taught systematically and explicitly so they learn that the primary mechanism for word identification is the grapho-phonemic information contained in the words themselves. Such instruction requires the use of decodable texts in the initial stages of reading instruction rather than authentic texts, which are neither decodable nor designed for instructional use.

I think that much of what is contained in the typical whole language reading program can be salvaged if they get the phonics part right in the beginning levels.

Nancy, what will it take for whole language proponents to see the light? Why aren’t they coming out of their caves?

Creech, 8:34 a.m.:

Thank you for your interesting and thoughtful response. It took me a while to get a sense of what you were saying, so if I misinterpreted something please forgive me. I couldn’t see because of the lack of light in the cave. : ) Have you been in a whole language classroom lately? I think you would be impressed with how much reflective light there is. Whole language is constantly challenging itself and changing to align with current research. If we were stuck with a decades old script, nothing would have changed for me or whole language.

I was worried that there might be some confusion about whole language from the “dictionary” definitions I was reading a few weeks ago on http://parentalcation.blogspot.com. Looking up “whole language” in the dictionary is like looking up “love” or “friendship” in a dictionary. Whole language is also often confused with "whole word" which is how I was taught to read several years ago. Here is the most recent statement of our beliefs.

Whole language isn’t a program and it isn’t about guessing. I have never used the word “guess” with a student in regard to reading words. I have also seen children in DI classrooms “guess” at words. For instance the example of the word “was” that Englemann gives on his video. The script says "sound out this word" and the students say, w-a-s (rhymes with bass, the fish). Then the script says, "Correct, that is the way we sound it out, but this is the way we say it, “was” (pronounced correctly). However, the next time the student comes to it, he or she may still pronounce it the sounded out way (a nonsense word), and it has to be corrected to something meaningful. And I bet it happens, even in decodable reading, they use context to get the word “was”. ALL kids guess sometimes. If they read a word correctly, I won’t know if they are guessing or not.

I would like to address one of the points that we agree on. Phonics is a tool. A tool in the toolbox of everything that is needed to bring a child to literacy. This tool isn’t all that dependable however, and only actually works with words about 50% of the time (Moustafa). Also, according to the National Reading Panel Report, phonics does not significantly impact the reading of children from grades 2 through 6.

“Every Letter, Every Sound, Every Day in Every Way” is posted on my kindergarten classroom wall. It is a quote from a friend who is also a whole language teacher. We don’t limit our teaching of phonics to one method. We immerse young children in phonics just like we immerse them in reading and writing. They learn the letters, the sounds, to segment and to blend, slow and fast, and to rhyme, and they do it within a meaningful context. You state to do it that way is “incompatible with proper phonics instruction.” If they can read and write and know the letters and sounds and can blend and segment words, what could I do to make it more proper?

So is the difference decodable books? Is that the way to make it more “proper?” Why would I do with poorly written reading material, what I can do with wonderfully written children’s literature? You state, “the main motivation is to make reading fun for the student.” When I read this I thought, YEAH! It isn’t the only motivation but it certainly is one of the main ones in kindergarten, or first, or second….well when does reading cease to be fun??? I sure wouldn’t want my children to have a teacher who didn’t inspire them to be a reader for a lifetime, and I certainly wouldn’t read as much as I do if I didn’t find pleasure in it. I also want my students to read for a lot of authentic purposes and in a variety of genres. I want them to read critically and understand what they are reading, but heck yeah I want them to think reading is fun!!!

So what is reading? This is Michigan’s definition and it is one that I therefore must use to guide my instruction, “Reading is the process of constructing meaning through the dynamic interaction among the reader’s existing knowledge, the information suggested by the text, and the context of the reading situation.” What is your definition?

De Rosa, 3:23 p.m.:

You better watch out, Nancy, you may not get invited to Ken Goodman’s holiday party if you keep writing that a large part of whole language is not about guessing based on context cues. This is, of course, our primary disagreement, so I want to use this post to flesh out the details (I’ll round up Nancy’s remaining points in my next post).

A great deal of confusion has surrounded the use and misuse of context as a strategy for reading unknown, phonetically irregular words. Once students have learned the most common letter combinations, common prefixes and suffixes, and can apply this knowledge accurately to reading words, teaching students to use context of a sentence to help figure out a new word is an appropriate instructional strategy.

However, introducing the use of context when students are in the beginning stage of reading instruction is problematic, as it is likely to result in student confusion and encourages guessing, which is an unproductive reading behavior. Certainly, promoting the use of context cues as an equal or superior method of word identification, as is done in whole language instruction, puts the cart before the horse. This is especially true for students who have not yet acquired phonic- and structural-analysis skills. When students possess these skills, the number of words that need to be treated as irregulars significantly decreases. Thus, context cues play a much diminished role for regular words which represent the bulk of words in common usage.

Skilled readers identify most words quickly with little help from context. It is readers of lower skill who rely on context to support word identification. (Perfetti, Goldman & Hogaboam, 1979; Stanovich, 1980). Consider, for example, how difficult it is for a beginning reader to rely on context cues for word identification purposes. The following passage has been modified to make it 80% decodable. This is about the level of decodability that the beginning reader will encounter in whole language instruction, using authentic text which has not been carefully controlled for decodability:

“He had never seen dogs fight as these w__ish c___ f____t, and his firs ex__________ t____t him an unf________able l_____n. It is true, it was a vi_______ ex_________, else he would not have lived to pr_____it by it. Curly was the v_________. They were camped near the log store, where she, in her friend__ way, made ad_________ to a husky dog the size of a full-______ wolf, th____ not half so large as _he. __ere was no w_____ing, only a leap in like a flash, a met_____ clip of teeth, a leap out equal__ swift, and Curly's face was ripped open from eye to jaw.

“It was the wolf manner of fight__, to st___ and leap away; but there was more to it than this. Th__ or forty huskies ran _o the spot and not com______d that s_____t circle. Buck did not com______d that s_____t in_______, not the e___ way with which they were licking their chops. Curly rushed her ant________, who struck again and leaped aside. He met her next rush with his chest, in a p________ fash___ that tum___ed her off her feet. She never re_____ed them. This was __at the on______ing huskies had w______ for.

(Jack London, Call of the Wild)

Skilled readers simply do not use context cues for word identification purposes to the extent that whole language proponents would lead us to believe. In fact, in recent years eye movement research has revealed that skilled reading involves word identification based primarily on word structure, not on context cues.

These studies have shown that the information needed for reading gets into the processing system very quickly, on the order of 50 to 60 ms. In addition, although readers are not consciously aware of their eye movement, how long their eyes are fixated on a word is very much influenced by the ease of difficulty of understanding that word. Low frequency words are fixated on longer than high frequency words. Short words that are highly predictable from the preceding context are typically skipped; however, even though these words are not directly fixated, they have been processed (fixations preceding and following skips have inflated durations).

Skilled readers are not engaged in guessing activities. They are efficiently and quickly processing (at an unconscious level) the text. And, all the letters in a word are being processed during word identification. In contrast, beginning readers’ eye movements are quite different from those of skilled readers (Rayner 1986). Beginning readers fixate virtually on every word and often have multiple fixations on many words. Also, they regress much more frequently and their perceptual span is also smaller than that of skilled readers. Thus, their eye movements reflect the difficulty they have decoding the words in the text. Moreover, research on skilled readers shows that phonological codes are activated for words very early in eye fixations (Pollatesk et al., 1992; Rayner, Sereno, Lesch & Pollatsek, 1995).

Contrast this to how the meanings of words are identified. Words can be identified either directly from print (direct access) or by computing a letter string’s phonological code and using that information to access meaning (phonologically mediated access). It is currently believed that skilled readers use both mechanisms to determine word meaning with each mechanism racing to ascertain the correct meaning.

A problem occurs with readers with weak phonological processing skills. These readers rely more heavily on direct access; however, the mapping between spelling and meaning is largely arbitrary (Van Orden, Pennington, & Stone, 1990) and, thus, difficult to learn. Consider what happens when a beginning reader encounters an unfamiliar word. The direct-access mechanism cannot operate because the string has not been encountered before and the association between form and meaning has not been established. The word cannot be identified and the meaning of the word cannot be ascertained. (This, is what you experienced when you read the modified Jack London passage above.) However, if the reader can phonologically recode the letter string (“sound it out”), the unknown word can be matched to knowledge of the word derived from spoken language, resulting in successful reading.

This leads me to a functional definition of reading. Reading is the process of gaining meaning from print. And, learning to read is the acquisition of knowledge that results in the child being able to identify and understand printed words that he knows on the basis of his spoken language. As I have hopefully shown, this process requires the reader to understand that English is an alphabetic writing system in which written symbols are associated with speech sounds. For some children this knowledge can be acquired implicitly (through extraction of print speech correspondences in text). However, many children need to acquire this knowledge through explicit instruction in phonics.

Nancy claims she is teaching phonics during her whole language lessons, but hasn’t given us sufficient detail to determine exactly what that phonics instruction entails and if it is sufficiently explicit so that naïve learners will acquire the knowledge they need to be proficient readers. Nancy, would you enlighten us in your next post?

Creech, 9:06 p.m.:

If I may, before I begin my description of what my phonics instruction would entail, I would like to respond to a couple of your comments and questions. Ken Goodman is someone I respect and admire. He has devoted his life to teaching children to read, especially poor children, as has Siegfried Engelmann. I would be honored to attend either one’s holiday party (I would especially like to take a spin on one of Engelmann’s motorcycles). This is something else whole language and DI have in common. Both schools of thought have members who are passionate, caring and dedicated to helping all children become literate. I think that is what is most important.

You still insist that a LARGE part of whole language is based on context clues even though I have posted what the whole language philosophy is, and nothing in it claims that a LARGE part of whole language is based on context clues. It is often hard to remove oneself from preconceived notions. That is why I read a lot about DI, have tried the materials and have observed in DI classrooms. I can see and learn for myself, rather than listen to what someone tells me. As has been mentioned, whole language teachers do believe children use semantic or meaning based cues to read. In my own experience tutoring struggling older readers, I have actually more often seen an over reliance on graphophonemic cues holding back fluency. Children chugging, sluggishly trying to sound out, but when I tell them to think about meaning, that chugging often very quickly disappears and prosody becomes much more evident.

I am very impressed with your knowledge of eye movement research and the academic voice of your writing when discussing it. Eye movement studies are something I haven’t looked at quite as extensively as you have, although I am fairly familiar with Peter Duckett’s award winning research. His research found that first grade readers’ eyes do not fixate on every word, but skip all over the page. This is a fascinating field of study and I’m sure much more eye movement research will be forthcoming from a variety of sources.

I would never, ever give Call of the Wild to a beginning reader. It has some questionable language in it and I would not give text like that to a student that is so far from their instructional level. I have to look at the student in front of me, see if they have the background knowledge to understand the story, decide what my next point of instruction is going to be and what text would best fit that instruction. I would be using a text in which they can read most of the words with accuracy.

Ken, I want to invite you into my classroom. If you are anywhere near Michigan, I will welcome you to my school. If you are too far away, then I want to invite you to join me on this virtual visit.

One day after school I am reading the children’s writing and responding to them in their interactive journals. I find that several of the children are writing a story about their classmate on the playground. His name is Shep, and although they are starting his name with “s” many of them don’t have an understanding of the “sh” sound.

The next morning when the children arrive I am wearing half of a 3x5 card that has a large “sh” on it. I wear these different sounds or dolch sight words every day and the children watch for them as they come in the door. I can hear some of them saying the sound, or trying to say the sound as they enter. One of my students, Shep, is more excited than the others. As we gather on the carpet I ask him why he is so excited about the sound I am wearing that day. With a big smile he says, “That is how my name starts!” I respond, “Yes! Let’s say Shep’s name and listen to the sounds.” The children respond and after a few moments I say. Let’s say Shep’s name like a ghost would say it. The children put on their scariest faces and in deep voices say, “SHHHHHHHHHHHH EEEEEEEEEEEE PPPPPP,” segmenting the sounds. I say, “Hear that sound at the beginning of Shep’s name..shhhhhhhhh? That is many teachers’ favorite sound, ‘sh.’ Shep, how do you spell your name?” Shep responds, “ S-H-E-P.” I continue, “ We know that the “S” at the beginning of a word sounds like “s-s-s-s” but I bet someone knows what two letters together make the sound at the beginning of Shep’s name.” (This would reinforce the “s” sound we have learned previously as well. Even though I have heard the children use the “s” sound in their reading and seen it in their writing I would go back throughout the year to reinforce it if needed. Engelmann and Carnine in their book Theory of Instruction, Principles and Applications stress the importance of repetition in teaching).

I pull out a big book of Joy Cowley’s story, Mrs, Wishy Washy to begin shared reading. The children ooh and ahhh and a couple of them whisper upon recognizing the author’s name. They are very familiar with her writing, as we read her books and talked about her as an author in the past. One of them says, “I loved The Meanies.”

I start to read the book and many of the girls and boys chime in during the repetitive “whishy, washy, whishy, washy.” (we would read the story together in a big book format several times in the next two weeks as we do KLP reading and writing in my room. KLP is a reading strategy for kindergarten we have been inserviced on by Elizabeth Sulzby from the University of Michigan on one of our many professional development days. I may use the book for many different instructional purposes during that time, such as prediction, sequence, making text-to-self and text-to-text connections, or other comprehension strategies. We might also talk about spacing, capitals, periods and other writing conventions. I have additional small copies available for the children to read during KLP reading time).

After the shared reading, I get out a large piece of chart paper. I say to the children, “What are some of the words we heard that sounded like they had “shhhhh” in them? Does anyone know any others? The children volunteer, wish, wash, dish and so forth. We post the list of “sh” words in the classroom and of course Shep’s name is included. We add to the list whenever we come to an “sh” word in the next few days in our reading or conversation, As we walk to gym or music during the week, instead of saying “sh” if someone talks in the hall, I say S-H.

Each day we do interactive writing on the white board. This day I ask, “Does anyone know sentence with a word with “sh” in it?” A child responds,” I have a pet a fish.” I have a child begin to write the sentence at the white board with students taking turns doing the writing. I would help them stretch the sounds to write them.

The boys and girls return to their writing folders to write their own sentences or story for our classroom literacy magazine, and I suggest that they try using an “sh” word. I rove the classroom to see if they need help and reinforce as needed. This isn’t a day’s lesson, this immersion in “sh” will continue until I am confident all the children know “sh.”

This “sh” reinforcement would also occur when children ask individually for feedback on their writing. Writing is critical in a whole language classroom and is a wonderful way to assess children’s graphophonemic knowledge. Learning to encode is extremely important. When I went to observe DI classrooms I noticed there was not any paper in the classroom other than the worksheets which the children colored on when complete. Whole language teachers believe that oral language, reading and writing are all part of the same developmental process and take place in the development of a reading-writing community within the classroom. In a whole language-based classroom, phonics is learned in the context of meaningful reading and writing, which is based on learner needs. It begins when children understand that written language contains meaning, and is not taught in isolation (Freppon & Dahl, 1991).

Children are viewed as beginning readers and writers from the time they walk into the kindergarten classroom. Hansen (1987) says, “Writing is the foundation of reading; it may be the most basic way to learn about reading” (p.178).Hansen suggests that phonics is a “servant” that young children use to make sense on paper. It is important for young children to write because they are promoting their own phonics development. In an examination of exemplary classrooms it was found that reading and writing strengthen each other in a “dialectical” way; reading offering models for writing, and writing supporting students’ decoding skills. Michael Pressley and others found that exemplary first grade teachers were more conscious of the many benefits of encouraging students to write.

A whole language writing program would have several key criteria including that it be an authentic literary event, builds on the student’s previous experience, is developmental, parts are learned in the context of the whole, ideas are developed, writers present what they have written and reading and writing are integrated (Goodman). In a case study by Richards and Morse (2003), writing workshop in a kindergarten classroom is viewed as focused instructional time during which teacher directed lessons, including phonics and broader literacy skills, are practiced step-by-step with teacher supervision in both large and small groups. This time during the school day is a time for children to communicate their ideas. The teacher guides the students through the segmentation and blending of words helping them with “kid writing”. Although setting aside enough time in a curriculum packed-day is a challenge, the authors found that the more children wrote the better writers they became. Encoding and decoding compliment each other and reinforce each other in my kindergarten classroom.

How would you do it?

De Rosa, 3:36 p.m.

Sorry about the overly academic tone of my last post, Nancy. I found that my awkward paraphrasing was less clear than the researchers’ own words. Hopefully, I made it clear enough for a general audience to understand.

Allow me to now take you up on your offer and explain how I think it should be done. I’ll use the Direct Instruction (DI) reading program as my guide, as opposed to a more generic direct instruction program. I do this for two reasons. First, DI has a large research base, so we know the instruction is effective and, second, the methodology has been standardized. Let me begin by describing what has to be taught in any beginning reading program.

There are two types of words that beginning readers will encounter: regular words and irregular words. A regular word is any word in which each letter represents its respective, most common sound. For example, the words am, cat, mud, best, and flag are regular words. An irregular word, on the other hand, is any word in which one or more letters does not represent its most common sound. The word was is irregular because the letters a and s do not make their most common sound.

In the very beginning of the DI sequence, phonetically regular words are presented in word lists and the student is taught how to sound out these words using sound-symbol relationships which have been previously taught. Thus, from the very beginning, students are taught an overt strategy—saying the sounds for each letter in the word in a left-to-right progression, then saying the blended sounds at a normal rate. If a student misreads a word, the cause of the error and an effective correction procedure are made clear. For example, if a student says “mud” when encountering the word “mad” the teacher checks to see if the student knows the sound for the letter u. If the student does not know the correct sound, the source of the error is known and the correction is implied, namely, that the student needs to be re-taught the sound-symbol relationship for letter u.

Sequencing instruction this way, forces the students to looking at the letters and use the sound-symbol relationships to identify words. This strategy is designed to help children remember a word’s identity since the identity is defined by the letters and their sequence. Furthermore, this is the only reliable way to remember which word is which. A word’s identity is not dependent upon either the context or the syntax or its semantics. This is especially true for regular words.

Thus, the most productive and effective strategy is for the beginning reader to look at and attend to all the letters in each word to determine its identity. This strategy must be developed to the point of automaticity in readers. It is only by looking carefully at the letters that the reader can tell which is which, every time—even in the absence of context clues.

Once students can sound out the words in a word-list with relative ease, they begin reading passages made up of the words they have been taught. During this initial stage, passages should be structured so that the students are likely to attend to the letter in the words and nothing else. As more sound symbol relationships and words containing those relationships are learned, the reading passages can be gradually lengthened and made more complicated, thus regulating student frustration. Teaching this way allows the teacher to provide each student with a higher degree of success in the reading process. This is because each and every word that will be encountered by the beginning reader can be taught ahead of time and the child will use the right strategy to remember the word’s identity.

As quickly as their ability permits, the students should be transitioned to reading words, both regular and irregular, without sounding them out orally. For most children in a properly implemented DI classroom, this will occur sometime in the second half of kindergarten, if not sooner. For at-risk students, especially those with low language skills, this will probably not occur until halfway through first grade.

Which brings us to the controversial topic of how to teach irregular words.

The manner in which irregular words are introduced is an important factor in determining if students develop confusion regarding how to apply word attack strategies. Learning to decode irregular words is difficult for beginning readers because a new strategy is involved. The reader cannot simply sound out a word, then translate the blended sound into a word. But, bear in mind that this does not require, for most irregular words, that the reader use anything other than the letters and structure of the word itself to identify the word.

Finally, we have come to the critical distinction between code-based instruction and whole language instruction.

In the beginning of the DI sequence, irregular words are taught in the manner that Nancy gave in her first post. Children are taught to say the most common sounds in the irregular words—and then remember that the actual pronunciation is different. For example “was” is “sounded out” as wwwaaassss (rhymes with bass) but the student is told, “Here’s how we say it—wuz.” The reason why this works is because there is no way for the student to be confused. There is only one “wwwaaassss” that exists and it is always pronounced as “wuz.” By making the children “sound-out” the word each time they develop the habit of looking at all the letters before deciding the identity of the word. This, ultimately, is the critical behavior we want to see all students develop to become proficient readers.

A slightly different strategy is used after the names of all the letters have been learned. The teacher tells the students what the word is, and then the students are asked to spell the word while looking at it. Then, the teacher asks, “What word did you spell?” This procedure is used for introduction of new, unknown words and for corrections (no, Nancy, context is still not used at this stage). The point is to direct the student’s attention to the letters of the word—after reminding the students of the word’s identity. By the time students have learned a couple hundred words it is no longer necessary or productive to require students to “sound out” each word. By this time, if the teacher has taught well, the students will have developed a reading brain and they should be able to learn new words easily with very few repetitions.

Once this skill has been firmly established, the strategy of using the context of the sentence can be used as a source of information to decode unknown irregular words. This is because the teacher cannot systematically introduce all the irregular words students will encounter as they increasingly read more outside the structured reading lesson. Of course, the unknown word must be a word that is in the student’s receptive vocabulary. If the student has never heard the word before, or does not know what it means, context will not be a useful cue.

Most students who begin the DI reading program in kindergarten will be able to read Leaving the Land of Peevish Pets, which is the last story in the program. It seems about as “authentic” as any story my son in first grade brings home from his whole language class.

Of course, this is not the only way to teach phonics systematically and explicitly (I’m sure the commenters will chime in); however, it is a very safe way to teach reading. Virtually all kids will learn how to read in a timely fashion using the DI sequence. For most at-risk kids this is one of the very few reading programs that is successful. Their ability to read and comprehend more advanced reading levels is only limited by their ability to acquire vocabulary and underlying concept knowledge. Decoding will not be an issue. Higher performers have more options available to them. They will still succeed in less structured reading programs; more than a few will even succeed in a program like Nancy’s which seems to have more phonics than the typical reading program which claims to be guided by whole language principles.

But here’s the part that continues to bother me. I am not aware of any objective evidence that shows that students taught via whole language turn out to be better readers and enjoy reading more than those students taught via code-based method, such as DI. If anything, the phonics taught children perform demonstrably better by an educationally significant amount. But lets assume arguendo that the performance of the higher performing students is about the same. We also know that lower performing students will read significantly better in a well designed systematic phonics program like DI. So, why do we continue to use whole language for reading instruction? It seems to be a bad trade-off to me. No demonstrable benefit and significantly more risk of student failure. Nancy, do you have an answer?

Creech, 8:45 a.m.:

Never never disagree

With a shark beneath the sea,

Lest you feel a sudden crunch

And discover you are lunch.

-Jack Prelutsky

Ken, you state that “the most productive and effective strategy is for the beginning reader to look at and attend to all the letters in each word to determine its identity.” I’m sorry, but I think that is just one reading strategy, and you are limiting the child to a single strategy that often doesn’t work! Think of the excited child who comes to school eager to learn to read and then is told to wait until he learns an isolated set of sounds that are meaningless to him. Steve Strauss a linguist and neurologist states in his book, The Linguistics, Neurology and Politics of Phonics; Silent “E” Speaks Out, that “ the pronunciation of written words depends on more than just alphabetic information and that the alphabetic principle is insufficient to explain letter-sound conversions…pronunciation, no matter how it is derived, still does not guarantee word identification.” He continues, “Even Venenzky’s study (1999) probably the most rigorous work on the roles of letter-sound relationships, concluded that context is an indispensable element in a reading instruction program that uses phonics.”

On to your point of automaticity. Is the goal of DI to get kids to automaticity with a whole sequence of individual words? That sounds more like fluency. But what about meaning? Most educators today believe the word fluency means to read quickly and accurately. Though some theorists believe that fast reading increases or guarantees comprehension, there is little research that supports that belief. Without meaning, isn’t that just barking at words? Jay Samuels, whose theory of automaticity brought attention to the importance of fluency in reading instruction, states that “automatic word decoding skills and [italics added] prior knowledge may interact and strongly affect success in comprehension” (Samuels, 1994, p.831). Recently he stated that having students focus on meaning making plays a role in the rate of fluency (Samuels, 2006).

It is also stated by some direct instruction theorists that effective fluency instruction is achieved through repeated readings of the same passage and agree that “fluency is thought [italics added] to be the connection between accurate word recognition and comprehension because fluent readers, those with well developed decoding skills, appear [italics added] better able to focus on the meaning of the text they are reading” (Stein & Kinder, 2004,p.104).

There is question as to whether oral reading is a good measure of assessing reading ability at all. Allington (1984) suggests that although oral reading is often viewed as an assessment of efficient silent reading, many see it as a performance rather than actual reading to enjoy a story or obtain information. So you can perform the poem from Through the Looking Glass without having a clue what it means.

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

What the heck is a brillig anyway?

There is actually no research to support that quickly reading words per minute leads to increased comprehension. It is simply an “understood” or is implied. The definition of fluency is where the research and results get murky.

One study that is often referenced as supporting words per minute reading as is tested in DIBELS, actually uses a different measure of fluency than words per minute. That study, by Pinnell and others (1995), compared the fluency scores of fourth graders to their comprehension scores on the NAEP. Although it showed a causal relationship between oral reading fluency and comprehension, the definition of fluency was not based on words per minute (automaticity), but on the student reading in meaningful phrase groups, preserving the author’s syntax, and with an expressive interpretation. Also students were tested on the third time they read the required reading. The first two times they read the passage silently. No rate was taken on their silent reading. Accuracy was not part of the fluency scale. In fact, it was found that overall reading proficiency was somewhat dependent on if the reader maintained meaning when making errors. The study also found that students considered to be fluent and proficient, often had rates per minute that were less than fluent for fourth graders. Stahl (2004) points out that fluency is not as important in grades three and four as are other components of reading.

The National Reading Panel report (2000) found that repeated readings aided in both fluency and comprehension. However it states that “Although accuracy in word recognition is indeed an important reading milestone, accuracy is not enough to ensure fluency and without fluency, comprehension might [italics added] be impeded” (p.3-8). It is interesting that the National Reading Panel divides comprehension into the following three parts; vocabulary instruction, text comprehension instruction, and comprehension strategies instruction, but noticeably absent is having children read fast or reading over (repeated reading) what they didn’t understand!

I would like to return to that irregular word, “was”. Although Strauss gives numerous examples of phonetically irregular words that conflict with the over 2000 English language phonics rules in his book, I do believe “was” is the first irregular that is taught in DI and is a good example of the need for multiple reading strategies. You say again, and I believe this is correct although I don’t have it in front of me, that the word is sounded out w-a-s, rhyming with bass and then the boys and girls are told, that is the way you sound it out, but this is the way you say it, “wuz.” I have found kindergarten students to be very confused by this. First the teacher is saying this is the system, then says oops, by the way, it isn’t. Then if the child reads it as rhyming with bass as first directed, you have them repeat the sounding out, pronounce it as a sight word, and then have them read it in the sentence, providing context for support! Not only that, you have turned it into a sight word...whole word reading. What happens when that child comes to the word “wash?” Do they say “wash” rhyming with bash? Or “wash” pronounced “wuzsh?”

Have you asked your son’s teacher if he or she is a whole language teacher? It seems to me that DI folks assume that if a teacher isn’t DI, they are whole language. I’d be interested to hear the reply. So Ken, you tell me, if DI is the magic pill, why after all these years isn’t it taking the country by storm? And please, no conspiracy theories. Teachers want to bring children to literacy.

De Rosa, 1:10 p.m.

Nancy, I agree with you that “context is an indispensable element in [any] reading instruction program. We all agree that when comprehending text readers combine information from semantics (word meanings), syntax (word order), and the graphophonemic (letters and sounds) to make ultimate sense of a passage. However, this idea has been incorrectly taken by whole language advocates to mean that readers can rely on syntax and semantic clues in determining the correct identification of words they are reading.

As Marilyn Adams (1997) has noted, “If the original premise of the three cueing system was that the reason for reading the words is to understand the text, it has been oddly converted such that, in effect, the reason for understanding the text is in order to figure out the words.”

The net result is that these additional whole language strategies you favor for decoding unknown words are counterproductive because they direct the student’s attention away from the letters and towards the context and other spurious clues. One might summarize these alternate strategies as “try anything but looking closely at the word.” Here’s a list of the whole language reading strategies (“Active Reading Strategies”).

The key to understanding why these strategies will not help the struggling reader to decode words independently lies in the admonition “some strategies may be more appropriate than others, depending on the situation.” For example, if the reader is trying to decode the word “them,” using the story’s illustrations won’t be much help. If the rest of the sentence tells you what the word ought to be then skipping the word and coming back might work. For example, “Looking through his _______, the astronomer gazed at the stars.” Unfortunately, in many sentences context doesn’t work (Mary gave Bill a ______.) However, if the teacher is helping the child and knows that the unknown word can be in the picture at the top of the page where it shows Mary giving a ball to Bill, the teacher might suggest a different strategy—one more appropriate to the situation. In fact, the choice of which strategy to use is not dependent upon the situation; it’s dependent upon already knowing the word’s identity. In theory, children could run down the list of possible strategies until they find one that works—but again, if the children truly do not know the word, what’s to prevent them from using one of the strategies to get the incorrect answer.

I think we are somewhat in agreement with respect to fluency. With respect to the distinction between fluency and automaticity, fluency is the ability to read text quickly and accurately with ease and expression. In contrast, automaticity refers to fast, effortless recognition of words in sentences and passages. Automatic word recognition is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition of fluency. Some students may recognize words in isolation or in lists (or in your example Through the Looking Glass) with automaticity and still lack fluency when reading those same words in sentences. When fluent readers read aloud, it sounds like they are speaking. The oral reading of readers who have not yet developed fluency is slow, word by word, and plodding.

Fluency is important because it is a bridge between word recognition and comprehension. Fluent readers can focus their limited working memory on the meaning of text because they do not need to concentrate on decoding the words. Because less fluent readers must focus their attention on figuring out the words, they have less attention left to devote to understanding the text. Fluency is essential to comprehension and automatic word recognition is essential to fluency. Thus, fluency is a bridge that the reader must traverse to get from word recognition to comprehension. Automatic word recognition, fluency, and comprehension are inextricably intertwined reading skills.

The National Reading Panel pointed out that research has not yet confirmed independent silent reading as a means of improving fluency and overall reading achievement. Research has, however, conformed that repeated oral reading with feedback and guidance improves fluency and has a positive impact on comprehension.

Which brings me to the matter of reading comprehension which seems to be commonly misunderstood aspect of reading in the whole language community.

Comprehension is a matter of language understanding, not a unique feature of reading. The acquisition of reading comprehension skill includes two highly general components: the application of non-linguistic (conceptual knowledge) and the application of general knowledge comprehension skills to written text. Even though typical reading skills include mechanisms that can compensate to some extent for limited knowledge (Perfetti, 1985), the contribution that background knowledge makes to reading comprehension, and every other kind of comprehension, cannot be overstated.

If written and spoken comprehension go together, what about children who can read but whose reading comprehension is not as good as their spoken language comprehension. The frequency of these “word callers” or “word barkers” is exaggerated by the anecdotal impressions of teachers who have not had the luxury of asserting carefully both the comprehension (spoken and written) and word-identification skills of such children (Perfetti, 1985). There is surprisingly little convincing documentation of pure reading comprehension deficits accompanied by high levels of both word-identification and listening comprehension skill.

Thus, the potential for comprehending a written text appears to be set by the ability to comprehend that same text when it is spoken. Both whole language and phonics advocates agree on this point. Children should be immersed in a language rich environment from early on to build the language skills they will need for reading comprehension. Teaching phonics systematically and explicitly does not preclude the language rich environment favored by whole language proponents.

Finally, I want to respond to your point about the teaching of irregular words, such as the word was. The sounding out procedure comes from Reading Mastery I which is designed to accommodate at-risk children who come into school not knowing the names of many letters. In order to get these children up and reading as soon as possible and to avoid confusion, the letter names are not taught until a few months into the school year. Once the children know the letter names this procedure is replaced with the procedure of having the children spell each irregular word using letter names. The reason for the temporary sounding out procedure is to enable the teaching of irregular words early in the instructional sequence before students can develop the misconception that all words are phonetically regular.

Eventually, the meaning of this high-frequency irregular word will most likely be directly accessed from the letter sequence when the children become skilled readers without their having to fall back on phonological recoding, which, in this case, is less efficient. Using context to ascertain the identity of these high frequency irregulars is also not a productive strategy. (The word wash is also an irregular word since the letter a goes not make its most common sound, i.e., short a.)

I will tie up any remaining loose ends in tomorrow’s final post.

Creech, 5:45 a.m.:

I thought long and hard before doing this debate. As Ken I'm sure will attest , it took a lot of time and effort on our parts, with a little help from friends, to write our posting every day. I want to tell you that I am extremely happy that I did agree to participate, because like most endeavors that I undertake, I learned a lot. By sharing here I have learned not only more about the theories behind reading instruction, but I also learned a lot about the people behind those theories, and about myself. I hope others that participated have also taken away something from the efforts that Ken and I put forth.

Because of the time that it took to do the actual postings, I really didn't have time to address all the comments that were addressed to me personally, and it bothers me that some of them haven't been responded to. Please let me apologize in advance for their brevity. I don't mean to sound short or snarky in the responses but I do have a life beyond this debate. So, I will respond as best I can to those questions now, and then sum up, including a response to Ken's latest entry.

Eric

I'm not sure what you are referring to here. Contractually in my district we get several days of PD every year (We’ve had Foundations, DIBELS, Writing). Maybe you are talking about a particular local?

Brett

I have no problem with a free market.

However in this case the market was not “free.”

Click here: Report: Officials improperly backed reading program - CNN.com

Click here: Contractor evaluating own reading program - CNN.com

Mel

Please read Chall’s book.

Read Engelmann’s book.

He says he wants teachers in the study who believe in what they are doing. Why do you suppose that is? Because teachers who believe in what they do are the ones who achieve the most success with students.

Please see above about whole language not being a program.

I agree completely we need excellent teachers.

With excellent teachers we don't need a program.

Sam

I’m glad I never had you for a teacher.

(This one IS intentionally snappy).

I. George

"Reading is saying (or, rather, identifying) the right words."

Please see Ken's definition.

Ms. Teacher

I didn’t want to get into the research argument because it becomes "he said, she said."

Just like my kids, your kids.

My story, your story.

Also much of the research appears in refereed journals that not every one has access too.

Here are a few references:

Allington, R.L. ( 1984). Oral Reading. In P.D. Pearson (ed.), Handbook of Reading Research (pp.829-864). New York: Longman.

Allington, R.L. (2002). Big Brother and the national reading curriculum: How ideology trumped evidence. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Arya, P., Martens P., Wilson G. P., Altwerger, B.,Jin, L.,Laster, B.,and Lang, D. (2005). Reclaiming literacy instruction: evidence in support of literature-based programs. Language Arts, 83(1), 63-72.

Bond, G., & Dykstra, R. (1997). The cooperative research program in first-grade reading instruction . Reading Research Quarterly, 32(4), 348-427.

Cowen, J.E (2003). A balanced approach to beginning reading instruction: A synthesis of six major U.S. research studies. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Dahl, K. L., Scharer P. L., Lawson L. L., and Grogan, P. R. (1999). Phonics instruction and student achievement in whole language first-grade classrooms. Reading Research Quarterly, 34(3), 312-341.

Dahl, K. L., & Freppon, P. A. (1995). A comparison of innercity children's interpretations of reading and writing instruction in the early grades in skills-based and whole language classrooms. Reading Research Quarterly, 30(1), 50-74.

Paris, S. G. (2005). Reinterpreting the development of reading skills. Reading Research Quarterly, 40(2), 184-202.

Rasinski, T. & Padak, N. (2004). Beyond consensus-Beyond balance: Toward a comprehensive literacy curriculum. Reading and Writing Quarterly. 20,91-102.

Scully, P., & Roberts, H. (2002). Phonics, expository writing, and reading aloud: Playful literacy in the primary grades. Early Childhood Education Journal. 30, 93-99.

Zemelman, S., Daniels, H., & Bizar M. (1999, March). Sixty years of reading research--but who's listening. Kappan Magazine, retrieved Oct 22, 2005, from here.

From the Dahl and Freppon study:

“Children in whole language classrooms seem to develop a greater ability to use phonics knowledge effectively than children in traditional classrooms where skills are practiced in isolation. The skills group attempted to sound out words more than twice as often as the others, but the literature-based group was more successful in doing so. The literature based children were more successful because they made better use of phonics in conjunction with other information and cues."

Allison

I find the "codification" of my professional abilities insulting.

Christina

"Plueeze no more nit-picking about typos etc. It's rather churlish, eh?"

Thank you.

Sheri

I mentioned I like some of Joy Cowley’s books. The boys and girls also like Eric Carle, Bill Martin, John Archambault and David Shannon for fiction. For Non-Fiction, Gale Gibbons is a classroom favorite. We also read a lot of Fairy Tales, Nursery Rhymes and poetry, especially this month!

Sam

I don’t have a lot of research at my fingertips about children liking to read more who are taught in whole language classrooms. There are two of Delores Durkin’s books, Children who read Early and Early Fluent Readers that I read when I first started teaching young children because I was fascinated by children who I was told by their parents began to read “on their own” as young as 3. I don’t have these books at my fingertips right now, but I remember her research showed that children who read at such a young age were those children who had access to libraries, and parents who took them there and let them select books of their choosing. Susan Neuman has also done more recent research about the importance of the proximity of bookstores to children’s neighborhoods and Steve Krashen has done research about the importance of libraries in children’s neighborhoods. This you might say does not prove anything about children enjoying reading more if they come from whole language classrooms, but it does point out that being immersed in good books and being read to is important. One of the scariest things for me when I went to observe DI was that there were NO books in the classroom and the school had no library. It just didn’t seem important to them. Little paper decodable books and worksheets were all these kids had access to. I was almost in tears. I have hundreds, maybe thousands of children’s books in my classroom and I know other whole language teachers who spend an enormous amount of their personal money on children’s books for students. Shelly Harwayne has said the best way to hook children on books is to read them a great story and read it well. I think having good books available for children to choose to read in the classroom is critical.

Lucy Calkins (2004) says,

“Kids need to understand what literacy is for. The most important thing first is to help them fall in love with books, become accustomed to following and creating in their minds a story. We need them to understand that the pages of a story go together and create a drama in your mind. We want them to reach for books and carry books with them and value books. That doesn't happen if you only teach phonics.”

I think I have answered all the questions that were addressed to me personally. Now a short response to Ken’s last posting.

Ahhhhhhhh, Marilyn Adams…did you know she is one of the people who convinced me to be a whole language teacher? Have you ever heard her speak about reading? It is quite an experience. I have an interview with her right in front of me and she says the following to answer the question about the whole language/ phonics debate:

If you look closer at the literature, what you see is closer to a violent agreement than disagreement.

Some of the most productive ways for inducing children to develop interest in, explore, and solidify how the alphabetic system works are activities typically associated with whole language: language-experience activities, book sharing, writing and the reading of engaging informative texts. Looking at it this way renders the debate more or less moot.

To cast the whole language movement as an issue of phonics versus no phonics is not only to misrepresent it but also to put its vital components at genuine risk by inviting people to misunderstand and argue against it for the wrong reasons. The whole language movement is about many extremely complex and important issues.

At the same time, the whole language movement should properly be seen as a core component of a much bigger broader more general educational revolution that is happening.

And finally:

To be sure a commitment to early writing was not particularly spawned by interest in phonics, but when you think about it, it’s a wonderful way of introducing the alphabetic principle. Against it, the alternative of informing kids that B says /b/ seems almost futile. After all, most of the kids won’t listen. Many who listen won’t understand. And of those who do listen and can understand, the majority will not have needed it in the first place-those who know what you are trying to say, will have already grasped the idea of the connection between sound and symbol. (Language Arts, 1991)

Don’t you just love Marilyn Adams?

I couldn’t get to your reading strategies link, but I’m sure I know them by heart.

You can actually sing them to the tune of I’m a little tea pot. You would be surprised at how quickly children assimilate them and use them.

I agree with much of what you say about prior knowledge and the intertwining of reading. I like to use the analogy of a car. You can’t drive it if you just know how to start the car, or turn the steering wheel, or put your foot on the brakes, or look in the mirrors. It takes the driver doing every thing together… the whole thing…to drive the car safely down the street. I would like to recommend a wonderful book to you on reading comprehension. It is called Mosaic of Thought by Ellin Keene . I think you would enjoy it.

I want to end by repeating Renee’s last comments.

There are experienced, effective teachers who lean toward direct instruction models, and experienced, effective teachers who lean toward Whole Language models (and the reverse is true, as well).

There is usually more common ground than uncommon ground between people with different opinions.

I have known this all along. Like with the students that I teach, I prefer to build on strengths rather than weaknesses. For me, the strengths of this debate were that it created understanding, we saw some commonalities, and we confirmed and reflected on our own beliefs. Much thanks to you Ken and to all the people who participated.

Nancy

De Rosa, 10:38 a.m.

I can certainly agree with Nancy that this debate was hard work. I also agree that the debate (along with many of the points raised in the comments) has been productive even though there have been many disagreements. Even when we disagree, our views are often affected and change subtly, perhaps imperceptibly, but they change nonetheless.

To the extent we continue to disagree, that disagreement centers around the alphabetic code that makes up our language. It is the position of phonics advocates that whole language advocates do not take full advantage of the efficiencies inherent in the structure of our language.

I’ve purposely saved that point for last because that is the last impression I want the readers to leave the debate thinking about as they carry the debate back to their various discussion boards. But before I get to that point I want to dispel some of the common misconceptions surrounding what goes on in the early reading classroom in an effort to point out how close both camps are in actuality.

As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, my son is in first grade being taught to read in a balanced literacy classroom. The class uses leveled readers based on the scholastic guided reader system (I believe). The class has a phonics component similar to what Nancy has described. And, in addition, he gets a spelling list every week that usually revolves around a particular phonics rule. The school also uses DIBELS as a benchmark to track students’ decoding ability and reading progress. He also goes through word lists which seem to be correlated with the stories he is reading. If he can’t read a word in the list, the word gets put on a word ring which he takes home every night and practices to automaticity. Students pick books on their level to read in class, at home, and in small teacher-led reading groups. The teacher instructs the students to use the whole language reading strategies we’ve been discussing. He is now reading on an end of second grade level (level M). The books he is now reading are clearly “authentic” in that they are written with simple, yet natural, language.

About a third of his class reads at this level. They are all good readers, reading well above grade level. They are all excellent decoders and make few mistakes while reading. They all came into first grade with high language abilities, reading at about an end of first grade level. These kids already had developed “reading brains” from day one of first grade. For these kids, reading instruction could have consisted of tap dancing and hand puppets and these kids would still be reading at an advanced level today.

In contrast, the bottom third of the class did not come into first grade with developed reading brains. These kids still hadn’t caught onto the reading game and were reading at the lowest levels (levels A-C) in the series. There is nothing authentic about the books at this level. No reading program can possibly use authentic anything at this stage. The books at this stage use highly contrived language and/or predictable text. In both the whole language classroom as well as the phonics classroom, truly authentic books are at least six months to a year away. Like it or not. Whole language advocates want us to believe that it is all rainbows and lollipops during this period, but it’s not. It is a very difficult, and sometimes painful, learning process involving many decoding errors (or “miscues”) and much stilted and plodding reading. We have not yet found the golden road to reading for these kids. It is hard work. And, it takes the dedication of many hard-working teachers, like Nancy, to get the kids through this difficult instructional period.

It is equally hard word to get kids through this reading stage in the phonics classroom. And, I assure you that instruction during this period does not consist solely of phonics drills. To the extent that there is repetition, drills should not be dull, boring, or monotonous. The idea is to get kids reading as soon as possible and get them into authentic texts as soon as possible. Here is how it is done in the Direct Instruction Reading Mastery Fast Cycle class that my son went through in kindergarten.

It is true that students are initially taught the letter sound relations in the phonics classroom. However, by the third week, they have learned a sufficient number of letters and sounds to read and write words. By the fifth week they have learned enough words to be reading and writing sentences. By Halloween they will be reading daily stories. The Reading Mastery series uses a modified orthography that permits the reading of a larger variety of words than the typical phonics program; however, the text is not truly authentic by any stretch of the imagination. The daily stories read by the students will be about 50 words by late November and 100 words by late December. The stories will be read with comprehension because the students will have to complete many exercises demonstrating that they understand what they are reading.

After winter break, they will begin to read chapter stories. The “sounding out” exercises are over by about the sixth month. By this time, students have developed sufficient decoding skills that they are able to read words without having to sound them out orally first. By the end of the year the last story they will read is sixteen chapters long. I linked to the last chapter of that story in my second post. This story is as authentic as any story you are going to get in any whole language class, at least for children reading on this level. My son enjoys the stories he reads in reading mastery as much he does in his whole language class.

Surprisingly, the students have had to memorize hardly any phonics rules during this period. Letter-sound relationships are taught by example. Moving forward, phonics are presented in a manner similar to how they are presented in a class like Nancy’s and my son’s. The students are shown a relationship (e.g., oa makes the long o sound) and then they read them in a short word list (e.g., boat, coat, float, moat). Later these words are dispersed in word lists and presented in the stories the children are reading. Sounds very holistic and whole-languagey to me. From the students’ perspective from this point forward there is no perceptible difference between a Reading Mastery class and a well run balanced literacy class.

My son placed into the third level of Reading Mastery at the beginning of first grade. About, the top third of his class would have been placed similarly. All of these kids were reading at a second grade level. None would have had to endure phonics drills or “drudgery.” Most of their reading class would have consisted of the reading of actual stories, just like in the whole language class. They would all have been grouped together, just like in the whole language class. And they would proceed at a pace commensurate with their abilities, just like in the whole language class. All of the aspects of DI that some teachers find “offensive” are long since over.

The lower performing students would be doing what my son did in kindergarten. Some will be proceeding at a lower pace because they do not learn as fast as the higher performers. But they are getting the practice and repetition, without prejudice. Virtually all of them would eventually become proficient decoders. A small number with low language abilities might have comprehension problems- comprehension problems they would have in any class, including the best run whole language class. Unfortunately, this remains a difficult problem.

The reason why kids performed better in Reading Mastery during Project Follow Through was not due to the presence of aides. The whole language implementation (TEEM) had aides and the same funding, yet did not perform nearly as well. One of the reasons why is because Reading Mastery, like most phonics based programs, better capitalizes on the efficiencies inherent in the alphabetic code.

Unlike Chinese and Japanese Kana, English is based on a alphabetic writing system in which letters (graphemes) are mapped to elementary speech sounds (phonemes). This association of letters to phonemes is the alphabetic principle and permits the alphabet to be productive because a small set of symbols (letters) can be used to write an indefinitely large number words. Productivity simplifies the learning problem by allowing the child to use the mapping between, for example, four letters and their phonemes /t/, /p/, /s/, and /o/ to read a great many words, such as top, pot, stop, spot, pots, and tops.

However, despite the economy of the alphabetic principle, learning to read an alphabetic writing system like English is not easy. American English, for example, has more than a dozen vowel sounds, but only five standard vowel letters. These vowels do double and triple duty. Thus, English represents economy at the expense of complexity (the mapping between letter and sound is one to many). The trade-off is a good one, however, because the resulting ambiguity is greatly reduced by other regularities in the writing system. English is not as irregular as it is often implied. But, it is more complex than other alphabetic writing systems, such as Spanish that adhere more closely to one sound per letter.

English also exhibits a trade-off between phonological explicitness and morphological transparency. For example, the use of a to represent two different phonemes in nature and natural may be confusing as a guide to pronunciation, but it serves to remind the reader that the two words are morphologically related. This is a common trade-off in English and it greatly complicates the orthography for the beginning reader.

Because of these problems, teaching methods, such as whole language instruction, that make the alphabetic principle explicit, like systematic phonics instruction, result in greater success among children trying to master the reading skill than methods that do not make it explicit. Some children require more explicitness than others and whole language instruction, as it is frequently practiced, does not provide many students with the explicitness they need. In addition, the three–cueing system upon which whole language is based has been thoroughly discredited as a system for identifying words. Context clues have always been a useful tool for deriving meaning for identified words and as an advanced technique for helping to identify new words. But, such techniques often serve to confuse many beginning readers. Hopefully, I have shown that much of what transpires in a whole language classroom can be replicated in a systematic phonics classroom rather painlessly. Don’t wait for your theorists to admit they were wrong all along.

I’d like to join Nancy in thanking Edspesso for provide a forum for the debate and for everyone who participated. I especially want to thank Nancy for holding up here end of the debate so well. I’ll provide some afterthoughts at my blog d-ed reckoning and answer any remaining questions anyone might have and invite Nancy to join in as well.