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Bill Bosher
Richmond Times Dispatch
(Reprinted with permission)
May, 2000
In 1970 Caleb Gattegno wrote a piece entitled, “What
We Owe Children: The Subordination of Teaching to Learning.”
Often the debates in education do not center on how children
learn, but how teachers teach. With each wave of research
comes a new set of teaching methods. Frequently entrepreneurship
drives these new approaches more than the changing intellectual
demands of young people. In the ’60s and ’70s, instruction
in English migrated through a variety of grammatical approaches
including “structural,” “linguistic,”
“transformational-generative,” and “eclectic.”
During the research, publication, marketing, training, and
implementation of each of these methods of instruction, language
and its functions did not appreciably change.
The most recent “war” over methods has focused
on the teaching of reading and language arts. The competing
approaches are phonics and whole language. Phonics uses letter
recognition and sounds through drill and practice. Whole language
instruction immerses students very early in literature and
places emphasis on creative writing.
On April 13, the U.S. Department of Education with the National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development released the
results of two years of research on the effectiveness of these
frequently debated approaches to the teaching of reading.
The committee of teachers, parents, and university professors
concluded that each has a place. Without supporting or rejecting
either approach, the committee concluded that the most effective
classroom instruction would include a blend of phonics and
whole language.
THERE IS a valid argument for balance in the use of methods
in reading instruction; however, the work of the national
panel studying this issue may have provided results more indicative
of diplomacy than research. Used in extremes, both methods
can be abused. Phonics can be a simple “rote and regurgitate”
approach where young people exhibit a wonderful capacity to
repeat words that have absolutely no meaning for them. Whole
language instruction on the contrary introduces literature
and creative writing with little emphasis on mechanics. Children
are taught ideas and their context but without the structure
of spelling, punctuation, and grammar. The very purpose of
language is to develop a communications tool that can be used
in school and the market place.
Gattegno probably would ask whether our emphasis is on how
students learn or how teachers teach. Each young person comes
to school with a unique set of characteristics. If parents
think they see stark differences in the two or three children
in their own families, they should spend some time with a
class of 25.
Some young people arrive for the first day with an amazing
capacity to recognize words, phrases, and sentences. They
can read! Others step into the first day of school and cannot
recognize colors, shapes, or letters. Should they all start
at the same place in the same set of materials? No one would
say yes for fear of “holding some back” while others
are helped to “catch up.” The strong teacher first
looks at the student and then the content and methods.
FOR YOUNG people who come to school reading, a phonics-only
approach is probably a set-back. If a child can read, then
give him or her the opportunity to explore literature and
its stories. Also provide the structure and mechanics that
are so critical to the acquisition of a standard language.
For children who arrive with limited language skills, phonics
is critical. While whole language assumes that young children
should start with “whole” words, many today must
first acquire the building blocks that are essential to reading.
Despite the efforts toward diplomacy, the battle over phonics
and whole language persists. The “look-say” approach
of whole language will continue to be weighed against the
decoding and drill of phonics. The rhetoric of politics and
practice will continue. In a society that has become very
sophisticated in marketing and consumerism, parents should
spend less time shopping for the best method of reading instruction
for “all” children and more time shopping for the
best method for “their” child.
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