Whole Language Goes Up, Reading Standards Go Down. Fact Or Fiction?

Whole Language goes up, reading standards go down. Fact or fiction? Tom Nicholson, PhD Associate Professor School of Education University of Auckland New Zealand Phone/Voicemail: 64-9-373.7599 Ext 7372 Fax: 64-9-373-7455 email: [email protected] Whole Language goes up, reading standards go down. Fact or fiction? The rise and rise of whole language In The Netherlands, in a village called Naarden just outside Amsterdam, is a memorial to Jan Amos Comenius. As our tour group stood beside the statue of Comenius, the guide said that one of the great contributions of Comenius was to publish a book for children, which had ‘designs’ (line illustrations). Within the illustrations, key objects were given numbers, to correspond with words in the written text, which were also numbered. Thus, children could relate the meanings of the printed words to objects that were in the sketches, and thus read more easily, since they could use picture clues to help work out the written words. Yetta Goodman (1989) has argued that ‘Visible World’ (Comenius, 1658/1967), was the first picture book written for children, and a philosophical precursor to whole language. Where did the term ‘whole language’ come from? It seems that Comenius was the first to use the term. But what happened after that? In the 1960s, when the First Grade Studies Project (Bond & Dykstra, 1967) was carried out, many different methods of teaching reading were compared, but there was no mention of whole language. Yetta Goodman (1989) reports that the term ‘whole language’ did not occur in recent times until it was used in an article by Harste and Burke (1977). Their article described an informal survey of teacher’s theoretical orientations to reading. They asked teachers to comment on three different reading errors made by children. Teachers were shown a short passage which contained the word ‘canal’. The passage read, ‘I live near this canal. Men haul things up and down the canal in big boats.’ They reproduced the passage on three different cards, where the word ‘canal’ was misread as either ‘channel’, ‘candle’, or ‘cannel’. Harste and Burke asked teachers to decide which error was the best. The three errors were intended to indicate decoding theory, skills theory, and ‘whole language’ theory. They found that whole language teachers in their study chose ‘channel’ as the best error, because it was a meaningful error. This is because whole language teachers view reading as an inexact process, involving a reconstruction of the author’s meaning. In contrast, skills teachers chose ‘candle’ as best because it was a similar-looking real word, while decoding teachers chose ‘cannel’ as best because it was similar in sound to the text word, ‘canal’. A whole language approach has been typical of New Zealand teaching for decades now. The term ‘whole language’ never been used officially to describe the prevailing method of teaching reading (Ministry of Education, 1985, 1996), but the principles of the method are consistent with whole language. Smith and Elley (1993) write that, ‘The focus is on meaning from the start, in both reading and writing, rather than regular systematic drills and artificial exercises’ (p. 142). This is supported by data from a teacher survey Chamberlain (1993), where it was concluded that the key features of New Zealand’s approach to the teaching of reading were ‘prediction, context, reading for meaning and semantic based monitoring of progress’ (p. 111). The study found, for example, that 84% of teachers of 9- and 10-year-olds taught prediction strategies at least once a week (39% taught them every day), whereas only 54% taught letter-sound correspondences or phonics at least once a week (only 19% taught them every day). It was also reported that 84% of teachers disgreed with the statement, ‘expect children to read every word accurately.’ In a replication of the Harste and Burke (1977) study, Nicholson and Lam (submitted) found a similar whole language orientation among a sample of 25 elementary school teachers. Almost all of the teachers had described themselves in ways that reflected a whole language orientation. The teachers also responded to the three ‘canal’ errors. We changed the Harste and Burke research procedure somewhat. Instead of asking which error was ‘best’, we asked teachers whether they thought each error was ‘OK’ or ‘Not-OK’. We found that 80% of the teachers thought ‘channel’ was OK, indicating that they had a whole language perspective. But we also found that 76% thought ‘cannel’ was OK. Only 32% thought ‘candle’ was OK. The odd finding was that teachers thought the ‘cannel’ error was OK. This was not consistent with Harste and Burke (1977). A possible explanation for the unusual finding is that whole language theory does encourage the child to use grapho-phonic cues as one of three cue sources, the others being syntactic and semantic cues. As Goodman (1986) puts it, ‘They may use their developing phonics generalisations to help when the going gets tough’ (p. 38). So ‘cannel’ could be seen as OK, though perhaps not the ‘best’ error. Another possible explanation is that ‘cannel’ was not a real word. It was neither context appropriate nor inappropriate. One teacher commented as follows, ‘Not reading for meaning, but good attempt.’ Teachers in our study were much less tolerant of ‘candle’, which was a real word, and looked similar, but was contextually inappropriate. One teacher commented, ‘Does not make sense.’ Another teacher said, ‘Not using context clues.’ These results supported Harste and Burke (1977), in that these whole language teachers saw reading as a search for meaning, rather than a process of trying to sound-out, or guess at words on the basis of their visual ‘look’. Yetta Goodman (1990) has commented that one important influence on the emergence of whole language in the United States was New Zealand, with its ‘wholistic and progressive educational policy’ (p. 118). Ken Goodman (1986, p.59) has also put it succinctly, ‘For its single national school authority, whole language is the policy in New Zealand.’ This wholistic approach started in 1962, when the New Zealand government published a new, home-grown reading series, called ‘Ready to Read’. What was remarkable about the series was that it was uninfluenced by the 1950s debate about phonics, especially in the United States. Rudolf Flesch (1955) wrote a book called, ‘Why Johnny can’t read’, which strongly attacked the look-say method of teaching reading. Flesch opened Chapter 1 with a letter to ‘Johnny’s mother’, where he encouraged her to look at Johnny’s school primer: ‘You will immediately see that all the words in it are learned by endless repetition. Not a sign anywhere that letters correspond to sounds and that words can be worked out by pronouncing the letters. No. The child is told what each word means and then they are mechanically, brutally hammered into his brain.’(p. 5). The book, ‘Why Johnny can’t read’ had a huge impact in the United States. Adams (1990) noted that (p. 24) ‘the book was more than thirty weeks on the best-seller list and broadly serialized by the popular press.’ As a result, phonics was re-emphasised in a lot of reading programs. Yet, thousands of miles away in New Zealand, the 1962 Ready to Read series seemed just like the look-say materials that Flesch had denounced. Here are a few lines from a Ready to Read primer: Father is here. Sally is here. ‘Come to breakfast, Peter,’ said Mother. The Ready to Read series was supposed to be new and different from the Janet and John materials they replaced. The Janet and John series had been used in New Zealand since 1949 (Simpson, 1949). The books were imported from England, though they had links to the United States, in that they were a modified version of the Alice and Jerry series (for a historical review, see Nicholson, 1997). Here is a short extract from the Janet and John book, ‘Here we go’ (1949): Run. Run, little dog. Look, Janet. See the little dog. In fact, the only clear difference between Ready to Read and Janet and John, was that the stories were about children in New Zealand, and had local themes and settings. Otherwise, Ready to Read books were still using the 1950s look-say approach, like Janet and John in England, and like Dick and Jane in the States. The stories gradually increased in difficulty, from little books to big books. There was tight vocabulary control, and repetition. To illustrate the similarity between Ready to Read and Dick and Jane, here are a few lines from Fun With Dick And Jane (Gray & Arbuthnot, 1958) text: ‘Who is this?’ said Father. ‘Can you guess who it is?’ Mother said, ‘It is not Dick. It is not Jane and Sally.’ Although the Ready to Read books had the same look-say format as Janet and John, and Dick and Jane, the theoretical orientation was different. The teacher handbook for the series stated that children should read to make sense, rather than be allowed to get away with ‘mere word calling’ (Simpson, 1962, p. 48). Children were taught to use all cues available, including picture clues, to guess words they were reading. Rather than learning to read through phonics, the approach was to let children learn to read naturally, by reading. Rather than teach words, letter and sounds separately, the teacher started with a book. The teacher read the book with the class, encouraging the class to work out letter-sound rules by making analogies to known words (e.g., read ‘today’ by relating it to known words ‘to’ and ‘day’).

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