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’).

The 1960s Ready to Read series was introduced to schools in good faith, but there was no empirical research support for the idea of learning to read by starting with the book itself. The first support came from research by Marie Clay (1967). She conducted a longitudinal study of

100 5-year-olds in schools using Ready to Read materials. She made regular checks of their reading and writing progress over a school year. Children read to her from their Ready to Read books, and she analysed their errors. She found that 79% of their errors made sense both syntactically and semantically. Yet only 42% of errors showed letter-sound similarities with text words. At the time, these results seemed clearcut, though later research has shown that most of the errors in her data pool would have been made by poor readers rather than good readers. That is, poor and beginning readers tend to rely more on context, and less on letter-sound cues (Nicholson, 1991). Clay reported that good readers seemed to teach themselves. They used all cue sources to figure out word meanings, and would self-correct if their guesses did not make sense. Good readers appeared to be strongly influenced by context. As she put it, ‘There are other ways of learning to read with the primary emphasis on sounds, letters or sight words, but the description of reading behaviour which emerged in this research seems to approximate closely what the mature reader does’ (p. 30).

The building blocks of whole language had been put in place in New

Zealand in the 1960s and 1970s. However, by the 1980s, whole language writers, such as Ken Goodman, Frank Smith, Bill Martin, Don Holdaway and Marie Clay, had made the 1960s Ready to Read books seem overly contrived and controlled, like the United States ‘Dick and Jane’ basals. There was a feeling that books for children should not use controlled vocabulary. The books must be interesting, genuine and authentic literature. Things that were not whole language were

‘ingenuine, unauthentic and contrived’ (Pearson, 1989, p. 232). Tried and true commercial New Zealand publishers such as Price Milburn, who published material similar to Ready to Read, went into decline. In their place came new publishers like Wendy Pye, with her Story Box,

Jellybeans, and Sunshine reading series. The Wendy Pye books used repetitive story lines, to make stories more memorable, and more natural. For example, ‘Little Pig’ (Melser & Cowley, 1981):

‘Go home,’ said the hens.

‘No,’ said little pig.

‘Go home,’ said the ducks.

‘No,’ said little pig.

In 1985, the revised Ready to Read series appeared. The 1985 Ready to

Read included ‘little books’, but it had ‘big books’ as well. Where did the idea of ‘big books’ come from? It may have been a New Zealand invention. But enlarged copies of primers had been used in the 1920s and 1930s. For example, the Elson-Gray Basic Readers (1938) included a wall chart ‘big book’, which was an enlarged copy of their Dick and

Jane preprimer. The new Ready to Read stories were different to the old

Ready to Read little books, and quite similar to the Wendy Pye books, even using the same authors. The texts were memorable, with repetition at the sentence level rather than the word level. For example, here are some lines from Greedy Cat (Cowley, 1988):

‘No!’ said Dad.

‘You’re a greedy cat!’

‘No! said Mum.

‘You’re a greedy cat.’

The revised Ready to read handbook for teachers (Ministry of Education,

1985) was very much in line with the whole-language movement as it was developing in the United States. Here is one quotation from the handbook (p. 23): ‘You are a skilled reader. You didn’t read every word. You sampled or selected some parts of the text.’ Here is another quotation (p. 48): ‘It is better that children predict meaning from other cues at the outset and use their knowledge of the relationships of letters and sounds for confirmation.’ These theoretical statements were very similar to those of whole language theorists in the United

States, such as Ken Goodman, who was well-known for his paper,

‘Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game’ (1970), and Frank Smith, who was also well known for his paper, ‘Learning to read by reading’

(1976).

The 1980s was also a time when the whole language movement grew strongly in the United States and elsewhere. Pearson (1989) has commented, ‘Never have I witnessed anything like the rapid spread of the whole language movement. Pick your metaphor - an epidemic, wildfire, manna from heaven - whole language has spread so rapidly throughout North America that it is a fact of life in literacy curriculum and research.’ (p. 231). Why did whole language spread so quickly? Many would say that ‘the time was ripe’. As Pearson (1989) put it, part of the success of the whole language movement was that it was a reaction against a time of ‘testing turmoil and mandated accountability’ (p.245). Another possible reason for the growth of the movement is that it was well organised. An organisation was set up, called Whole Language Umbrella (WLU). It is an association of hundreds of smaller whole language teacher groups. Levine (1994) reported that

WLU has 25,000 members. It also has its own conference, its own publication (The Whole Language Teachers Newsletter), and its own internet listserv (Teachers Applying Whole Language, or TAWL).

Another possible reason for the rise of whole language is that, when teachers went looking for change, there were materials available to them. Ken Goodman (1986) has remarked that (p. 63), ‘Whole language can’t be packaged in a kit or bound between the covers of textbooks or workbooks.’ But the phenomenal success, in the United States, of Wendy

Pye’s books, and the New Zealand Ministry of Education’s Ready to Read materials suggests that New Zealand publishers helped to promote whole language in the United States. Colvin (1997) reported that Wendy Pye teamed up with United States publishers Tom and Aileen Wright, in 1982.

In 1996, Wright Group annual sales exceeded 50 million dollars. Colvin

(1997) reported that ‘Two million American children learn to read each year with the Wright books, and tens of thousands of teachers have attended their training sessions’ (p. A1). Wendy Pye has sold more than

85 million of her children’s readers around the world. In her own words, ‘I’m the lady that took it to America and made it happen. I’ve transformed barren classrooms into magic places of learning’ (Colvin, 1997, p. A1).

Reading Standards. Down, down, down?

But how successful has whole language been? In New Zealand, there has been a lot of pride in our accomplishments. Our reading programs are world-renowned (Reading literacy, 1993). Our classrooms are visited by teachers from all over the world. Our teachers are sought after as consultants to teach in the United States and elsewhere. Our publishing companies have sold many millions of our children’s readers. Yet there are worrying statistics. A recent international comparison of reading achievement in 31 countries showed that our international ratings had slipped (Wagemaker, 1993). The survey, done in 1990, showed that at the

14-year-old level, we were in fourth place, down from first place in an earlier 1970 survey. At the 9-year-old level, we were in sixth place, behind the United States. Moreover, the results showed that ‘the gap between the better readers and the poorer ones, especially those from non-English backgrounds, is large by international comparisons’

(Ministry of Education, 1996, p. 58). When did this decline take place?

It may be that it occurred after 1985. Reid (1994) reported that reading achievement scores up to 1985 had been ‘remarkably stable’ (p.

9), based on re-checks of norms for standardized tests used in New

Zealand. After 1985, no further monitoring was carried out, partly due to cost, and partly because new standardized tests were produced, making comparisons with original tests more difficult. So the decline may have occurred from 1985 to 1990, when the revised Ready to Read materials were fully introduced to New Zealand schools.

Are reading standards as good as we want them to be? It could be argued that the New Zealand decline in reading standards is quite small, and of no major concern. But we could also ask the question, ‘Are we as good as we could be?’ Here are some worrying statistics. In 1995, at least 20% (perhaps 25%) of 6-year-olds were receiving Reading Recovery tuition (Kerslake, 1996). The 1997 results of the National Education Monitoring Project are also worrying. In this project, nearly 3,000 8- and 12-year-old children were given reading tasks that had been assessed as suitable in difficulty for children of those age levels. The findings were that 80% of children were indeed able to read at those levels. But 20% could not. Also, 10% of children in each age group performed three years or more below the normal levels

(Crooks & Flockton, 1997). A final worry is the extent of social class and ethnicity disparities in reading achievement that have been reported. The New Zealand Education Review Office (ERO) has given poor report cards to schools in low-income areas of our cities, and in poor rural areas (Hotere, 1996; Gerritsen, 1997). In low-income parts of

Auckland, ERO found that 60 to 80% of high school pupils were reading below average. These findings replicated data reported by Nicholson and

Gallienne (1995). Qualifications and retention data support the findings, showing that 24% of students in Manukau City, in South

Auckland, leave school with no formal qualifications at all, compared with 14% of students in the more affluent North Shore suburbs of

Auckland (Ministry of Education, 1996). Other survey data show that

70-80% of students in the poorest parts of Auckland leave school having failed School Certificate English, which is a minimal qualification

(Nicholson, 1995). Clearly, a lot of children in New Zealand are not learning to read, and this is impacting on their school achievement in general, and their life chances. Failure is particularly prevalent among the economically less privileged. But under-achievement in reading has cut across all social classes.

The way ahead

The whole language approach to the teaching of reading has been the predominant method of teaching in New Zealand for decades. It has become increasingly popular around the world since the 1980s. Yet the method has not served underprivileged children well. It has not even served privileged children well. The method is not 100% successful.

There is a significant minority of children, across all social classes, who do not learn to read successfully. My worry, in the next few years, is that we will portray this problem as a social class problem. There is certainly a ‘cultural capital’ difference between middle class and low-income children. Cultural capital is part of the plot, but it is not the culprit. It would be a shame to divert attention to political issues, such as social class, when there are more proximal factors, such as ways of teaching reading, that we could look at. Another stumbling block in the next few years will be the politics of reading.

I am dismayed at the way in which reading has become politicised.

Reading researchers are described as New Right, Neo-Liberals, and so on. In discussions about reading, politics is used as a way of marginalising researchers, and undermining research. In a recent Time article (Collins, 1997), Ken Goodman, a key figure in the whole language movement, was reported in this way: ‘Goodman’s main strategy in response to his critics, is to say that they are unwitting pawns of the Christian Right.’ At the other extreme, whole language researchers are described as Communists, or Left Wing. Such a level of acrimony and personal insults is not needed. Do we really need to characterise phonics advocates as ‘phonicators’, and whole language supporters as

‘miscueteers’. Do we need to describe phonics as ‘thalidomide of the mind’? Do we need to describe experimental researchers as ‘vampires’?

Do we really need to snub or walk away from someone at a conference because they like phonics, or whole language?

I don’t have the ‘magic bullet’ that will solve the reading problems that exist. But I don’t agree with the pessimistic point of view that says, ‘Children who are hungry or unhappy will always be hard to bring up to average’ (Elley, 1997, p. 10). Reading is not just for the rich.

It is for everyone. It is time to look for something new, for a more effective way of teaching reading, that will enable us to be better than we think we can be. As Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, recently said (Gordon, 1997), reading is the main course of education.

It is not the after-dinner mint . Similar words have come from

President Clinton (Webwire, 1997), ‘I’m committed to making sure that every eight-year-old can read, every 12-year-old can log into the internet, every 18-year-old can go onto college, every adult can learn for a lifetime.’ I’m sure Comenius would have endorsed such goals. I certainly do.

References

Adams, M.J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bond, G.L., & Dykstra, R. (1967). The cooperative research program in first-grade reading instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 2, 5-142.

Chamberlain, G. (1993). Teachers of reading. In Wagemaker, H. (Ed.),

Achievement in reading literacy: New Zealand’s performance in a national and international context (pp. 89-120). Wellington: Ministry of Education.

Clay, M.M. The reading behaviour of five year old children: A research report. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 2, 11-31.

Collins, J. (1997, October 27). How Johnny should read. Time,150.

Colvin, R.L. (1997, May 4). Trouble in the Mecca of reading. Los

Angeles Times, p. A1.

Comenius, J.A. (1658/1967). Orbis sensualisium pictus. Sydney: Sydney

University Press.

Cowley, J., & Melser, R. (1982). Little Pig. Auckland: Story Box.

Cowley, J. , & Melser, R. (1988). Greedy cat is hungry. Wellington:

Department of Education.

Crooks, T. and Flockton, L. (1997, July). National Education Monitoring

Project Forum Newssheet. Dunedin: Otago University Educational

Assessment Research Unit.

Elley, W. (1997, August 6). No cause for panic over reading levels. New

Zealand Education Review, p. 10.

Elson-Gray Basic Readers (1938). Contents and sample pages. Chicago:

Scott Foresman. Flesch, R. (1955). Why Johnny can’t read. NY: Harper.

Gerritsen, J. (1997, November 5). East Coast education substandard. New

Zealand Education Review, p.1.

Goodman, K.E. (1967/1970). Reading: A psycholoinguistic guessing game.

In H. Singer & R.B. Ruddell (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading (1st ed., pp. 259-271). Newark, DE: International reading

Association.

Goodman, K.E. (1986). What’s whole in whole language? Portsmouth, NH:

Heinemann.

Goodman, Y. (1989). Roots of the whole language movement. The

Elementary School Journal, 90, 113-127.

Gordon, M. (1997, September 24). Howard sides with Kemp in literacy row. The Australian, p. 4.

Gray, W.S., & Arbuthnot, M.H. (1958). Fun with Dick and Jane. Toronto,

Canada: W.J. Gage.

Glynn, T., Sherrell, J., Crooks, M., and Lane, M. (1989). Reading

Recovery in context. Wellington: Department of Education.

Harste, J.C., & Burke, C.L. (1977). A new hypothesis for reading teacher research: Both teaching and learning of reading are theoretically based. In P.D. Pearson (Ed.), Reading: Theory, research, and practice (pp. 32-40). Clemson, SC: National Reading Conference.

James Nisbet (1949). The Janet and John Books. Here we go. London:

James Nisbet.

Hotere, A. (1996, May 22) South Auckland’s reading dilemma. New Zealand

Education Review (Agenda, unpaged).

Kerslake, J. (1996). A summary of the 1995 data on Reading Recovery. The Research Bulletin, No. 7, 23-27.

Ministry of Education (1985). Reading in junior classes. Wellington:

Author.

Ministry of Education (1996). The learner as a reader. Wellington:

Author.

Ministry of Education. (1996). Briefing for the incoming government.

Wellington: Author.

Nicholson, T. (1991). Do children read words better in context or in lists? A classic study revisited. Journal of Educational Psychology,

83, 444-450.

Nicholson, T. and Gallienne, G. (1995). A survey of reading achievement levels among 13-year-old pupils in two contrasting socioeconomic areas.

New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 30, 125-23.

Nicholson, T. (1995). More news on rich and poor schools, and the news is still not good. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 30,

227-228.

Nicholson, T. (1997b). From ABC to Ready to Read: Perspectives on reading. “Set” Special: Language and literacy. Item 2. Wellington: New

Zealand Council for Educational Research.

Nicholson, T., & Lam, R. (Submitted). Whether or not a reading error is

OK or no-OK depends on your theoretical orientation to the reading process. Auckland, New Zealand: School of Education, University of

Auckland.

Pearson, P.D. (1989). Reading the whole-language movement. The

Elementary School Journal, 90, 231-241.

Reading literacy (1993, November 15). Education Gazette, 72, 1-2. Reid, N. (1994). How literate are kiwis? Who knows (or cares)? Reading

Forum NZ, No. 2, 3-24.

Simpson, M.M.(1949). The new infant readers. The Janet and John series.

Education, 1, 44-47.

Simpson, M.M.(1962). Suggestions for teaching reading in infant classes. Wellington: Department of Education.

Smith, F. (1976). Learning to read by reading. Language Arts, 53,

297-322.

Smith, J. W., & Elley, W. (1993). Learning to read in New Zealand.

Auckland: Longman Paul.

Wagemaker, H. (1993). Reading achievement of New Zealand 9- and 14- year-olds.

Webwire (1997, September 30). President Clinton delivers remarks on school vouchers. Washington, DC: Federal Document Clearing House.

Whole language goes up ...