Whole Language vs. Phonemic Awareness

NEW YORK (AP) - Nora Newcombe's son was in first grade, and she was in a state. Andrew was a bright kid, but he just couldn't read. A few months into the school year, he'd scored in the 24th percentile on a standardized reading test. His teacher said he needed to be in a class for children with learning disabilities. Andrew was getting frustrated and upset.

 

"He was like, `I'm stupid. I can't do what the other kids do,' '' Newcombe said.

As a parent, she was concerned. But as a developmental psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, she also had a little perspective on the situation.

First, she gave Andrew an IQ test. No problems there. Then she went to her son's school and started asking questions: What exactly didn't he understand? What was going on in class? How was Andrew learning to read?

It turned out Andrew was being taught whole language, a reading instruction method that became popular in the 1980s and is widely used in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Great Britain. Although proponents tout it as the best way by far to teach kids how to read, nearly a decade of scientific research and sad experience have shown it can be a miserable failure.

In California, where a recent backlash against the method led the state to revise its English language arts curriculum, opponents blame whole language for pulling the state's reading scores to the bottom of the national barrel. In a recent national education assessment, California tied with Louisiana for last place in reading.

Beginning reading behaves very much like an athletic activity or a physical skill, like walking or ice skating or swimming, where some kids just act like mermaids right when they jump in the pool. But in reading, just as in swimming or ice skating or playing piano, most kids need systematic instruction that should foster something reading experts call phonemic awareness.

Phonemic awareness is one of those skills that feels natural to people who have mastered it, such as riding an bicycle or getting on an escalator, but really isn't. It's the understanding that spoken language can be broken down into component sounds that then can be represented by strings of letters.

But in addition to phonemic awareness, kids also have to learn there's a system to how words are spelled. Before they can read effectively, they must realize sounds can be represented in ways that don't follow phonic rules, such as "ight'' standing for the "ite'' sound in most cases.

Cognitive neuroscientists, who model aspects of the human brain with computers, have gotten so good at their craft that they actually can design phonemically aware computer programs that learn how to read. And when the researchers introduce phonemic defects into the programs, they even can cause the computers to make the same mistakes a reading-disabled child does.

What it tells you is that this particular part of reading - figuring out the relationship between spelling and phonology - is a big step. Reading experts estimate 20 percent to 40 percent of kids have problems taking that step. Imaging studies that show which parts of the brain are active during reading indicate some kids - the same ones who have trouble learning to read - really are wired differently. It has nothing to do with intelligence.

``There are smart children who have this problem and there are fairly average or below-average students who do not have this problem,'' said John Silber, chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Education. But studies show that if they are recognized early and taught phonemic awareness, children who initially have trouble reading can learn the skill nearly as quickly as their peers.

That's what happened for Andrew, whose mother began drilling him with a set of 130 words from the experimental Benchmark School in Media, Pennsylvania. Andrew hated it, of course, because it was hard for him. But after he'd learned to sound out those carefully selected words, he was on the road to reading. By the end of the second grade, his reading scores had risen to the 84th percentile.

`It was a whole lot better than being at the 24th percentile,'' Newcombe said. ``When I think that he could have been shunted to a pullout program for kids with learning disabilities ... it just chills the blood.''