John Michael Sawyer
Education; Director of the Reading Laboratory
MSU-Bozeman
There is a great debate about how we should best teach reading. Some reading experts advocate a pure phonics method, which consists of teaching the children to decode the alphabet symbols on the page into sound. Others who say the wholeness of language needs to be the starting point of reading instruction emphasize the use of real books and the creation of real literary opportunities, all practiced in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. One could place the methods of teaching reading on a continuum, with five stopping points:
One: a synthetic phonics method, where a code is thoroughly taught prior to actual practice in reading.
Two: applied phonics, where an element of the code is taught, and then the children practice this phonic element by reading a story in which there are many words deliberately written into the text to give the reader an opportunity to practice the particular phonics rule.
Three: phonics and whole language elements are combined. There is a specific phonics curriculum but the students also use "real" children's books and also practice literacy in all four language dimensions.
Four: "Phonics as needed" is where the children use whole books and whole language, but some phonics elements are directly taught if the teacher sees a need. Direct phonics generalizations might be taught through spelling, or as individual children might need them.
Five: In a pure whole language approach, phonics notions are learned intuitively, through much practice in choral reading, chanting, writing with invented spelling, and speech, often in the form of drama.
Many teachers of beginning reading are in the middle of this continuum, individualizing their instruction for each learner, and using elements from all areas. Thus a "real" reading teacher would have both whole language and phonics based lessons in his/her reading curriculum. It is usually the reading theorists who take a purer position and argue that the pole positions reflect the "correct" technique.
Why Our Children Can't Read, And What We Can Do About It, by Diane McGuinness, presents a strong argument for the author's technique for teaching beginning reading through a program in phoneme awareness training that she has registered to herself under the trade name of Allographs. The author is a professor at the University of South Florida and a cognitive developmental psychologist. Her method seems based on both theories of learning psychology and the historical development of modern English from Anglo-Saxon and Norman French. Her book is also an attack on other methods of teaching reading. Dr. McGuinness is especially critical of the Whole Language method, which she believes is causing widespread reading disability: "Writing systems are codes for spoken language. Someone has to teach the code, because most people can't figure it out alone" (101). She also believes many phonics-based systems are also deficient as they either fail to teach the entire code, or fail to teach the code in a manner that the students can understand and apply. Finally, she is critical of professors of reading pedagogy, who, themselves, do not understand the code.
The "correct code", which she owns and has copyrighted under the name Allographs, consists of 43 phonemes in English which are represented by approximately 100 letters or letter combinations. There are 24 letter and letter combinations for the consonant sounds, and 19 for the vowel sounds. The learning of these sound symbol relationships must precede most reading in order that the child have a logical basis for decoding the text into sound. One of the sections of the book describes a method and philosophy for the teaching of these "Allographs." Thus, in the great debate, Dr. Diane McGuiness, and her book Why Our Children Can't Read, would support the theories of the foniks fowks.
What is the correct method, whole language or phonics? The answer is, there are many other factors that affect a child's development as a reader. How much the parents support reading and provide time for reading are important elements, as is the amount of television viewing, the availability of books in the home, access to libraries, income of the family, education of the parents, and, perhaps of greatest importance, the skill of the individual teacher to nurture the child through the processes of emergent and developing literacy. Much of the research suggests that the methods of teaching reading are not as significant as these other factors.
The author argues well and supports her positions with anecdotes about children who fail to learn to read and with reference to specific studies. Still, if children do not practice the skills of reading until they become automatic, they will probably fail to become fluent readers. Currently, the "typical child" practices watching television for four hours a day, and reading for less than ten minutes. This is the problem!