| 1a. Whole Word / Look
and Say / La methode globale (France) Ganzheitsmethode (Germany)
1b. Whole Language / 'A psycholinguistic
guessing game'/ Real Books / Literature-based Approach / Discovery Method / Language Experience / Apprenticeship
Approach / Acquisition of reading in authentic contexts through a progressive and invisible pedagogy (Goouch/Lambirth p110); the Emperor's New Clothes, indeed!
Children are expected to memorise whole words (or whole sentences!) or guess words
using context, syntax or picture clues
with no phoneme-grapheme instruction and, if they are lucky, they will 'discover'
the alphabet code for themselves and reading will 'emerge'. e.g. Ladybird's
'Janet and John' (Dick and Jane. USA) Oxford Reading Tree,
Project X, ReadWritea2z, Ginn 360, Cambridge Reading, Story Chest, Rockets... Whole word remedial (!) programmes include Reading
Recovery, Catch Up, FisherFamilyTrust Wave3, Better Reading Partnership and Wellington Square. Scroll down to base
of page for 'What's Wrong with Reading Recovery'.
Words, viewed as wholes, form abstract visual patterns which
humans find difficult to memorise and for this reason no true
writing system is based on whole words. Contrary to the myth
that they are logographic writing systems, Japanese writing
consists, mostly, of sequences of different consonant-vowel
pairs (diphones) whilst Chinese writing is based on monosyllabic-morphemic units fused with category symbols (DeFrancis) There are approx. 1,200 syllables in Chinese (English has approx. 60,000) which makes it possible to base the written language on this size of unit.
An in-depth examination of writing systems, ancient and modern, reveals, amongst other things, that the average visual-memory limit for whole-words is approximately
2,000 (D.McGuinness GRB p214),
but a good English dictionary contains from 250,000 to 500,000
words. A writing system based on whole-words will never work
as for each learner it would be like trying to remember the
contents of a telephone directory (McGuinness
ERI p17) Victor Mair, Professor of Chinese Language
and Literature, comes to the same conclusion, 'there is a
natural upper limit to the number of unique forms that can
be tolerated in a functioning script. For most individuals,
this amount seems to lie in the range of approximately 2,000-2,500'
(The World's Writing Systems p200)
*Whole word methods lead some children to believe that they can memorize each word as a random string of letters. This makes learning to read exactly like trying to memorise the telephone directory. 'Like printed letter strings, telephone numbers contain a small set of symbols … Unless all numbers are dialed correctly and in the right order the connection will fail … Unfortunately, there are no systematic or predictable relationships between these strings and their corresponding entries; so each of the many thousands of such associations must be painstakingly committed to memory. There may exist a few rare individuals who are capable of memorizing entire telephone directories, but for the average child about to learn to read, the absurdity of this task should be obvious' (Share. Cognition 55/2.1995. quoted in Goswami)
The following are the 20 most frequent words in the English
language taken from the Dolch word list, coded into numbers:
2085, 2015, 1144, 85, 1, 9, 251521, 920, 156, 914, 23119,
19194, 8919, 208120, 1985, 61518, 1514, 208525, 22120, 814
The very first whole-word programme was invented in France,
by Abbe Bertaud in 1744; the Quadrille programme. Derivatives
of this programme spread through continental Europe - endorsed
by the King of Prussia, used by Basedow and Gedike in Germany,
and Jacatot in Belgium. Back in France, Abbe de l'Epee (circa
1760) was inspired by the Quadrille programme to produce his
own whole-word programme, which he used with deaf-mutes. By
1826 whole-word books were being promoted both sides of the
Atlantic, Abbe de l'Epee's method being used by Thomas Gallaudet,
with deaf-mutes in America. Gallaudet also produced a beginners'
reading book (1836) for hearing children 'The Mother's Primer'.
This taught reading by the whole-word method with all mention
of the deaf-mute connection erased (Rodgers.
Born Yesterday)
Whole-word reading
methods were pushed into schools by a procession of self-appointed education 'experts',
working in the new teacher-training colleges, who had political clout. They ordered
teachers to use the whole-word, look-say method using 'flash-cards'. The look-say
method metamorphosised into the whole-sentence 'meaning' method, using reading
schemes (basal readers.USA) written using only high frequency words. The disappearance
of phonics and its replacement by these methods caused reading scores to plummet.
Professor
Thorndike of Columbia teacher-training college identified the 10,000 most frequently used
words in the English language (1921). Just 1,000 of these words form 90% of all
reading material. It is these words that children taught with whole-word methods
partially memorize in order to read. Unfortunately for these children, it is the
remaining 499,000 words without which '...almost nothing of any real importance
can be written or read with real understanding.' (Rodgers
p75)
Optometrist Byron Harrison developed an eye tracking device
and discovered that 'whole-word guessers' scan words as though they were pictures,
focusing only on the high visibility letters: the beginning and end letters plus
any letters with 'limbs' which extrude above or below the line of print (Harrison
p48) One of the continuing stream of education 'experts', Dr. Russell
of California University, produced a book in 1949 that included the following
strategies, in order of importance, to aid recognition of new words:
1. The
general pattern, or configuration, of the word.
2. Special characteristics
of the appearance of the word.
3. Similarity to known words.
4. Recognition
of familiar parts in longer words.
5. The use of picture clues.
6. The
use of context clues.
7. Phonetic and structural analysis of the word.
(Flesch
p55)
These strategies (1-6 are forms of guessing) are almost identical
to those advocated by some reading 'experts' today.
The reading schemes
were very dull and repetitive and taught words at a very slow rate, but proved
lucrative for the newly emerging educational publishers. Whole-language, founded by Kenneth
Goodman and Frank Smith (an ex-journalist who by his own admission has never taught anyone to read), was the
next mutation, appearing (circa1960) as a reaction to the dreary schemes. "Matching letters with sounds is a flat-earth view of the world," Goodman declared in his 1986 book, What's Whole in Whole Language (Allen)
Whole-language purists were hostile to whole-word methods
and even more so to phonics. Children were given 'real books' ie. story books,
to read from the very start. No reading instruction was given as it was decided
that children could, and would, learn to read as easily as they learnt to talk,
simply by having access to plenty of good books with lovely pictures. Reading
scores plummented further.
The whole-word reading methods crossed to
Britain from both America and the European continent and were used in some areas
of England from about 1840 or so onwards' (Diack p45),
usually in combination with phonics. The change to almost exclusive use of whole
word methods began in the first quarter of the twentieth century and they have
remained in place ever since, the latest guise being 'a mixture of methods' or
'a balanced approach' which are no more than whole-word reading schemes used alongside
the teaching of a bare minimum of phonics - see Method
2. There is no sound scientific evidence to support the whole-word/language
method.The research cited by the whole language advocates consists almost entirely of collections of anecdotes (qualitative research) or 'kidwatching' (Allen)
In response to the final Rose Report, the United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA: an organisation which continues to support and promote whole language and the multi-cueing strategies) put out a statement which included the following assertion, ''(T)eachers and teaching assistants need time, support and high-quality professional development to enable them to fine-tune their practice in order to ensure that all children become skilled, competent and highly motivated readers'' (www.ukla.org) Need TIME! The 'professionals' in charge of development have already had 80+ years to show teachers and assistants how to 'fine-tune' the whole-word/ mixed-methods practices, and during every one of those years over 20% of children have left school still unable to read.
Professor Martin Kozloff says, 'In fact, the revolutionary whole language conception of reading as a "psycholinguistic guessing game" is a bizarre fantasy--a fantasy that managed to catch on (and make many thousands of children illiterate) because students in schools of education naively trusted their "literacy" professors--who were more interested in getting tenure, making a reputation, and selling themselves as innovators and self-inflating champions of social justice than they were at making sure new teachers (1) are guided by scientific research (which does not support whole language) and (2) know exactly how to teach reading effectively. In some fields (medicine, law, engineering) this combination of self-aggrandizement, immorality, and ineptitude is called malpractice, fraud, and criminal negligence. In education, it is called "philosophical differences" and "academic freedom." Apparently, school children and new teachers are supposed to pay for the academic freedom of education professors' (http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/wlquotes.html) The general public pay for this academic freedom too; if professionals aren't capable of accurately sounding out 'all through the word' accidents will happen. The New York Times (NYT 3/6/99) reported how pharmacists are increasingly giving out incorrect prescriptions. In one incident, chlorpromazine, a drug which lowers blood sugar, was wrongly substituted for chlorpropamide, an anti-psychotic, with fatal results.
In 2002 Ofsted reported that student primary school teachers
at Cambridge University, one of the country's top teacher
training courses, still did not know how to teach reading
at the end of a four-year degree course. In particular the
teaching of phonics "left much to be desired" and
was hardly touched on (RRF50 p12) Disturbingly, it appears that many teacher trainers are still strongly wedded to whole language theory as a result of their progressive ideology and are extremely reluctant to implement the Rose Report recommendations.
Trainee primary teachers are still not being taught exactly how to teach
children to read and write. To put it bluntly, there 'is an overwhelming bias in
teacher training courses against teaching phonics' (Turner/Burkard
p24) Evidence of this bias can be easily seen in the choice of authors
on reading lists for trainee primary teachers. The lists are totally dominated
by authors who are committed to the whole-word / language philosophy whilst books
by pre-eminent, pro-synthetic phonic, reading experts, such as Professor Diane McGuinness, Professor Rhona Johnston and Dr. Bonnie Macmillan, rarely appear.
Cambridge University reading list 2008-9
http://www.educ.cam.ac.uk/undergradstudy/reading%20lists/Foundation_Course_2_2008-09_Reading_List.doc
See Resources 9. for RECOMMENDED books on teaching reading.
T.H. MacDonald says, 'I, as a former professor of education
and as one who is thoroughly familiar with the curriculum in such courses, know
that only rarely is the teaching of reading taught as a specific skill and in
a series of indentifiable stages. What happens is that the trainees are told that
there have been, and are, a number of possible approaches to the task- including
phonics and whole-word recognition - and that the best routines seem to involve
an eclectic mixture of methods (see- Method 2) ) Often the trainee teachers are given instructions in various aspects of educational
psychology, but they are not given enough specific instruction in methodologies
of teaching reading for them to feel confident about it. The result is they are
obliged to simply fit in with whatever method prevails at whichever school they
take up as their first post (MacDonald p3)
Emeritus professor of education, Henrietta Dombey, describes the Rose Report as 'amateurish' (!) and says that it 'takes the profession along a dangerous path, not supported by sound research evidence, into some dangerous territory' (Wyse/Styles. Editorial), yet she is unable to produce any 'sound (scientific) research evidence' to support the type and timing of reading instruction she prefers, as none exists. 'Unfortunately, education has become the preserve of ideologues who consider that their own wisdom should prevail over empirical evidence' (Turner/Burkard)
Anybody can use whole-word methods to teach reading;
it doesn't need any skill or training; just provide lots of
lovely story-books or a glossy whole-word scheme and let the
children 'discover' how to read for themselves - if they can.
Many (20+%) don't ever figure out how alphabet code works
and, as a result, join the 'special educational need' statistics.
The American homeschool 'guru' John Taylor Gatto (former
New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year, with
30 years of teaching experience) numbers himself among the
critics of whole language (Gatto p65)
'A sight vocabulary is faster to learn than letters and
phonograms but the gain is a Trojan horse; only after several
years have passed does the sight reader's difficulty learning
words from outside sources begin to become apparent.'
(Gatto p68)
Professor Steven Pinker, a leading cognitive scientist, says,
'In the dominant technique, called 'whole language', the
insight that language is a naturally developing human instinct
has been garbled into the evolutionarily improbable claim
that reading is a naturally developing human instinct. Old-fashioned
practice at connecting letters to sounds is replaced by immersion
in a text-rich social environment and the children don't learn
to read' (Pinker p342).
In other words, although speech and language are 'hard wired'
into our brains, reading, which is a relatively recent cultural
phenomenon, cannot possibly be fixed in this way. “We were never born to read.”(Wolf p3)
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Xsl_sf4DoRo&feature=related
Video clip: young child being taught whole language reading strategies
www.nychold.com/talk-stotsky-051002.doc
Why Reading Teachers Are Not Trained to Use a Research-Based
Pedagogy.
www.nctq.org/nctq/images/nctq_reading_study_app.pdf
What education schools aren't teaching about reading (USA)
www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/readytoread.pdf
Ready to Read? Covers UK teacher training, the NLS and lots more.
http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/wlquotes.html
Whole Language quotes examined.
http://my.execpc.com/~presswis/phonics.html
Learning To Read and Whole Language Ideology
www.illinoisloop.org/anon_thankyouwl.html
A personal essay:Thank you Whole Language
www.pisd.org/academic/reading.htm
Reading.
http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4151
The
Phonics vs. "Whole Language" Controversy
www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j17/fonicsfobia.php
PhonicsPhobia
http://nurtureareader.blogspot.com/2009/03/keith-stanovich-on-context-clues.html
Stanovich on context clues
http://web.mac.com/kstanovich/iWeb/Site/Research%20on%20Reading_files/RRQ86A.pdf
Stanovich: Matthew Effects in Reading.
www.societyforqualityeducation.org/newsletter/archives/pandoras.pdf
Teachers who can't read.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language
Wiki's whole language page
www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/visible/
Chinese written language - morphosyllabic.
www.rrf.org.uk/messageforum/viewtopic.php?t=543
Burkard's 'Schools of Bricklaying' :-)
www.nrrf.org/satire_golf.html
Whole language takes on golf :-)
www.nrrf.org/satire_WL_at_Fork.html
Whole language at the Fork in the Road :-)
What's Wrong with Reading Recovery:
Reading Recovery (RR) is a 1-to-1 programme taught by specially trained teachers and used with a very narrow age group; the lowest achieving Year 1 children. National Co-ordinator for RR, Julia Douetil, claims that, "These are children for whom, for some reason, phonics hasn't worked" (Independent 30/10/08). Over the course of a year the school's RR teacher will give 4-9 children individual tutoring for half-an-hour daily; around 90-100 sessions for each child. Despite this massive input, a significant number (23%) of children are failed by the programme and are 'referred on', a euphemism for 'need further intervention'. Apart from the ridiculousness of using a whole language programme for reading intervention, an additional problem is that, in order to justify the considerable cost of their employment** the RR trained teacher/s in a school are being encouraged by the DCSF to 'impact on' the 'quality first' (Wave1) teaching, that is, influence the synthetic phonics teaching in the reception class, and on the literacy teaching throughout the school. This has the affect of changing the teaching of reading in the school back to MIXED METHODS. In addition, its use will undermine the still fragile confidence and knowledge-base of the majority of teachers who are new to using synthetic phonics. The combination of RR's impact on literacy teaching, the continuing use of whole language reading books and weak synthetic phonics training will, naturally, affect a school's literacy teaching in reception, leading to a steady stream of children who need reading interventions in Year 1 and beyond.
www.prometheantrust.org/admin/files/ECAR%20-%2001-09.pdf
Feb. 2009. ECaR: Time to Stop Digging. .
www.policyexchange.org.uk/images/publications/pdfs/Rising_Marks__Falling_Standards.pdf
April 2009. See pages 37-40
www.thedyslexia-spldtrust.org.uk/media/downloads/articles/13-intervention_for_dyslexia_final_with_further_corrections_15_june_2009.pdf
June 2009. Chris Singleton's dyslexia report slams RR -see p95-118.
Book Review: Marie Clay: Lessons in Literacy Part Two. 2005
http://www.rrf.org.uk/messageforum/viewtopic.php?t=3739
www.rrf.org.uk/newsletter.php?n_ID=186
www.nrrf.org/essay_ReadRec_10.html www.uoregon.edu/~bgrossen/rr.htm www.educationation.org/readingrecoveryresearch.htm www.ednews.org/articles/2484/1/EVIDENCE--BASED-RESEARCH-ON-READING-RECOVERY/Page1.html
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/01/30/ED20575.DTL
www.educationreport.org/pubs/mer/article.asp?ID=3430
http://www.ldanh.org/docs/Reading%20Recovery.pdf
www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/4816466a11.html
NZ professor says RR is dated and 'useless for dyslexics'
http://LightfootRR.notlong.com
Liz Lightfoot answers the question on Reading Recovery
www.nonweiler.demon.co.uk/RR_or_SP_for_Intervention.pdf
RR or Synthetic Phonics for intervention?
www.ioe.ac.uk/schools/ecpe/readingrecovery/pages/newsletter_running_record_2004.pdf
UK RR's 2004 newsletter: see article: ''Sound it out''.
www.ioe.ac.uk/schools/ecpe/readingrecovery/pages/newsletter_running_record_%2005.pdf
UK RR's 2005 newsletter: see article: Phonics in Reading Recovery
www.ioe.ac.uk/schools/ecpe/readingrecovery/pages/newsletter_Running%20Record%2006.pdf
UK RR's 2006 newsletter: see article: Skilful teaching of phonics in Reading Recovery.
www.everychildareader.org/news/npd.cfm
UK ECaR claims 'high quality phonic work is fundamental to Reading Recovery'
A typical Reading Recovery lesson (spot
the 'high quality phonics' they claim to include, if you can!)
It is divided into three main sections each lasting 10 mins.
Familiar Reading (5 mins) – this gives the child the
opportunity to ‘warm-up’ for the lesson by reading
a selection of texts read at least once before. It enables
him/her to pull together reading behaviours on familiar material,
read with fluency and expression and revisit favourite stories.
Running Record (5 mins) – each day at the end of the
lesson a child is introduced to and reads a new text. This
is then re-read the following day and a running record of
the child’s reading behaviour taken on this as he/she
reads. Salient teaching points are addressed after the running
record and it is analysed at the end of the lesson to direct
future teaching moves.
Letter/Word Work (2/3 mins) – in the early stages this
concentrates on knowing the letters by name, sound and trigger
word, their relationship to words and how this knowledge enables
us to attempt unknown vocabulary in reading and writing. Later
this develops into looking at how words work and feeds into
the reading and writing components. It is SHORT as most of
this work is done in context.
Writing (7/8 mins) – Here the child composes and writes
his own short story with increasing independence. He/she learns
a bank of well-known high-utility words which occur frequently
in writing and is supported in his/her learning of different
ways to problem-solving on unknown vocabulary. The teacher
re-writes this story on a strip of paper, cuts it up to emphasize
a pertinent teaching point and the child then re-assembles
it.
New Story (10 mins) – The teacher chooses an appropriate
new text for the child each day. She introduces this to the
child who then reads it. The text will have been chosen to
give the child opportunities to consolidate and extend existing
reading strategies. This will become tomorrow’s running
record text. http://tre.ngfl.gov.uk/server.php?request=cmVzb3VyY2UuZnVsbHZpZXc%3D&resourceId=8374
''In the Summer of 2001 Dame Marie Clay, creator of the New Zealand based Reading Recovery program, and her entourage came to the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC, to speak with House Education Committee Staffer Bob Sweet. Her purpose was to ascertain whether Reading Recovery would be eligible for Reading First funding once the bill was passed. Bob explained to Ms. Clay that explicit, systematic phonics instruction had to be included in any program eligible for RF funding because it was one of the necessary key components of reading instruction that had been established through decades of carefully conducted quantitative research. These findings had been validated in the Report of the National Reading Panel in 2000 and were now going to become an essential part of the Reading First Law. He pleaded with Ms. Clay to use her extensive network of teacher training programs all over the US to help in the implementation of the RF program. He encouraged her to provide the leadership within the RR family to make the modifications necessary, and thus make RR eligible for RF funding consideration. With a stare as cold as ice, Marie Clay replied that RR would not be making any changes to their program; however, Mr. Sweet could be certain a new description of its components would be written in such a way as to bring it into compliance with the RF law. Momentarily dumbfounded, he maintained that Reading Recovery could not be eligible for RF funding without modification, and his initial estimation then still stands today.'' www.therant.us/staff/nsalvato/2007/print/2006/10272006.htm
** Documents on the DCSF's 'RR Toolkit' webpage reveal that it costs a school £82,830 to employ an RR teacher part-time (0.5) for 4 years. Even using RR's own optimistic figures which have each teacher tutoring 9 pupils a year, RR costs over £2,400 per child, 23% of whom need yet further intervention!
Independent UK researchers suggest that the cost per child is closer to £5,000
www.prometheantrust.org/admin/files/ECAR%20-%2001-09.pdf
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