Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, February 20, 1992 TAG: 9202200574
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAMELA J. RICHARDSON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
`WHOLE LANGUAGE' NOT PHONICS' ENEMY
BETTY G. Price's commentary Jan. 20 ("Phonics is the key for solving illiteracy") contains a few good ideas, mixed in with some rather serious misapprehensions about how it is that children achieve the critical and complex task of learning to read.Clearly, phonics - the decoding of words on the basis of the sounds that letters and letter combinations make - is an indispensable part of language instruction. Ms. Price's dismissal of the "whole language" technique implies that phonics is the most important aspect of reading instruction - perhaps the only kind of reading instruction that is necessary. In taking this stand, Ms. Price ignores nearly all of the current knowledge on what constitutes effective reading instruction.
The "whole language" approach to reading simply means that teachers draw on the whole world of available reading materials in teaching their children. Basal reading series are big business, and their content is geared to the anticipated interests of the greatest number of children. As a result, they are bland and inoffensive - and absolutely uninteresting to many students.
Freed from the confines of the basal series, a teacher can draw on the best of children's literature, newspapers and magazines, instructional manuals for things that children want to learn to do - materials that make reading a lively and worthwhile and meaningful activity. If the only reading materials available to adults were basals written at our level, I doubt that many of us would ever pick up a book. Shouldn't we provide children reading materials that are least as vital as those we demand for ourselves?
Granted, adults are not in the process of learning to read. But a skilled teacher - and the teachers in our classrooms are far more skilled than they are often credited with being - knows how to use these varied and meaningful materials to teach children the skills as well as the pleasures of reading.
By replacing or supplementing a basal series with real-world reading materials, teachers do not deny their responsibility to use such varied methodologies as language experience, sight word recognition, the use of context clues, and structural analysis. They do not even deny their responsibility to teach phonics.
Students will be far more motivated to learn these skills when they discover their usefulness in reading material that is interesting and meaningful to them than when phonics and other reading skills are taught in isolation. Access to interesting and meaningful information is a far more powerful incentive for learning to read than the problem-solving appeal that Ms. Price claims a heavy diet of phonics will have for the young brain.
I am also concerned by Ms. Price's attack on acceptance of young children's invented spellings. As children begin to understand the (to them) revolutionary concept of language being written down, they take great delight in experimenting with their own ways of making writing happen.
At the earliest stages, of course, they are not familiar with the conventions of English spelling and usage they will learn in due course.
To correct children's first, tentative efforts to create written language - to tell them that what they've done is wrong - is to kill some of the joy they initially take in reading and writing. To do so repeatedly may be to create illiterate adults who do not wish to read or write because they have come to experience these as painful and damaging experiences. This is the greatest tragedy of all.
Pamela J. Richardson is associate professor with Mary Baldwin College's adult-degree program in Roanoke.