Maggie's Farm

This posting has unintentionally brought up the war between Whole Language versus Phonics as the best way to teach children to read. Go to Wikipedia or a teacher friend if you want further elucidation.

Basically, Phonics advocates maintain that the best way to teach children to read is to teach them to connect letters and letter groupings to their corresponding sounds, and once that is done, to use that knowledge to determine what combinations of letter groupings, a.k.a. words, sound like. This involves a fair amount of drill and repetition.

Whole Language advocates maintain that the best way to teach children to read is to teach them whole words, i.e., by reading. Others can explain and justify it better than I.

Deciphering the above passage could be seen as a victory for Whole Language advocates. Those of us who deciphered that misspelled passage saw it as a combination of whole words. We did not break the passage down into letter sounds to understand it. Had we done so, we would have been very frustrated.

There are at least two flies in the ointment for those who maintain that reading this was a victory for Whole Language. First, note that only about 55% were presumed able to decipher this passage. When we teach something, we do not shoot for 55% mastering something: that would be considered failure.

A further problem, assuming that the 55% figure is for adults, is that adults, with their adult-sized vocabulary, will do much better with Whole Language than will children with their child-sized vocabulary.

Phonics gives the child to decode the sound of a word they have never seen before. Whole Language does not give them this capability.

The problem with Whole Language advocates is that they think as adults and not as children. Adults are much more able to see words whole, as in the above misspelled passage, because their vocabulary is much more extensive than that of children. A second way that Whole Language advocates do not think as children is that as adults they get bored by the drill and repetition of Phonics, and assume that young children will also be bored by the drill and repetition of Phonics. Au contraire, young children like drill and repetition: it increases familiarity with something new. Think of how a four or five year old wants the same story read every night in the same way .

A further issue with the Whole Language advocates is that they assume that Phonics precludes also reading whole books. Not at all: some time with phonics, some time with stories.

I was dismayed during one trip to Guatemala to find out that some well-intentioned gringos were teaching according to Whole Language, ignorantly claiming that as a way of teaching children to read it was “proven” and “well-regarded.” Ironically, while such well intentioned people see themselves as reversing the US’s screwing the Third World (THEIR view of how the US has acted, NOT MINE), teaching via Whole Language would be screwing the Third World.

Well expressed.

I agree with you and Meta that the multiple names in Russian novels frustrate the reader. I recently read Anna Karenina, and also wondered why the publisher did not also include a listing of the characters' various names. I kept telling myself I was going to write such a list, but never did. Maybe I'll do it the next time I reread War and Peace.