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June 21, 1993
Ms Susan Smith
Director, Lower School
The Brooks Hill School
Frederiksted, St. Croix, Virgin Islands
Dear Ms Smith,
I hope this letter finds you well. Thank you for your November 2,
1992 letter, responding to mine of October 26, 1992 to the Head of
School. This is my reply.
It must be unimaginably horrible for a parent to watch an
automobile strike a beloved child; to hear the bones break, and see
the body fall; to feel bright promise and dreams encompassing the
world evaporate in an instant. None but the worst amongst us would
intentionally cripple any child---physically, spiritually,
emotionally, or intellectually. As parents, our greatest joy comes
from helping our children to become loving, strong, skillful, and
competent. We want our children to live up to their greatest
potential. The wise parent does not expect or want his Mary to equal
his neighbor's Anne in all fields of endeavor, but the parent does
want Mary to be the best she can be. The caring parent is
always examining her own behavior and doing those things necessary to
promote the full flowering of her children. The parents cannot cause
the child to become skillful and competent---the child must do it on
her own, but the parents (and the child's school teachers) have a
strong, often critical, influence in the process.
A key to successful parenting (and teaching) is understanding how
habits are planted, nurtured and strengthened. Good habits are our
treasure; bad habits, the bane of our existence. Habits start with a
thought, but develop into consistent, reliable action over the long
term. As the saying goes, "sow a thought, reap an action; sow an
action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character,
reap a destiny." We have reading habits, just as we have other habits.
In my earlier letter I touched upon the importance of good reading
habits in our general intellectual functioning.
As parents we are showered with wonderful, sacred moments. We have
the great privilege of closely accompanying our children through the
early years of their lives. How terrific to share the learning of the
alphabet, and the discovery that every letter has both a name and a
sound, or a "power" as they used to call it! The parents giggle like
kids when the son or daughter starts putting sounds together, sounding
out first syllables and simple words.
Then, though, in kindergarten at The Brooks Hill School, enter the
Ladybird series of look-and-say basal readers. Gone are the
days of the child being taught consistently to sound out our
alphabetic language. Instead the child is taught to learn all kinds of
words, "regular" and "irregular," as a whole, by their shape. The
child loses the habit of always paying close attention to the letters
of the words and their sounds. He now guesses from the first letter of
the word, the shape of the word, and the context, at what the word is.
The child starts misreading "has" for "are," and "tent" for "camp,"
mistakes that would have been unthinkable before. Good-bye good
habits. Enter the intellectual bane. Crash! The use of the Ladybird
series and its look-and-say methods is not intended to cripple, but
crippling it often is. Mediocrity, or worse, now becomes the goal.
Suddenly, you are told that your role as parent is to shut up and sit
down. Do not even think about what the school's reading program is
doing to the children, let alone comment.
______________
What is the goal of a school reading (and writing) program? The
primary purpose of a school reading program is to assist all the
students to become skillful readers. One becomes a skillful reader by
developing good habits, and employing them always. The skillful reader
rejects bad reading habits. Similarly, the good school reading program
instills in all the students good reading habits and discourages poor
reading techniques that can become bad reading habits. Some maintain
the specific reading program utilized does not make any difference.
Does it? Research, mentioned below and in my earlier letter, says that
it does.
The principal habit a reading program must inculcate in the
students is consistent, day-in, day-out use of "word recognition"
skills that are effective in the long run. How to do this is the
subject of this letter.
______________
In a nutshell, the primary problem with The Brooks Hill School
program for teaching students to read is that the children are taught
and encouraged to use look-and-say "word recognition" techniques.
Look-and-say techniques include whole word memorization without regard
to phonetic pronounceability and word guessing techniques (trying to
"read" the word not by sounding it out but by guessing what word it is
using visual cues such as the first letter of the word, the ending,
the shape of the word, little familiar words in the middle, and the
context, including pictures). To read well, a child must master
effective "word recognition" skills. Word recognition skills are,
as the name implies, skills used to read individual words, especially
unfamiliar words. Word recognition skills are the essential bedrock
of reading. The most important element of a truly successful program
for the teaching of children to read is the development in all of the
children of the habit of consistently using effective word recognition
skills. Not all word recognition techniques are equally useful.
Phonics skills are invaluable. Ironically, the presence of irregularly
spelled words in written English does not provide the basis for a good
argument against the use of phonics as the word recognition
technique to use in the teaching of reading and writing. To the
contrary, when phonics is taught as the word recognition
method, and it is taught early on, directly, intensively, and
systematically, it becomes an extremely powerful tool for the reader
to infer the correct pronunciation of irregular words. Dr. Groff's
book is so insightful that I have obtained a copy for you, which I
enclose herewith. I have also enclosed, with Dr. Groff's blessing, a
copy of his paper "Modern Phonics Instruction", published in 1989, and
designed as ERIC document number ED 328 900. Please also see Rudolph
Flesch, Ph.D., Why Johnny Still Can't Read (Harper
Collins, 1981), p. 97. If you react to all this sounding out by
saying, "Gee, I don't sound out words when I'm reading - this doesn't
make sense!", remember that beginning readers do not read the way
fluent adult readers do. Please see Why Johnny Still Can't
Read, pp. 32-36. Look-and-say techniques for word recognition are
not skills at all, but rather are obstacles to skillful reading. When
taught in the reading program, look-and-say techniques become bad
habits that undermine and erode valuable phonics word recognition
skills, to the detriment of the children.
Although approaches to teaching reading and writing English are
myriad, the approaches currently in use can be divided into two
groups, differentiated by their recommended word recognition
techniques. I refer to these two groups as the two "methods" of
teaching reading and writing English. As I mentioned in my earlier
letter and as described above, one is most commonly called the "whole
word" method, or look-and-say. The other is phonics. As I also stated
before, the method used at The Brooks Hill School is best described as
look-and-say with supplemental phonics. The teaching of look-and-say
reading techniques with supplemental phonics is bad because the habits
taught look-and-say students, whole word memorization without regard
to phonetic pronounceability, and word guessing techniques, are
antithetical to the phonics process of instilling in the child a
pervasive phonetic awareness of our magnificent language and the habit
of consistently using phonics to "decode" words accurately and easily.
Skillful readers can do this, poor ones cannot. We create poor readers
by separating children from their phonetic awareness of our written
language early on, and by teaching them that word guessing is
acceptable, allowing this terrible habit of word guessing to take root
with the blessing of the teacher and to flourish. This makes for many
halting, uncertain readers who must rely upon context to guess at what
they are reading, disrupting their attention and making the task of
interpreting the passage, discerning its meaning, more difficult. "The
primary goal of beginning instruction on printed word identification
is to teach students about spelling patterns and how these patterns
map onto the sounds and meanings of words." Marilyn Jager Adams,
Ph.D., Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print, A
Summary (Center for the Study of Reading, The Reading Research and
Education Center, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1990),
pp. 89-91. The Summary was prepared by Steven A. Stahl, Jean
Osborn, and Fran Lehr.
Your letter does not compare phonics and look-and-say; rather, it
skirts the principal issue raised by my letter: whether we should
jettison look-and-say and emphasize phonics. Although look-and-say and
phonics are not compared in your letter, the letter does contain the
following direct comments on word recognition techniques: "...the most
pervasive problem afflicting much elementary instruction in the past
has been a narrow focus on the acquisition of discrete academic skills
- the ability to decode a word, punctuate a sentence...to the
exclusion of more thought provoking content exploration that taps the
child's real world experiences, feelings, and interests" ; "[t]he
pushing down of such skill focused academic program into the
kindergarten and preschool years and the inappropriate reliance on
passive rote learning are major concerns in need of correction";
"...phonics is a valuable tool for a beginning reader..."
(emphasis in original); "[p]honics is an important element in the
teaching of reading, but it should never be allowed to become the
whole program"; and your statements that "successful initial literacy
programs" should "...[i]nclude a phonics component that is presented
early and kept simple..." and "...[p]resent 'Keyword' lists of those
words that are not phonetically decodable and yet are most frequently
visible in written text... ."
Although the term is not used in your letter, your letter sets
forth the rationale for a "whole language" reading curriculum,
referenced in your letter as "this multifaceted approach" used at The
Brooks Hill School. [You may prefer to label the Brooks Hill program
as the "thinking curriculum" (which is the term used in the California
Department of Education publication It's Elementary!, mentioned
in your letter to me, to describe the curriculum the Department
advocates for use in California, and which your letter advocates for
the Brooks Hill School). The "thinking curriculum" incorporates the
whole language approach to reading instruction within the context of a
curriculum intended to stimulate thought, and the following comments
about the whole language approach apply equally to the "thinking
curriculum".] Unfortunately, as is true of other similar descriptions
of the whole language approach (and the It's Elementary!
description of the "thinking curriculum"), your description begs the
most important question: within the context of this "rich
environment," without reference to look-and-say or phonics word
recognition techniques, what techniques does the whole language
approach specify the children shall be taught to use in order
initially to learn most words and to read unfamiliar words? The answer
is: none. The description of the whole language (or "thinking
curriculum") program by itself, without reference to look-and-say or
phonics, does not provide the teacher with any technique for
use by the child in initially learning words or reading unfamiliar
words, but word recognition is the foundation of reading. For
this reason in my letter to the Head of School I refer to the whole
language approach as a "so-called" method of teaching reading. The
whole language (or "thinking curriculum") approach by itself without
look-and-say or phonics word recognition techniques is not truly a
method of teaching how to read or write at all.
My letter to the Head of School compared word recognition
techniques in phonics and look-and-say: sounding out verses whole word
memorization and guessing. I argued that sounding out is good; but
whole word memorization without regard to the phonetic basis of words,
and visual cue and contextual guessing are bad. I pointed out that
unfortunately whole word memorization without regard to phonetic
pronounceability and visual cue and contextual guessing are regularly
taught and encouraged at Brooks Hill. At the end of my letter, I
mentioned that the whole language approach is used at Brooks Hill, but
I chose not to comment on it at length because what is most
important by far is the word recognition techniques taught the
children, not the context in which they are taught.
Instead of addressing the controversy over word recognition
techniques, your letter concentrated on delineating the principles of
the whole language "thinking curriculum" approach, describing what you
believe to be the context in which reading should be taught. As
appears to be the case with most whole language programs, the
administration's conscious effort in The Brooks Hill School reading
program is primarily concentrated on efforts to create a connected,
thought-provoking reading environment, but with an inconsistent,
grab-bag approach to word recognition. This approach is fallout from,
and a reaction to, the domination of look-and-say basal reading
programs over many years in the United States. We can retain the
thought-provoking elements of the Brooks Hill program and still
establish a consistent program: (1) encouraging the proper development
of essential word recognition reading and spelling habits (that is,
the decoding and encoding [pronouncing out and spelling] skills of
phonics); and (2) discouraging bad reading habits (look-and-say whole
word memorization and visual cue and contextual guessing). The word
recognition skill development portion of the reading program is the
critical foundation for other elements (you discussed at length in
your letter) designed to recognize and encourage thinking among our
children. Reading research shows that a systematic program where
children learn to use phonics principles consistently to decode
(pronounce out; read) and encode (spell; write) is superior to
look-and-say initial word memorization and later word guessing. A
phonics-based program in kindergarten and throughout the School does
not have to exclude thought provoking content exploration. Quite to
the contrary, a child who becomes a skillful reader through the use of
phonics is more capable of thought provoking content exploration than
the look-and-say guesser. This will be addressed more fully later in
this letter. The effects of the different approaches on children are
very real, and often tragic in the case of look-and-say students.
It is surprising that whole language advocates apparently usually
fail to recognize that the whole language approach is not a method
of teaching how to read individual words. "The ability to
read does not emerge spontaneously, but through regular and active
engagement with print." Children do not learn to read by osmosis.
Whole language advocates gloss over that in a whole language
classroom, within the context of the "rich environment," the teacher
must still teach the children techniques of how to read
individual words. When a child encounters an unfamiliar word, she
must either pronounce it out using the principles of phonics or look
at the first letter, the ending, the shape of the word, the context
(including pictures), and/or already known smaller words in the
middle, and guess what the word is. Whether a child is in a whole
language classroom or a non-whole language classroom, he must still
read and write individual words. Word recognition techniques must be
taught the children. The issue of which word recognition
techniques should be taught our children cannot be avoided. The School
should choose, as a matter of policy, the techniques to be taught.
After all, "[r]eading is the core of the whole academic program" at
Brooks Hill and all academic schools.
On page three of your letter, you list what you assert are ten
elements of successful initial literacy programs. A phonics-based
program does not have to exclude real-life literature. Children can
keep journals and read and write about subjects of interest to them.
What is important is that from the beginning children are
systematically taught the phonics skills they need to know, and are
taught to use those skills consistently (to the exclusion of
look-and-say techniques) to read individual words. Thinking about
and discussing the meaning of written language should be a part of any
reading curriculum. In order truly to understand the meaning of a text
the child must be able to read the text accurately. A phonics-based
program need not neglect literacy program elements you have identified
that may prove useful. People who know phonics need to listen to the
Brooks Hill children read aloud to assess their phonetic awareness and
the status of their reading habits. After all, reading is the core of
the whole academic program. We cannot accept the argument that Brooks
Hill School does not have enough time in the school day to conduct a
proper reading program including one that is intended to undo what has
been done under look-and-say. It can be done. I suspect that if the
surface is scratched on this issue with the parents that a cadre of
reading improvement assistants would become available. I hereby
enthusiastically volunteer! As Dr. Chall mentions in her enclosed
paper, teacher education in phonics rules and how to teach them is
critically important. A phonics-based program that rejects
look-and-say habits enables the child to read accurately and to write
precisely. This gives the child confidence and frees her or him to
concentrate on, and to think about, the meaning of texts, whether a
text is presented to the child, or the child (with or without peers)
creates the text himself or herself.
It is ironic that the look-and-say program bills itself as the
"meaning-emphasis" method as opposed to phonics-first, the
"code-emphasis" method, since the look-and-say child often becomes an
imprecise guesser, a poor reader, using guessing techniques that
inhibit, rather than foster reading comprehension. "In summary, deep
and thorough knowledge of letters, spelling patterns, and words, as
well as the phonological translations of all three, are of inescapable
importance to both skillful reading and its acquisition. By extension,
instruction designed to develop students' sensitivity to spellings and
their relations to pronunciations should be of paramount importance in
the development of skillful reading. This is, of course, precisely the
goal of good phonics instruction." Dr. Adams's cited work, pp.
116-117. Thus, look-and-say is not meaning centered, it is guessing
centered.
As I touched upon in my earlier letter, the pure whole language
advocate rejects the use of modern reading textbooks, known as basal
readers. The Brooks Hill School is not condemned by unavailability of
alternatives to use the look-and-say Ladybird and Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich basal readers and look-and-say spelling workbooks. To
provide one alternative, I have enclosed herewith an Educators
Publishing Service, Inc., K-12 catalog, which presents many readers,
workbooks, and other materials for a phonics-based school reading (and
writing) program. I would be happy to bring to your attention other
phonics-based materials if that would be helpful. In rejecting
look-and-say basal readers as the foundation of the reading program,
whole language proponents maintain they are teaching reading in a
fundamentally different way from the basal reader-based classroom.
What these individuals fail to realize, however, is that the primary,
and by far the most important, characteristic distinguishing one
reading program from another is the word recognition techniques
taught. When a child is taught to memorize words, whole word by whole
word, without regard to phonetic pronounceability, and taught to guess
at unfamiliar words, using cues such as the first letter, the ending,
etc., the reading program is bad for the child, whether it is based
upon vocabulary-controlled basal readers or children's literature and
the child's real world experiences. Children should be taught to sound
out consistently virtually all words, even irregular ones; however,
usually whole language practitioners (including those at Brooks Hill
School) continue to use pervasive initial whole word memorization
without regard to phonetic pronounceability and word guessing
techniques of look-and-say. Since the word recognition techniques used
in a reading program constitute its defining characteristic, it is
wrong to lump together look-and-say basal reader-based instruction and
traditional classroom phonics-first instruction as though they were
more similar to each other than whole language is to either one.
This mistaken attitude of the whole language proponent is
dramatically demonstrated in Daniel Gursky's article "After the Reign
of Dick and Jane," found in the August, 1991 Teacher Magazine,
which you kindly provided to me last school year after I suggested
that The Brooks Hill School adopt a phonics-first program. The "Dick
and Jane" readers referenced by Author Gursky were look-and-say
readers developed by Professor William S. Gray of the University of
Chicago after he was asked in 1929 by Scott, Foresman & Company to
revamp their Elson Readers. As recounted by Dr. Flesch, "A year later,
Professor Gates joined up with Macmillan and produced a look-and-say
series for them. Gradually most major textbook houses fell in line and
the 'Dismal Dozen' of basal readers came into being." These
look-and-say basal readers have dominated the teaching of reading in
the United States since earlier this century with disastrous results.
Dr. Flesch includes within his Dismal Dozen the Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich basal readers used at The Brooks Hill School above the
level of kindergarten (Brooks Hill kindergarten classrooms use the
Ladybird look-and-say readers, which I discuss later in this
letter.). Author Gursky describes whole language as being opposed to
"[a] system built around basal readers and standardized textbooks...",
but within any system, the children must be taught techniques of
how to read individual words. A whole language system
incorporating look-and-say guessing techniques is much more similar to
a basal reader look-and-say program than a phonics-first program which
discourages guessing, since by far the most important elements of
any reading program are the techniques taught for reading individual
words.
Back to your letter: you state that successful initial literacy
programs should "[p]resent 'Keyword' lists of those words that are not
phonetically decodable and yet are most frequently visible in written
text." I have commented elsewhere in this letter on the utility of
phonics in encouraging children to decode irregular words for
themselves, rather than simply memorizing them without reference to
phonics, which is what I assume you mean when you say the words should
be "presented" to the children: they should be "presented" with
instructions to memorize. Here is what Dr. Flesch has to say about
this practice:
And now, once this point is settled---and I hope it is
settled for good---let's talk about so-called sight words. As
you may have noticed, so far there has been no mention of
sight words at all. A student learns the phonic rules and the
words exemplifying them---cat, bat, mat, and fake,
drape, shame---and by the time he gets to the end of the
181-item phonic inventory, he can read English.
Yes, you say, but what about all those sight words? A
teacher---a pleasant, unaggressive one---wrote to me, "In
kindergarten children are introduced to the letters and their
sounds. In first grade I continue to teach by phonics, in
which I introduce certain basic sight vocabulary. Some of
these words cannot be easily decoded through simple phonics
rules (ex. the, said, come, one, four, who, their). As
the child begins reading he uses both methods in his own way.
Some children depend more on phonics, some memorize words more
easily. The child then has both methods at his disposal."
It all sounds so reasonable, doesn't it? Here is an
obviously nice person trying to do her best to teach children
to read. What's wrong with an eminently sane approach?
What's wrong, of course, is that the child will never learn
to read this way. Once you have a language that's 97.4 percent
phonetically regular, the thing to do is to teach it by
telling the child, one after another, about the 181 rules, and
then he can read. As soon as you interrupt your teaching to
tell the children about some irregular words like some,
one, are, or was, you've started the poor child on
the path to confusion and the scheme falls apart.
I began to wonder what I'd done with those so-called sight
words when I wrote Why Johnny Can't Read, which by all
accounts works like a charm. Well, after some searching, I
found page 100. There I'd written, "You don't have to wait a
whole year, though, before you can give your child stories to
read. Let him learn how it feels to read; if you teach him
phonics right along, he won't be confused by 'unphonetic'
words like was and done."
And that's all there is to it. At some point, when you feel
the time has come, start your child on reading stories---real
stories, I mean, not the look-and-say pap---and he won't
hesitate a minute to pronounce was as wuz and
done as dun. Why Johnny Still Can't Read,
pp. 96-97.
Your description of successful initial literacy programs does not
state that the children should be taught regular, phonetically
decodable words, whole word by whole word, by memorizing the shape
of the word (instead of the phonics method of putting together the
sounds of the letters and groups of letters, and sounding the word
out), but this look-and-say method of whole word memorization is
taught with approval and used extensively at Brooks Hill School.
A glaring and extremely important example of the use of this
look-and-say principle is found in the Ladybird look-and-say
basal readers, a staple of Brooks Hill kindergarten reading
instruction. In the first volume, 1a, the child is taught to memorize
(using repeated exposure to the words in a "story" with accompanying
pictures), as whole words, the following: "Peter", "Jane", "and",
"here", "is", "the", "dog", "likes", "I", "a", "shop", "toy", "in",
"has", "ball", and "tree". Other than "the" and "a", these are all
regular, phonetically decodable words. This technique of whole word
memorization of phonetically decodable words, without prior or
simultaneous applicable phonetic instruction, is used throughout the
Ladybird series, the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich series, and
Brooks Hill Lower School. If the Brooks Hill initial literacy program
is set forth in numbered elements on page three of your letter, we
should add to that description: "11. Require children to memorize
whole, word by word, by their shape, words that otherwise would be
fully phonetically decodable and encodable by phonics. This process
should begin in kindergarten, when children are otherwise learning
that their spoken language is phonetically encoded in their written
language; and should continue, through hundreds of words, throughout
the Lower School."
It is worthwhile to think for a moment about the effect of this
characteristic of the Ladybird series on children. At a time
(in kindergarten) when a child is still becoming thoroughly familiar
with the sounds of letters; when she should be learning about the
short vowels and the consonants, how they can blend together and the
syllables they can form (many of which are words; for instance: cat,
bad, bet, met, pit, dim, lot, doll, fun, gut), the child is drawn away
from her developing awareness of the phonetic nature of our written
language, and instead is told to memorize a group of words by their
shape, without being instructed about how the words are constructed
phonetically. At a time when a child should be figuring out on his own
the word "pet" because she has learned the sounds of "p", "e", and "t"
and can blend them together, she is told to memorize that P,e,t,e, and
r together make the word "Peter" as we pronounce it, without any
phonetic explanation. At this point typically the child knows nothing
about long vowels or that the first "e" in Peter is long because the
word is syllabicated before the first internal consonant, leaving a
vowel (the first "e") at the end of the first syllable, thus making it
long. She would not have been instructed that "er" at the end of word
usually is pronounced "rrr". Similarly, the child is taught "Jane" as
a whole, before she knows of the long "a", and before the child knows
of the silent "e" at the end of the word that makes the "a" say its
name (its sound as a long vowel instead of a short vowel). The other
words in the reader, no matter how phonetically decodable they may be,
are also taught as wholes without prior or simultaneous explanation of
their phonetic structures. Phonics, instead of being primary, comes
nonsystematically, too little, and too late in the Ladybird
series.
Thus, just at a time when we should be impressing strongly upon the
child that our language is phonetically written, and that the child
can have a great time figuring out words on his or her own (and
develop of love of reading), we are working against the development of
this critical awareness and consistent use of the phonics thinking
process by pollution with techniques that work against phonetic
awareness. The use of this phonics awareness-destroying method is
particularly distressing when the child does not even know the phonics
rules governing the pronunciation and spelling of the word. Teaching
"Jane" as a whole when the child knows nothing of long "a" and how the
letter becomes long in its pronunciation by its relationship to other
letters in our written language, without any explanation, works
against the phonics lessons and can lead to confusion and distrust of
phonics as the reliable method of encoding our spoken language into
writing. It becomes a self-fulfilling (and tragic) prophesy of the
need and appropriateness of look-and-say whole word memorization.
In a phonics-based program, a child would not be presented with the
word "Jane" and be told what it is (This is the Ladybird series
look-and-say technique.); rather, he or she would be taught about long
vowels and the effect of the silent "e" at the end, and would be
encouraged to read the word himself. The phonics-first reading method
is the one that truly requires and stimulates thought with precision.
Look-and-say, not phonics, is based upon "passive rote learning".
Phonics requires the child to figure out words on his or her own by
sounding them out. When a child is taught that phonics is the
method to use in figuring out new words, it is fun and successful. As
I have said before, it is a detective game, and, without exaggeration,
one of the greatest of all.
Ask yourself, if you will, what is the purpose of having
kindergartners read from the Ladybird series, memorizing whole
words instead of phonetically decoding them themselves? There is
absolutely no benefit whatsoever to the children in this process. To
the contrary, it is crippling. In the words of Dr. Flesch:
The point is that the whole issue of sight words
comes up only because the look-and-say people insist
they must immediately have the children read stories.
Dumb stories, inane stories, but stories there must
be, otherwise the child is "bored" and lacks
"motivation." The phonics people go ahead and teach
children to read, relying on the sheer thrill of
learning the alphabetic code - one of the great
wonders of the world - to fascinate the children until
they can hardly wait to be told that u makes
yoo.
But the look-and-say people don't know about
children. They think they must let them read stories
with lots of was's and said's that will
make them jump up and down with joy and excitement.
I spent an hour or so assembling the most common
sight words that play such an enormous role in the
look-and-say method of teaching. I immediately found
ten words the lazy American tongue likes to muffle -
a, come, does, done, none, of, some, the, was,
and were. Next were another ten with an
unusually pronounced vowel: again, against, been,
friend, gone, have, money, ready, said, and
says.
There are 21 more words of a similar type - any,
buy, could, do, eye, many, once, one, put, sew, shoe,
should, their, there, to, two, where, who, whose,
women, and would.
Finally add nine more words - answer, breakfast,
beautiful, buy, laugh, only, people, pretty, and
Wednesday.
And that's the whole list-except, of course, for
the famous spelling-bee words of which we are so proud
- acoustics, asthma, awry, boatswain, choir,
colonel, fuchsia, indict, khaki, plaid, sergeant,
solder, sieve, thyme, and victuals.
And for that ridiculously short list we should
teach our children to read English like Chinese, in
spite of the fact it is 97.4 percent decodable? Why
Johnny Still Can't Read, pp. 98-99.
The phonics-first versus look-and-say controversy reminds me of the
dichotomy between two persons looking at the same glass with desired
liquid in it, one seeing it as half-full, and the other seeing it as
half-empty. The phonics-first proponent sees that the vast majority of
our written language is phonetically encoded. Typically, the
phonics-first advocate loves the written English language, respecting
its diverse origins and consequent sound spelling variations. To him
or her it is extremely painful to sit with a child as the child
guesses at unfamiliar written words that are perfectly phonetically
pronounceable and well within the child's abilities to read correctly.
The child stumbles along, making error after guessing error, having
great difficulty in being able to attend to the meaning of the
passage, when he or she could be reading perfectly, having fun doing
it, and understanding fully the meaning of the text. The salt in the
gaping wound of he who understands and appreciates that phonics is
the key to learning how to read is that the child, in guessing
instead of pronouncing out words, is doing exactly what he or she is
explicitly taught to do in school! At The Brooks Hill School, for many
students guessing is the order of the day when it comes to unfamiliar
words.
The look-and-say advocate, on the other hand, sees the English
language as half-empty. He or she focuses on the irregular written
words, those that are not fully phonetically decodable, to justify his
or her major dissatisfaction with our written language. The
look-and-say advocate does not see the usefulness of a reading program
that systematically teaches the children all the most important rules
of phonics and then lets the children loose on our written language,
our literature, and the children's own creations. The look-and-say
attitude toward the written English language is that it is a mess from
the word go. Look-and-say proponents are so separated from their own
phonetic awareness of the written language they do not realize that
phonics is the key to learning how to read. Instead of
teaching children the principles of phonics and telling them to figure
out (using sounding out skills) the pronunciation of written words,
they teach the written language word by whole word, as though English
were Chinese, which has a non-alphabetic, non-phonetic written
language. Look-and-say advocates even teach the children that the
preferred method of "attacking" (a look-and-say term) unfamiliar
written words is to guess at them. One gets the sense that in
look-and-say the written English language is not loved, it is feared,
perhaps even hated.
As any knowledgeable tennis player knows, an individual being
taught tennis should be taught how to approach the ball properly and
how correctly to execute strokes. It does not matter where the
student's strengths and weaknesses lie. Everyone should be taught the
proper techniques. It is not considered acceptable for the instructor
to tell the students: "Here are the proper techniques, however it just
as good and acceptable simply to hack at the ball without following
the proper techniques." If this were common teaching, there would be
many more formless hackers among instructed players.
In look-and-say with supplemental phonics, the children are exposed
to phonics in a piecemeal, nonsystematic, nonextensive, denigrated
fashion. They are taught that in approaching unfamiliar words they
need not use phonics, they can guess, they can "hack" at the word,
using visual cues of the first letter of the word, the ending, little
words in the middle, the shape of the word, and the context, including
pictures, to guess at the pronunciation of the word. Really, they are
not even guessing "at the pronunciation", but are guessing at what
the word is. Children are human. When they are given the option of
learning the rules and using them with precision to figure out the
pronunciation of unfamiliar words, or guessing, not surprisingly many
become chronic guessers. In look-and-say parlance, these unfortunates
are known as "contextual readers." The sad part is that the Brooks
Hill reading program creates these contextual readers. One gets the
impression that the look-and-say teacher sees the contextual reader as
a reader in a normal state, rather than one who has developed a bad
habit that needs effort from the teacher (and the student and the
parents) to change. There is such a lack of awareness that phonics is
the proper word recognition method, and thus the cure for the
contextual reader, that the category of contextual readers is seen as
just another "normal" category, similar to the categories of "visual"
learners and "auditory" learners; "global perceivers" and "analytical
thinkers", which categories are still wrongly cited by look-and-say
proponents for the proposition that different children require
different instructional methods (different word recognition
techniques). See Dr. Adams's cited work, p. 37, and Chapter 8, "No One
Method Is Best", in Dr. Flesch's Why Johnny Still Can't Read.
Although learning phonics well at first takes more work, in the long
run it makes reading easier and much more fun. As Dr. Chall points out
in her position paper for the Secretary of Education transmitted
herewith, much of the criticism of phonics instruction appears to be
based upon the perception that learning phonics is dull and
uninteresting, but as Dr. Chall points out in her paper, when taught
properly the learning of phonics can be interesting. As a phonics
teacher (of my children) I know that learning phonics can be lots of
fun, fascinating, stimulating, and invigorating. It requires thought
and promotes healthy brain activity. There is a great passage on page
74 of Dr. Flesch's Why Johnny Can't Read, which I heartily
commend to you. As Dr. Flesch remarks, any normal youngster loves to
learn letters and sounds. Children are not small-sized adults. The
meaning comes through loud and clear. In reading, as in most other
human activities, one can develop good habits or bad habits. We should
take the time to figure out which are good habits and which are bad,
and design our reading program so that good habits are developed in
all the children, and bad habits discouraged. We cannot just throw
all word recognition techniques at the children and expect the good
habits to predominate. Just because an approach is multi-faceted does
not mean that it is better than one without so many facets, especially
if facets work against each other. It takes consistent effort
to instill the good habits, and consistent vigilance to root
out the bad. The second sentence quoted is a bit more cryptic. How
could phonics, or the teaching of phonics, dominate over time spent on
making meaning from text? If this means that phonics should be the
word recognition technique taught, but substantial time should be
spent on other elements of deriving meaning from text, other than word
recognition: well, if phonics has been sufficiently overlearned so
that the child has developed consistent habits enabling her or him to
decode written words quickly and easily, as a skillful reader can,
then spend lots of time on other elements of reading. On the other
hand, if "time spent on making meaning from text" means time spent
teaching look-and-say word recognition techniques of whole word
memorization without regard to phonetic pronounceability and word
guessing techniques, using the first letter of the word, its shape,
little words in the middle, the ending, etc., then that is another
matter altogether, and it is the subject of this letter.
This is the second major problem with look-and-say, after whole
word memorization without regard to phonics: children are taught to be
anticipatory readers and to guess at unfamiliar words (using the first
letter of the word, the ending, little words in the middle, the shape,
and the context) instead of pronouncing them out with precision by the
use of phonics. The Brooks Hill School teaches its Lower School
students that it is expected, normal, and good for them to use
regularly this look-and-say word guessing method. As a result, in many
a child, phonetic awareness and his or her ability consistently to use
phonics atrophies. The good habit of the skillful reader is not formed
because the bad habit is permitted and even encouraged. Often, the
child becomes a contextual reader, misreading "Valerie" for
"Victoria," "kind" for "kid," and making endless other pathetic
mistakes. Look-and-say teachers describe this manifestation of
"look-and-say disease" (Dr. Flesch's phrase) as though it were
perfectly normal, without any sense of responsibility for its
development or its elimination, having no idea that the problem is
caused by the school's look-and-say reading program. (See Chapter 12,
"Your Child Is Disabled", in Why Johnny Still Can't Read
by Dr. Flesch.) Of course, the child becomes a contextual reader (a
poor reader) not because of some genetic predisposition, but because
the School does not consistently teach phonics as the method
of reading unfamiliar words, but rather encourages the child to guess
at words from imprecise visual cues and context. This is a very
poor way to teach reading. This is the Brooks Hill method. Brooks Hill
children are given look-and-say spelling workbooks where the words are
not grouped according to spelling patterns at all, and where the
children are taught simply to memorize the words and pay particular
attention to their shapes. This diverts the attention of the students
from attempts to sound the words out and pay attention to their
spelling patterns. Some look-and-say instructors think that because
computers now have spell-checking capabilities that learning correct
spelling is not extremely important. Actually, knowledge of spelling
and particularly spelling patterns remains of great importance. I will
not take the time to explain this in detail here, but one can imagine
the effect that poor spelling has on a child's willingness and desire
to write, and the effect it has on the child's self-image. So, if the
Brooks Hill initial literacy program is set forth in numbered elements
on page three of your letter, we should add to that description, in
addition to my suggested paragraph 11: "12. Tell the children that
they need not use phonics to sound out unfamiliar words, that they may
instead guess at unfamiliar words, using visual cues, such as the
first letter of the word, its ending, little words in the middle, the
shape of the word, and its context."
The use of the Ladybird series at The Brooks Hill School is
one demonstration that elements 11 and 12 set forth above are elements
of The Brooks Hill School initial literacy program. The Ladybird
series may be cornerstone of the Brooks Hill look-and-say reading
program, but it is by no means the only look-and-say element. It is
accompanied by other pervasive manifestations. We must ask ourselves:
should our school allow teachers to teach word guessing, by using
visual cues such as the first letter of the word, its ending, little
familiar words in the middle, the shape of the word, and by attending
to the context, including the pictures? Or instead, should teachers
learn the principles of phonics themselves, and use every opportunity
to teach the children habitually to use phonics as their word
recognition technique?
Most written word pronunciation irregularities are vowel
pronunciation subtleties. As earlier mentioned, readers who use
phonics consistently can first pronounce the unfamiliar written word
phonetically. Then, in a split second the reader is aware that the
written word's pronunciation does not fit within the reader's spoken
vocabulary. Usually a different pronunciation does, and the word is
recognized as irregular. One of the benefits of knowing phonics well
and using it consistently is that one comes to know the irregular
words well. One becomes familiar with the process of being at first
aware of the phonetic pronunciation of the word, comparing it against
one's spoken (and later written) vocabulary and one's developed
knowledge of written spelling variations, and then and only then using
the context to "puzzle out" the word.
In addition to eliminating instruction in look-and-say word
recognition techniques, we need to vastly increase, and systematize,
the time the teachers spend in explicitly teaching phonics word
recognition techniques, including syllabication (which is important to
learn), and in assisting students to learn to apply phonics
consistently in identifying new words; to develop the "phonics habit."
This is not just a kindergarten activity---it should be a major,
time-consuming, every day, actual teaching activity of every teacher
in every class throughout the Lower School, until all the
children in the class are truly skillful readers. Even then, it should
not be ignored or forgotten. Teachers should learn the rules of
phonics and learn how best to teach them systematically in the
classroom.
It is a mistake to continue teaching through the use of the
look-and-say basal readers, but it is a bigger mistake to retain them
and to continue largely to limit phonics instruction to the
presentations in, and worksheets accompanying the look-and-say basal
readers at Brooks Hill. I realize there are many goals to accomplish
in very limited time at school, but "[r]eading is the core of the
whole academic program" and the mastery of phonics word recognition
skills is essential to becoming an excellent reader.
"If only basal and phonics instruction were consistently and
carefully designed in support of one another, these conflicts might
disappear, and the situation would be significantly improved.
"However, even this would not provide a total cure. There is a
deeper problem here: As material to be taught or learned, individual
letter-sound correspondences and phonic generalizations are, when
divorced from the rest of the reading situation, inherently difficult.
Moreover, to be useful, individual letter-sound correspondences or
phonic generalizations must not merely be learned, they must be
overlearned such that they are instantly and effortlessly available to
readers. But overlearning requires lots of practice and review and,
therefore, lots of time." Dr. Adams's cited work, p. 114.
"Because the phonics instruction in basal reading programs is so
often mismatched with the rest of the program, thinking teachers may
well downplay it. They may find that the other pages and the stories
of the basal program provide a greater sense of purpose, direction,
and achievement. The structure of the basal program may appear clearer
than that defined by the schedule and progression of phonics lessons.
"The downplaying of phonics instruction may also be traced to
management considerations. The amount of class time that can be spent
on reading is limited. Listening to students' oral reading requires
teacher time, but most phonics activities in workbooks do not. Thus,
from the viewpoint of the teacher, one way to maximize the time
available is to relegate phonics exercises to seatwork.
"For students who already know considerable phonics, this practice
may not be the best solution. For students less well prepared, it may
be a big mistake. Investigators have found repeatedly that the degree
of engagement or attention that students invest in their schoolwork is
directly related to how much they learn. [Citation omitted] Seatwork
is associated with lower levels of engagement and achievement. High
levels of student engagement and classroom achievement are associated
with teacher-led activities. [Citation omitted] In the early
grades, the amount of time students are engaged in teacher-led
instruction on phonics is a strong predictor of their reading
achievement." (Emphasis added.) Dr. Adams's cited work, pp.
111-112.
There appears to be a great urgency in the whole language approach
to expose children very early in the reading program with "connected
text" that is not structured so as to develop good phonics reading
habits. In contrast, in the beginning of a phonics-based program,
usually exposure of the student to irregular words is limited to none
at all, or a very few extremely common words. Initially, the emphasis
is placed on the child reading phonetically pronounced syllables and
short words, using repetition of onsets (letter blends that begin
words) and rhymes, and emphasizing sounding out and successive
blending.
"To a large extent, the instructional value of rimes has been
implicitly recognized in many reading programs. In code-emphasis
programs, words are usually presented with other words sharing the
same rime, and this is true whether or not phonograms were
methodically practiced or explicitly acknowledged in the instructional
plan. Such introduction of words with similar spelling-sound
correspondences allows for new words to be introduced more rapidly. To
the extent that words in a story share spelling-sound patterns, each
may be conquered more easily. [Citation omitted]
"In contrast, within meaning-emphasis [look-and-say] programs,
words are typically selected on the basis of frequency or need, and
rarely on shared rimes. As a consequence, their stories provide less
focused exercise of spelling patterns. In such programs words tend to
be remembered on the basis of such cues as shape, length, and initial
letter. [Citation omitted]" Dr. Adams's cited work, p. 86.
This last paragraph gives a perfect description of the Ladybird
series, which is the foundation of The Brooks Hill School look-and-say
reading program.
"The dilemma is tragic. Teachers give students phonics practice to
enable them to recognize words independently and with sufficient ease
so that their attention and interest can be focused on the meaning of
what they read. At the same time, teachers provide students with
connected text to enable them to understand the purpose and value of
the phonics lessons through applying what they have learned. In
practice, however, it seems that teachers often lose sight of the
goals behind their plans. The initial activities in connected reading
tend to compete with or even to displace the word recognition skills
they were intended, in part, to develop." Dr. Adams's cited work, p.
112. It is important that initial reading activities that promote good
reading habits (phonetic analysis and decoding of words) be selected.
______________
Initial reading activities that are limited to phonetically
pronounced syllables and short words, that repeat onsets and rhymes,
and emphasize the development of phonics skills do not constitute
intellectual crawling; they are well-designed exercises for the proper
development of good reading habits. The overlearning, from the
start, of the good habit of the use of phonics in word recognition
develops a rock solid foundation for the student's lifetime of
skillful reading. After all, the other option is to include
look-and-say word recognition techniques. Those guessing techniques,
taught right from the start in kindergarten at Brooks Hill in the
Ladybird series, are the furthest one can get from intellectual
walking or running. A look-and-say child is given a foundation of sand
on which to build his or her reading life.
I am not suggesting "a narrow focus on the acquisition of discrete
academic skills...to the exclusion of more thought provoking
exploration..." (November 2nd letter, page 1); nor am I suggesting "[s]ingle-minded
concentration of the mechanics of reading and mathematics to the
exclusion of how these subjects can inform or stimulate children's
interest in school." (November 2nd letter, page 2)
The development of the phonics habit is not "passive rote
learning." To the contrary, unlike look-and-say and the Ladybird
series, in phonics instruction typically the child is not told
what a word is and instructed to memorize it by shape. Instead the
child learns the sounds of the letters and letter combinations and
figures out words on his own. Phonics, unlike look-and-say, is
intellectually stimulating and confidence-building. Look-and-say is
memorization and guesswork.
In my October 26, 1992 letter I commented upon the salutary effects
of learning to read and write through phonics on our ability to think
clearly and to analyze with confidence. In his provocative book,
The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the
Development of Western Civilization, Dr. Robert K. Logan, a
physics professor at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed to the
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, argues:
The phonetic alphabet is the most recent of the
three writing systems. It is also the most economical,
with the fewest number of signs, and hence is the most
abstract. It is these properties of the alphabet that
have influenced the development of Western culture and
contributed to what we shall call the "alphabet
effect
Because the alphabet is so much a part of our
information environment, however, we often take its
existence for granted and we are blind to its effects,
much as fish are unaware of the water in which they
swim. The alphabet effect is a subliminal phenomenon.
There is more to using the alphabet than just learning
how to read and write. Using the alphabet, as we shall
soon discover, also entails the ability to: 1) code
and decode, 2) convert auditory signals or sounds into
visual signs, 3) think deductively, 4) classify
information, and 5) order words through the process of
alphabetization. These are the hidden lessons of the
alphabet that are not contained (or at least not
contained to the same degree) in learning the Chinese
writing system. These are also the features of the use
of the phonetic alphabet that give rise to the
alphabet effect.
The extra lessons of alphabetic literacy explain
why school children in North America take just as long
to learn to read and write as Chinese children despite
the fact they have to learn only twenty-six letters
compared with the one thousand basis characters
required to read Chinese. In both China and North
America children begin school at age five and have
learned how to read and write, more or less, by the
time they are eight years old. Western children take
the same time because along with reading and writing
they are learning many other things. What they learn
are the intellectual by-products of the alphabet, such
as abstraction, analysis, rationality, and
classification, which form the essence of the alphabet
effect and the basis for Western abstract scientific
and logical thinking. The use of the phonetic alphabet
helps to explain why Western and Chinese thinking are
so different (abstract and theoretical for the West
versus concrete and practical for the East). Robert K.
Logan, Ph.D., The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of
the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western
Civilization (St. Martin's Press, 1986), pp.
21-22.
______________
To avoid writing on interminably, I am not going to interpret here
and comment upon the other remarks in your letter, except your
reference to professional development videos and the International
Reading Association. Your letter indicates that the Brooks Hill
teachers see professional development videos featuring accepted
leaders in the forefront of an unspecified reading reform movement. If
these videos explain that look-and-say word recognition techniques are
bad and phonics good, then I congratulate you. If they are videos by
whole language proponents, then I ask: what word recognition skills do
they promote?
As far as the International Reading Association is concerned, Dr.
Flesch points out in Why Johnny Still Can't Read (at pp.
112-113) that this organization was one of the signatories of an
"anti-phonics manifesto" as far back as 1977. I would be delighted to
read, however, any materials the Association would make available to
me regarding the look-and-say versus phonics word recognition
controversy.
After the receipt of your November 2nd letter I ordered the
preliminary program for the International Reading Association annual
convention of April 26-30, 1993. To give an historical perspective, I
note that the first president of the International Reading Association
was William S. Gray, mentioned above as the author of the Dick and
Jane look-and-say readers.
The International Reading Association convention itself consisted
of numerous meetings of the thousands of participants including
approximately 27 "institutes," 117 "sessions," 77 meetings in the
"Chapter I Series," 11 "co-sponsored" meetings, 13 research reports,
68 symposia, 49 poster sessions, 45 meetings of special interest
groups, various sessions on International Reading Association
publications, 5 sessions on "outstanding" dissertations, and 76
microworkshops (one of which, "Reading the Earth," was given by the
two Good Hope third grade teachers and Marcia Taylor).
A review of the descriptions of these various meetings reveal a
paucity of discussion about phonics, but a tremendous interest in
whole language. The International Reading Association is clearly in
line with the mainstream methods of teaching reading in the United
States, which are sorely lacking.
Again, Ms Smith, let me express my good wishes for you and all the
teachers and administrators at our school. Shall we start by getting
rid of the Ladybird series?
Cordially,
Edward Haskins Jacobs
cc: Head of School
Members of Board of Trustees
President, Parent Association
Teachers, Lower School
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