Louisa Moats is one of the most important theorists
and researchers writing on reading instruction in the United States at this
time. Her warnings about how whole language ‘lives on’ in the guise of a ‘balanced’
approach should be read carefully by both parents and teachers. Hopefully
the current Nelson enquiry into teaching methods actually in use in Australian
classrooms will take full cognizance of her insights. This essay has been
published on various web sites, and other locations, testifying to its intellectual
power and clarity. This text has been sourced from Gadfly, a consistently
interesting and provocative educational e-zine. GS
Whole
Language Lives On
The Illusion Of ‘Balanced’ Reading Instruction
By Louisa Cook Moats
Foreword
Executive
Summary
Glossary
Introduction
and Summary
What
Is Whole Language?
A
Typical Whole-Language Class
What’s
Wrong with Whole Language?
The
Consequences of Whole Language for Teachers and Children
Whole
Language Persists
What
Next?
Notes
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Foreword
Regular readers of this foundation’s publications and web site know we believe strongly that schools should utilize “best practices” that are supported by scientific research and should eschew classroom methods that do not work. In no domain of education is that contrast more vivid than in teaching young children to read. No domain has been studied more intensely. None has yielded clearer and more definitive findings about what works and what does not. Yet no domain is more vulnerable to the perpetuation of bad ideas and failed methods.
Three things are clear about early reading:
First, it isn’t being handled well in American schools. Four in
ten of our fourth-graders lack basic reading skills. Tens of millions of adults
are weak readers. Millions of children are needlessly classified as “disabled”
when, in fact, their main problem is that nobody taught them to read when they
were five and six years old.
Second, we know what works for nearly all children when it comes
to imparting basic reading skills to them. (The scientific consensus is
admirably summarized in the pages that follow.)
Third, we also know what doesn’t work for most children. It’s
called “whole language.”
Yet whole language persists, despite efforts by policymakers and
reading experts to root it out. Today, though, it often disguises itself, not
using the term “whole language” but, rather, wearing the fig leaf of “balanced”
instruction. A lot of people who have a casual acquaintance with the research
have persuaded themselves that balanced reading instruction means a little of
this, a little of that. Take a cup of phonics from one cupboard, add a
half-pint of whole language from the fridge, and the resulting blend will
succeed with children while avoiding the battles and conflicts of the “reading
wars.” Everyone will be happy, and all will be well.
The problem is that it doesn’t work that way. What’s going on in
many places in the name of “balance” or “consensus” is that the worst practices
of whole language are persisting, continuing to inflict boundless harm on young
children who need to learn to read. How and why that is happening—and how and
why such practices are misguided and harmful—are what this report is about. In
its pages, Louisa Cook Moats describes the whole-language approach; shows why
it doesn’t work and how it has been disproven by careful research; and explains
why it nonetheless persists in practice and what should be done about that.
We don’t kid ourselves. Rooting out failed methods of reading
instruction from
Louisa Moats is currently project director of the National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Early Interventions Project
in
After receiving her doctorate in reading at Harvard, Dr. Moats
worked as a psychologist and consultant with individuals, schools, and
education agencies. She assisted the California State Board of Education in
implementing the California Reading Initiative.
Her recent book, Speech to
Print: Language Essentials for Teachers (Brookes Publishing, 2000), is the
basis for the innovative courses she teaches at the Greenwood Institute in
Putney, Vermont, and Simmons College in Boston. Author of several other books
and numerous journal articles, she currently serves as a national board member
of the International Dyslexia Association.
Readers wishing to
contact Dr. Moats directly may write her at the NICHD Early Interventions
Project, 825 North Capitol Street, NE, 8th Floor, Washington, DC 20002, or
e-mail her at l.moats@worldnet.att.net.
We are honored to dedicate this report to the memory of Jeanne
Sternlicht Chall, who taught not only Louisa Moats but also hundreds of other
reading experts and teachers. Professor (and professor emerita) at the Harvard
Graduate School of Education from 1965 until her death in 1999 at the age of
78, Jeanne Chall was, quite simply, the nation’s foremost authority on how
children learn to read and how to teach them that most basic of basic skills.
Her great book, Learning to
Read: The Great Debate, first published in 1967, was the first to enunciate
clearly the essential elements of the research synthesis that has since been
refined and confirmed by, among others, the National Academy of Sciences, the
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the recent
National Reading Panel.
Endlessly curious, astoundingly prolific, tireless in her pursuit
of the truth and her capacity to propagate it through her many students and
disciples, passionate in her commitment to the effective education of children
(especially disadvantaged youngsters), Jeanne Chall embodied superb research
skills and a rare sense of how to turn scholarship into practice. We’re deeply
grateful for her contribution—and we miss her.
The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation is a private foundation that
supports research, publications, and action projects in elementary/secondary
education reform at the national level and in the
Further information can be obtained from our web site (www.edexcellence.net) or by writing us at
This report is available in full on the Foundation’s web site, and
hard copies can be obtained by calling 1-888-TBF-7474 (single copies are free).
The Foundation is not connected to or sponsored by
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Executive Summary
The whole-language approach to reading instruction continues to be
widely used in the primary grades in
Almost every premise advanced by whole language about how reading
is learned has been contradicted by scientific investigations that have
established the following facts:
* Learning
to read is not a “natural” process. Most children must be taught to read
through a structured and protracted process in which they are made aware of
sounds and the symbols that represent them, and then learn to apply these
skills automatically and attend to meaning.
* Our
alphabetic writing system is not learned simply from exposure to print.
Phonological awareness is primarily responsible for the ability to sound words
out. The ability to use phonics and to sound words out, in turn, is primarily
responsible for the development of context-free word-recognition ability, which
in turn is primarily responsible for the development of the ability to read and
comprehend connected text.
* Spoken
language and written language are very different; mastery of each requires
unique skills.
* The most
important skill in early reading is the ability to read single words completely,
accurately, and fluently.
Despite overwhelming evidence, the reading field rushed to embrace
unfounded whole-language practices between 1975 and 1995. The effects have been
far-reaching, particularly for those students who are most dependent on
effective instruction within the classroom.
Whole language persists today for several reasons. A pervasive lack of rigor in university
education departments has allowed much nonsense to infect reading-research
symposia, courses for teachers, and journals. Many reading programs have
come to covertly embody whole-language principles. Additionally, many state standards
and curricular frameworks still reflect whole-language ideas.
Rooting out whole language from reading classrooms calls for
effort on eight separate fronts:
1. Every state should have language-arts content standards and
curricular frameworks for each grade from kindergarten through third grade that
are explicitly based on solid reading-research findings.
2. State assessments should be calibrated to show the effects of
reading instruction as delineated in well-written state standards.
3. State accountability systems should emphasize the attainment of
grade-appropriate reading, spelling, and writing skills by third grade.
4. States should adopt rigorous licensing exams for new and
veteran teachers alike.
5. Alternative teacher-preparation programs should be encouraged.
6. Traditional teacher-preparation programs of education should
focus on training and retention of effective teachers.
7. State-guided textbook adoptions should focus on the alignment
of the material with research evidence about what works best, and publishers
should be required to show for whom their product works and under what
conditions.
8. Journalists and policymakers need to examine closely
instructional programs and packages offered in the name of “balanced” reading.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Glossary
code-emphasis: An approach to reading instruction in
which lessons are organized around the systematic teaching of letter-sound
correspondences and patterns, and children are taught to sound out words using
phonic knowledge.
graphophonic: A whole-language term that refers to
the written spellings for individual speech sounds, more properly termed
sound-symbol or phoneme-grapheme associations.
holism: The philosophy of teaching reading that
values preservation of the whole word over segmentation of the word or other
language entities into parts or synthesis of the whole from the parts.
morphemes: The smallest meaningful units in
language, such as the prefix, root, and suffix in ob-serv-ance.
orthography: The writing system for a language.
English is an alphabetic, phonemic, and morphemic orthography; Chinese
characters are a logographic orthography.
phonemes: The smallest sound units (consonants
and vowels) that combine to make the word of a language, for example /sh/, /e/,
/l/ in “shell.”
phonological: Having to do with the speech sound
system of a language, including the production and interpretation of the sound
patterns of language.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Introduction and
Summary
In policy circles, the storm over reading instruction would seem
to have calmed.
State agencies, large school districts, and the U.S. Department of
Education all claim to embrace balanced
reading instruction. The concept of balance
implies, in turn, that worthy ideas and practices from both whole-language and
code-emphasis approaches to reading have been successfully integrated into an
eclectic mix that should go down easily with teachers and kids. Educators who
wish to take no stand in the reading wars may safely embrace a little of each
perspective and claim that what they are doing is both based on “the latest
research” and grounded in a philosophical synthesis between two previously
warring positions.
Appearances can be deceiving, however, and painless solutions are
often wrong. Unfortunately, many who pledge allegiance to balanced reading
continue to misunderstand reading development and to deliver poorly conceived,
ineffective instruction. In fact, despite numerous claims by people in the
field, the deep division between reading science and whole-language ideology(1) has not been bridged. Probably it cannot and should not be. In my
view, a marriage of these perspectives is neither possible nor desirable.
It is too easy for practitioners, while endorsing “balance,” to
continue teaching whole language without ever understanding the most important
research findings about reading or incorporating those findings into their
classroom practice. Wrong-headed ideas about reading continue to characterize
textbooks, reading course syllabi, classroom instructional materials, state
language-arts standards, and policy documents.
Here is what reading science actually tells us about effective
literacy instruction:
* All
children need explicit, systematic instruction in phonics and exposure to rich
literature, both fiction and nonfiction.
* Although
children need instruction in phonics in early reading development, even then,
attention to meaning, comprehension strategies, language development, and
writing are essential.
* At all
times, developing children’s interest and pleasure in reading must be as much a
focus as developing their reading skills.(2)
Well-done studies of reading instruction support systematic,
synthetic phonics in which children are taught sound-symbol correspondences
singly, directly, and explicitly.(3)
Further, such studies show that children should be taught directly
how to blend those sound-spellings (such as the /ch/, /i/, and /ck/ in “chick”)
until they can decode almost any unknown word. This instruction should be part
of, and linked to, a complete instructional program that includes phoneme
awareness, plentiful reading to build fluency, vocabulary development, and
guided oral reading to build comprehension.
Note, though, that this prescription is not equivalent to an eclectic combination of whole language and
phonics.
Whole-language approaches by definition minimize or omit direct,
systematic teaching of language structure (phoneme awareness, spelling patterns
and rules, grammar, and so forth) in the name of preserving an unbroken focus
on reading for meaning. To the onlooker, these points may sound trivial; in the
classroom, however, such distinctions have profound consequences.
True, reading policy and practice have been righted to some extent
since the mid-1990s when
Yet resistance to the
Some whole-language defenders claim that they have always advocated teaching both phonics
and comprehension, and thus revision of their understandings about reading is
not necessary.(4)
Others insist that they understand the importance of phonological
skills in early reading, but they then fail to practice or teach them
systematically.(5)
Still others confirm that phonological skills are important for
learning to read, even as they caution teachers that phonemic awareness and
phonics instruction can be dangerous, boring, ineffective, or irrelevant, and
shouldn’t be overdone. Such a tone echoes even through Teaching Children to Read, the recent report of the National
Reading Panel.(6)
Where sound policy is ahead of practice, whole language may appear
to be dying. Inside the classroom, however, it’s not dead at all.
The mission of this paper is to describe what whole language is,
why it is contradicted by scientific studies,(7)
how it continues in education, and what should be done to correct that
situation. So long as whole-language ideas influence classroom practice to any
great extent, students who are most dependent on effective instruction inside
the classroom stand to lose. Recognizing
and confronting bankrupt ideas and practices, even though they are masquerading
under benign terms such as balanced reading,
continues to be an important mission for education leaders and policymakers.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
What
Is Whole Language?
Even at its most popular, whole language defied definition by
those who attempted to study it objectively.(8)
Among the publications of whole-language advocates, one finds agreement that it
is primarily a system of beliefs and intentions.(9) It
embraces a set of practices in teaching reading and writing that are derived
from a more general philosophy of teaching and learning.
Relying on theory derived largely from introspection into their
own mental processes, Ken Goodman and Frank Smith in the late 1960s advanced
the notion that meaning and purpose should be the salient goals in early
reading instruction.(10)
Observing that adults appear to process the written word without
recoding it letter by letter or sound by sound, and claiming that children
should learn to read as naturally as they learn to speak, Smith asserted that the
decomposition of words into sounds was pointless; that attention to letters was
unnecessary and meaningless; that letter-sound correspondences were
“jabberwocky” to be avoided; and that skill development was largely boring,
repetitive, nonsensical, and unrelated to developing real readers.(11)
Smith, Goodman, and their disciples pushed ideas that were eagerly
and readily embraced by progressive educators turned off by drab basal readers,(12) mechanistic drills, and the knowledge that the basal
readers in use had not solved all of their instructional challenges. Teachers
were persuaded that the cause of most reading failure was insufficient emphasis
on reading real books for real purposes. By the mid-1980s, schools were ready
to throw out basal readers, phonics workbooks, spelling programs, and other
“canned” material so that teachers could create individualized reading
instruction with “authentic” children’s literature.
The International Reading Association (IRA) and the National
Council for Teachers of English vigorously promoted the philosophy and
practices of whole language. Publishing houses, university reading departments,
state education agencies, and professional development providers jumped on the
bandwagon. The ideas were disseminated through Internet connections, teacher
journals that do not require articles to meet standards of scientific accuracy,
courses and textbooks used in schools of education, and instructional manuals
for teachers. Recently published books and articles(13) continue to characterize the orthodoxy of whole language
as follows:
Children and adults use
similar strategies to read and spell. Whole-language believers assert that children process print and
comprehend it like adults. Children will learn from imitating adult reading.
The teacher is a model of adult literacy, and modeling is a method for teaching
children. Thus, the teacher is encouraged to sit in front of the class and to
be seen reading silently for a portion of each day in which the children are
also to be reading silently or in pairs. The teacher is also to read aloud,
pointing to the print in a big book, as children follow along. The children may
point to the words as the teacher reads them. The passage is read several times
this way until it is memorized.(14)
Although this traditional practice may be worthwhile, “shared
reading” in whole language has replaced instruction in how to read the words
sound by sound. Children are expected to figure out for themselves the
connection between the letters and the sounds of the words as the adult points
to them. There is no further explication of how the letters represent words.
The assumption that children learn like adults also translates into student
choice of reading material, a focus on advanced reading comprehension strategies
for young children, avoidance of reading groups or sequential oral reading, and
ample time in school for independent silent reading in the company of others
(Drop Everything and Read!).
These activities are the instructional core of a whole-language
curriculum, not ancillary components.
Spelling, like reading, is meant to happen by having children
imitate the stages and characteristics of adult writing. Debbie Powell and
David Hornsby, in a best-selling handbook for teachers, state, “We feel that
there are no stages of development in terms of the strategies spellers use
because the strategies beginning spellers use are the same as those of mature
spellers.”(15)
Learning to read and
spell is just like learning to talk. All language is naturally acquired, according to whole-language
devotees.
Phoneme awareness,
phonics, spelling, punctuation, and other skills of written language can be
learned "naturally." "Most children will learn to read and write with no explicit
instruction in phonics and spelling," whole-language experts advise.(16)
The word “naturally,” which connotes a wholesome and spontaneous
process unspoiled by human tampering, means without deliberate practice.
Natural learning is playful, incidental, and easy. Phoneme awareness will
happen if children play rhyming games; spelling will happen if children write;
word recognition will happen if children follow the print as the adult reads;
and comprehension will happen if children’s curiosity is piqued. The teacher
needn’t follow a structure or sequence; she is to share, guide, and facilitate
as the child discovers how reading works. Powell and Hornsby state, “Proficient
readers easily recognize most words and gain meaning usually without even
attending to all of the letters or even all of the words, because their ability
to decode is largely automatic and subconscious.”(17)
Whole-language advocates believe that teachers who teach component skills and
who make reading a conscious process may spoil the reading experience for
children.
Teach phonics and
spelling on an "as needed" basis, that is, after students make errors
on words while they are reading and writing. Phonics is allowed into the whole-language classroom, but
it is not taught first, foremost, or formally. The teacher is to observe errors
(“miscues”) children are making while reading text and is then to provide
“mini-lessons” on the word pattern or sound-symbol correspondence the children
missed while reading.(18)
The children’s errors dictate what will be taught. The goal is to
read a specific text, not to learn skills that may generalize to all texts.
Too much phonics
instruction is harmful to children, so keep it unobtrusive. In whole-language orthodoxy, phonics
is seen as a distraction, an interference that prevents real reading from
occurring. Phonics and other instruction in component reading skills are
necessary evils that divert children from reading authentic text and thinking
creatively about its content. Teachers are warned that if children receive too
much phonics instruction outside of a meaningful context, they will become
“word callers” who do not understand the real purposes of reading. Skill
lessons are to be unobtrusive, brief, and, if possible, disguised. Teaching
phonics should be a covert operation.
Children should construct
their own insights into language. The skilled whole-language teacher is coach, model, and guide.
Concepts are to be discovered, not presented, because discovery, according to
the whole-language canon, promotes higher-order thinking.
If the goal of the lesson is to have children read words with /o/
and notice all the ways the /o/ sound is spelled, the teacher does not provide
the list of the spellings for /o/, examples of each, and planned practice to
ensure their recognition. Children are to construct their own knowledge of /o/.
The children may be asked to search a text for all the words with the /o/ sound
and then group them according to their spellings (ow, oe, oa, o, ough, and so
forth).
Although active engagement is a principle of good teaching, the
discovery approach to language skills can be imprecise and unnecessarily time
consuming. It should not replace direct teaching of concepts.
It is unimportant to
teach strategies for reading single words out of context. According to whole-language doctrine,
the point of reading is not to read individual words; it is to understand
connected text. This truism has been translated into a prohibition against
teaching or testing the child’s ability to read single words out of context.
Work on word recognition is minimized in favor of literature-related
activities, even in the beginning stages when children cannot yet read.
Accuracy in word reading is not valued for its own sake. Children’s reading
errors (miscues) are accepted if the error is the same part of speech as the
misread word or if it does not change the meaning of the passage.(19) The teacher is directed away from the importance of
accurate word reading out of context.
Good readers can
recognize words on the basis of a few sound-symbol correspondences, such as
beginning and ending consonants, and don't really need to know the inner
details, such as vowels.
In whole language, reading is viewed as a process of predicting words on the
basis of meaning and context.
The good reader samples the print, and detailed decoding of all
the sounds in words is unnecessary. As a consequence, teaching all the
letter-sound correspondences, and teaching children the skills to sound out an
entire word, is unnecessary.
Thus, many so-called phonics activities in whole-language
classrooms emphasize the decoding of initial consonants (and maybe end
consonants) and word families (that is, the part of a syllable composed of the
vowel and all the consonants that follow it, such as -ild, -ank, or -odge), but
complete knowledge of the sound-symbol system is not emphasized.
When a child is reading
and cannot recognize a word, the child should be asked to guess at the word
from context and then sound the word out if guessing does not yield a word that
would make sense in the sentence. On a third-grade teacher’s wall, in a classroom in
If a word in a sentence is unfamiliar, read to the end of the
sentence. Skip the word you do not know. After reading the sentence, use the context to guess the word. If you still
do not know the word, do the following:
Think about your letter sounds.
Think about word parts.
Try to say the word. (Does it make sense?)
If you still don’t know the word, look it up in the glossary or
dictionary.
Ask someone for help.
Whole language dictates that recognition of unknown words is a
function of three “cueing systems.”(20) Semantic,
syntactic, and graphophonic processes are depicted as the enablers of
functional reading, although the graphophonic cueing system (an invention of
whole language, not of cognitive psychology) plays a minor, back-up role in
whole-language models of reading. The
sense of the passage is supposed to drive word recognition. The
graphophonic cueing system is to be deployed as a strategy of last resort if
context-based guessing has not yielded the correct word.(21) The problem with the model, however, is that skilled
readers do not rely on context to read words. They recognize them out of
context by their letter-sound correspondences.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
A
Typical Whole-Language Class(22)
A first- or second-grade classroom in which whole-language ideas
predominate is not the traditional class of bygone years. It has clusters of
desks, not rows; the space is not arranged so that children focus on the
teacher in front of the class. Learning centers and clusters of desks lend themselves
to individualized, self-directed, and small-group learning. A classroom library
corner has many books of different genres and a comfortable place to read.
Little use is made of the chalkboard. Paper charts prevail. There is a
prominent “word wall,” on which high-frequency vocabulary is placed in
alphabetical order. Words such as off,
on, orange, open, our, and oil might all be placed under Oo. The varying sounds of
those letter correspondences are irrelevant to the presentation.
Children gather on the floor around the teacher’s chair during
reading instruction. The teacher introduces a lesson with a “shared” reading;
she previews a selection with the youngsters by taking a “picture walk” through
the book’s illustrations. She introduces new vocabulary meanings needed to
understand the story, but there is little reference to word structure. The five
to ten new words on the vocabulary list are presented as if they should be
recognized on sight, by their appearance and context. Vocabulary words are selected
for their meanings, not for their sound-symbol correspondences, so they are not
used to reinforce a lesson on sound-symbol decoding. The teacher reads the book
aloud as she follows the text with her finger. She leads a discussion about the
story, eliciting from children their prior knowledge of the content and their
questions about the content. After the story, she teaches a phonics mini-lesson
on a family of words with similar spellings, by listing them and asking the
children to read them aloud. The words are chosen because of their use in the
text.
More readings of the text follow on subsequent days. By week’s
end, children may have read the same text three or four times, the first few by
choral reading and patterning. When children take turns reading, they are
encouraged to refer to the sense of the text to figure out unknown words. The
teacher gives cues such as, “what would make sense there,” “look at the
pictures,” “it rhymes with ____,” or “look at the beginning sound,” when a
child is stuck. Assignments often involve writing or illustrating a personal
response to the text in a reader-response journal. Spelling instruction is
given on those words that the children misspell, after they have been used in
writing. During instruction, the children are asked to invent what they think
the likely spelling of a word might be (Have a go!) before the teacher gives
them the correct spelling. There are no spelling lists or spelling workbooks.
Children are expected to collaborate as they work on reading and writing
projects. This is a constructivist environment: knowledge and truth will be
discovered if teachers put children in the lead.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
What’s
Wrong with Whole Language?
Almost every premise
advanced by whole language proponents about how reading is learned has been
contradicted by scientific investigations. Almost every practice stemming from these premises has
been less successful with groups of both normally developing and reading-disabled
children than practices based on reading science. As Michael Pressley, editor
of Educational Psychologist, has
remarked, “At best, much of whole-language thinking...is obsolete, and at
worst, much of it never was well informed about children and their intellectual
development….”(23)
Not all consequences of whole-language ideology have been
detrimental; mistaken beliefs about early reading acquisition have also been
associated with some worthwhile ideas
and sensible strategies such as encouraging student self-assessment, using
classic children’s literature, reading aloud daily, organizing collaborative
groups, and involving parents and students in literacy homework.(24) Most educators
commonly hold such ideas.
They are not the core
ideas on which whole language was constructed, however, and they are not the
intellectual property of whole language. Whole-language beliefs about the
psychology of basic reading instruction, and the practices that have been based
on those beliefs, are misinformed in theory and ineffective in application.
The National Reading Panel’s Teaching
Children to Read reviews once more what is
known about the psychology of reading and reading instruction. It does not
evaluate whole language directly, but it does synthesize evidence on critical
components of teaching reading. It resonates with several other reputable
reviews of research, including Marilyn Adams’s Beginning to Read, Jack Fletcher and G. Reid Lyon’s summary of the
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s studies of reading,(25) and Catherine Snow, M. Susan Burns, and Peg Griffin’s Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young
Children. The tenets and practices of whole language are contradicted by
the following facts:
Learning to read is not
natural.(26) Large numbers of children fail to
learn to read with fluency, accuracy, and comprehension. Alphabetic writing
systems are a late cultural invention for which we are not biologically
specialized. Only some languages have written symbol systems, and many of those
writing systems represent whole words, concepts (morphemes), or syllables. Only
some of the most recently invented writing systems represent individual speech
sounds. Spoken language may be hard-wired in the human brain, but written
language is an acquired skill that requires special, unnatural insights about
the sounds in words. Most children must be taught to read through a rather
protracted process in which they are made aware of sounds and the symbols that
represent them, and then learn to apply these skills automatically and attend
to meaning.
The alphabetic principle is not learned simply from exposure to
print. Children can understand our alphabetic
writing system if they have acquired a more fundamental understanding called
phonological awareness.
That is, in order to read new words written with an alphabetic system, children
need to be able to map the symbols to the speech sounds that make up spoken
words. Children who lack the required insights often are unable to read or
spell well, even if they are reasonably intelligent or acquainted with the
information in books. Phonological awareness is primarily responsible for the
development of the ability to sound words out. The ability to use phonics and
to sound words out, in turn, is primarily responsible for the development of
context-free word-recognition ability. Context-free word-recognition ability,
moreover, is primarily responsible for the development of the ability to read
connected text and comprehend it.(27)
Spoken language and
written language are very different, and mastery of each requires unique skills
and proficiencies.
Many children who are challenged in learning written language are relatively
proficient in spoken language. Spoken language systems are learned
automatically, without conscious instruction, when children share experiences
and language with caretakers. Spoken language comprises deeply networked rules
for sound production and sentence construction that are devised and learned by
a community of language speakers. Written languages, in contrast, are arbitrary
systems that use a variety of symbols for words, concepts, syllables, and
sounds. Written English, in contrast to spoken English, uses a much wider
vocabulary and more complex, formal syntax to convey meaning.
The most important skill
in the beginning stages of reading is the ability to read single words
completely, accurately, and fluently. Most of the variability in
reading achievement at the end of first grade is accounted for by children’s
ability to decode words out of context, using knowledge of phonic
correspondences. The most common and fundamental characteristic of poor
text reading is the inability to read single words accurately and fluently.
Skill in word reading in turn depends on both phonological awareness and the
development of rapid associations of speech to print.(29)
Context is not the
primary factor in word recognition. Context is valuable for deciphering the meanings and uses for
unfamiliar words once they have been named or decoded. It also helps to resolve
ambiguities that arise from reading words such as content, which can be a noun or predicate adjective (or verb).
Words are recognized, however, from detailed perceptual data at the average
rate of about five words per second. We see what is printed, every letter of
it, and our minds recognize letters, sounds, and word pieces simultaneously and
interactively as we search for meaning. Good readers are more aware of the
details of language structure and more attentive to internal aspects of words
than poor readers. They are less likely to use a guessing strategy. In fact,
guessing from context leads to egregious errors; only 10 to 25 percent of words
are correctly guessed.(30) Recognizing words such as scarred and scared, content and context, and devoid and devout require
precise letter-wise decoding skill.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The
Consequences of Whole Language for Teachers and Children
Between 1975 and 1995, an entire field rushed to embrace a set of
unfounded ideas and practices without any evidence that children would learn to
read better, earlier, or in greater numbers than they had with the basal
readers in use at the time.(31)
Although whole-language believers shunned basal readers in favor
of reading programs created by individual teachers from children’s books,
publishers swiftly jumped on the bandwagon to produce whole-language materials
for schools. The California Language Arts Frameworks of 1987 were especially
influential in driving publishers away from basic-skill instruction.(32) Basal programs were marketed and sold, but now without
emphasis (or even any lessons) on direct teaching of phonemic awareness,
spelling, phonics, grammar, handwriting, or other language skills.
Predictable or repetitive text that children could memorize was
preferred to stories that required children to sound words out based on what
they had been taught. Beyond classroom reading instruction itself, however,
whole language has had far-reaching—it is not too much to say
corrupting—effects:
Rejection of reliable,
valid measures of achievement. In order to justify its love affair with whole language in the
face of little or no evidence for its positive results, the field of reading
education began to disavow scientific methodology and objective measurement.(33) Between 1989, when Steven Stahl and P.D. Miller conducted
their first major review of the evidence, and 1994, when they updated their
analysis, twenty of forty-five studies that purportedly evaluated the
effectiveness of whole language declined to use or report any standardized
measure of reading achievement. Instead of acknowledging that objective
assessments were proving them wrong, many reading-education researchers
rejected objectivity itself. Those invested in defending whole language
criticized traditional achievement tests as unauthentic and replaced them with
measures of motivation, enjoyment, or self-esteem. Attitude, not achievement,
became the outcome of concern in the reading education research community. A
positive attitude toward reading was expected to lead children automatically
into more and better reading. Many reading-education researchers replaced
standardized, reliable, validated assessments with alternative assessments that
probed attitudes. The goal of teaching
became love of reading, not the ability to read. The effects of
whole-language methods on student achievement were thus impossible to
determine.
Teachers were easily persuaded that the science of behavioral
measurement had little to offer them. The schools of education did not require
their own students to understand concepts such as behavioral sampling,
correlation, prediction, reliability, validity, and normative standards.
Teachers were seldom obliged to inform instruction with samples of critical
component reading skills: phoneme blending and segmentation, sound-symbol
association knowledge, decoding and spelling of regular spelling patterns,
text-reading fluency, or vocabulary knowledge. Instead, teachers were and are
taught to use forms of reading assessment that have little reliability or
correspondence to research-validated outcome measures. The goal in whole language
is to measure the process of reading, not the product of instruction—a
difficult mission to accomplish even when the reading process is well
conceived.
Miscue analysis and “running records” have been and continue to be
widely promoted whole-language tools.(34) Even
within the past year (1999),
Error analysis has value when based on a defensible understanding
of reading and spelling processes. It is worthwhile if it helps us determine
what kind of problem a child has, what kind of information that child needs,
and what kind of instructional activities are likely to work well. Miscues and
running records do not meet these criteria.
Minimizing the importance
of language structure for teachers and students. In the whole-language context, neither
students nor teachers need to know specific concepts about the structure of
spoken or written language. Speech sounds, syllables, spelling correspondences,
sentence parts, grammatical categories, and cohesive devices are minimized
together. If holism and contextual learning are valued, then language parts
become unimportant. If students are to learn reading and spelling through
imprinting, modeling, and discovery, then teachers need not know explicit
linguistic analysis. If concepts can be taught minimally in mini-lessons, then
they do not need to be defined with precision, understood in relation to one
another, or taught methodically. Pre-determined sequences, selection of
component skills, and planned lessons in which skills are systematically
developed are unnecessary. Teachers can
get by knowing very little about their language; their own knowledge gaps will
not be exposed during a whole-language lesson.
Cursory treatment of linguistic concepts continues to be applauded
in descriptions of well-taught whole-language lessons. A recent article in the
IRA journal, The Reading Teacher,(37) describes an exemplary whole-language teacher at work.
She is helping a child sound out the word happy.(38) The teacher informs the child that the sounds are /h/ /a/
/p/ /p/ /y/. This information, however, is inaccurate: the doubled letter in happy is a spelling convention. There is
only one /p/ sound in happy. The letter is doubled because of the
juncture of two syllables, the first of which has a short vowel. This
student has been misinformed by the teacher’s explanation, but the teacher (and
The
The same teacher goes on to help another child decode nose. She asks him what letters the word
begins and ends with (n and e). Then, the teacher asks the child
what the letter e stands for, and the
child says /e/. Next, the teacher says that the e is silent and points to the other vowel, o. She tells the child that the o
will be long and will say its name. Finally, she instructs the child to look at
the picture and guess what word starts with an n. The child doesn’t respond. The teacher says it starts with /n/
and points to the picture; the child finally gets nose. The aversion to direct
teaching of language, based on accurate analyses of phonology and orthography,
persists.
Knowing the speech sounds in apple
or happy and the syllable conventions
that underlie such spellings is uncommon among recently trained reading
teachers.(39) Knowing how to teach a language concept
so that children are led systematically to grasp it is even less common. These
gaps in professional content knowledge adversely affect the children. In
interchanges such as those just cited, the
students have been short-changed; the information provided to them is
incomplete, inaccurate linguistically, and ineffectively taught. The
students’ propensity to guess from partial understanding is reinforced because they have not been taught systematically
how the spelling patterns work or practiced the associations so that they can
be used successfully at the next encounter. They have been encouraged to
guess from context because they do not have the skill to read the new words
independently. Of greatest concern, the leading journal for teachers of reading
portrays such instruction as exemplary because it minimizes the teaching of
word analysis and focuses the child on meaning.
Misunderstanding of the
role of skills in competent performance. A most unfortunate legacy of whole language has been the
denigration of skill building and skill instruction in the name of holism. The word skills has been repeatedly associated with pejorative terms such as
boring, isolated, meaningless,
and dreadful in whole-language
rhetoric. Skill building is never
described as necessary, engaging, satisfying, or enjoyable, or identified as the essential base on which
expert performance is constructed. Out on this limb, the field of reading
education has rejected major premises of cognitive psychology. John Anderson, a
cognitive psychologist at
“The theory [of knowledge
acquisition] implies that acquiring competence is very much a labor-intensive
business in which one must acquire one-by-one all the knowledge components.
This flies very much in the face of current educational fashion, but…this
educational fashion is having a very deleterious effect on education. We need
to recognize and respect the effort that goes into acquiring competence.”(40)
Competence, he explains, is more than the sum of its parts: it
depends on deployment of the right information for the right purpose at the
right time. Having at one’s disposal a large storehouse of organized and
defined information is prerequisite for complex applications of facts,
concepts, and skills.(41)
Equation of teacher
empowerment with freedom from structured curricula. Professions
are generally defined by the knowledge and skill that their members share.
The public interest depends on such definition and the ability of the
professional community to regulate itself accordingly. Whole language, however, promotes the ideas of teacher independence and
self-sufficiency. Instead of encouraging the development or dissemination
of better instructional programs, or encouraging teachers to apply best
practices validated by others, whole-language
educators encouraged teachers to invent their own individual curricula and to
rely primarily on their own experience to make instructional decisions.
Even now, reading education professors in the U.S. continue to rail against
education policies that impose constraints or directives (“mandates”) about
curriculum or methods, complaining that the loss of control by classroom
teachers over what they do in their classes is a threat to both democracy and
professionalism.(42) In the climate perpetuated by such
rhetoric, teachers’ incentives to collaborate, to replicate best practices, or
to study research are diminished.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Whole
Language Persists
The stubborn persistence of unsupported ideas and practices in reading education (indeed, all of education) puzzles and dismays many people outside the field. When a field continues to value philosophy over evidence that certain practices benefit children more than others, we must ask why this is the case.
Ideology is valued over
evidence. One
straightforward explanation for the nonsense that infects reading education
must be a pervasive lack of rigor in academic education departments. In
reading, anyone who publishes in any form is customarily referred to as a
“researcher” in conference programs.
Reading-research journals publish articles that defy any
reasonable standard of acceptable methodology. For example, a recent issue of The Reading Teacher (Spring 2000)
includes an article in which “researchers” visited eight preselected
whole-language classrooms to document what the teachers were doing. Only
teachers who used methods consistent with whole-language theory were included
in the study.(43)
The a priori assumption
communicated to readers was that good teachers are whole-language teachers. The
number of citations on reading screened by the National Reading Panel (100,000)
is many times larger than the few dozen studies that ultimately informed the
panel’s conclusions.(44) The number of scientifically credible
studies of reading instruction is relatively small in comparison to the volume
of work that is done.
Unfortunately, lack of rigor and disrespect for evidence in
reading education are reinforced by the passivity of education leaders who feel
that any idea that can muster a vigorous advocate is legitimate and deserves to
be aired. The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development published
a monograph in 1998 entitled Perspectives
in Reading Instruction. Rather than taking a stand about which points of
view were grounded in evidence and which were without foundation, the ASCD
published a diatribe by Ken Goodman against National Institutes of Health
research and a marketing piece by Marie Carbo (a proponent of Learning Styles,
another misinformed approach without scientific underpinnings).(45) These coexist in one slim volume with essays by more
credible writers, all prefaced with the comment that “multiple voices…must be
heard.”(46) In October 1999, Educational Leadership included an article entitled “Whole Language
Works: Sixty Years of Research,” by three authors who caricature code-emphasis
instruction (“‘Decodable text’ is the new trend in reading”(47)); make statements that contradict every authoritative
research summary on reading (“[C]ontemporary research on early reading strongly
endorses a holistic approach”(48)); and
misrepresent the views of authors who are referenced, such as Carol Chomsky.(49) The field would be better served by editorial policies
that result in the reader’s enlightenment, rather than policies that contribute
to the reader’s confusion.
Whole-language incarnations, such as Reading Recovery, covertly
embody whole-language ideas. The success and persistence of Reading Recovery (RR) exemplifies
the power of ideology over evidence. RR
is an expensive, first grade, one-on-one tutorial intervention approach that is
compatible with whole-language ideas. It is promoted by a parent institute
in
Their findings, obtained under controlled and well-designed
conditions of scientific investigation, were consistent with previous studies. Success in RR was a function of students’
entering phonological abilities. Participation in the program did not eliminate
or reduce phonological deficiencies. Students with phonological difficulties
did poorly. The program did not produce accelerated reading performance. One
year later, the children’s reading was about one year below age-appropriate
levels, even though they had progressed through the sequence of books used in
the RR program. Children who had not progressed well showed declines in reading
self-concept after RR, more negative perceptions of their reading and spelling
ability, and problems with academic self-concept a year later. They also had
more classroom behavior problems. In conjunction with previous studies,
Tunmer’s group concluded that RR may be more effective if greater emphasis is
placed on development and use of word-level skills and strategies involving phonological
information. Tunmer has reported several
times that direct, systematic instruction in sound-symbol decoding is more
effective than the incidental instruction used by RR. In one study, the RR
apcproach was 37 percent less efficient than the direct, systematic approach
because letter-to-phoneme knowledge is primarily responsible for driving the
development of word-recognition skills.(53)
Have these reports caused RR’s promoters or consumers to change their rationale, methodology, student-assessment practices, or requirements for teacher training? Evidently not. Although individuals and training sites may differ, the official line from RR leaders remains virtually the same as it has been for two decades. The institute continues to teach a flawed conception of reading psychology and a methodology that would be significantly improved if it were aligned with the results of research. Regrettably, this has not happened. The resistance to change is difficult to understand, but it may simply reflect the expectation by RR leaders that consumers will not care about the research. So far, they have been right.
State standards and
frameworks continue to reflect whole-language ideas. States’ academic standards commonly
reflect prevailing educational philosophies. Once established, they change
slowly. Meanwhile, they influence practice.
Even states with generally praiseworthy standards for language
arts can sometimes slip when it comes to essentials of early reading
instruction. Massachusetts’ new standards, for example, are excellent for third
grade and up, as judged by several reviews by Achieve, Inc. and the Thomas B.
Fordham Foundation.(55) Students are expected to know language
structure at several levels, and to read a broad sampling of worthwhile
literature. The early literacy portion of the document, however, includes a
sample lesson that could be taken from a whole-language handbook.(56) In this literature-focused lesson, there is no
instruction in sound-symbol relationships beyond initial consonant decoding, no
instruction in left-to-right sound blending, and no control over the
sound-symbol patterns taught. It is not
explained how the children should learn to read other than guessing from
context and an initial consonant. Commendable though the
------------------------------------------------------------------------
What
Next?
Advocates for education reform and improvement may be surprised that we have not slain the monster of misinformed reading instruction. After all, a half dozen major consensus documents on the research evidence about reading have been widely distributed, digested, and converted into policy. Class-room practice and academic education, however, are not changing fast enough for us to claim that evidence-based teaching will predominate in our schools at any time soon.
Whole language may have
been disproven by scholars, but it still lurks in many corners of education
practice: in textbooks for teachers, instructional materials for classroom use,
teacher-licensing requirements, courses and standards for teacher education,
and the professional context in which teachers work. As a consequence, too many
children are not doing as well as they could be, and others are falling by the
wayside in beginning reading, never to get on track, even though this failure
is largely preventable.
Not all children are adversely affected, to be sure; many children
learn to read in spite of how we teach them, and many teachers are teaching reading well. Nevertheless,
it is those children who depend the most on valid and effective instruction in
school, including minority, low-income, immigrant, and inner-city children, who
are most likely to be harmed by persistent whole-language ideology and its
manifestations in practice.(57)
Confronting and changing the legacy of whole language is a mission
yet to be accomplished. Righting reading instruction calls for continuing
effort on eight separate fronts.
1. Every
state should have language-arts content standards and curricular frameworks for
each grade from kindergarten through third grade. These should be explicitly
based on research findings on phonemic awareness, alphabetic skills, reading
fluency, beginning and advanced decoding skills, vocabulary, and comprehension.
2. State
assessments of reading and language arts should be calibrated to show the
effects of reading instruction as delineated in well-written state standards.
3. State
accountability systems should emphasize the attainment of grade-appropriate
reading, spelling, and writing skills by third grade, so that actions can be
taken quickly to (a) provide meaningful and effective remediation to the
students who have fallen by the wayside; and (b) reorganize or disband failing
schools or provide parents with alternative placements for their children. To
this end, the efforts of states such as
4. States
should adopt rigorous licensing examinations for new teachers and veteran
teachers alike. States must be clear and specific in their delineation of
research-based practice, so that little incentive remains for the perpetuation
of unsupported ideas such as those of whole language. Knowledge of reading
development, language structure, reading pedagogy, and assessments would seem
minimally necessary for effective, informed instruction. Licensing exams should
probe actual mastery of specific components of reading instruction. Classroom
practices at the school level should be based on best practice and be open to
independent review by others who are knowledgeable about the issues.
5. Because
state university reading departments have been the slowest to change and the
most tenaciously loyal to whole-language ideology, alternative
teacher-preparation programs should be encouraged and supported. If disillusioned
consumers are able to look elsewhere for teachers who can pass a licensing exam
and demonstrate their competence with students, entrenched academic departments
may feel more pressure to improve.
6. Traditional
schools and programs of education should be organized differently. Professional
preparation of effective teachers should be their focus. Faculty tenure would
be abolished. Faculty would maintain positions if they could successfully
collaborate with a team in the preparation of competent teachers. Professional
schools for teaching would be partners with departments of core disciplines
including linguistics and psychology. Faculty members would be eligible for
their role if they themselves had been successful practitioners in K-12 classrooms.
7. State-guided
textbook adoptions should be regulated according to the alignment of the
material with research evidence for what works best. Publishers should be
required to show for whom their product works and under what conditions.
8. Journalists
and policymakers need to untie the string and closely examine the innards of
instructional programs and packages that are offered in the name of “balanced”
reading.
What children bring to the printed page, and to the task of
writing, is knowledge of spoken language. What must be learned is knowledge of
the written symbols that represent speech, and the ability to use those
productively. Knowing the difference between sacks and sax, past and passed, or their and there, or knowing that antique says “anteek,” requires language
awareness and attention to detail. Students who are not taught properly are
less able to sound out a new word when it is encountered, slower and less
accurate at reading whole words, less able to spell, less able to interpret
punctuation and sentence meaning, and less able to learn new vocabulary words
from reading them in context. Students deserve to have sufficient understanding
of the language they speak, read, and write so that they can use it to
communicate well. Ironically, whole language has stood in the way of this
accomplishment for many years. Today, its influence is still with us. If
sufficient attention is promptly given to changes such as those outlined above,
tomorrow may yet be a different story.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Notes
1 See Marilyn J. Adams, “The Progress of the Whole-Language
Debate,” Educational Psychologist 29,
no. 4 (1994): 217-222; and Michael Pressley, “State of the Science
Primary-Grades Reading Instruction or Whole Language?” Educational Psychologist 29, no. 4 (1994): 211-215.
2 See Learning First
3 See National
4 See Penny A. Freppon and Karin L. Dahl, “Balanced Instruction:
Insights and Considerations,” Reading
Research Quarterly 33, no. 2 (1998): 240-251.
5 See Ellen McIntyre and Michael Pressley, eds., Balanced Instruction: Strategies and Skills
in Whole Language (Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon, 1996).
6 The National
7 See Marilyn Adams, Beginning
to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1990); Michael Pressley, Reading
Instruction that Works: The Case for Balanced Teaching (New York: Guilford
Press, 1998); and Catherine E. Snow, M. Susan Burns, and Peg Griffin, eds., Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young
Children (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1998).
8 See Steven A. Stahl and P.D. Miller, “Whole Language and
Language Experience Approaches for Beginning Reading: A Quantitative Research
Synthesis,” Review of Educational
Research 59, no.1 (1989): 87-116.
9 See Karin L. Dahl and Patricia L. Scharer, “Phonics Teaching and
Learning in Whole Language Classrooms: New Evidence from Research,” The Reading Teacher 53 (2000): 584-594;
Harvey Daniels, Steve Zemelman, and Marilyn Bizar, “Whole Language Works: Sixty
Years of Research,” Educational
Leadership 57, no. 2 (2000): 32-37; Kenneth S. Goodman, Phonics Phacts
(Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993); Kenneth S. Goodman, What's Whole in Whole Language? (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1986);
Margaret Moustafa, Beyond Traditional Phonics (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann,
1997); and Constance Weaver, “On Research and the Teaching of Phonics,” in Creating Support for Effective Literacy
Education, ed. Constance Weaver, Lorraine Fillmeister-Krause, and Grace
Vento-Zogby (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1996), xv-xvii.
10 Kenneth S. Goodman, “
11 Frank Smith, Understanding
Reading: A Psycholinguistic Analysis of
12 A basal reader is a classroom reading textbook. It usually
includes stories of graded difficulty, some control over the vocabulary that is
introduced, and supportive lessons in various skills necessary for learning to
read. Classrooms often have the same text for every student, even though
students are grouped according to their reading levels for smaller group
instruction.
13 See Daniels, Zemelman, and Bizar, “Whole Language Works”; and
Debbie Powell and David Hornsby, Learning
Phonics and Spelling in a Whole Language Classroom (New York: Scholastic
Professional Books, 1993).
14
15 Powell and Hornsby, Learning
Phonics and Spelling, 23.
16 Ibid., 43.
17 Ibid., 21.
18 The “mini-lesson” approach is pervasive in the products of
major classroom basal reading programs.
19 See Kerry Hempenstall, “Miscue Analysis: A Critique,”
20 Marilyn J.
21 In the California Reading Language Arts Framework, which was
written under Bill Honig’s term as state superintendent of public instruction
in 1987, and which was in effect until 1997, teachers were advised to cover up
parts of words that children misread in order to encourage guessing from
context. Sounding out was characterized as the strategy of last resort.
22 A whole-language lesson and contrasting methods are portrayed
in Snow, Burns, and
23 Pressley, “State-of-the-Science,” 213.
24 See Daniels, Zemelman, and Bizar, “Whole Language Works,”
32-37.
25 Jack M. Fletcher and G. Reid Lyon, “
26 See Alvin M. Liberman, “The
27 See Linnea Ehri, “Phases of Development in Learning to Read
Words by Sight,” Journal of Research in
28 See Liberman, “The
29 See Fletcher and Lyon, “
30 See Phil Gough, “The Beginning of Decoding,”
31 See Steven Stahl, M.C. McKenna, and J.R. Pagnucco, “The Effects
of Whole Language Instruction: An Update and Reappraisal,” Educational Psychologist 29, no. 4 (1994): 175-185; and Steven
Stahl and P.D. Miller, “Whole Language and Language Experience Approaches.”
32 Bill Honig, who was superintendent of public instruction in
33 E.D. Hirsch, in The
Schools We Need: Why We Don't Have Them (New York: Doubleday, 1996), p.
176, calls this “shooting the messenger” in his chapter on test evasion.
34 See Marie M. Clay, The
Early Detection of Reading Difficulties: A Diagnostic Survey and Reading
Recovery Procedures (Auckland: Heinemann Educational Books, 1985); and
Kenneth S. Goodman, Miscue Analysis:
Applications to Reading Instruction (Urbana, IL: National Council of
Teachers of English, 1973).
35 See Hempenstall, “Miscue Analysis,” 87-93.
36 See James W. Chapman, William E. Tunmer, and Jane E. Prochnow, Success in Reading Recovery Depends on the
Development of Phonological Processing Skills, report to the Ministry of
Education of
37 Dahl and Scharer, “Phonics Teaching and Learning,” 588.
38 For many years, The
Reading Teacher contained almost no articles with any positive reference to
phonics, vocabulary, or word analysis; at least the topic is once again
permissible, but it is limited to discussion of the exemplary whole-language
classroom.
39 See Louisa C. Moats, “The Missing Foundation in Teacher
Education,” American Educator 19, no.
9 (1995): 43-51.
40 John R.
41 Ibid., 355-365.
42 See James Hoffman, “The De-democratization of Schools and
Literacy in
43 Dahl and Scharer, “Phonics Teaching and Learning,” 584-94.
44 See National Reading Panel, Teaching
Children to Read, 1, 7, 9, 12, 13.
45 For a critique of Marie Carbo’s “learning styles” theory, see
Steven Stahl, “Different Strokes for Different Folks? A Critique of Learning
Styles,” American Educator 23, no. 3
(1999): 27-31.
46 Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Perspectives on Reading Instruction
(Alexandria,VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1998).
47 Harvey Daniels, Steve Zemelman, and Marilyn Bizar, “Whole
Language Works: Sixty Years of Research," Educational Leadership 57, no. 2 (2000): 32.
48 Ibid., 36.
49 Ibid., 35-36.
50 See Irene C. Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, “How and Why Children
Learn About Sounds, Letters, and Words in
51 Ibid.
52 See Chapman, Tunmer, and Prochnow, “Success in Reading
Recovery.”
53 William E. Tunmer and W.A. Hoover, “Phonological Skill and
Beginning
54 New Jersey State Department of Education, New Jersey Language Arts Literacy Curriculum Framework (Trenton,
NJ: New Jersey State Department of Education, 1998), 254.
55 Lynn Olson, “Rating the Standards,” Education Week 18, no. 17 (1999): 107-09. See also Chester E. Finn
Jr. and Michael J. Petrilli, eds., The
State of State Standards 2000 (Washington, DC: The Thomas B. Fordham
Foundation, 2000), 68; and Sandra Stotsky, State
English Standards: An Appraisal of English Language-Arts/Reading Standards in
28 States (Complete Edition) (Washington, DC: The Thomas B. Fordham
Foundation, 1997), 19, 88-90.
56
57 Barbara R. Foorman, David J. Francis, Jack M. Fletcher, Chris
Schatschneider, and P. Mehta, “The Role Of Instruction in Learning to Read:
Preventing
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