As a beginning teacher in the year 2000, and the father of a young child, the question, ‘Do I use whole language or phonics?’ did not occur to me. Instinctively, it made sense that when attempting to pronounce a new word one had to know something of the connection to the sounds we make and the letter symbols we see. I was unaware then of the reading wars but I was aware that some educational psychologists were advocating that phonics and explicit teaching of the alphabet code inform early reading instruction.
I am unsure what early childhood and primary teachers understand today. Suffice to say, that discussion and practice in many schools is now how to include phonics in a literacy program. Should it be a discreet unit of stand-alone instruction, or be part of the whole context of speech, reading and writing processes? I have pursued my own research, weighing-up the arguments for systematic phonics, and phonics in context, forever arguing with myself and engaging with respected and knowledgeable professionals.
My university experience in 2000 was once over lightly with an emphasis on good children’s books as an essential for engaging children with the written word for meaning and enjoyment. Phonics was not part of the menu. There was no appetite for any discussion among lecturers or student peers.
In penning these pages, my hope is to share with non-teachers something of the complexity of the arguments as to what is involved in learning to read in the early-years of school. What does it mean to learn to read? Is there a magical moment when ‘learning’ to read stops and one can just read? Or is reading, like life and learning, an evolving continuum? Does learning to read require learners to practise reading regularly? Is decoding a word into units of sound and syllables reading, or is it just decoding? What about encoding, writing down the units of sounds as letters and words? Teaching ‘reading’ is all of these things and so much more. As any reader of literature knows, as for most things, we are learning when we reflect on and rethink what we know. Effective teachers ask these kinds of questions, debating with ourselves and reflecting on what our students are doing as we review our practice.
Education and Training Minister Julia Gillard believed she knew best when she announced to the world that ‘k-a-t’ are the sounds associated with each letter in the word cat, in case teachers were unaware of sound-to-letter correspondence. She noted that cats also dwell within the sentence, ‘the cat sat on the mat’. If only it were so easy.
Students do need to be helped to read, be it a picture book, a page of text, a painting or a sequence of moving images. Language evolves in novel ways. The meaning of what it is to read is as much about communication as it is about the act of reading print. We should be asking ‘what is on the readers mind?’ Thinking about the psycholinguistic aspect is to acknowledge that there is a connection between language and consciousness, rather than believing that there is some external mechanism which enables us to extract the available information from a page.
Proficient readers of print are able to restrict attention to that which is most relevant to their purposes, be it reading a recipe, or finding a word in a dictionary. An absence of fluency suggests there is an inability to discriminate. Reading is a selective process, seeking clues and cues from among details to comprehend meaning in accord with the reader’s expectations.
Words which sound the same but have different spellings and meanings – bear, bare; cite, sight, site; peak, peek, pique; rain, reign, rein and whether, weather, wether exemplify why the English language is a morpho-phonemic/phono-morphic system. In the first three years of school, children are provided with the four hundred most common words and encouraged to recognise them automatically, without thinking. Here is a selection from the first hundred: the, to, is, you, was, for, as, or, one, by, all, their, other, out, some, find. These ‘sight words’ are so named because there is not a straightforward sound-to-letter correspondence. The presumption is that children are reading regularly and seeing and saying these words quite often.
To sound out a word may appear to be an obvious instruction, but the variability of sounds-to-letters correspondence reveals the complexities that both the learner and teacher have to navigate. A teacher attempting to apply a strictly phonetic sound-to-letter approach soon discovers its limits. As much as we may wish it to be otherwise, learning to read and decode is not a lock-step, sequential process.
How, for instance, are the letters ho pronounced in hot, hope, hook, hoot, house, hoist, horse, and horizon? Phonics rules are so numerous and have limited application to many words. As ‘rules’ apply only up to around 45% of the time, it is better to think of them as prompts to memory. One such ‘rule’ is a reminder to what vowel sounds a reader should make. For example, leaf and head both have a first vowel which represents the sounds associated with the letter ‘e ‘, but what about chief? Another example, is when a vowel is followed by a w the vowel says its name, as in, crow and flow but the rule fails in raw and threw; and lastly, when a word has a final unsaid ‘e ’,we say the vowel’s name as in, bone but it does not apply to done. Take a nonsense word tove, is the vowel pronounced ‘o ‘ as in rove, or ‘u ‘ as in love? In this last case the meaning and context are absent, so we are reduced to guessing what is in the author’s head. Never fear the joy we get from Lewis Carroll’s verse,
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Contrast English, which has an opaque letters-to-sound relationship, with a transparent letters-to-sound system such as Spanish. Spanish has a one-sound-to-one-letter correspondence which provides a comparatively straightforward foundation from which to progress. Once the sounds-to-letters are learnt, pronunciation and spelling follow relatively easily. As anyone who has learnt another tongue with an alphabet system knows, initial sound-to-letter understanding of the alphabet, while essential, is just one aspect of beginning to read the new language.
Phonics makes sense to those of us who already know how to read; and it helps when we have an idea of what the word is. Just as teachers should engage with professional learning about phonics and phonology, as a minimum, it is unreasonable to denigrate the whole language approach. Whole language provides teachers with the means to comprehend the complexities of speaking, reading, and writing, and how they combine. Meaningful reading extends to when the learner makes a connection to content and context from what we know. Reasonable prediction of new words and content then becomes more likely.
Whole language understands that, from birth, we are immersed in a world of language. We read for meaning from the context. Proficient readers do not read a page of print as if we were reading aloud. We don’t sound out each word one after the other in our heads, but when we are unsure of a word, we pass over it so as to not lose track of the argument. There is no prescription to how we read print as many factors come into play. We do not learn to read by building-up words as autarkies of sounds and letters severed from the storyline, from our social and cultural settings and from our purpose in choosing that text.
Opponents of whole language argue erroneously, that its teachers only ever ask students to guess at, and memorise words. Rather, the whole language approach places the child at the centre of language production and cognitive development. Imbued with the humanist and emancipatory spirit of the progressive education movement, its initial proponents revolutionised our understandings of language acquisition. Children should be heard, and seen, as social beings engaged in cultural activities, experimenting with, and inventing language to communicate and to satisfy their needs and desires. Life and learning are not confined to the classroom; most of a child’s time is spent beyond the school gate.
School systems are subject to social-political and commercial pressures. Corporate providers such as Microsoft and Google have created a whole new learning environment for school systems. Their products and programs are having, and will have, impacts in ways we are yet to imagine. Are they reinforcing pre-literacy? Students’ call up Siri to do the work of encoding and decoding. Academics and corporate headhunters cultivate each other, build careers and peddle products which promise what the politicians want to hear, some fail-safe guarantee of success prior to their next election. Beware of any idea that says there was, or can be a golden age of reading instruction. It took Shakespeare more than sound-to-letter to encode, and more than us decoding, to enjoy Sonnet 23,
O, let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more expressed.
O, learn to read what silent love hath writ;
To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.
Peter Curtis
Peter Curtis is a public-school teacher in the ACT. He has recently published, ‘A Meeting of Minds’, an imagined dialogue between Paulo Freire and Karl Marx.
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