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Not "either/or" but "both/and": Phonics and Whole Language

by John Holdren

Discussions of educational issues too often veer into "either/or" oppositions rather than "both/and" propositions. From each of the following pairs choose one and only one: either skills or content; either student-centered or content-centered instruction; either hands-on learning or rote memorization; either standardized tests or authentic assessments; and — an especially divisive opposition — either phonics or whole language.

Disagreements over phonics and whole language are often more emotional than rational, and sometimes lapse into the worst kind of stereotyping: phonics advocates like Rush Limbaugh, while whole language advocates support saving the rain forest. The fact is, the debate between phonics and whole language is not a political debate. It has nothing to do with ideology, and everything to do with education, specifically with a—perhaps even the—crucial mission of early education: teaching children to read.

In the classroom, when children are learning to read, what they need is not either phonics or whole language, but both phonics and whole language. Actually, resolving the "great debate"about learning to read requires something more complex than merging phonics and whole language, but given the current terms of the debate, it's useful to begin by trying to bring these two sides together.

Together is where they belong. If you look at a range of long-term studies of how children learn to read, you reach the inescapable conclusion that early, systematic phonics instruction is beneficial for most students. Likewise, it's also beneficial to give students a rich diet of "whole language"—a term that, while variously and sometimes vaguely defined, typically suggests meaningful stories and poems, and many opportunities to engage in varied language activities (writing in various modes, reciting, performing, being read to, etc.).

The need for some common ground between the phonics focus on decoding and the whole language focus on meaning was made clear some years ago in the sensible report, Becoming a Nation of Readers (1985), which states that "children who are taught phonics get off to a better start in learning to read than children who are not taught phonics.…Thus, the issue is no longer, as it was several decades ago, whether children should be taught phonics. The issues now are specific ones of just how it should be done." The report also makes clear, however, that "no matter how children are introduced to words, very early in the program they should have experience with reading these words in meaningful texts."¹

This "both/and" rather than "either/or" position has been confirmed by responsible researchers who speak in reasonable voices. For example, University of Virginia Professor Connie Juel has written that "the debate that has occurred over these two positions [phonics and whole language] is an artificial one.…No matter how bright, creative, and knowledgeable about oral language and the world a child may be, he or she cannot read and write well unless the code of written English is known. No matter how well the code is known, a child will not want to read or write well unless the child has been under the spell of a wonderful story or seen the value of communicating in writing."²

The challenge, then, is to achieve a balance—a balance that's best for most children. Unfortunately, many classrooms today are unbalanced, leaning precariously away from early phonics instruction, and too heavily toward whole language practices.

As Professor Juel observes, in whole language classrooms committed to "authentic literature, the teacher may, on occasion, highlight certain words for the reader. [But] little, if any, explicit or systematic instruction with the letters and sounds of the text words is given by the teacher to the pupil. In the current partisan climate of whole language, the teacher who is caught with old phonics materials in hand is viewed as a traitor."³

A number of whole language advocates will reassure you that they "also teach phonics." But how do they teach it? Too often, not in the explicit, systematic form that's most effective for most children. Most children need deliberate, coherent, direct instruction in letter-sound correspondences, not just occasional attention to a short vowel sound or a silent "k" in "knife," as dictated by the child's momentary and fleeting interests or difficulties.

But many whole language advocates are opposed to such direct, systematic instruction because they feel it discourages invention, creativity, and discovery, and thus violates the child's natural development as a reader. Whole language teachers begin from the premise that reading is "natural." They see learning to read as analogous to learning to speak. But that is a false analogy. While it is utterly natural for children to be curious about the meanings conveyed by those mysterious marks on the page, learning to read is not a natural process.

The written language is quite the opposite of natural: it is artificial, a human artifact. It is a code, and one needs to give children the keys to crack the code. To gain access to meaningful texts, most children need to work through early stages of decoding text that may strike experienced adult readers as less than meaningful and more than a little contrived. Consider, for example, the following, from a Merrill basal reading series:

• Is a cat on a mat?
• A cat is on a mat.
• Is the cat fat?
• Is the cat Nat?
• The cat on the mat is Nat.

Whole-language advocates condemn such text as "unauthentic," "unnatural," and likely to kill the desire to read in any normal child. For example, Judith Renyi (in Going Public: Schooling for a Diverse Democracy) disparages the "cat on the mat" text as "an artificial, manufactured language that no real speaker or writer ever used."⁴ Well, yes, that's true: but to toss such text from the classroom is to throw out the baby with the bath water.

Such text is meant for what is essentially an artificial situation: the beginning stages of learning to read. The truth is, as an adult, you may not want to read "The cat on the mat is Nat" very often if ever, but a child who's just beginning to crack the code can experience a thrilling sense of success from reading — on his or her own! — even that kind of sentence.

The mistake that some whole language advocates make is in believing that every piece of reading, from the beginning, has to be meaningful-interesting-relevant-authentic. Thus, from their adult perspective—as perfectly competent and experienced readers—they condemn the "cat is on the mat" kind of text you can find in beginning phonics readers. They fail to see that there's a time and place for text that has as its modest but crucial function the teaching of certain decoding skills. The teacher who thinks that simply surrounding children with "authentic, meaningful texts" will somehow lead to epiphanies when the children are "developmentally ready" to read is withholding the very tools that most children need to gain access, on their own, to authentic, meaningful texts.

This does not mean that phonics is a magic cure-all. It means that early, systematic phonics instruction is, for most children, one necessary ingredient in the complex process of learning to read. As an ingredient, it comes in varying doses and levels of purity; and, if used too much, or in isolation, it can ruin the dish.

While it's increasingly rare to find a classroom that leans too heavily toward phonics, it occasionally happens that phonics purists will resist any and all practices even remotely associated with whole language, including practices that have been proven effective by research. For example, the most ardent phonics advocates may insist that children be limited to writing only that which they can spell correctly . Thus, in such classrooms, first graders copy from the board, but they never write their own stories or poems or sentences, because the teacher fears the plague that might result from infecting her students with the virus of "invented spelling."

But this is rather like telling a child who's learning the violin only to play those notes that she can produce with perfect sweetness of tone--no squeaks or screeches allowed. Well, if you want that child to play the violin, you just have to grin and bear it through the inevitable squeaks and screeches. And if you want that child to write with fluency and confidence, you should allow for some invented spellings in some writing tasks.

The irony is, phonics purists who forbid invented spelling are discouraging the very kind of understanding they want their students to gain. That's because invented spelling makes children think the sounds of words and ponder their options in choosing to represent those sounds in print. Of course invented spelling is not a substitute for correct spelling: the key, once again, is to have beginning writers work with both invented spelling and correct spelling. The trouble starts when, in the name of "whole language," a teacher generalizes from the limited benefits of invented spelling that "spelling isn't important; after all, today we have word processors that can correct your spelling errors." That is a deeply mistaken view, however, since the ability to spell correctly is crucial to the ability to read.⁵

Can schools and teachers get beyond the name calling and embrace both systematic phonics and whole language? It needs to happen. In the words of Priscilla Vail, who is both a teacher and a writer, "Proponents of both whole language and phonics want children to read and write easily, accurately, and joyfully... . The goal is too important to be compromised by factionalism. We need to move from rival turf to common ground."⁶

Notes

1. Richard C. Anderson et al, Becoming a Nation of Readers: The Report of the Commission on Reading (Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Education, 1985), pp. 37 and 43.
2. Connie Juel, 'Teaching Phonics in the Context of the Integrated Language Arts', in Integrated Language Arts, ed. L. M. Morrow et al (Needham Heights, Mass.: Allyn and Bacon, 1994), p. 135.
3. Juel, p. 136.
4. Judith Renyi, Going Public: Schooling for a Diverse Democracy (New York: New Press, 1993), pp. 147-48.
5. For a detailed technical discussion of the research on both traditional and invented spelling, and pedagogical implications, see chapter 14 of Marilyn Jager Adams, Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, l99O). Adams's summary of the research reveals both (1) that "classroom encouragement of invented spellings and independent writing from the start seems a promising approach to the development of literacy skills" (p. 386); and, (2) that "the arguments for including spelling instruction as a major component of the reading and language program are strong", (p 404).
6. Priscilla Vail, Common Ground: Whole Language and Phonics Working Together (Rosemont, N.J.: Modern Learning Press, l99l), p. 3

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Last updated: Thu, May 22 2008