How should reading be taught?

By Keith Rayncr a Barbara R Foorman

A
Learning to speak is automatic for almost all children, but learning to read
requires elaborate instruction and conscious effort. Well aware of the
difficulties, educators have given a great deal of thought to how they can
best help children learn to read. No single method has triumphed. Indeed,
heated arguments about the most appropriate form of reading instruction
continue to polarize the teaching community.
B
Three general approaches have been tried. In one, called whole-word
instruction, children learn by rote how to recognise at a glance a vocabulary
of 50 to 100 words. Then they gradually acquire other words, often through
seeing them used over and over again in the context of a story.
Speakers of most languages learn the relationship between letters and the
sounds associated with them (phonemes). That is, children are taught how
to use their knowledge of the alphabet to sound out words. This procedure
constitutes a second approach to teaching reading – phonics.
Many schools have adopted a different approach: the whole-language
method. The strategy here relies on the child’s experience with the language.
For example, students are offered engaging books and are encouraged to
guess the words that they do not know by considering the context of the
sentence or by looking for clues in the storyline and illustrations, rather than
trying to sound them out.
Many teachers adopted the whole-language approach because of its
intuitive appeal. Making reading fun promises to keep children motivated,
and learning to read depends more on what the student does than on what
the teacher does. The presumed benefits of whole-language instruction –
and the contrast to the perceived dullness of phonics – led to its growing
acceptance across American during the 1990s and a movement away from
phonics.
C
However, many linguists and psychologists objected strongly to the
abandonment of phonics in American schools. Why was this so? In short,
because research had clearly demonstrated that understanding how letters
related to the component sounds in words is critically important in reading.
This conclusion rests, in part, on knowledge of how experienced readers
make sense of words on a page. Advocates of whole-language instruction
have argued forcefully that people often derive meanings directly from print
without ever determining the sound of the word. Some psychologists today
accept this view, but most believe that reading is typically a process of
rapidly sounding out words mentally. Compelling evidence for this comes
from experiments which show that subjects often confuse homophones
(words that sound the same, such as Jrose and ‘rows5). This supports the
idea that readers convert strings of letters to sounds.
D
In order to evaluate different approaches to teaching reading, a number of
experiments have been carried out, firstly with college students, then with
school pupils. Investigators trained English-speaking college students to
read using unfamiliar symbols such as Arabic letters (the phonics approach),
while another group learned entire words associated with certain strings of
Arabic letters (whole-word). Then both groups were required to read a new
set of words constructed from the original characters. In general, readers
who were taught the rules of phonics could read many more new words than
those trained with a whole-word procedure.
Classroom studies comparing phonics with either whole-word or whole-
language instruction are also quite illuminating. One particularly persuasive
study compared two programmes used in 20 first-grade classrooms. Half
the students were offered traditional reading instruction, which included the
use of phonics drills and applications. The other half were taught using an
individualised method that drew from their experiences with languages;
these children produce their own booklets of stories and developed sets of
words to be recognised (common components of the whole-language
approach). This study found that the first group scored higher at year’s end
on tests of reading and comprehension.
E
If researchers are so convinced about the need for phonics instruction, why
does the debate continue? Because the controversy is enmeshed in the
philosophical differences between traditional and progressive (or new)
approaches, differences that have divided educators for years. The
progressive challenge the results of laboratory tests and classroom studies
on the basis of a broad philosophical skepticism about the values of such
research. They champion student-centred learned and teacher
empowerment. Sadly, they fail to realise that these very admirable
educational values are equally consistent with the teaching of phonics.
F
If schools of education insisted that would-be reading teachers learned
something about the vast research in linguistics and psychology that bears
on reading, their graduates would be more eager to use phonics and would
be prepared to do so effectively. They could allow their pupils to apply the
principles of phonics while reading for pleasure. Using whole-language
activities to supplement phonics instruction certainly helps to make reading
fun and meaningful for children, so no one would want to see such tools
discarded. Indeed, recent work has indicated that the combination of
literature-based instruction and phonics is more powerful than either
method used alone.
Teachers need to strike a balance. But in doing so, we urge them to
remember that reading must be grounded in a firm understanding of the
connections between letters and sounds. Educators who deny this reality are
neglecting decades of research. They are also neglecting the needs of their
students.
Questions 6-10
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading
Passage?
In boxes 6-10 on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

6. The whole-language approach relates letters to sounds.

7. Many educators believe the whole-language approach to be the most
interesting way to teach children to read.
8. Research supports the theory that we read without linking words to
sounds.
9. Research has shown that the whole-word approach is less effective than
the whole-language approach.
10. Research has shown that phonics is more successful than both the
whole-word and whole-language approaches.