Report Urges Hybrid Approach to Reading Education


By JACQUES STEINBERG
The New York Times
March 19, 1998

The seemingly simple question has divided parents, teachers, schools and communities across the country: how best to teach children how to read. Old-fashioned phonics? Or the newer "whole language" method?

Wednesday, after two years of study, a panel of national experts offered an answer: use some of both.

In a 390-page report, which sought to synthesize decades of sometimes divergent scholarship, the panel recommended that beginning readers be taught to sound out letters as the primary way to identify unfamiliar words. That has long been the cornerstone of the phonics approach -- and the panel's conclusion was viewed Wednesday by phonics supporters as a resounding affirmation.

But the panel also endorsed several founding principles of the newer whole language method: imploring children, as they begin to recognize words, to predict what might happen next in a story, to draw inferences from any number of surrounding clues, and even to invent their own spellings of words as they experiment with writing their own stories.

Perhaps as important, in issuing the report, the panel of reading experts convened by the National Research Council pleaded for "an end of the reading wars," which have sent school districts, and in some cases entire states, ricocheting from one exclusive approach to the other over the last 25 years, with little academic ground gained by the nation's children.

Often, the battles over phonics vs. whole language have been cultural and political, as well as educational. As in similar disputes over "new math" and sex education, some parents protest whole language -- a more relaxed approach to reading that emphasizes the meaning of words, over their sounds -- as one more symbol of public education's failure to instill basic standards.

As much as conservatives against liberals, the two methods pitted nostalgia for the good old days, when teachers used flash cards to drill students in phonics (the relationship between letters and their sounds), against the progressive ideal of discovering the joy of learning on one's own.

In the most contentious case, California, which embraced whole language a decade ago, renounced the method last year after literacy rates plunged and offered school districts a financial incentive to return to phonics.

While the report issued Wednesday could serve as a road map to national standards -- and influence teachers, curriculum writers, test publishers and superintendents -- its main message was a common sense one: Rather than fight over one method or the other, educators should carefully take the best of both and concentrate on helping children with reading difficulties as early as possible.

The debate may have philosophically engaged the educational and political communities, the authors wrote, but it has served only to distract the nation from focusing on a national epidemic: the millions of pupils who move from grade to grade each year without learning how to read.

In most cases, the report concluded, those students, even those deemed dyslexic or afflicted with attention deficit disorder, could have overriden their reading difficulties with intensive, early intervention. But too often, the authors argued, the nation's pre-kindergarten and elementary-school teachers have only the most rudimentary training in how to help struggling readers.

The 17-member panel, whose broad representation ranged from Harvard to the California State University system, called for a sweeping reform of the nation's teaching schools and teacher certification programs, including the adoption of a core requirement that all fledgling elementary-school teachers be steeped in the nuances of reading research.

Those teachers, the panelists said, should then be supported throughout their careers by mentors and highly-trained master reading teachers.

The report also recommended a fundamental rethinking of pre-kindergarten -- with children's ability to talk to each other and tell stories at age 3 or 4 deemed as relevant to their later reading success as their mastery of the alphabet, which need not be fully memorized so young.

"Much of the difficulty in seeking real reforms in reading instruction and intervention derives from simplistic beliefs about these issues," wrote the panelists, who were led by Catherine Snow, a professor at the Harvard School of Education.

"Not only the first-grade teacher but also the parent, the pediatrician, the school administrator, the curriculum consultant, the textbook publisher, the state legislator and the secretary of education need to understand what is truly hard about learning to read, and how wide-ranging and varied are the experiences that support and facilitate reading acquisition."

In recommending the integration of both methods, the panel praised what the best teachers often do already behind the closed doors of their classrooms: "If we have learned anything from this effort, it is that effective teachers are able to craft a special mix of instructional ingredients for every child they work with."

In what was at least a temporary cease-fire Wednesday, some of the most battle-worn combatants from the skirmishes over reading said they judged the report's findings to be sound.

"What I like about this report is that it isn't rigid and it does see value in all sorts of different arguments," said Peter Bryant, a professor at Oxford University in England, whose research has used nursery rhymes to demonstrate the critical importance of phonetic learning to emergent readers.

"Children definitely have to get over a difficult hurdle in breaking words into phonemes, which are the sounds that correspond to letters," said Bryant, who reviewed the report in advance but was not on the panel. "On the other hand, these people who talk about how children use context to decipher reading -- that definitely does happen too."

The panelists wrote that a variety of studies have shown that emergent readers who are given direct instruction in phonics "learn to read more quickly." But it cautioned that phonics has its limits, and that without an understanding of context, the word "spring," for example, can refer to a season or a coiled piece of metal, and that "read" can be pronounced "reed" or "red."

For that reason, the panel stopped far short of calling for a return to the era of Dick-and-Jane books -- pat stories in which only a controlled vocabulary was used. Echoing perhaps the most powerful teaching of whole language, it implored teachers to use rich literature to hook youngsters as lifelong readers.

The onus will now fall on districts to translate the panel's recommendations into the classroom. The panel suggested that districts pay special attention to children from poor families, as well as those of African-American and Hispanic background, who have had the most difficulties with reading. The panel recommended that those students receive the same instruction as more advanced readers, but in smaller class settings and with close coordination between teachers and specially-trained tutors.

Those smaller class sizes will cost money, as will the more intensive professional development that the panel wants reading teachers to receive throughout their careers. Currently, the report said, most education schools allow elementary-school teachers to graduate after taking a single course based on research-supported reading techniques.

A recent study of more than 1,000 school districts, the panel noted, concluded "that every dollar spent on more highly qualified teachers netted greater improvements in student achievement than did any other use of school resources."

But Education Secretary Richard Riley, in praising the report, reminded parents that the building blocks of literacy begin at home.

"Families, care givers and early childhood educators can help our youngest children develop strong language skills by talking to them, singing nursery rhymes and reading to them beginning at birth," said Riley, whose agency, along with the Department of Health and Human Services, had commissioned the report from the National Research Council. "Each of us can apply this report in our daily lives."

In addition to Ms. Snow of Harvard, the other 16 panel members are: Marilyn Jager Adams, also of Harvard; Barbara T. Bowman, Erikson Institute, Chicago; Barbara Foorman, University of Texas, Houston Medical School; Dorothy Fowler, Fairfax County Public Schools, Virginia; Claude N. Goldenberg, California State University, Long Beach; Edward J. Kame'enui, University of Oregon, Eugene; William Labov, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Richard K. Olson, University of Colorado, Boulder; Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Charles A. Perfetti, University of Pittsburgh; Hollis S. Scarborough, Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, Conn.; Keith Stanovich, Ontario Institute for the Study of Education, Toronto; Dorothy Strickland, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.; Sam Stringfield, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and Elizabeth Sulzby, University of Michigan.


Back to "Reading Wars"