Excerpt from 'Reading Through Tears'WHOLE LANGUAGE
The dogma:
In this book we have used the term ‘Whole Language’ as a general term to describe a number of related teaching programs that swept the world in the 1970/80’s. Whilst the names of the programs have changed from time to time, the basic underlying principles have not.
Advocates of Whole Language share a common belief that learning to read is a natural process similar to learning to speak. They point out that if a babe mumbles ‘mumumum’, the parents don’t correct the child and say ‘No dear, the word is ‘mother’; instead we encourage the child by saying ‘That's right ...mumma’. Sooner or later the child drops ‘mumumum’ and substitutes ‘mumma’ then 'mummy' and, later still, ‘mother’...all without formal teaching. The mother merely models correct speech and the child gradually adopts it.
Whole Language advocates assumed that reading could be taught in the same way. If the child failed to read, parents were asked if they were reading to their child, implying that parental neglect was responsible for reading failure because of inadequate modelling. The madness even reached the ludicrous level where in 2004 one Australian major political party promised to spend millions of dollars on providing babies with free books.
Whole Language encouraged children to use book illustrations as a basis for guessing the text or to read to the end of the sentence and then to try to guess any of the words that they couldn’t actually read.
Publishers and book sellers then reacted by filling their shops with highly illustrated books rather than with books graded from easy-to-difficult text complexity.
Whole Language advocates also pointed out that when babes said words like ‘man’, they spoke it as a single unit without understanding that it is composed of three individual sounds...’m+a+n’. They therefore jumped to the conclusions that the traditional ‘phonic’ teaching practices of teaching sounds, of accurately blending those sounds into syllables and of blending the syllables into longer words, were not essential to learning to read. As a result of these beliefs, teachers were retrained to encourage children to guess words as a whole unit rather than to break the words down into their isolated sounds. In fact for years Whole Language advocates 'actively discouraged teachers from using any phonic instruction approaches’. Teachers were told that, provided the guess made logical sense, it didn't even matter if the word-guesses were inaccurate.
In order to establish this new educational fad, the traditional phonic strategies were attacked and almost totally discarded by teacher trainers. This happened, not because of any supportive research, but merely to fit within their pre-occupation with word guessing and context cues. Researchers have never been able to demonstrate the efficacy of this guessing approach.
The researchers' response:
In fact we now know that these Whole Language advocates were wrong; in fact they have been wrong for three decades. They were only able to maintain their error because the philosophy that spawned Whole Language included opposition not only to teaching basic phonic skills, it also included opposition to testing those skills. By refusing to properly test the outcomes of their practices, educators thereby hid the failure of Whole Language.
The Whole Language assertion, that learning to read is the same process as learning to speak, has long been ridiculed by researchers. Speech is a universal, instinctive process, everyone can speak. But reading is not a natural process, it is a learned process. After 4000 years of learning to read, there are still peoples on earth who can speak but cannot read a word. The evidence of failure was there for all to see.
One of the leading advocates of Whole Language guessing practices was Kenneth Goodman. He once described reading as a 'psycholinguistic guessing game' and yet, as far back as 1978, Goodman’s own university (Arizona) demonstrated, in one of the biggest literacy studies ever carried out, that Whole Language strategies failed in almost every aspect of literacy. The margin of defeat for the Whole Language method was fourteen times that necessary to prove statistical significance.
And yet the Whole Language advocacy continued unabated, impervious to data, driven by belief. Until California, historically the most literate state in the USA, did what we have long been urging Australian educators to do, they tested outcomes.
Californians found that in the years during which Whole Language had been mandatory in California, the state had slipped from top to the bottom of the educational literacy league.
Other states followed, including N.Carolina, Ohio, Massachusetts and Texas. Even Arizona, the birth place of modern Whole Language advocacy has since also officially abandoned Whole Language.
In Australia, we do not elect our public servants; once established in a job, they tend to stay. The Whole Language advocates’ in education departments still remain in place, in denial and in control of teacher training. They still refuse to accept any contrary evidence. The degree of denial can be gauged from the fact that, years after Whole Language was invalidated in many large UK and USA studies, Australian educators made Whole Language ideology mandatory for literacy teaching in every Australian state!
The level of dominance can be gauged from the 1992 Australian government inquiry which reported that: 'The current approach to literacy learning in Australian schools focuses on the Whole Language or Natural Learning approach and virtually all curriculum guidelines on primary school literacy teaching produced are based on this approach. Two major Australian professional associations for primary teachers of reading and writing have also supported this approach in their conferences and publications. Virtually all teachers have undertaken the in-service training course, Early Literacy In-service Course (ELIC), which is also based on a Whole Language approach to learning and literacy’.
And yet we now know that these professional associations and these teacher trainers were wrong all along. This is not mere hindsight, researchers had been issuing warnings right from the outset...the evidence and the science was simply ignored for almost three decades.
I meet many teachers-in-training and have yet to meet one trainee who has been informed by their lecturers that the Whole Language strategies being promoted within their training have been rejected overseas.
This book exposes 'The Hole in Whole Language' (the title of a paper we wrote in 1996).
This book also summarises VAS Theory, which explains WHY guessing strategies were always doomed to fail and we have now released on the Internet, software which provides teachers and parents with the necessary tools for testing reading performance. For the first time teachers and parents can see the end-results of Whole Language for themselves.
But first we need to understand the alternative strategy, 'Phonics'.
Click the link below.
Phonics