Title: Beginning reading: Phonemic awareness and whole texts
Abstract: It may be serendipity, or a function of the news media I sample during the course of each day, but I have increasingly heard it claimed from various sources that Australia is again facing a literacy crisis. Politicians, radio broadcasters and journalists have all claimed that a proportion of children in schools around the country either do not learn to read, or are so significantly impaired in their reading development as to warrant special remedial programs. What is disturbing about these claims is that the evidence on which the claim is founded is not easily challenged or queried in a 30-second radio or television news story. Claims of a crisis in literacy fuel parental concerns about the progress of their own children, undermine confidence in the institution of the school, and often mislead parents and caregivers by implying that research has provided a modern, scientific understanding of the teaching of beginning readers which is being wilfully ignored by teachers. New methods founded on what is characterised as a scientific understanding of reading and reading development are held in stark contrast to a caricature of Whole Language teaching which, it is invariably claimed, is responsible for a significant number of children who are not able to read adequately. Lurking somewhere among these claims against Whole Language is the belief that teachers have been persuaded not to teach phonics, and, indeed, the promoters of Whole Language (read Ken and Yetta Goodman and Frank Smith) are often accused of encouraging teachers not to teach phonics. Unfortunately, this is not the first time this debate over the teaching of reading has surfaced, nor is it the first time that such bitter oppositional stances have been taken. Adams (1990 & 1994) has noted that a very similar pattern of claim and counter claim was established in the United States following the publication of Rudolph Flesch's polemically provocative books, Why Johnny Can't Read (1955) and Why Johnny Still Can't Read (1981). As she observes, for Flesch the issue was not complicated: it was a matter of phonics versus look-and-say pedagogy. Yet, as she goes on to argue: there is much more to skillful word recognition than the memorization of the alphabet and its letter-to-sound correspondences. Similarly, the issues surrounding the proper development of comprehension are complex and extend vastly beyond the ways in which one might come to identify whole words. Just as Flesch in the mid-1950s succeeded then in blurring the issues, polarising the debate and diverting the research agenda, there is again a danger of being caught in a polarised debate in which, on the one hand, the term whole language is perceived as a 'thinly veiled push for look-say approaches to word recognition... [and] is translated to mean an uninformed and irresponsible effort to finesse necessary instruction with touchy-feely classroom gratification -- and worse'; and on the other, where the term phonics is immediately translated 'into an unenlightened commitment to unending drill and practice at the expense of the motivation and higher-order dimensions of text that make reading worthwhile' (Adams: p. 26). Such a debate is fruitless and a diversion from ensuring that children learn to decode in the first place; and secondly, that they find the process enjoyable enough to want to continue with reading to become competent, commited, perhaps even obsessive, readers. The history of the teaching of reading and the history of reading is as fascinating and complex as the individuals who have been engaged in it. Ultimately, as Alberto Manguel (1996) has observed, the history of reading is the history of each of its readers. Since the development of writing created the need for readers, readers have been taught to read by sometimes very bizarre, even painful methods. Manguel (p. 72), when referring to the great Italian humanist scholar Leon Battista Alberti, writing between 1435 and 1444, notes that he advised that young children, in the care of nurses and/or their mothers, should be taught the alphabet at the earliest possible age. …
Publication Year: 1997
Publication Date: 1997-02-01
Language: en
Type: article
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