Friday, October 28, 2011

A Pox on "Progressive" Whole Language

To hear [educators] talk, the word method is the only method of teaching reading that fits into the whole of modern educational theory.  It's all part and parcel, they say, of modern, enlightened education.  

I say it isn't so ... The fact is, I am on the whole on the side of progressive education.  I have a Ph.D. degree from Teachers College, Columbia, and I am a sincere admirer of John Dewey.  I think education should be democratic, free of senseless formalism and drill, based on interest and meaningful experience, and inseparably joined to the real life that goes on around the child.  — Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Can't Read.

What really distinguishes Whole Language teachers, though, is not just a broader array of strategies for helping children learn to decode text, but the belief that reading is more than decoding text.  A child filled full of phonics rules may be able to pronounce a word flawlessly without having any idea what it means, much less what its relation is to the words sitting next to it.  (Some critics refer to the process of getting kids to call out the words in front of them as “barking at the page.”)  Whole Language teachers insist that reading is first and foremost about meaning.  — Alfie Kohn, On Teaching Reading, Spelling and Related Subjects

Frankly, I'd rather watch Younger Daughter "bark at the page", correctly,  than guess wildly without even looking at the page, as she was taught at her "progressive" private school.  As Rudolf Flesch says of a struggling whole-word student, "Characteristically, he doesn't look at the word in the book, but stares into space."

According to Alfie Kohn, "Once they can recognize the first letter of the word, that, along with other clues from the context, can help them predict the rest."  Thanks, Alfie.  That's why I've got a kid who, confronted with the word "on", guesses "octopus".

A Whole Language teacher would rather spend her classroom budget on the kind of children’s stories that can be found in bookstores and libraries.  The underlying assumption isn’t just that reading material doesn’t need to contain controlled vocabulary, where new phonemes or skills are introduced on a specific schedule.  Rather, it’s that such texts ought to be actively avoided.  Better to have a child read a well-written story about an interesting subject.  — Alfie Kohn.

Well, sure, that's the theory, but in practice schools teach whole-word reading using "leveled readers", coded from A to Z, that are just as boring as Dick and Jane.  A typical "leveled reader" book would be something like "Kate Gets Dressed".  Each page of the book has a sentence beginning "Kate puts on her ...", with a big picture on top.  Under the picture of Kate putting on her socks, what do you think the text is?  This enables kids like my daughter to fake reading, without ever actually learning to read the words the book allegedly teaches, like "socks" and "mittens".

As Rudolf Flesch points out, once they've learned phonics, kids can read anything they want.  It's the concept of whole-word learning that dooms kids to boring books.

Alfie Kohn claims that Whole Language actually teaches decoding better, "Because it’s easier to decode a word when you already know what it means."  That's ridiculous, and a terrible way to teach reading.  What if the author wrote something unexpected?  And why should we ask small children, with their limited life experience, to correctly predict what the author wants to say?

... a child may be temporarily stumped by a tricky word.  In that case, the Whole Language teacher might invite him to speculate about what the word could be.  Or she might say, “Skip that word; we’ll come back to it later.”  And if he tries and makes a mistake?  Suppose a child is slowly reading aloud from a story that includes the sentence I think my car needs new tires.  He gets through the first six words and then pauses before blurting out, “Trees.”  A skills-oriented teacher would likely say, “No.  Look at the letters again.  What comes after the t?”  But a Whole Language teacher is more likely to respond, “My car needs new trees??”  Does that make sense to you?”  Then, once he gets the word right, she’d probably call his attention to the way it’s spelled.  — Alfie Kohn.

Again, a terrible way to teach reading (and notice how it's being pushed by the district of Upper Tax Bracket!)  If we can predict beforehand what the author will say, why bother reading at all?  What if the kid is reading science fiction or fantasy, and the sentence is "I think my car needs new wings"?  Notice that Kohn is suggesting kids should read only books that make sense to them, so they can predict what the words should be.  Think how very limiting that is, especially to a small child!  It's the exact opposite of what I want the reading experience to be for my kids.  If reading doesn't communicate something new and surprising, really, what is the point?

You can bet that when I work on reading with Younger Daughter, I do exactly what Kohn says I shouldn't do. I say, "look at the word! What's the next letter after t?" If I used Kohn's method, I would "probably" get around to teaching the phonics, after telling my daughter she should have magically intuited the word from context.

On teaching spelling, Kohn suggests "They might be invited to write a word as many different ways as possible and then to evaluate the different spellings, finally checking out which one is in the dictionary."  How is that less annoying than just telling the kid the correct spelling?  And how likely is it that the kid will even remember the correct spelling after he's just laboriously written out all the possible wrong spellings?

This is the kind of thinking that gives "progressive" education a bad name.


  1. PsychMom says,
    Thanks for the previous video...what a hoot.

    About reading..What I observed in our Upper Tax Bracket school is that the whole word method was used and kids having problems were lagging behind unless their parents made demands. External tutoring was needed...
    Normally I'm a big Kohn fan, but I'm not sure the needs of the child are best addressed by this method. As long as acquisition is trouble free, it probably doesn't matter what method you choose. But if a kid has trouble reading, picking the method that works is what's needed, not blindly feeling around for sparks.

    What do you think about the idea of not teaching reading until after age 7?

  2. I knew some of that article would set you off! I agree with a lot of what you're saying. But phonics has its limitations, too -- not least of which is that we speak a language with lots of crazy departures from phonetic spelling.

    Again, I don't really have strong opinions about this subject, and I don't really want to align myself with any "school" of reading instruction. I think what you're saying makes a lot of sense -- when in doubt, looking at the letters of the word should be the first resort, shouldn't it? But some of what Kohn is saying in that article makes sense to me too. It seems to make sense not to lose sight of the fact that the process of reading is a lot more than just sounding out words -- especially given schools' tendency to seize on superficial measures of accomplishment.

    I also think he's probably right that different kids learn to read in different ways, and that a good instruction program would try to accommodate that. But I know that's way easier than it sounds and probably leads to lots of poorly thought-out instruction like the examples you've posted. And you're probably right that any bureaucratic institution is likely to turn "enjoyment of reading" into a standardized set of boring "reading books" in short order, whatever its underlying philosophy is.

    This seems like one of those areas where individual differences are so important that any attempt to impose one approach on an entire classroom full of kids is likely to be inefficient and even counterproductive. I'd put my money on a homeschooling parent who knows his or her child well but knows nothing about reading instruction over a teacher trained in reading instruction but with a group of thirty kids to teach.

  3. Chris said:

    I knew some of that article would set you off!

    Sometimes prediction works!

    I'm still getting riled up over this. Kohn says that reading should be about meaning, but then he wants kids to know the meaning before they read the word! It's the opposite of getting meaning from the reading. And we're training a generation of kids to assume they know what the passage says before they've read through it.

    As for English not being strictly phonetic, that's true. That's why "try a different vowel sound" is reasonable advice. However, sounding out the word phonetically should always be the first tactic attempted, and then you can tweak it if you have to.

    @PsychMom, as for the age when we should start teaching kids to read, I don't know. We're seriously teaching Younger Daughter late (she's 8 years old), but only by accident. I would never have done it this way on purpose.

  4. Also @PsychMom, I hear you about the school recommending tutoring. Back at Natural Friends, the first-grade teacher wanted us to send Younger Daughter to summer school, so she could learn to read. She told us there were several children in the same boat. Did she think that would make us feel better?

  5. PsychMom -- I think some kids are ready and able to read at age five or even sooner, while others probably aren't until later, maybe even 7 or 8. I have some homeschooling friends who didn't believe in pushing reading on their kids until the kids seemed interested in pursuing it. Some of their kids were early readers, but one of them was not yet reading when she turned 8, and my friends were getting anxious. But they were patient, and within a few months she started reading, and within a few months after that, she was reading Harry Potter books.

    There may be kids who are worse off because they waited too long to start to learn to read. On the other hand, there are probably some who are worse off for being pressured to read before they are ready. I doubt there's a right answer for everyone, but I think schools worry too much about the former and not enough about the latter.

  6. Isn't the problem that schools choose one method over another and then there is no wiggle room? I have a child that does fine with the whole word approach but in her previous school they decided that phonics was the way to go. So everyone....including kids reading 2-3 grade levels ahead were forced to tap out grade appropriate words. DD was bored to death and was never challenged. My beef is that it's ok for adults to be good at different things....we aren't all doctors or chefs or teachers but kids don't get that luxury. They must all learn the same way, and that is whatever way their school happens to choose. Wouldn't it be something if teachers had the OPTION of meeting our kids, getting to know them and us and then use their knowledge to try to match what might work for each kid? Instead our schools pay for reading coaches that come into school and "train" (ie., dictate) how reading will be taught. It's ridiculous to think that one method would work for all kids. Yet, that is the exact approach our schools take. Then add on top of that they dictate what kids should read. It surprises me that any kid can maintain any enthusiasm for reading in those conditions.

  7. Anonymous, what you describe sounds like a problem of treating all the kids the same way, more than a problem of what method to use.

    Of course, kids who are reading 2-3 grade levels ahead shouldn't be in the same reading class as kids who are struggling to learn to read. I have one child who learned to read easily, and another who is struggling, and if they were the same age I would never have wanted them in the same class. It just wouldn't make sense for either of them.

  8. I should add that once you've got the kids separated by skill level, of COURSE you give the different groups different teaching. The group with the struggling readers could be working on basic phonics, while the advanced reading group would be reading something interesting.

  9. This is how guided reading groups work. Students reading at a Level a are in a small group reading level a books, working on letters and sounds, rhyming, etc. Students reading in say a level c book would be reading a more complex, less predictable text that would require more word solving strategies and less reliance on the picture to read the book. I would say most teachers are not simply phonics or whole language teachers. If a student sounds out a word but doesn't know what it means then yes, the picture or the rest of the sentence can help create meaning.

  10. And while the groups are homogenous for the duration of the book, the groups do mix up as students' reading behaviors or skills progress, or based on subject interest, or sometimes based on how students in a group get along. Mix it up so the "blue birds" and "red birds" aren't always the same

  11. Yes! A pox on whole language!

  12. I've added your blog to a new category on mine. The category is Favorite Links. I toyed with subtitling it "Those who Get It."

  13. Thanks, Concerned Parent!

    .. but I don't get it as often as I'd like. That's a joke from the Vicar of Dibley britcom!

    You should check out kitchen table math on whole language. They get it too.