WHOLE LANGUAGE BACKERS GIVE 'STUPID' NEW MEANING

Date: Saturday, November 27, 2004

I ought to be a poster child for "whole language," the theory of reading instruction that says reading instruction isn't necessary because children will learn to read "incidentally" if they're around people who read.

Well, that's what I did and it's my earliest memory. My mother was washing dishes and I was pestering her to read the books we'd just brought home from the library. My birthday is in December, and there were icicles on the window over the sink (single-pane windows, no insulation), so most likely I was 4 years old.

She told me to look at the pictures until she finished, so I opened one of the books to a two-page spread with picture of two children, a boy and a girl, holding hands, looking into the window of a 5-and-10-cent store. I looked at the few lines of type below the picture and realized I knew what they said.

It was a wondrous moment.

But your average first-grade classroom is not filled with children like me, and most of them will benefit from more systematic instruction. An unknown but large proportion of them absolutely must have systematic and effective instruction or they won't learn to read at all. Far too many do not learn well enough to make their way in the world.

For more authoritative comment on this subject, may I introduce you to the pseudonymous Professor Plum, whose Web log (at professorplum.typepad.com /my_weblog/) is titled "Professor Plum's Relentless Rants on Eduquackery." The good professor professes at a university somewhere in Texas, and his colleagues are lucky to have him, but probably don't think so.

[URL current as of Nov. 3, 2005; site is University of North Carolina at Wilmington]

His Nov. 20 post (click on the calendar) is "A Whole Language Catalog of the Grotesque." He's collected more than 40 brief quotations from the academic literature on whole language, and annotated them. With a scalpel. Or maybe a chainsaw.

* "Children must develop reading strategies by and for themselves" (citations omitted). Advocates of this notion, PP responds, "would never toss their children into a rip current to allow their children to discover the strategy for not drowning. But somehow it is fine to let other people's children discover how to read -- which, in the long run, means to discover what life is like when you are illiterate."

* "Reading without guessing is not reading at all." Says PP, "I would ask the reader if he or she is guessing at the words he or she is reading now -- or is it feeding how, or bleeding cow, or dreading wow?" He wonders "just how much guessing is a child supposed to do before it is called reading? 'Look at Cherie. She is guessing at every single word. She's a real reader. But look at Debra. No guessing at all. She knows exactly what every word says. That's not reading!' So stupid."

Indeed, the stupidity of some of the quotations is so appalling you almost think he must be making them up:

* "Matching letters with sounds is a flat-Earth view of the world, one that rejects modern science about reading."

* "To the fluent reader the alphabetic principle is completely irrelevant. He identifies every word (if he identifies words at all) as an ideogram."

* "The art of becoming a fluent reader lies in learning to rely less and less on information from the eyes."

So the best readers read with their eyes closed?

It's hard to understand how anything so patently untrue, so inconsistent with one's own experience, could have been written in all seriousness and taken seriously by anyone, let alone become and remain the orthodoxy in schools of education for decades. (I interviewed an ed school professor three or four years ago, and she believed whole language was an essential part of reading pedagogy. Her students are teaching your kids now. Be very afraid.)

If language is best understood as a whole, not broken up into paragraphs, sentences, words and letters, why do we flounder for weeks when our high school French first meets up with native speakers in France? We can't tell where the words stop and start, that's why.

If fluent readers don't look at individual letters, how does anyone proofread? Proofing pages is part of my job, but in fact proofreading for me is always "on" (though not always perfect). It even happens that my eyes will spot a typo a long way ahead of the spot where my brain is currently registering content, so I know that the letters-into-words processing happens way before the words-into-meaning processing, and quite without conscious effort. That's what "fluent" means.

If you're involved in any way with teaching reading, and your professors taught you to have faith in whole language, it is time to put away stupid things.

Or if you're a parent with children at an age where they are beginning to learn to read, Professor Plum has excellent advice on making sure the school district does right by them. Or on how to teach them yourself, so the school can't hurt them.

Now, as the saying has it, go Read The Whole Thing.