Reading: Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, and the Search for a Balanced Approach

In the mid-90's the National Assessment of Education Progress reported that California students ranked near the bottom in reading proficiency. In one set of scores, only students in Guam fared more poorly. These dismal results provoked a fierce debate, sometimes referred to as "the reading wars," between advocates of a phonics approach to teaching reading and advocates of a whole-language approach (see "A Note on Terms: Conceptualizing Phonics and Whole Language" in Constance Weaver's Reconsidering a Balanced Approach to Reading, pp. 5-9 [Reserve] for a short explanation of "phonics" and "whole language"). Those who advocate phonics base their argument on research that suggests that explicit instruction in sound-letter correspondences is essential to develop reading skill. Advocates of whole-language approaches argue that intensive phonics instruction is not useful and favor instead a literature-based reading program featuring exposure to meaningful texts.

Begin your investigation of this topic by reading the following two informative journalistic accounts of the reading wars:

Collins, James. "How Johnny Should Read." Time 27 Oct. 1997: 78-81 [Reserve].

Focuses on the national scene.

Lemann, Nicholas. "The Reading Wars." Atlantic Monthly Nov. 1997: 128-134 [Reserve].

Focuses on the reading wars in California.

Another way to get a feel for the reading wars is to read two articles from California English (Spring, 1996), one by Ken Goodman, a leading advocate of whole language approaches, that attacks phonics approaches and one by Bill Honig that supports them. Honig, a former superintendent of education in California, converted to phonics approaches after he left office. Both writers discuss a report by the California Reading Task Force, Every Child a Reader (1995), which advocates what it calls a "balanced approach," but is designed to correct what it sees as a harmful neglect of explicit phonics. This report is short--26 pages--and should be read along with the articles by Goodman and Honig.

Goodman, Ken. "The Report of the California Reading Task Force: Forced Choices in a Non-Crisis." California English

Spring, 1996): 8-10) [Reserve].

Honig, Bill. "The Role of Skills in a Comprehensive Reading Program: The Necessity for a Balanced Approach."

California English (Spring, 1996): 16-20) [Reserve].

In California the reading wars are pretty much over with victory going to those advocating phonemic awareness training and phonics instruction. To learn about key initiatives in California related to reading instruction, a good place to begin is a site called the California Reading Initiative maintained by the California Department of Education. There you will read about (and be able to access online versions of) the new English-Language Arts Content Standards (1998) and the new Reading/Language Arts Curriculum Framework (1999). This new framework, which replaces the 1987 framework (now considered too whole-language oriented) mandates what the CDE considers a �balanced� approach to reading instruction (others--see below--consider it imbalanced on the phonics side). You can also access another important CDE document related to reading instruction, a program advisory called "Teaching Reading: A Balanced, Comprehensive Approach to Teaching Reading in Pre-kindergarten through Grade Three" (1996). This advisory, intended for school districts, suggests ways of implementing the approach to teaching reading outlined in Every Child a Reader. You may find it most convenient to access the above CDE documents from the CDE's site Reading and Language Arts: Information and Resources.

Nationally, too, "phonemic awareness" and "systematic, explicit phonics" are becoming cherished concepts. A National Reading Panel has recently (April, 2000) issued a report entitled Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction (available in pdf--portable document format). This panel concludes that phonemic awareness training and phonics instruction produce better readers.

The wars are not completely over, however. Though everyone talks now of a "balanced" approach to reading instruction, some researchers and teachers fear that approaches touted as balanced are actually imbalanced on the phonics side of the scale. Constance Weaver, for example, thinks that the two key California documents mentioned above--Every Child a Reader and "Teaching Reading: A Balanced, Comprehensive Approach"--are not balanced at all but harmfully overweighted on the phonics side (see the introduction and first chapter of Weaver's Reconsidering a Balanced Approach to Reading). Some researchers have argued that the low reading scores in California are not the result of a literature-based (whole language) curriculum but stem from other causes--the lack of books in school libraries and the poverty of students, for example (see articles by Jeff McQuillan and Kenneth Goodman in Reconsidering a Balanced Approach to Reading). Other scholars have attacked the research on which the phonics movement is based. The titles of the following two books suggest the views of their authors:

Coles, Gerald. Misreading Reading: The Bad Science That Hurts Children. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000

[Ordered by HSU Library; I'll put it on reserve when it arrives].

Taylor, Denny. Beginning to Read and the Spin Doctors of Science: The Political Campaign to Change America's

Mind about How Children Learn to Read. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1998 [Reserve].

Possible areas of responsibility:

1. What is phonemic awareness? What does this term have to do with the linguistic concept of the phoneme that we have studied in the phonetics section of English 326? Why are some scholars arguing for the imporance of phonemic awareness training?

2. What is meant by phonics? What is the difference between explicit (or synthetic) phonics and implicit (or analytic) phonics? What is "embedded phonics" (You could include examples of phonics lessons from textbooks used in local schools.)

3. What is the whole-language approach to reading? (You could include a sample of a whole language lesson. Since the 1987 Language-Arts Framework [On Reserve]--now abandoned--was considered too "whole language," you could look at it and compare it to the new framework.)

3. Interviews with or surveys of local primary grade teachers regarding their thoughts concerning the current push for more phonemic awareness training and more phonics activities. Do they feel that the 1987 Language Arts Framework was imbalanced in the whole language direction? Do they applaud the move away from it? Are they pleased with the current approaches stressing "systematic explicit phonics" that are demanded by current state laws?

5. Analysis of the balanced approach which is recommended by the CDE and which is supposed to be embodied in official CDE documents, including the new Reading/Language Arts Framework. How does one define balance? Is California on the road to a truly balanced approach? For ways to define balance, see Jill Fitzgerald's "What Is This Thing Called 'Balance'?" (Reading Teacher 53 (Oct., 1999) 100-107 [Reserve]. See also the introduction and first chapter of Constance Weaver's Reconsidering a Balanced Approach to Reading [Reserve].

6. Discussion of a controversial research study. Look at a research study that more than any other has caused the movement toward more phonics but has been attacked by critics. The study is listed below. For criticism of it, see Chapter 4 of Denny Taylor's Beginning to Read and Chapter 3 of Gerry Coles' Misreading Reading.

Foorman, Barbara et al. "The Role of Instruction in Learning to Read: Preventing Reading Failure in At-Risk

Children." Journal of Educational Psychology 90 (1998): 37-55 [Reserve].