“Mr. King, I don’t know that word!” I hear this so much during the day. My response is always the same…”Sound it out!” I always get blank stares because my students aren’t used to having to recognize the sounds that make up words. I was drilled on phonics from pre-school until second grade. It was definitely an integral part in my development as a reader, and speaker of English. The whole-language phenomenon was absolutely foreign to me until I was in college. While in college, I taught at a high school in Memphis. It was there that I found out that students had been taught to recognize familiar words and word groupings. It was absolutely appalling because there were so many “familiar” words that they did not know.
Now that I teach seventh grade, I am really seeing how stifling the whole-language teaching techniques are. I am basically retroactively teaching phonics on a daily basis. Reading this article has given me more insight into the debate, and it has affirmed my stance on the importance of phonics.
Page 129 referenced psychology research. I was a psychology major in college, and when I did research in Cognitive Psychology, I learned that we gather information in a very systematic way. We learn phonemes (sounds) as bits—then we put those bits together to make chunks (words). Eventually, we develop cognitive schemas that help us synthesize all of the information. That is exactly how phonics instruction works. Whole-language theory sounds good when it argues for “unstructured immersion.” Nevertheless, it skips essential developmental stepping-stones and jumps directly to developing broad schemas. It is like having the roof for the house without having the foundation. Whole-language learning is supposed to be humanistic, but there’s nothing humanistic about not a theory that doesn’t take human development into consideration. Even with large classes, it is important for the students to wrestle with the material. I always tell my students that the best learning happens when you struggle with the material first. That initial struggle helps the student figure out what’s wrong, and then teach themselves the steps to solving the problem (i.e. sounding the word out!).
It is very sad that politics and business are still the driving forces of education. Textbook sales, educational consultations, and professional development have crippled children all over America, and specifically in California. I was surprised to learn about how personal agendas (political and social) have such a large effect on how school systems are run. I now wonder how much these same things have hurt the children of Mississippi. What are the political, social, and economic agendas that have only hurt the children in the end? I’m not one who delves into the political arena, but I would be interested to see the legislation that has shaped the educational system in Mississippi. How many of the current policies were constructed to benefit the children and not to appease the powerful? How much insight was taken from the people who work at the grassroots level of education? These are the pertinent questions--questions that need to be answered in order to fix the pervading education problems.
The study referenced on Page 133 that talks about the reading comprehension test was refreshing. It gave us empirical evidence that phonics instruction works! In the age of “data-driven schools,” it presents a strong argument for teaching phonics. As the article concluded, I was happy to read that no one in the wider public seems to be actively promoting whole-language instruction. The next step is to develop a curriculum that fully integrates phonics instruction into the elementary schools. The very basis of reading must be taught, correctly, when the children are at the very early stages. Explicit phonics instruction is the key to reading. If students can master the sounds of the language, then they will not have to worry about struggling with them when it is time to move up to more advanced words. They can then focus on comprehension, analysis, and synthesis of information. Even then, there were no developmental steps skipped. Build a strong foundation, and your house will be beautiful!
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