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My kids entered first grade in the mid-1990s, attending a school that was considered progressive. As a teacher, I’m all in favor of using the most advanced pedagogical techniques. But the work my kids brought home confounded me—especially in what the school called “language arts.”
Each week my kids brought home a spelling list to learn—just as I had done at their age. But the spelling lists were bizarre—back, after, use, two, how, our, work, first, well, way. These were just random lists of common words. Back when I was in grade school, we learned lists of words with common patterns—bought, brought, ought, sought, fought, and so on.
One day my daughter showed me a “story” she’d written in class. It was just a few scrawled lines, and many of the words—even common ones—were misspelled. Fearing the worst, as parents always do, I dreaded the academic struggles my dyslexic daughter would face. But wait—the teacher had pasted a gold star and written “Very Good!” on it.
At the next parent-teacher conference, I confronted the instructor about her lax standards. “Don’t you teach these kids how to spell, how to sound out words?” I asked.
She gave me a forbearing smile that I interpreted as contemptuous. I wasn’t just some parent railing, “That’s not the way they did it back in my day.” I was still a graduate student at the time, but I considered myself fairly up-to-speed on the latest research in the psychology of language.
“We use a whole language approach,” she explained. “We believe that reading and writing are natural acts. If you provide enough exposure to print material, children will discover the principles of reading and writing on their own.”
“Why not just teach them how to spell and sound out words?” I asked.
“Phonics puts too much emphasis on decoding the written word,” she said. “The whole language approach is better because the emphasis is on understanding and interpreting texts.”
Never argue with a teacher. She has all the power, even if she’s wrong. We taught our kids phonics at home. Because of our efforts—I’d like to think—they’re both strong readers and writers as adults.
Some version of the whole language approach is still used in many schools across the U.S., despite the fact that there’s little scientific support for its effectiveness. It’s a pedagogical philosophy that contradicts what is already known about human learning and memory processes.
As Australian psychologist John Sweller points out in the most recent issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, there are two types of human knowledge, each with its own set of learning mechanisms. “Primary knowledge” is picked up naturally and effortlessly through experience and social interactions, while “secondary knowledge” must be explicitly taught.
Primary knowledge includes all the stuff you need to know to survive as a human. Language is a perfect example. You aren’t born knowing English, but evolution has honed a set of learning mechanisms so you can quickly acquire the language of those around you.
It’s true that children “discover” language through experience and social interaction. However, the fallacy in the “whole language” philosophy is that reading is simply a visual form of language.
Reading is not language. Rather, it’s a decoding process that converts visual symbols into spoken language. When we learn to read, we pronounce each word out loud. As our skill improves, we learn to read silently. But that inner voice never goes away, no matter how proficient we are at reading.
When readers “engage in a text,” they’re not dealing with the printed symbols on the page. Instead, they’re working with the spoken discourse they’ve recreated in their heads as a result of decoding that text. Any “whole language” approach that de-emphasizes encoding and decoding skills is, in effect, a “no language” approach.
There’s nothing at all natural about learning to read. It’s a recent cultural invention, with no time for evolution to hone special learning mechanisms for it. In fact, learning to read requires years of effort—and learning to write even more. It’s no different from learning to play a musical instrument or a sport or a game like chess. All of these are examples of Sweller’s “secondary knowledge,” in that they’re only acquired through direct instruction.
Without explicit phonics training, the text remains indecipherable, and hence incomprehensible. Children from homes where literacy is valued will eventually work out the code, mainly with some informal phonics from their parents. But children from disadvantaged homes don’t come to school with the tools to “discover” reading. Furthermore, explicit phonics training helps children with dyslexia gain some level of functional literacy.
Phonics drills can certainly be dull, but they don’t have to be. The mission of educators isn’t to come up with fanciful pedagogies based on wishful thinking. Rather, it’s to find ways to get students engaged. That way, they’ll do the grunt work needed to learn the skills of our culture. Children won’t “discover” reading through exposure to print any more than I can “pick up” the piano by listening to my wife play for twenty years.
References
Sweller, J. (2015). In academe, what is learned, and how is it learned? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24, 190-194.
Shakespeare, W. (1599/1602). Hamlet. Act 1, scene 5, lines 166-167.
David Ludden is the author of The Psychology of Language: An Integrated Approach (SAGE Publications).
