by Dr. Patrick Groff
NRRF Board Member & Senior Advisor

Dr. Patrick Groff, Professor of Education Emeritus San Diego State University, has published over 325 books, monographs, and journal articles and is a nationally known expert in the field of reading instruction.

In a recent communication to the National Right to Read Foundation, an understandably distressed parent shared the following message sent home to her by her child's public school kindergarten teacher:

Your child has been reading the attached book, A Winter Day.

Please take the time with your child [to have him/her] read [it] (in a memorized, word perfect way), track the words and discuss the illustration. We have emphasized the rhyming words and how they sound. Your child still needs to track the words with his/her finger.

It is obvious that the child in question is enrolled in a class in which the experimentally discredited Whole Language (WL) approach to reading development is employed. In spite of repeated scientific evidence to the contrary, the WL theory maintains that no controls need to be placed on the words, sentence structures, or content of material provided for novice readers to peruse. A Winter Day is an example of such reading material.

The governing principle of WL is that school children best learn to read in the same informal, natural way they previously learned to speak at home, as preschoolers. It thus is assumed by WL that by immersing beginning readers in written language they will infer from this experience what they individually need to know to learn to read competently. Direct, systematic, intensive, and comprehensive teaching of phonics skills (the ability to sound-out words by attaching speech sounds to their letters) is greatly de-emphasized in WL classrooms.

Therefore, in the WL classroom in question, children are given entire books to read without the precaution of first teaching them how to decode (sound-out) their various words. As the notice to parents indicates, instead of using previously taught phonics information to decode written words, children are taught to "memorize" them.

Whole Language teachers never pause to reflect, How does a child supposedly "memorize" a word? How does he/she visually process the word? What goes on in the child's thinking during this purported process of memorization or rote learning?

Instead, the WL teacher falsely assumes that the best way for beginning readers to learn to recognize written words is to look at them over and over while saying their names. Hence, great emphasis is placed on "tracking" the words in books. By this is meant, the child places his/her finger under each word as he/she reads it aloud. Often kindergarten children taught in this way can "read" a story without actually looking at each of its words. At that age they have remarkable retentive powers, and thus find it relatively easy to memorize the complete story.

In this regard, the WL approach adopts the empirically uncorroborated look-say method of teaching children to read. In WL classes, teachers first read aloud stories or short books to beginning readers. Pupils are directed to "follow along" in identical texts. The children do this by placing their finger under words (tracking them) as the WL teacher repeatedly says them aloud.

As in many WL classrooms, some phonics information is taught by the WL teacher in question, but in a confused, irregular, and highly ineffective manner. In this regard, she "emphasizes" the "sounds" of the "rhyming" words in the book. This practice violates a fundamental rule of phonics teaching.

For phonics instruction to be the most efficient, it is necessary for teachers to minimize the number of different correspondences between letters and speech sounds (phonics rules) taught at a time. There are many phonics rules found among the rhyming words in the book, A Winter Day. Some of these correspondences are far more difficult for children to learn than are others. There must be systematic, repetitive exposure by novice readers to single phonics rules if they are to master them.

Finally, the WL teacher in question errs by teaching children to use illustrations in the book sent home as cues to the recognition of written words. Instead, experimental research makes clear that beginning readers must be weaned away from the use of these cues, along with the use of sentence context cues, to identify words. Competent readers only rarely employ these cueing systems to process written material.

What should parents do who receive messages from schools in which their young children are enrolled, such as the one discussed here? They must protest to the educational authorities, school administrators and school boards, that their children are not being afforded the greatest opportunity possible to learn to read. In this respect, parents should demand that the managers of their schools provide them with experimental documentation that the WL mode of instruction is superior to direct, systematic, intensive, comprehensive, and early teaching of phonics skills.

Parents soon will discover that there is no such evidence. None of the unique principles or practices of WL has been verified by experimental inquiries.

BR85