Wl Learning Recognized As Unscientific
In a letter to the Albuquerque Journal, a teacher says a recent column of mine on “whole language” - or WL - omits important information; specifically, that WL works when properly taught.
In that column, I cited the fact that California’s Department of Public Instruction has recanted its embrace of WL and ordered all state school systems to return to phonics-based reading/language arts instruction. It did so after California fourth-graders came in dead last in a 1994 national assessment of reading abilities and an in-state study found that by the end of second grade, phonics students scored more than a year above WL students in word recognition, comprehension and vocabulary.
Whole language was one of many nouveau reforms to sweep through public education in the 1980s. Also known as “literature-based” instruction, its advocates maintain that the most natural way for children to learn to read and write is through the trial-and-error of simply doing so. After all, they reason, children learn to talk without ever being taught formal rules of speech, so the same should apply to learning to read, etc. Phonics instruction is unnecessary “drudgery,” say some WL apologists, even going so far as to claim that it is a negative experience that causes children to hate reading.
Echoing those ideas, the writer of the letter mentioned above said “whole language is a phrase used to describe how children’s receptive and expressive language develops most effectively through real life experience rather than through textbook grammar drills.”
Keep in mind that when phonics reigned supreme in the teaching of reading, far fewer children had reading problems than is the case today. In this context, the claims of WL advocates are just another example of how rhetoric often fails to mirror reality.
But don’t take my word for it. The November, 1995, issue of The Blumenfeld Education Letter (for information, call 208-322-4440) contains the full text of a letter (dated July 12, 1995) sent by 40 professors of linguistics and psycholinguistics from Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, University of Massachusetts, Brandeis and Boston University to the Massachusetts Commissioner of Education strongly criticizing the state’s plan to mandate WL as the standard for reading instruction. Impressive, eh?
The professors assert that WL is a “scientifically unfounded” view of reading instruction; that decoding, which is at the heart of phonics, reflects the “modular” nature of language itself, and that “sound methodology in reading instruction must begin with these realities.”
So, contrary to the assertion made by my critic, whole language does not accurately reflect how children’s receptive and expressive language develops. There is, in other words, more to language development than meets the eye.
The professors accuse WL of treating “the alphabetic nature of our writing system as little more than an accident, when in fact it is the most important property of written English - a linguistic achievement of historic importance.”
They warn that claims to the effect that recent research supports the WL approach are deceptive. In fact, there are no such findings or, at the very least, 40 eminent professors at six prestigious academic institutions are unaware of them.
Whole language, they say, is based on an “erroneous view of how human language works, a view that runs counter to most of the major scientific results of more than 100 years of linguistics and psycholinguistics,” and students taught with whole language are being “shortchanged.”
So, with all due respect to well-intentioned educators who have climbed on the WL bandwagon, I think it’s safe to say WL’s days are numbered. One can only hope that the rest of the nation follows California’s courageous lead in admitting its error and moving swiftly to correct it.
John Rosemond is a family psychologist in North Carolina. Questions of general interest may be sent to him at P.O. Box 4124, Gastonia, NC 28054 and at http://www.rosemond.com/parenting on the Internet’s World Wide Web.