9/24/1999
Friday

Reading: Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card. I haven't read much more than Card's introduction yet, but now I know why the ending of Ender's Game seems tacked on: because it was tacked on, literally. Card added the new ending to the Ender's Game novella to ease the segue to Speaker.

Also, I'm back to reading James and the Giant Peach to Daniel. We spent so much time on his homework this week, we never got around to reading James. We're at the part where the Cloud Men attack the peach. I'd forgotten so much of this book!


















Phonics vs Whole Language

As linguists, we are concerned that the Commonwealth, through its powers to set standards for schools, should presume to legislate 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. We are even more concerned that uninformed thinking about language should lie at the heart of a "standards" document for Massachusetts schools.

Letter to the Massachusetts Department of Education, signed by MIT's Dr. David Pesetsky and 39 other linguists and psycholinguists




Last night I gave Daniel a practice test on his ten spelling words, and he scored six right out of ten, which is a big improvement over Monday when he was zero for ten. See for yourself.

I asked him to write the four words he missed ten times each, and when I checked him this morning on our drive to school, he could spell all ten words perfectly. As it turns out, he didn't even have his spelling test today because his teacher injured her foot and went home early without telling the sub about the test.

Still, I'm glad we put the time in on spelling this week. We'll review a little this weekend, but he knows the words now.

The spelling episode this week started me thinking about the way kids learn to read and write. I'd heard a little about the conflict between phonics advocates and whole language proponents, but I was inspired this week to do a little research on the subject. What I found was a hornet's nest of charges and counter-charges, blame and recrimination.

For those who have managed to stay blissfully unaware of the debate, the quick and dirty summary is this: up until the late 1970s most children in this country learned to read using the phonics method: children were taught that each letter represented a sound and were told to read unfamiliar words by "sounding them out."

Twenty-five years ago, whole language techniques started to supplant phonics teaching. Whole language emphasized exposing children to a language-rich environment, allowing them to use invented spelling, and teaching them to "sight read," or recognize words by sight instead of sounding them out.

Whole language has its advantages. Who can argue that exposing children to books is a bad thing? In fact, it seems to me that much of the anti-whole language argument is actually thinly-veiled conservative rhetoric against other classroom innovations such as multi-cultural texts. That connection can be easily seen on the web, where many of the anti-whole language pages can be found on self-proclaimed "pro-family" sites.

The problem with whole language, though, is that it ignores the basic fact that our written language is not composed of pictograms but is based on spoken language. No one would confuse a picture of a horse with that of a house; yet, the words "horse" and "house" are often confused by beginning readers who have only been taught sight reading and who lack the tools to sound out the word.

Phonics is not the perfect answer either, since it is tedious to learn and for every phonics rule there are numerous exceptions. I don't know if there is a perfect method for teaching reading. I do know that as a concerned parent, I need to be aware of what is going on in my children's classrooms and be prepared to fill in the gaps.

That's what parents do, fill in gaps.


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