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April 06, 2006
The Knowledge Deficit
Since the Whole Language method of reading instruction has been described as the rote memorization of every word in the English language; and since the basic premise of WL is that learning to read is as natural as learning to speak; and since WL is still the dominant method used in public schools, it stands to reason that kids arriving in first grade with a deficiency in their spoken vocabulary will be at a severe disadvantage when reading instruction (such as it is) begins: their capability to memorize will never match their increasing spoken vocabulary.
E.D. Hirsch examines this ongoing problem in his new book The Knowledge Deficit. Linda Seebach recently reviewed it (hat tip to Joanne Jacobs):
Hirsch's point _ not a new one, of course, but with each passing year, it becomes clearer that he is right _ is that understanding what you read depends on your being able to fill in from your own knowledge all the things the writer assumes readers will know and therefore doesn't mention.Learning to decode _ that is, to identify printed words with their spoken equivalents _ is challenging enough for many children, especially if their teachers have been stuffed full of romantic nonsense about how easy and natural reading is. (It isn't.) But it isn't even close to sufficient for successful academic performance beyond the early elementary grades.
Many disadvantaged children enter school with less exposure to the kind of language they will hear there, and significantly smaller vocabularies, than their more fortunate peers. That already makes learning to read harder for them. But matters get worse as they get older, because by fourth grade or so, children begin to acquire both new words and new knowledge from what they read.
Emphases mine. Reading performance drops after the first few grades because the kids' capacity for retaining memorized whole words has been overwhelmed. And since they don't know how to employ phonetic decoding to decipher longer words, they wander off down the path that leads to adult functional illiteracy.
And note: "progressive" educators will jump to their feet to protest, "But we promote a balanced approach to literacy instruction--we use phonics when appropriate!"
That won't do. A "balanced literacy program" is simply a sop thrown by "progressives" to parents who are concerned with the habitually lousy reading scores generated by American kids. If a program starts a child with whole words, it's Whole Language--no matter when phonics are introduced. You can't require a child to write a story before you've taught him how to hold a pencil; likewise phonemic instruction must come first.
Seebach says that advantaged children learn between 2,000 and 5,000 words a year from the ages of two through seventeen, so we can expect such a child who's just entering first grade to know about 12,000 words, on average. Yet Diane McGuinness (1) claims there is an upper limit of about 2,000 words when test subjects are asked to match abstract symbols with words. In other words, if a child in a WL classroom is given little or no knowledge of phonemic building blocks than she is forced to treat the entire word as an abstract symbol, and with a vocabulary numbering in the tens of thousands of words she will be at a disadvantage right off the bat in the WL memorization game. By the time she reaches third grade her spoken vocabulary will have continued to increase at several thousand words a year, far outstripping her powers of word memorization.
And of course the foregoing is all based on the abilities of an advantaged child--one who grows up in a home rich in literacy. For a disadvantaged kid attending an inner-city school, the problems will be compounded exponentially.
(1) Diane McGuinness, Why Our Children Can't Read and What We Can Do About It, 1st Touchstone edition, 1997, p. 38.
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Comments
It fascinates that me that this topic is so politically charged. Why on earth would whole-language proponents be so intense about the topic? How did it start?
(full disclosure: per my mom, teachers thought I was a bit slow, eh, until I was put on a phonics curriculum and took off. With such a powerful tool that clearly works wonders in some cases, I find the political resistence reprehensible. Yeah, I can't feign objectivity on the topic.)
Posted by: jpe at April 6, 2006 10:23 PM
I disagree with the comment: "WL is still the dominant method used in public schools."
Really? I have volunteered at several (public) elementary schools and have many (public) elementary school teachers as friends, and I have _never_ seen "whole language" being taught. It was not used when I was taught to read, and even those whom I know with reading difficulties were all taught to "sound out" the words.
This is a dead issue. Everyone knows memorizing words doesn't work. And this fact has been universally accepted for over twenty years.
Posted by: Greg at April 7, 2006 08:51 AM
I don't know where you volunteered, but here in Houston it most certainly is not a dead issue. In the spring of 2004, nationally-known whole language advocate Regie Routman visited Rummel Creek elementary, which is in the Spring Branch Independent School District, my home district. Here's a glowing report from the school website.
According to the National Right to Read Foundation:
Regie Routman reiterates approvingly the principles that undergird WL reading teaching. According to Routman,
(1) "Literacy acquisition is a natural process." Thus, the operative "conditions" in children's acquisition of speech, and in their learning to read, supposedly are identical in nature.
(2) Illiterate children have "much knowledge about literacy" because they have acquired speaking ability.
(3) The "optimal" WL reading instruction program encourages students' "risk taking" when reading. Therefore, students' adding, omitting, and substituting words and meanings when reading, and guessing at word identities through the application of sentence context cues, are fostered and cherished in WL classrooms.
"Guided reading" and Reading Recovery are well-know proxies for whole language instruction, and they form the basis of reading instruction in SBISD. A casual survey of our district's elementary school websites will reveal the extent to which these programs are emphasized.
Here's a suggestion: do an Amazon.com search for "whole language" and have a look at the 400+ results--I think the latest is from 2005. From a eyeball check it looks like those that support WL outnumber those critical by at least 3 to 1. (And that's not even counting all the titles for Reading Recovery and guided reading.)
"Everyone knows memorizing whole words doesn't work"? That's simply not true.
Posted by: Jeff at April 7, 2006 11:01 AM
jpe, you asked, "Why on earth would whole-language proponents be so intense about the topic? How did it start?"
I've thought about this a lot, and the best I can come up with is my own theory of "opposition by political induction". In electrostatics when a charge is given to one object, the opposite charge can be "induced" on a nearby object, for example when a cloud obtains a negative charge in a thunderstorm, a positive charge is induced in the ground, with well-known results.
Since the debate is so free of good reasoning on the WL side, I can only speculate that the WL advocacy is a politically induced opposition to "the Establishment". Of course what's so insane about their position is that high literacy (and the good reasoning that follows) can and should be as potent a weapon for the Left as for the Right.
Indeed, E.D. Hirsch (though no friend to the progressives) made a lasting point with me in his intro to The Schools We Need when he noted Antonio Gramsci's antipathy toward the "naturalistic" methods taking hold in the early 1900's. Hirsch: "[Gramsci thought] the oppressed class should be taught to master the tools of power and authority--the ability to read, write, and communicate--and to gain enough traditional knowledge to understand the worlds of nature and culture surrounding them."
I'm obviously no friend to Marxist theory of any stripe, but Gramsci's point holds: the tools of learning are really apolitical.
But obviously the reading wars are hyper-political, and it's very depressing.
Posted by: Jeff at April 7, 2006 11:27 AM
That sounds right to me. Thanks, Jeff. (and kudos on the casual Gramsci reference! You don't get to do that everyday)
Posted by: jpe at April 7, 2006 03:38 PM
Re Gramsci: That's pushing the outside of the envelope, for me.
Posted by: Jeff at April 7, 2006 08:19 PM
Whole Language, as articulated by its founders (Ken Goodman et al), was a political enterprise from the outset. See article by Groff in the Comment section: http://instructivist.blogspot.com/2006/02/revised-whole-language-golf.html
Posted by: instructivist at April 14, 2006 09:56 AM
Thanks for the link--I'll reply in more depth later, but that reminds me of a book I found at the local used book story. The title was "Critical Pedagogy: Notes From the Real World". Critical pedagogy, yeah right.
Posted by: Jeff at April 14, 2006 11:40 AM
