By Rick Townsend
We've all heard it--the answer that comes when we complain about our kids not getting phonics training in the schools. the canned answer is always the same. "But we DO teach phonics, as well as lots of other reading word attack strategies. We want the kids to have all the tools, and not just one." Self proclaimed reading experts say it. The teachers say it in school. The principals say it in PTA meetings. Board members say it. Yet few of these folks really seem to understand it.
What are parents to do? Well, many of us have done research. Here is what we have found.
Phonics instruction simply makes more sense than whole language, integrated language, sight-words, and the resulting word-guessing. Occasionally mentioning a phonics rule is not the same as teaching phonics. Illiteracy is up, nationally, after more than a generation of experimenting with this "cutting edge" approach. It is time to get serious about education and reading instruction.
Consider these passages:
"Simply and clearly, according to our accepted system of instruction, reading isn't taught at all. Books are put in front of the children and they are told to guess at the words or wait until the teacher tells them. But they are NOT taught to read--if by reading you mean what the dictionary says it means, namely, 'to get the meaning of writing or printing.' "
"When [you educators] talk about phonics, you mean something entirely different. You mean phonics as one among a dozen things that come into the teaching of reading. You mean that on Wednesday in May, out of the blue and with nothing before or after it, you go to the blackboard and show the children that the word PIN with an E at the end makes PINE. The children thereupon dutifully "learn" that fact. They are not shown that the same principle holds for A, E, I, O, and U; They are not shown that it also applies to PINING and TINY. they are not told what short and long vowels there are; they are not told that the I also makes the sound of IR in BIRD and the sound of IE in PIE. No. The are given "incidental" phonics. On a Friday in June they will be told that the TCH in CATCH stands for the sound of CH. Next October they may hear about the NK in PINK.
"Let's understand each other. Systematic phonics is one thing, unsystematic phonics is another. Systematic phonics is the way to teach reading, unsystematic phonics is nothing--an occasional excursion into something that has nothing whatever to do with the method used to fix words in a child's mind."
And when and by whom do you suppose these passages were written? They resonate with the experience of today's parents, but were written in 1953 by Rudolph Flesch in his book, WHY JOHNNY CAN'T READ. (pages 17 and 121) But today's modern educator hasn't found time to read it--it's only been out for 42 years.
At some point, it will be time for our educators to get serious, smell the coffee, and teach reading as a set of understandable, comprehensible rules which frees students from mind-numbing limited vocabulary readers. For the sake of our society, I hope we do that soon.
Rick Townsend