Reading rites // New teaching approach focuses on whole words

DATE                  05/30/91
NEWSPAPER             THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
SECTION               ACCENT
EDITION               MORNING
PAGE                  E01
STORY LENGTH          23 INCHES
HEADLINE              Reading rites // New teaching approach focuses on whole 
                         words
BYLINE/CREDIT         Dan Froomkin:The Orange County Register
SUBJECT TERMS         CHILDREN:EDUCATION:SCHOOLS:OC:CA:CHANGE:STUDENTS
 
    See Spot.
    See Spot run.
    See Spot run right out of the classroom and not come back.
    The way California's children are learning how to read has changed
  dramatically in the last several years.
    Where once the heart of the reading curriculum was primers such as
  "Fun With Dick and Jane," flashcards and workbooks, children are now
  learning to read with entertaining and amusing children's books, more
  along the lines of "Peter Rabbit."
    Where once reading, writing, spelling and oral language skills were
  taught separately, they are now taught together as children read a
  book together, discuss it, write down their thoughts and their own
  stories and go over the mistakes.
    What's the big idea?
    Simply put, it's that children should learn to understand what they
  read, rather than just to read, and that they should see reading not
  as an arcane skill but as a way of gathering information and having
  fun.
    These changes came about because of California's new Language Arts
  Framework, the statewide curriculum guide that took effect last year
  in most school districts.
    The goal is children who love reading -- children, in short, like
  those at Meadow Park Elementary School in Irvine.
    "It's fun to read 'cause Mrs. Dow always gives us fun things to
  read," says Chapman Nelson, a 7-year-old in Claudia Dow's first-grade
  class.
    Proponents of the new framework say a lot of it is common sense. If
  reading isn't turned into a chore, children will take to it with more
  gusto. Some say good teachers have been doing it that way for years
  anyway.
    And the framework still calls for phonics to be taught, though
  "kept simple and completed in the early grades."
    Phonics is the process of teaching children the letters of the
  alphabet, the sounds in words and how they relate. It is a method,
  once learned, that allows children to decode words letter by letter.
   The newer "whole language" approach, on the other hand, encourages
  students to decode words by their context.
    Take the word "gift," for instance. Using phonics, children would
  learn to read the word "gift" by sounding out the word's four
  letters, one by one, then putting them together.
    The whole language approach would have them figure it out from its
  context in a sentence or paragraph, such as, "For Mother's Day, we
  will make your mother a gift. She will like it."
    Marilyn Tabor, curriculum coordinator for the Irvine Unified School
  District, says the California framework calls for a combination of
  both approaches, starting with heavy use of phonics in the early
  grades.
    At Meadow Park Elementary, those students whom teachers decide are
  having problems with the whole language approach are pulled out for
  special, intensive drills that stress phonics.
    But relegating phonics to second-class status is still a subject of
  great concern to some of the country's leading experts on teaching
  reading, including Jeanne Chall, professor of education at Harvard
  University.
    Whole language may be the current rage, but people like Chall argue
  that phonics works and has worked for thousands of years under
  different names.
    "It's the classic style. This goes back to the Greeks and the
  Romans," Chall says. "The research evidence shows that if you teach
  (phonics), more children learn faster, particularly those at risk."
    Chall argues that whole language asks children to infer, rather
  than learn, the letter-sound relationship. That works for children
  whose parents have already taught them a lot about sounds and
  letters.
    But those children with less fortunate backgrounds -- and those who
  have learning disabilities such as dyslexia -- won't be as likely to
  make those inferences, Chall says. They need the basic building
  blocks.
    And Chall bristles at the condescending terms whole language
  proponents use to disparage tried-and-true methods. "They are making
  an assumption that only their way is fun," she says.
    Spend a day at Meadow Park Elementary, and you'll see a variety of
  techniques being used to teach children to read -- a lot of the new
  as well as plenty of the old.
    First-graders in Janet Anderson's class pull out a book first thing
  in the morning and read silently for a few minutes. Then Anderson
  stalks the rows of desks flashing flashcards, one per student, with
  words like "when" and "child."
    Then comes the "morning message," one of the clearest examples of
  the new thinking. It's a few sentences teachers write on the board
  describing what they will do that day.
    The idea is that children, by reading it, will realize that reading
  can convey useful information -- not just pap. Sometimes punctuation
  is left out, and students go to the board to add it.
    Teachers at the school also frequently read aloud to the children
  and -- using a major tenet of the new framework -- constantly
  encourage students to write as a further way of learning how to read.
    In kindergarten, where the emphasis is still on learning letters
  and sounds, children learning the letter "K" were copying the word
  "king," learning the "K" sound, tracing sandpaper K's with their
  fingertips and even making K's out of Play-Doh.
    The goal, says Tabor, is to "create experiences about letters" so
  children really understand them.
    "Can you think of anything more dull than sitting there and writing
  a page full of B's, and you don't know why?" Tabor asks.
    Chall says test scores routinely show that phonics is the best
  approach to teaching reading and that whole language hurts children.
    But people like Tabor are confident that California's new,
  integrated approach to reading will result in increased test scores
  in the coming years.
    Tabor says parents sometimes complain about the new ways of
  teaching reading because they aren't familiar with the reasons behind
  them.
    At Meadow Park, principal Diane Dougherty says the most common
  complaint from parents is that their child is not in the "advanced"
  reading group.
    Dougherty says she explains to them that "advanced" reading groups
  no longer exist.
    Another major recommendation of the framework is that teachers
  group students for reading homogenously so each group includes
  students of varying levels of ability.
    Teachers say in the old system, students pegged as slow from the
  beginning never improved and felt stupid.
    They say the "faster" children are not penalized in the new
  homogenous groups because teachers ask them the tougher questions.
    "It does require the teachers to know what they're doing," says
  first-grade teacher Anne Case. "But they should anyway."