An Introduction to the Reading Wars.

This post will deal with the great debate that has taken place in the educational world over how to teach reading.  Even though early childhood professionals do not teach reading per se, they do lay the foundation for future reading instruction.  Therefore, it is just as important for early childhood professionals to be knowledgeable on this subject as well.

Whole Language vs. Phonics
Most reading instruction in the United States falls into one of two camps or a combination of both camps.  One camp consists of those who follow the whole language method of reading instruction.  The other camp involves those who follow a phonics based approach to reading instruction.  These two approaches to reading instruction are very different from one another.

Whole Language
The whole language approach to reading involves memorizing words by how they look.  This approach really took hold during the time of the "Dick and Jane" series of readers.  It is based on the precept that learning to read English should follow the same method as learning to read languages like Chinese that have no phonetic base in the written language.  It came to prominence at a time when the Western world had developed a fascination with all things oriental.  Oriental written languages have pictographs instead of letters for words.  Oriental children must learn the pictograph for each individual word in order to read in these languages.  Many people of the early 1900s considered this to be an educational advantage for the oriental people.  This belief trickled down into the educational philosophy of the day causing the educational establishment to shift away from a more phonetic form of reading instruction.  It is also called the "look, say" method.

Phonics Based Approach
The phonics based approach to reading actually predates the whole language method by centuries.  Until the advent of the whole language approach, teaching children to sound out words by the letter sounds was the only way children learned to read all phonetic based languages.  English along with most languages of Europe and the Middle East follow a system of letters that were derived from Ancient Greek and then Latin.  The parts of the world that fell under the influence of these two empires embraced written forms of languages that followed certain rules as to the sounds associated with certain letters.  This is what is meant by a phonics based language.  Around the time of the advent of the whole language movement, phonics based instruction came under scrutiny because of the difficulties it posed for hearing impaired children.  Since the "look, say" method of instruction worked better for hearing impaired children, all children were tranferred to this method of reading instruction over the next several decades.

Dr. Jean Chall
Then along came Dr. Jean Chall.  In the mid 1960s Dr. Chall released a book entitled The Stages of Reading Development.  This book laid out the case for the return of reading instruction to a more phonics based system.  Not only did it make the case for phonics, but Dr. Chall also made the case for systematic phonics instructions as opposed to random phonics instruction.  This book caused quite an uproar in the educational establishment, which had basically wholeheartedly embraced whole language instruction by this time.  Thus, the reading wars began.  A schism developed from this point between public schools and private schools.  Most of the public schools in the United States rejected Dr. Chall out of hand and continued to teach reading through the whole language method.  Many of the private schools embraced Dr. Chall and began to switch their curriculum to a systematic phonics based instruction.  When the homeschooling movement began to take off in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many of these parents embraced the systematic phonics instruction method of reading as well.  Around the mid 1990s phonics instruction began to gain popularity again because of the schism that began to be apparent between the reading levels of public school children and private/homeschool children.  However, the educational establishment fought back vehemently against the return to a more phonics based approach to reading.  They attributed the higher reading levels among private/homeschool children to the fact that most of the time these children tend to be more affluent.  They argued that poorer children from disadvantaged backgrounds could not handle the rigors of learning to read through phonics.  What developed from this time was a hybrid of both methods of instruction, which varies from school system to school system and state to state.  However, most of the phonics instruction in the hybrid versions is random instruction and not the systematic phonics instruction that is still used widely among private/homeschool teachers.

Whole Language in Preliteracy Training
What does all this have to do with preschool teachers and child care providers?  When I began to take early childhood classes, I had 13 years of homeschooling experience under my belt.  I recognized right away that all of the preliteracy training I was receiving followed the whole language method of reading instruction.  The phonics instruction my children received in preschool and kindergarten was considered developmentally inappropriate.  Many early childhood professionals do not even know the difference.  They have no idea that all the training they have received for developing early reading skills in children completely ignores an entire field of thought on reading instruction.  Now, with the push for more academic instruction in the preschool years, the "experts" are again fighting back hard against anything that resembles phonics based instruction in preschool.  They are once again using the excuse that poor children from disadvantaged backgrounds cannot handle the rigors of phonics based instruction.

The Research for Phonics 
Over the next month or so for these weekend posts, I will be looking at the research behind the renewed interest in once again moving toward a more phonics based method of reading and how to incorporate that into the preschool setting.  This post has served as your history lesson on the subject.  We have a phonics based language.  Common sense tells us we should use a phonics based reading program to teach our children to read.  One of these days, common sense will actually win the day, maybe.

I hope you have enjoyed this post.  Goodbye and God bless!!

Check out Natalie's children's books at:  https://www.amazon.com/author/nataliewade7457