Currents in Literacy

Understanding the Phonics Debates: Part I

By William T. Stokes

How do children learn to read and write? This is a simple, straightforward question. And, because it has been studied for generations, we might reasonably expect substantial consensus among theorists, researchers, curriculum specialists, and teachers about how to teach reading, writing, and spelling in the primary grades. Unfortunately, no such consensus exists, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the controversies about the role of phonics instruction. Indeed, the debates have become so fierce and political recently that it is common to hear experienced educators speak of the "reading wars." In my conversations with new teachers and parents of children entering kindergarten and first grade, I have heard their concerns and confusion, and even their anxiety, about the choice of alternative approaches to literacy instruction. My intention in this essay is to offer a kind of road map or guide to the current debates by briefly reviewing the essential elements of the debates and their historical context.

Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, the "great debate" was usually presented as a choice between two methods for teaching reading: phonics and whole word. Both approaches share the goal of guiding children to learning the relationships between sounds and letters. The difference between these approaches centers on whether the relationships are taught explicitly through sets of phonics rules (e.g., "silent-e" marks the long vowel in bite as distinct from the short vowel in bit) or through carefully prepared texts which would enable children to discover the relationships (yielding sentences like "The fat cat sat on the mat." or "Nan can fan Dan.").

In the past fifteen years, the debate has usually been presented as the conflict between whole language and phonics. Whole word should not be confused with whole language, although some participants in these debates do confuse the two. Whole language offers a comprehensive philosophy for teaching; it is not simply an alternative method. The essential features of that philosophy are taken up below, but, it is important to point out immediately that whole language is also concerned with helping children to acquire an understanding of the relationships between sounds and letters -- the difference lies in how this goal is to be achieved.

Most recently, a new term has entered the debates: balanced approach. It is sometimes offered as a compromise between whole language and phonics; or, it may be understood as an effort to transcend the debates and return a measure of common sense to our understanding of the complexities of literacy and literacy development, including the details of learning to read, write, and spell.

The current debates tend to polarize and over-simplify the differences that do distinguish these alternatives. In the sections that follow, I hope to reverse this tendency and offer a richer context for understanding these controversies and the competing claims made by proponents for each side. Part I, in this issue, will examine the alphabetic principle, the origins of phonics and the core elements of the debate. Part II, to appear in the next issue, will describe the most recent efforts to resolve the disputes.

The Fundamental Dilemma

In principle, an alphabet provides a simple visual code for representing an oral language. An ideal alphabet would assign one letter to each sound (or phoneme) in the language; thus a spoken language could be written down and read by others who know the code. This requires some knowledge of the sounds of the language and the relations between sounds and letters. The difficulty for English is that it departs significantly from an ideal alphabetic system. And, the acts of reading and writing are far more complex than merely manipulating a code.

Language is a complex natural and cultural system that relates sounds to meaning, and by six years of age the typical child will have substantially acquired her native language. This includes knowledge of sounds (e.g., to produce and perceive the differences between words such as puzzle, puddle and paddle) and grammar (e.g., to distinguish "the boy hit the ball" and "the boy was hit by the ball"), as well as innumerable subtle features of the meaning and use of language in everyday communication (e.g., recognizing instances of promising, warning and lying). And, if she is a member of a literate community, she may also appreciate the language of stories and books.

For example, when my daughter was about four years old, her favorite book was What Do You Do With a Kangaroo? by Mercer Mayer. The book had been read aloud to her many times; she had the entire story memorized and she could recite the book while looking at the pictures. One day, when I was blocking a doorway she wanted to get through, she put her hands on her hips and said "Get out of my way, you old moose, you!" -- a line from the story. I laughed, of course, and let her through.

Yet, despite all the knowledge of language and books that this episode suggests, she still could not read the story herself. In fact, she would not become a reader for two more years. The question is, what did she need to learn to become a reader? She knew the letters of the alphabet, i.e., she could name all the letters. She could write her own name and that of the family cat and a few other words. She knew STOP and EXIT signs and many product logos. She understood picture book stories read to her and once dictated her own story which we made into a book. She understood many of the purposes of writing, including the making of grocery lists and the importance of a letter to "Santa Claus." Yet, at the age of four, she could not read independently or write anything more than a few words. What did she need to learn? Or, from a developmental perspective, what had to be acquired or achieved, before she could become an independent reader?

If learning to read were simply a matter of learning letter-sound correspondences, and if, for a given language, there were an ideal alphabetic system, then learning to read ought to be a rather easy task of learning a visual code for an already acquired linguistic system. Assuming that a child has substantially acquired the spoken language and has the requisite neurological, cognitive, and perceptual development to acquire the alphabetic code, then it would seem that learning this code might only require a few weeks or months to develop the necessary knowledge and processes to allow fluent reading of familiar words, ideas, and stories.

Under these conditions there would be little controversy about the place of phonics in reading instruction. The goal of reading is to construct meanings and the acquisition of such a simple code would seem to support, rather than delay, access to meanings. Perhaps most children would acquire this code with very little direct instruction, if any. Literacy instruction in school would devote its attention to learning through reading, rather than learning to read.

Unfortunately, English is represented by an alphabet that does not permit an ideal one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters. To begin with, there are roughly twice as many sounds as letters. Each letter is used to represent several sounds in different contexts (e.g., notice the t in native, nation and nature, or in bat, bath and bathe). Each sound can be represented by several spellings (e.g., notice the "long-e" in be, bee, key, ski, sea, and baby). Moreover, for historical reasons, there are hundreds of exceptions within our complex system of spellings (e.g., maid and said, or hear and heart). Experience has shown that many children require at least three years to acquire the written code for English. During this time, learning to read becomes the primary purpose of schooling, while exercising literacy to learn more about the world is largely deferred until mastery of the code is evidenced.

We should not be surprised that there is great controversy concerning how to best support literacy development. Some educators, theorists, and researchers search for the most clever and efficient means to organize systematic instruction in honest attempts to speed the process and make it less arduous. Materials and procedures are developed to provide teachers with step-by-step guidelines for instruction. This is the aim of phonics instruction. Children who are having greater difficulty are gathered together and provided with even more intensive, systematic instruction to encourage the development of phonemic awareness (ie, explicit knowledge of the sounds of the language, often including direct instruction in letter-sound relationship).

Other educators, theorists, and researchers search for ways to support literacy development by subordinating concern for the code to other levels of texts, e.g., words, sentences, paragraphs, and whole stories. Recognizing that children accomplish the tremendously complex task of learning their native language without benefit of formal, systematic instruction, these educators search for means to help children extend those powerful learning systems to the development of literacy. Since language is acquired during use, and since meaning is seldom subordinated to form, the expectation is that literacy too can be acquired most effectively if meaning and communicative purposes are provided more attention. Greatest attention is given to children's gradual, natural emergence of closer approximations of adult competencies and to the role played by parents and teachers as competent models for the authentic uses of literate practices for social purposes. This is the perspective of whole language (Weaver, 1994).

It should be clear that both models represent sincere efforts to reach many of the same goals. However, it should also be clear that the differences that separate them are not likely to be easily resolved. Supporters of the first approach tend to view it as scientific and precisely organized and tested, while critics view it as unnecessarily tedious and indeed destructive to authentic literacy. Supporters of the second approach tend to view theirs as natural and joyful, leading to greater creativity and love of literature; while their critics tend to view that philosophy as a form of romanticism which will doom many children to poor reading skills and poor spelling.

As I suggested above, recent discussions of a balanced approach may offer a way out of this controversy. What such an approach might entail will be in Part II in the fall issue, but first we should take a closer look at the history of phonics and the controversies about learning to read and write.

Origins of Phonics

"The phonic method...is over three hundred and fifty years old." F.W. Parker, 1894.

When I first became interested in early literacy twenty years ago, a colleague recommended that I read Jeanne Chall's Learning to Read: The Great Debate (1967). It introduced me to the dispute between rival approaches to reading instruction and it left me with the impression that the fundamental choices were phonics ("code-emphasis") and whole word ("meaning emphasis"). Although the book clearly draws upon research and opinion dating from the 1910s onward, it yielded the initial impression that "the great debate" was a product of the 1950s and 1960s (the updated edition, 1983, adds an additional 15 years of research and commentary to the debate) (See also, Adams, 1990).

A few years later, quite by accident, I encountered Edmund Huey's The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading (1908). It quickly established that the debates over reading were by no means of recent origin. That book led me to F.W. Parker (1894) and the startling assertion quoted above that phonics dates back to the early 16th century. To quote Parker more fully, he argued that "the phonic method, as we all know, is over three hundred and fifty years old. It was at the time of its introduction a very profitable departure from the pure alphabetic method, and had its origins in some of the earnest minds that worked contemporaneously with Martin Luther" (1894, p. 196).

As a researcher and educator who was still new to these debates, I was astounded to discover that these issues were not merely recent technical arguments, but rather, had occupied educators for more than 400 years. How did such a controversy arise and what sustains it? As will be shown below, there are several replies to these questions, but it may be useful to point out a preliminary and rather surprising fact that there is no unique alphabet for the English language -- written English employs the Roman alphabet.

Throughout the middle ages, scholars studied and wrote primarily in Latin, or chose to represent other languages, such as English, using the familiar Roman alphabet. As the English language developed, pronunciations, spellings, and grammatical forms underwent rapid change and dialect variations abounded, especially during the period of Middle English. By the beginnings of the emergence of Modern English in the 15th century, a highly complex system of written English had evolved (Balmuth, 1982). Then, in the period of the Protestant Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries, there were widespread efforts to increase literacy rates and to translate, print, and distribute the Latin Bible and other Latin texts in the languages of Europe, including English. The problem confronting Martin Luther's contemporaries was how to help the greatest number of people to become literate.

In the case of Latin or related languages, such as Italian and Spanish, an ideal alphabet is closely approximated: e.g., the letter a has a consistent relationship to a particular phoneme, /a/, as in agricola. When adapted to English, the letter a can represent a significant number of sounds (e.g., fat, father, fate, fall, are, ant, what, beat, bear, beard, bread, said, plaid, caught, laugh). English has approximately forty-four sounds that make meaningful distinctions in the language. Dialect variations can extend this number. There are, however, only 26 letters and some of these, such as c and x, have values that overlap with the letters s and k. Consequently, English has evolved a very complex system for spellings and it has been a challenge to educators since the 16th century. This problem of an alphabetic representation of English led to the development of phonics as an effort to specifically teach the complex relation between English sounds and spellings.

New Approaches in the 19th Century

A careful reading of the historical record for the past two hundred years will reveal that there was a nearly continuous stream of "new" approaches to reading instruction being offered by educators and publishers. The alphabet method is the most ancient approach. It was characterized by an emphasis upon learning letter names and spelling words aloud often in choral drill until letters, syllables, and finally words were memorized. The New England Primer, first published around 1680, provided for this form of instruction for more than one hundred years. Webster's American Spelling Book continued these practices into the mid 19th century: "students learned the names of letters..., spelled and pronounced lists of two- and three-letter nonsense syllables, and then spelled and pronounced lists of words of various lengths before they began to read sentences orally." (Shannon, 1989, p. 6).

McGuffey's Eclectic First Reader for Young Children introduced a phonics approach during the period from the 1830s to the 1920s. This was also supplemented by what was called a phonetic approach (Huey, 1908) in which a modified alphabet was introduced so that there might be a greater approximation of a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sound -- thus, long and short vowels, silent letters, and digraphs (e.g., sh, ch, th) would all be explicitly marked to aid their recognition. Among these was Leigh's "scientific alphabet" (in 1873), which was incorporated into the widely used Funk and Wagnalls reading series.

As early as the 1840s, Horace Mann and other reformers influenced by the work of European educators, especially Pestalozzi and Froebel, advocated for a word method that would omit the drill and recitation associated with spelling and phonic approaches. Instead, emphasis would be placed on learning words with the aid of pictures, objects, sentences, and little stories. From the 1860s to the 1880s, the Oswego Movement fostered the word method, which was typically used in combination with alphabet, phonic, and phonetic methods.

With the gradual rise of the progressive education movement beginning in the 1880s, F.W. Parker advocated for reforms that would entail an even greater emphasis upon meaning than the word method. At the core of his proposals was the assertion that "reading is thinking." He proposed a thought method through which all efforts were made to keep meaningfulness central to all specific procedures. He advocated that all concerns for reading and writing as skills be subordinated to an integrated curriculum wherein children studied science, history, literature, and other central subjects. Parker argued that reading and writing would be acquired in the context of these subjects. Moreover, he argued that all methods be used in combination provided that meaning remained the foremost concern.

Parker also advocated that writing and reading be recognized as complementary. Children could be aided in learning letter-sound relationships not only in the context of reading interesting texts, but also in the context of their efforts to create their own texts. Parker boasted of having a library of 10,000 books written by children. In the process of creating these books, the children would of necessity have to attend to letter by letter representations of words. John Dewey and others in the progressive education movement carried forward Parker's innovations into the twentieth century, but competing theories and methods continued to co-exist. Part II continues this review and brings us up to the present phonics debates and the emergence of a more balanced perspective.

Bibliography

Adams, M. J. (1990) Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Balmuth, M. (1982) The Roots of Phonics: A Historical Introduction. NY: Teachers College Press.

Chall, J. (1967) Learning to Read: The Great Debate. NY: McGraw-Hill. (Updated Edition, 1983)

Huey, E. B. (1908/1968) The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Parker, F. W. (1894) Talks on Pedagogics. NY: E. L. Kellogg.

Shannon, P. (1989) Broken Promises: Reading Instruction in Twentieth-Century America. NY: Bergin & Garvey.

Weaver, C. (1994) Reading Process and Practice: From Socio-Psycholinguistics to Whole Language. (2nd ed.) Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

a href="mailto:wstokes@mail.lesley.edu">William T. Stokes, Ed.D. is a Professor at Lesley University, co-Director of the Literacy Institute, and the Director of the Hood Children's Literacy Project. For the past 25 years he has focused on children's language and literacy development.