Beginning reading: phonemic awareness and whole texts

By Paul Richardson

It may be serendipity, or a function of the news media I sample during the course of each day, but I have increasingly heard it claimed from various sources that Australia is again facing a literacy crisis. Politicians, radio broadcasters and journalists have all claimed that a proportion of children in schools around the country either do not learn to read, or are so significantly impaired in their reading development as to warrant special remedial programs. What is disturbing about these claims is that the evidence on which the claim is founded is not easily challenged or queried in a 30-second radio or television news story.

Claims of a crisis in literacy fuel parental concerns about the progress of their own children, undermine confidence in the institution of the school, and often mislead parents and caregivers by implying that research has provided a modern, scientific understanding of the teaching of beginning readers which is being wilfully ignored by teachers. New methods founded on what is characterised as a scientific understanding of reading and reading development are held in stark contrast to a caricature of Whole Language teaching which, it is invariably claimed, is responsible for a significant number of children who are not able to read adequately. Lurking somewhere among these claims against Whole Language is the belief that teachers have been persuaded not to teach phonics, and, indeed, the promoters of Whole Language (read Ken and Yetta Goodman and Frank Smith) are often accused of encouraging teachers not to teach phonics.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time this debate over the teaching of reading has surfaced, nor is it the first time that such bitter oppositional stances have been taken. Adams (1990 & 1994) has noted that a very similar pattern of claim and counter claim was established in the United States following the publication of Rudolph Flesch’s polemically provocative books, Why Johnny Can’t Read (1955) and Why Johnny Still Can’t Read (1981). As she observes, for Flesch the issue was not complicated: it was a matter of phonics versus look-and-say pedagogy. Yet, as she goes on to argue:

there is much more to skillful word recognition than the memorization of the alphabet and its letter-to-sound correspondences. Similarly, the issues surrounding the proper development of comprehension are complex and extend vastly beyond the ways in which one might come to identify whole words.

Just as Flesch in the mid-1950s succeeded then in blurring the issues, polarising the debate and diverting the research agenda, there is again a danger of being caught in a polarised debate in which, on the one hand, the term whole language is perceived as a ‘thinly veiled push for look-say approaches to word recognition… [and] is translated to mean an uninformed and irresponsible effort to finesse necessary instruction with “touchy-feely” classroom gratification — and worse’; and on the other, where the term phonics is immediately translated ‘into an unenlightened commitment to unending drill and practice at the expense of the motivation and higher-order dimensions of text that make reading worthwhile’ (Adams: p. 26). Such a debate is fruitless and a diversion from ensuring that children learn to decode in the first place; and secondly, that they find the process enjoyable enough to want to continue with reading to become competent, commited, perhaps even obsessive, readers.

The history of the teaching of reading and the history of reading is as fascinating and complex as the individuals who have been engaged in it. Ultimately, as Alberto Manguel (1996) has observed, the history of reading is the history of each of its readers. Since the development of writing created the need for readers, readers have been taught to read by sometimes very bizarre, even painful methods. Manguel (p. 72), when referring to the great Italian humanist scholar Leon Battista Alberti, writing between 1435 and 1444, notes that he advised that young children, in the care of nurses and/or their mothers, should be taught the alphabet at the earliest possible age. At this time, children were taught to read phonetically by repeating the letters inscribed on a hornbook or alphabet sheet, with each letter being identified by the nurse or mother. The method has a long history. Manguel, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1948, educated there and in London, comments in passing that he was taught initial reading in this manner by his nurse ‘reading out … the bold-type letters from an old English pictureg-book’. He was made to repeat the ‘sounds again and again’. The apparent tedium of these early reading experiences did not dissuade Manguel from becoming an avid reader. Indeed, his book is a testimony to his own reading life, scholarship and delight in reading, reading to others, and being read to.

Manguel’s book has much to offer the teacher of beginning readers, not as an instructional manual, nor as a fail-safe method, but because he places acts of reading into richly arrayed personal and cultural practices. Here he is as an upper-middle-class child from a well-to-do family explaining his experiences of being read to by his nurse:

I delegated both words and voice, gave up possession — and sometimes even the choice — of the book and, except for the odd clarifying question, became nothing but hearing. I would settle down (at night, but also often during the day, since frequent bouts of asthma kept me trapped in my bed for weeks) and, propped up high against the pillows, listened to my nurse read the Grimm’s terrifying fairy-tales. Sometimes her voice put me to sleep; sometimes, on the contrary, it made me feverish with excitement, and I urged her on in order to find out, more quickly than the author had intended, what happened in the story.

While his family’s wealth may have set him apart from many children, his recollection of the delight of being read to in the safety of the family home accompanied by the excitement of the story mirrors the experiences of many people (now avid readers) who were perhaps less well off. Manguel’s phonemic awareness and alphabetic knowledge may have resulted from beginning reading instruction similar to those employed 400 years earlier, but he became a reader because reading was intertwined with his life, his self, and his experience of others close to him. According to his account, he not only had one-to-one instruction in developing alphabetic knowledge and phonemic awareness, he also had the comfort and stimulation of a rich holistic experience of written language from culturally significant artifacts which simultaneously began the process of building a particular cultural capital.

Not all children arrive at school so well prepared for engaging in the social practices of reading and writing as Alberto Manguel did. Sadly, not all children have sat on the lap of a care-giver and been read to; not all children have been tucked into bed and lulled into sleep by the lilt of a story; not all children have been introduced to the alphabet; not all children are familiar with the sounds of an educated dialect; not all children know the stories, references and characters which form the basis of the cultural capital of the schooled and the educated. As experienced teachers of beginning literacy know, learning to read and write is a developmentally complex, often unpredictable process, involving a range of accomplishments which, as they are acquired, continue to develop expontentially.

Richgels, Poremba and Mcgee (1996) succinctly identify the challenge facing teachers engaged in beginning reading instruction: to bring together in daily practice in the classroom richly contextualised reading and phonemic awareness. As they outline in their paper, beginning reading instruction has come under the influence of two seemingly incompatible bodies of research. Firstly, research which gives emphasis to the contextualised nature of reading and writing includes work by Holdaway (1979), Clay (1979), Goodman, Hood, and Goodman (1991), and many others. Teachers who draw on this work focus on meaning and build on children’s spoken language abilities in designing classroom activities which, it is argued, serve authentic purposes in children’s fives at school and at home. These teachers use real books in the course of teaching children to read.

The second body of research focusses on the importance of phonemic awareness which, it is. argued, children need to have drawn to their attention if they are to become competent readers. As Richgels, Poremba and McGee explain:

Phonemic awareness is conscious attention to phonemes, which are the units of sound that speakers and listeners unconsciously combine and contrast to produce and perceive words in spoken language … Children must go beyond such unconscious use of phonemes when they learn to read and write. Conscious attention to phonemes is involved when they isolate sounds in words during invented spelling or use the sounds associated with letters to identify words and recognize word families.

Since the publication of Adams’s (1990) review of the literature on beginning to read, there has been increasing interest in the importance of the functional understanding of the alphabetic principle and phoneme awareness. Pedagogy has been influenced by research findings which have demonstrated that alphabetic knowledge assists children to move from reading ‘McDonald’s’ only when it is seen in the context of a restaurant to being able to read the word because of the letter sounds (Ehri, 1989; Scott & Ehri, 1990); and that a knowledge of phonemes assisted children with early invented spelling abilities (Ball & Blachman, 1991).

Rather than proposing that, this second body of research requires that children first receive systematic direct instruction in analysing words by sound — pronouncing parts of words, manipulating sounds in words, and associating letters with sounds. Richgels, Poremba and McGee (1996) propose that it is feasible, within the context of a whole class, to provide both rich contextualised reading and phonemic awareness. The instructional activity they have devised is called What Can You Show Us? It is designed to help a teacher taking a whole class to meet the individual needs of children who come to school with a variety of levels of print knowledge.

Essentially, What Can You Show Us? invites students to demonstrate before the class something of what they know about the text which is being read and discussed. It does not require basal readers, controlled vocabulary, expenditure on special books and work sheets; it relies on an experienced, skilled teacher who is sensitive to the needs of children, and who is systematic in meeting their identified, individual needs.

In brief, the What Can You Show Us? classroom activity is founded on four elements: preparation, previewing, student demonstration, and application. The first three elements are undertaken before the shared reading takes place; the fourth occurs during or after shared reading.

Preparation involves the teacher in preparing the text to engage children’s predictive abilities and to highlight particular features of the text: punctuation marks, capital letters, repeated words, and so on.

Previewing involves drawing attention to the book/text on display. The teacher directs attention to aspects of the text, providing an opportunity for students to talk and ask questions about it.

Student demonstrations occur prior to the reading and are founded on the practice of asking individual students to come forward to volunteer what they already know about the text — letters, words, sounds, the title, perhaps to even attempt to read the text. The teacher’s role is to engage with each individual student as s/he demonstrates what they already know.

Applications involves the practice of shared reading of the text, with the teacher taking up and extending the opportunities for instruction provided by the children during the student demonstration phase. The teacher’s role includes such activities as stopping to comment on character and plot, inviting predictions, remarking on illustrations, accepting and responding to student comments and questions, pointing out familiar words, noting punctuation, and emphasising sound-letter correspondence, and so on.

While one-to-one instruction in beginning reading, as in the Reading Recovery program, may produce positive results for some students, the rationalisation of teachers and programs in schools, the implementation of funding policies which require school-based program decision making, and increased teacher-student ratios, it would seem that programs based on one-to-one instruction will find it increasingly difficult to survive on the basis of cost effectiveness, even if the results were unequivocal. Rather than despair, there is evidence from research which suggests that whole class instruction can preserve children’s initiative, interest and enthusiasm and systematically facilitate emerging phonemic awareness. Phonics-first programs may have the seductive appearance of being sequential, systematic, even scientific, and they can certainly be implemented by an inexperienced teacher, but whether a young learner survives the drill and practice tedium to become an avid reader remains problematic. It would seem that children can have both a rich experience of reading and develop phonemic awareness in the context of an ordinary, everyday classroom. There used to be a slogan that read: If you can read, thank a teacher. Perhaps it should have read: If you can read, thank an energetic, skilled, observant, caring, patient, teacher.

REFERENCES

Adams, M. (1990 & 1994). Beginning. To Read. Cambridge, Massachuetts: MIT Press.

Ball, E. & Blachman, B. (1991). Does phoneme segmentation training in kindergarten make a difference in early word recognition and developmental spelling? Reading Research Quarterly, 26. pp. 44-66.

Clay, M. (1979). Reading: The patterning of complex behavior. 2nd ed. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Ehri, L. (1989). Movement into word reading and spelling: How spelling contributes to reading. In J. Mason (ed.), Reading and Writing Connections (pp. 65-81). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Flesch, R. (1955). Why Johnny Can’t Read. New York: Harper and Row.

Flesch, R. (1981). Why Johnny Still Can’t Read. New York: Harper and Row.

Goodman, K. (1993). Phonies Phacts. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Goodman, Y., Hood, W. & Goodman, K. (1991). Organizing for Whole Language.

Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Holdaway, D. (1979). The Foundations of literacy. New York: Ashton Scholastic.

Manguel, A. (1996). A History of Reading. London: Harper Collins.

Richgels, D., Poremba, K. & McGee, L. (1996). Kindergarteners talk about print: Phonemic awareness in meaningful context. The Reading Teacher, 49, 8. pp.632-42.

Scott, J. & Ehri, L. (1990). Sight word reading in prereaders: Use of logographic vs. alphabetic access routes. Journal of Reading Behavior, 22.