Whole Language: Evil Fad

The evil fad of teaching reading through immersion has also infected Australia. The whole language victims are much more likely to be poor, or Aboriginal.

Remedial reading programs are proving useless for a significant number of children, thanks in large part to an intellectual fad which has infected literacy training in Australia for the past 25 to 30 years: whole language theory.

Whole language "immerses" children in print, allowing them to figure out words for themselves "naturally" and informally, without having to bother with details of breaking words into their component parts and sounding them out, a method known as phonics.

The problem with whole language theory, as the literacy expert Kevin Wheldall, director of Macquarie University's Special Education Centre, said yesterday, is that it doesn't work for about 25 per cent of children. Instead of decoding words they will build up what he calls a "visual lexicon" of words they can recognise on sight until at about age eight their memory capacity is overwhelmed and they "hit the wall".

Whole language has been thoroughly discredited in recent years as researchers discover more about how the brain processes language. But the theory stubbornly holds on, buried within what educators describe as a "balanced approach", in combination with phonics, but which Wheldall says all too often pays only lip service to phonics.

Comments

[liz]

Greetings all you folks coming through from Spleenville. Here are some more whole language resources:
>Brief overview

The term "whole language" was coined by Dr. Kenneth Goodman of the University of Arizona in the early 1980's. Whole language developed into much more than just a reading program. It is an educational philosophy in its own right. It attempts to cover the whole gamut of language learning, including reading, writing and speaking. Much of the philosophy is derived from that used in developmentally appropriate practices teaching and other forms of student-centered instruction. Parts of whole language have been shown to be of value, but the word recognition strategies it advocates are a major point of debate. Goodman believed that learning written language occurs naturally, in the same way we acquire spoken language. He thought children could learn to read primarily by figuring out the meaning of words from an analysis of the context in which they occurred. Good readers don't read word by word Goodman argued. "[t]hey construct meaning from the [entire] text. Indeed, accuracy is not an essential goal of reading". In Goodman's view, it is more important that the reader construct his own meaning from the text than it is for him to accurately read what is on the text.

In a whole language classroom, children are immersed in reading and writing projects at the expense of systematically teaching specific reading or writing skills. Students are encouraged to recite what the teacher reads aloud from an entertaining big-print book. They are allowed to write using "inventive spelling", without actually learning punctuation, grammar or penmanship skills. One of the essential beliefs is that language is learned from "whole to part", with word recognition skills picked up in the context of actual reading and writing, or "immersion" in a print-rich classroom. A recent description of whole language written by two elementary school teachers illustrates this belief.

Whole language vs. Phonics in 1,000 words.

Speaking vs. Reading

summary of excellent Stewart article on whole language in California and the devastating effect.

Start: The Brain and Reading--six related essays on how the brain reads.