What does a "balanced
approach" to reading instruction mean?
Sebastian Wren, Ph.D.
There have been, over the years, two
general instructional approaches that have governed reading education.
They have gone by many names, but today they are generally known as Phonics
and Whole Language approaches. These approaches to reading instruction
reflect very different underlying philosophies and stress very different skills.
The philosophy underlying the Whole Language approach is that reading is
a natural process, much like learning to speak, and that children exposed
to a great deal of authentic, connected text will naturally become literate
without much in the way of explicit instruction in the rules and conventions
of printed text. The philosophy underlying the Phonics approach is
quite different -- Phonics advocates argue that in order to learn to read,
most children require a great deal of explicit instruction in the rules of
printed text.
Whole Language and Phonics
Approaches
A young child in a Whole
Language classroom is provided with simple, predictable and repetitive text
-- frequently the text is already familiar to the child, making it that much
easier to understand. Emphasis in a Whole Language classroom is not
placed on reading precision and accuracy, but on comprehension and appreciation
-- children are not expected to read the text verbatim, they are allowed to
insert and substitute words as long as the story still makes sense, and as
long as the child is understanding the gist of the story. The primary
goal of the Whole Language teacher is to foster a love for the act of reading
authentic and connected text, and to keep the process of reading instruction
uncontrived.
In a Phonics classroom,
by contrast, a great emphasis is placed on reading precision, and children
are encouraged to read the words exactly as they appear on the page.
Children are explicitly taught "rules" about the way words are written and
spelled, and they are taught spelling-sound relationships. After a
teacher provides an explicit lesson in a particular Phonics rule (e.g. if
the last letter of a word is an "e," then the first vowel is usually long),
the child is presented with a passage of text that contains many words consistent
with that rule (called decodable text); this provides the child with the opportunity
to apply each Phonics rule on a variety of words in the context of a passage.
The goal of the Phonics teacher, then, is to instill children with the Phonics
rules and the common spelling-sound relationships, and to teach children
to apply this knowledge in sounding-out each word they encounter, making
the assumption that comprehension and appreciation will be a natural consequence
of accuracy.
Some people have characterized
the fundamental difference between these two philosophies as being a debate
between whether reading is "top-down" or "bottom-up." The Whole
Language advocates state that reading is "top-down" in that the meaning of
the text is dependent upon the background knowledge and understanding that
the reader brings. The reader forms hypotheses and makes predictions,
and only samples the text occasionally to confirm those predictions.
By contrast, the Phonics
approach could be described as "bottom-up" -- Phonics advocates argue that
if a person is able to correctly decode text, meaning and understanding will
follow. The text contains the message, and through the act of decoding
the text, the reader discovers what that message is.
The Great Debate (a.k.a.
The Reading Wars)
Educators have debated over
which is the best approach to teach children to read for many years.
The ancient Greeks began reading instruction by teaching the letters and
the letter-sound relationships, and children did not attempt to decode any
real words until they had mastered these basics. In the middle of the
19th century, the great education reformer Horace Mann criticized the Phonics-like
approach to reading instruction that was prevalent at the time, describing
letters of the alphabet as "bloodless, ghostly apparitions." He advocated
more of a "whole word" approach to reading instruction. Late in the
19th century and early in the 20th century, the pendulum swung back towards
"skills and drills" based instruction, such as the McGuffy readers and the
Beacon readers. Before the second World War, the pendulum of education
back swung back again with the publication of the Scott Foresman's "Dick
and Jane" reading books that were more repetitive, emphasized simple words
that were supposed to be in the child’s "sight vocabulary," and which were
highly predictable. Thus, the "look-say" approach to reading instruction
became the predominant approach to reading instruction. In the midst
of the Cold-War era, Rudolf Flesch published "Why Johnny Can’t Read," which
suggested that the look-say approach was more than merely educationally inappropriate,
he characterized it as a threat to democracy. The pendulum once again
swung back towards Phonics, but in addition, this book added very political
overtones to what was already becoming a very heated debate. In the
1980s, educators rebelled against the contrived drills and worksheets that
were common in the Phonics curricula; the pendulum swung back towards Whole
Language and more "authentic" reading lessons, and the volatile nature of
what has come to be known as "the Great Debate" became even more politically
charged.
With social and political
conservatives having embraced Phonics as a traditionalist, back-to-basics
approach to reading instruction, liberals embraced Whole Language, describing
the Whole Language approach as more "democratic" and even using terms like
"elitist" and "racist" to describe the Phonics philosophy.
Arguably, the Great Debate,
or what some have more appropriately dubbed the "reading wars," has been
one of the most destructive forces in reading education. The battles
have grown from ideological differences to personal, politically charged attacks
on character. Teachers, and more importantly children, have been caught
in the crossfire.
Recently the National Academy
of Sciences released an analysis of research in reading instruction called
Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children. In the preface to
this book, the committee that authored it expressed their hopes that the
research-based information provided in their report would "mark the end of
the reading wars." They state that, "The study reported in this volume
was undertaken with the assumption that empirical work in the field of reading
had advanced sufficiently to allow substantial agreed-upon results and conclusions
that could form a basis for breaching the differences among the warring parties."
Their intent was to provide information about research-based reading instruction
without regard to ideologies or sides in the reading wars. It was clearly
their intention to simply promote the best information available about reading
and reading instruction, and to ignore which "party" had promoted it in the
past. Still, reviews of the report summarized the content with overly
simplistic statements such as "researchers call for a balanced approach to
end the reading wars."
A Balanced Approach
In fact, very few educators
today would describe themselves as strict advocates of either a Phonics approach
or a Whole Language approach -- most would describe their teaching as "balanced,"
which, on the surface, has a great deal of appeal. Educators nationwide
are promoting a "balanced" approach to reading instruction in an effort to
bring an end to the reading wars. However, while an end to the reading
wars could not possibly be more desirable, it is important to remember that
a compromise between these two approaches to reading instruction will not
necessarily result in the single, best approach. If either Phonics or
Whole Language was even close to being the panacea of reading education, then
there would not be a Great Debate. The fact is, there is not much evidence
that either the Whole Language approach or the Phonics approach is particularly
effective. As Marilyn Adams has said, "We have known for 30 years that
Phonics did a better job at teaching reading than Whole Word -- and now Whole
Language -- instruction. But, you know, it never was that much better."
Neither approach has been sufficiently effective, so why do we assume that
a compromise between these two approaches will provide educators with the
most effective approach possible?
While the pendulum of reading
instruction has swung back and forth several times, reading performance for
children has remained quite stable, and unfortunately, quite poor.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has been used to assess
major areas of education including reading performance since 1969.
In 30 years, despite the different approaches to reading education that have
prevailed at different times, reading scores have not really changed appreciably;
about 40 percent of this country’s fourth graders have always performed in
the "below basic" category, while approximately 5 percent have been ranked
in the "advanced" category at the other end of the distribution. Around
the world, not just in the U.S., when either a Phonics approach or a Whole
Language approach is adopted, an unacceptably large percentage of children
fail to learn to read. According to the 1992 NAEP, most teachers in
the U.S. adopted what they described as a balanced approach to reading instruction,
but still the scores remained unacceptably low.
Problems with a Balanced
Approach
One possible contributing
factor in the stability of the NAEP scores despite teachers moving to a more
"balanced approach" to reading instruction stems from the fact that most
people do not agree what the term "balanced approach" means. A balanced approach
could be generically described as "mixing some Phonics with Whole Language,"
but how this is accomplished in any particular classroom is unclear.
The eclectic approach, as some have come to call it, sometimes involves teaching
Phonics first, and then "graduating" to Whole Language approaches. Alternatively,
the Phonics instruction may be explicit, but children might be given more
opportunities to read connected, authentic literature. Or, lessons
prescribed by Phonics and Whole Language may be intermixed in the hopes that
different children will benefit from different "styles" of teaching.
Similarly, it is not uncommon for teachers to use an amalgam of decodable
text and predictable, repetitive text in a diplomatic approach to balanced
literacy instruction. The argument is often made that the best elements
of each philosophy can be utilized while the worst are eliminated, but how
are we to decide what the "best elements" are? Should we assume that
the two approaches represent the entire world of reading instruction, and
that the "best elements" are to be found in one camp or the other?
It is possible that some combination of the two approaches will work better
than either approach alone did, but is it necessarily the best possible approach
for each individual child?
Science to the Rescue
Research in reading is providing
us with approaches and understanding that neither "camp" was able to provide
-- fresh ideas and new ways of thinking about reading and reading instruction
that are not consistent with the tenets of either traditional Phonics or Whole
Language philosophies are being substantiated and validated through empirical
research. Teachers are now being encouraged to look beyond the restrictions
of the traditional approaches to reading instruction, and to use research
evidence to gain an understanding of the reading process that allows them
to make clearer and more purposeful instructional decisions. More importantly,
teachers are able to use the information provided by research to customize
instructional strategies to individual children’s needs -- rather than creating
lessons based on a philosophy or an approach, teachers can examine a child’s
development in reading and respond with appropriate instruction.
As long as educators are
in any way expected to base their educational decisions on the issues, debates,
politics and polemics of the Great Debate, and as long as we limit our horizons
to approaches and philosophies that have been advocated by one faction or
another, there is no reason to believe that real progress in reading education
will ever be made. Phonics approaches may be improved by incorporating
elements of Whole Language instruction, or vice versa, but it is doubtful
that the best approach to reading instruction will be scavenged from these
two philosophies, and it is even less likely that any instruction that is
not squarely centered on the individual student’s learning needs will ever
be universally effective.
Rather than picking the
best elements from these two approaches, it seems sensible to simply ask
what information about reading and reading instruction has been supported
by research, and move forward from there. If we focus on what research
has said about how children learn to read, and if we truly focus on the educational
needs of each individual child that is learning to read, then we do not need
to concern ourselves with striking any sort of balance or making any compromises
in our reading instruction. Educators should not be asking whether a
lesson is Phonics-based or Whole Language-based, they should be asking whether
a lesson is going to help a specific beginning reader to learn to read.
The most troubling aspect
of the debate over Phonics, Whole Language and balanced approaches to reading
instruction is that the interest and debate almost always focuses on the lessons
and activities that a teacher should deliver (and the order in which those
lessons and activities should be delivered). A typical Phonics teacher
plans lessons weeks or months in advance. So does a Whole Language
teacher. So does a teacher who is trying to balance these two approaches.
But if instruction is to be customized on individual students' learning needs,
teachers need to become more adept at planning lessons to focus on areas
of instructional need that were revealed through artful assessment and observation
of individual students. Lesson plans can be thought out in broad strokes
in advance, but if instruction is to be truly effective, lesson plans need
to be constantly revised to accommodate new assessment information, and lessons
need to be customized to suit the learning needs of individual students.
The Great Debate over reading instruction does not help teachers to develop
more assessment driven, individualized instruction strategies.
As stated earlier, an end
to the Reading Wars could not be more desirable, but the debate will not
end as long as the focus of reading instruction is on the teacher and the
activities and materials. The focus needs to shift to the student and
the individual learning needs that can be revealed through ongoing, diagnostic
assessment. Only when all teachers learn to diagnose student reading
skills and respond with focused, deliberate instruction will literacy be
available to all children.
** Parts of this article
were originally written for the Southwest
Educational Development Laboratory.
