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Notes -
It's a Vibes-based World for Us
The New Yorker recently printed a piece about a conflict among parents, politicians, and educators centered on childhood literacy. One group wants teachers to use a variation of whole language learning, a method based on immersing kids in books and showing them how to connect words with images. The other wants teachers to use a method called phonics where children are taught to sound out letters and groups of letters, allowing them voice whole words.
Currently, whole language learning dominates curricula in the US school system, with some 60% of children being taught using it--especially in urban areas. Which is surprising, given that researchers almost uniformly agree that phonics is more effective. It's been settled all the way back in the 60's.
This is why some states and cities have begun ordering their teacher to switch to phonics. It's happening in New York City, for example, where whole language learning has been the preferred method for almost twenty years. It's happening in Oakland, CA, where groups like NAACP or REACH (an educational advocacy group), are putting pressure on local school districts to get teachers to use phonics.
But to what do we owe the pleasure of putting tens of millions of kids through the less effective of the two teaching methods?
The New Yorker piece author points to vibes.
According to what she found, whole language learning gained popularity among both teachers and parents because it painted a rosy, feel-good image of literacy education. The method's supporters maintain that children should be put in a book-rich environment and the rest will take care of itself--"through proximity or osmosis", as the New Yorker writer sarcastically describes it. And the teacher's role? To ask encouraging questions, such as why an author chose to use a certain color or why a character was represented by a certain animal.
The author delicately points out another reason why so many favor whole language learning over phonics: politics. Through some clever rhetoric, whole language learning has positioned itself as a counter to the authoritarian, regimented phonics approach, where children have to go through regular letter-sounding drills and have to read the same set of books.
Kenneth Goodman, a famous proponent of whole language learning, said phonics is steeped in "negative, elitist, racist views of linguistic purity." Basically, phonics codes "conservative", and that often was enough to get whole school districts to move away from it, damn whatever researchers say about its effectiveness.
Well, this is all an interesting story that explains a lot about how the education system works. (I would also recommend this 1997 The Atlantic piece to get an even broader picture). But what really struck me about the whole thing is that it's not just vibes-based literacy, it's literally vibes all the way down:
Whole language learning is a vibes-based approach to teaching kids how to read. It's supported by vibes-based academics doing vibes-based science. It's put into practice by vibes-based policymakers. It's supported by vibes-based parents and vibes-based teachers.
Even the New Yorker writer, despite building a strong case for using science-backed phonics, abandons her position at the end, going instead for vibes. She concludes her piece by stating that it's tempting to focus our energies on changing concrete things like school curricula, but what we should really be doing is attacking larger, more abstract problems like poverty and structural racism.
It's a vibes-based world out there. So lay down your arguments, your charts and numbers, your ideas on cause and effect, and start vibing.
I wonder if any such controversy or split exists outside the English-speaking countries. In languages where the spelling doesn't lag behind pronunciation by several centuries as it does with English, something like phonics seems just obvious. In my Hungarian school we first learned the vowels (as they are easy to pronounce in isolation), the teacher would show big cards with these letters, and we pronounced it out loud, she would show another letter and we'd pronounce that etc. (We'd also do exercises of circling pictures in a workbook whose name contains the new letter/sound that we just learned.) Then after learning the vowels, we learned each consonant and immediately combined them into syllables. E.g. lesson about the letter "b": teacher writes syllables on the chalkboard like "ba, bá, be, bé, bi, bí, bo, bó, bö, bő, bu, bú, bü, bű" and we'd go over them, entire class pronouncing them. Then she may ask if any of these are meaningful words by themselves. Or if we know any word that starts with any of these syllables. This seems closer to phonics than to whole word. Then gradually we'd move to longer words, then very short sentences, then longer sentences in large font, short stories etc.
I'm a bit confused on the whole-word method though. Does it mean that they simply don't have a dedicated class/timeslot for each letter, they don't say that "hey this is the letter b, the capital letter looks like B and the cursive handwritten looks like this and this". That they don't do syllables? That it's all just "here's the word 'hello' and we pronounce it as hello", before the kid was ever told that the letters h, e, l, and o are things? Seems very silly. English spelling is far from pronunciation but isn't so far...
In Israel the corresponding methods are called “Phonetic” and “Global”. As far as I know, phonetic is leading, but there’s some global sprinkled in. In Hebrew it’s very common to read and write without all the vowels (the nikud) so some global reading is a must, but it’s not a good way to start learning.
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Hungarian is more or less pronounced perfectly phonetically, though, right?
It seems that how French speaking kids learn to read is the obvious question- French being a language with similar orthographic problems to English.
And American kids taught using the whole word method are taught their letters, but not necessarily the way they go together to make sounds. They’re expected to memorize ‘sight words’ that need to be recognized on sight and not to parse individual letters.
FWIW, "sight words" can complement phonics, it doesn't have to replace them. I think it's actually a good thing both for some tricky spelling, and for quicker reading -- as long as it doesn't exclude phonics.
Sadly, there was a similar movement in Germany, where regarding spelling they allowed all manner of misspelling -- as long as it "looked like it would sound" (which doesn't really make sense as a concept). This has led to a ton of kids who can't spell properly, for no apparent gain (and lasting surprisingly late in life). It's really annoying. I see it in my kids, where I'm a much better German speller, even if they are better speakers (as they are native, and I'm not).
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Yes, just like pretty much all European languages, except English and French. But I think even French spelling is more regular than English. (To nitpick: it isn't pronounced phonetically, but written phonetically)
Hence my wondering if any such debate exists elsewhere. But probably not, just like the concept of "spelling bee" contests makes no sense and they don't exist for non-English, European languages (elsewhere I don't know). It's useful to think about, in order to understand how fundamentally human this topic is and how far reaching the conclusions can be.
Yes, there has been a long-standing controversy in France about "méthode globale" (whole word method) as opposed to "méthode syllabique" (phonics), with the first being considered the modern, progressive approach and the second the traditional, no-nonsense one.
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