Whole Word Is Wholly Absurd (A Look At Three Lies That Sustain The Absurdity)


by Bruce Deitrick Price - Date: 2007-07-20 - Word Count: 1467 Share This!

The more I study Whole Word (also known as look-say and sight reading), the more I feel compelled to shout: this thing has no redeeming features. It must be stopped.

The problem comes in explaining my verdict to the average adult. Most are fluent readers; they can't identify with the horrific difficulties faced by children. My lawyer, a man of the world, knows everything. But when I try to tell him about the dangers of Whole Word, his face becomes bored and blank. "What...?" This essay is addressed to my lawyer and all who are like him: Please pay attention. You really do need to understand the vast damage being done to children, damage variously manifested as illiteracy, cognitive impairments (usually called dyslexia), or behavioral problems (usually called ADD).

The reading wars turn on one simple question: do you teach English words as SOUNDS or SHAPES? Phonics say you teach sounds because that's what English words are designed to represent. Whole Word foolishly says you teach shapes, which is merely a secondary feature that English words happen to possess. Recommending that we do things the hard way--the Whole Word way--requires three colossal lies:

LIE ONE. IT'S FEASIBLE TO MEMORIZE THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AS WHOLE WORDS (OR SIGHT WORDS).

English is now approaching one million total words. Sure, there are more than 500,000 chemical terms and obscure words. But real literacy probably does require 50,000 words. College graduates probably are familiar with 100,000 or even 200,000 words (and names). Unless you have a flawless photographic memory, memorizing 10,000 word-shapes is simply out of the question.

Frank Smith, the chief perpetrator of Whole Word, compares learning sight words to memorizing faces, cars, houses, logos or other objects. He makes it sound easy. But who among us could memorize even 3,000 cars, faces, or houses? Not just to name them correctly but to do it quickly--at reading speed.

Even the fanatics pushing Whole Word acknowledge that children can memorize only 800 word-shapes a year. Do the math. At best, that's 5000 by sixth grade and 10,000 by the end of high school--not close to half enough. And that's the SMART students who actually work at all this memorization. The slower students are just lost souls.

The nightmare is even worse than suggested. Every English word can be written as upper case, lower case, handwriting or in fancy type faces. So even if children are flawlessly reading a textbook with a controlled vocabulary printed in a typeface they are used to, much of their ability goes out the window when the children have to deal with the SAME words in billboards, TV ads, packaging, or a note from Mom.

Bottom line: Whole Word is a pedagogy that, by anyone's estimation, cannot finish the job. It's like bringing a tricycle to move all your furniture. (And remember--even if a mental whiz did memorize 25,000 sight words, that still leaves the other 975,000 words, which the whiz cannot read!)

LIE TWO: ENGLISH NEEDS TO BE LEARNED AS WHOLE WORDS BECAUSE ENGLISH IS NOT A PHONETIC LANGUAGE.

Let me be emphatic. English is 100% phonetic in that every word, when it was created, was intended to capture and convey helpful phonetic information. This information is a reader's best friend--why would you even think of abandoning it?

What happens over the years is that vowels, in particular, tend to drift. For example, "love" and "cove" probably rhymed at one time. But isn't it remarkable, on the basis of these irregularities, that whole word enthusiasts leap to this idiotic nonsequitur: English isn't phonetic. Scholars sometimes use phrases such as "English is 93% phonetic." Even this is misleading. It might be correct to say that English is only 93% CONSISTENT. Okay. But "love" and "cove" are still phonetic in that these symbols contain lots of phonetic information.

Here are some examples of phonetic symbols: any English word. Here are some examples of non-phonetic symbols: any Chinese word. How complicated is that? One might also stare all day at the symbols on an electrical circuit, or a weather map, or restrooms doors (the Men and Women symbols)--not a scrap of phonetic information in sight. People experience these things non-verbally or in their native language.

Calling English non-phonetic is as dumb as saying that the radioactive and handicapped symbols are phonetic. That our educators would try to flip the obvious will remain one of the most bizarre scams of the 20th century.

LIE THREE: PHONICS IS DIFFICULT, REQUIRING A CHILD TO LEARN LOTS OF RULES. WHOLE WORD, ON THE OTHER HAND, IS FUN AND EASY, AND LETS CHILDREN BE THEMSELVES.

These lies, and variations of these lies, are spun out in such gaudy profusion, it's easy to forget what is really happening. Here's the crux. Everything easy about Whole Word occurs at the very start. (Like most Ponzi schemes, it's front-loaded.) In the first months, the child learns only the easiest one-syllable words, words with two, three or four letters. Parents see all the easy words (a/k/a the Dolch words), and they too are drawn into the con. The cat is in the hat. How hard is that?

But these are just the first steps of a long, impossible journey. There's only so many short words. Even in the first few grades, children are asked to memorize longer, more confusing words. But it gets worse and worse; it NEVER gets better. There's no breakthrough or ah-ha moment in Whole Word.

Let's consider a child in fourth grade. Even if getting A's, his vocabulary of sight words is only 3000. The child is ten and can read only fake books with artificially controlled vocabularies. More to the point, the child cannot read a newspaper, an advertisement, or cereal box. Basically, the educational process is on hold. Literature? Science? History? Forget it. Children can't be taught anything substantial with such a tiny vocabulary. Furthermore, children are cut off from recognizing the many words they already have in their heads (even first graders recognize more than 25,000 words by ear).

With Whole Word, many children reach, say, fifth or sixth grade as a functional illiterate and is, predictably, hostile and fearful. What's wrong with me? Am I retarded? Yes, child, you are. Your teachers have made you that way.

Conversely, everything hard about phonics occurs in the beginning. Then the child breaks through to understanding and independence. Even in the worst case scenario (old-fashioned intensive phonetics), children might spend a few months learning a lot of picky rules. The payoff is that they can read 1,000,000 words by the time they are 8 or 9. Frank Smith makes much of what he calls "the 146 rules and 67 exceptions." He wants to pretend that it's so difficult, and he's so concerned about the children. The truth is that most of these rules and exceptions are not central; they don't need to be dealt with right away. Modern phonics (a striped-down approach to phonetics) tends to focus on the essentials, so the child moves more quickly to real reading. From my personal experience, I don't think a child needs more than the absolute basics. (I can read and I still don't know any phonics.) I caution against making phonics too complex because Whole Word people will seize on the difficulty of phonics to confuse and alarm parents.
----------------
So now you're probably wondering, well, if Whole Word is so dumb, why do educators keep pushing it? Sadly, many educators believe that fairness requires leveling; they end up in the educationally inane position of being in favor of less education. Truth is, John Dewey and his disciples were diehard ideologues. They were so intent on their socio-political goals, they drifted into being careless about, or even hostile to, traditional academic subjects and success, including literacy. (For more on this history, please see my "A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch"--easily found in Google.)

So where are we today? The people who run public schools (not just in the USA but in England, Australia, etc.) are still fighting a strange rearguard action. They have repackaged Whole Word as a prime component inside a big ball of fluff called Whole Language. They prattle on about Balanced Literacy (i.e., as much Whole Word as they can get away with.) Teachers are told to lie: "Oh, yes, we teach phonics."

Let me make this simple. The only way to teach a phonetic language is phonetically. Children have to learn, as early as possible, that letters stand for sounds. What children absolutely do not need is "sight words," Dolch words or any strategy that encourages children to see words as shapes that need to be memorized. There begins a descent into illiteracy and dyslexia.

-----------------------
Bruce Deitrick Price writes about education, language and culture on his site Improve-Education.org (this site now presents 26 articles on a great range of topics).

Related Tags: literacy, dyslexia, sight reading, phonics, illiteracy, whole word, whole language, balanced literacy, rudolph flesch, reading methodology

Your Article Search Directory : Find in Articles

© The article above is copyrighted by it's author. You're allowed to distribute this work according to the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license.
 

Recent articles in this category:



Most viewed articles in this category: