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Smith also argued that readers did not see every letter in a word or every word in a text. If they did and if they tried to translate what they saw into sounds, reading would be much too cumbersome. Somehow, though, children learned to read. To explain this, Smith adapted theories about the acquisition of oral language. In the mid-'60s the linguist Noam Chomsky had determined that a child's brain is actually wired with the rules of all spoken languages. Immersed in the world of speech, the child learns by experience which rules apply to the language of his community. Smith concluded that written language was acquired in the same fashion and should be taught in as natural and authentic a way as possible.
Goodman's and Smith's theories have been put into practice very directly. At a whole-language school in New York City that TIME visited, a first-grade teacher had put a Post-it on the last word on every page of a book. The children tried to guess the hidden words. "Why do I cover words when we read a new book?" the teacher asked. "So that we can practice our skipping strategy. That's your most important skill."
To give their pupils authentic literary experiences, whole-language teachers use children's books. The pupils are encouraged to "take risks" without fear of being corrected--a practice justified by the notion that children learn to read by experimenting with different rules. Exercises that break up the reading process are rejected. Whole-language advocates insist that they do teach phonics, but only when a question about phonics comes up in the course of reading.
Goodman says whole language has two bases: "the scientific and the humanistic," and the humanistic strand is an important reason for its appeal. With whole language, reading is considered an organic process, the dignity of teachers is paramount, and they regard their students as collaborators. These attitudes sit firmly within the tradition of progressive education, and it is tempting to think that the humanism came first and the science later. Goodman reacts to that speculation with a shrug and a smile. "I like people," he says. "And I'm very happy that my research confirms my prejudices."
In the 1970s, when students filled in endless phonics work sheets and read inane basals, and teachers felt overly controlled, whole language exercised a strong attraction. By the 1980s, it had come to dominate the teachers colleges and was strongly influencing publishers. Chall argues that the shift from a code emphasis to a meaning emphasis hurt reading scores. Citing National Assessment of Educational Progress data, she has written, "[F]rom 1971 to 1980 there was a steady improvement in the reading comprehension of nine-year-olds. However, during the 1980s...the scores did not improve and rather declined."
The counterrevolution began in 1990 with the publication of another landmark book, Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print, by Marilyn Adams, a cognitive psychologist. Adams' purpose, similar to Chall's, was to synthesize innumerable, uncoordinated studies of reading. She came to exactly the same conclusion that Chall did: reading programs that included systematic phonics instruction led to better readers than programs that did not. Programs that combined systematic phonics instruction with a meaning emphasis seemed to work best of all.