HOW JOHNNY SHOULD READ

A WAR IS ON BETWEEN SUPPORTERS OF PHONICS AND THOSE WHO BELIEVE IN THE WHOLE-LANGUAGE METHOD OF LEARNING TO READ; CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE--THE NATION'S SCHOOLCHILDREN

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Goodman's main strategy in response to his critics is to say they are the unwitting pawns of the Christian right. It is true that conservatives have taken up phonics as a cause, but in California, where there are plenty of liberals in the legislature, pro-phonics legislation passed unanimously. Asked what the best response to pro-phonics research is, Goodman refers to his book Phonics Phacts, a folksy 100-page paperback. Preferring the "ethnographic" data he collects, Goodman dismisses the research conducted by his opponents. Asked if there is research from other fields that confirms his findings, he cannot think of any. His final defense is that phonics teaches the ability to recognize individual words, not to understand text, but studies confirm what common sense tells us: comprehension depends on word recognition.

After reviewing the arguments mustered by the phonics and whole-language proponents, can we make a judgment as to who is right? Yes. The value of explicit, systematic phonics instruction has been well established. Hundreds of studies from a variety of fields support this conclusion. Indeed, the evidence is so strong that if the subject under discussion were, say, the treatment of the mumps, there would be no discussion.

Yet the discussion goes on. Of all the arguments in the debate, perhaps the most pernicious is that teaching phonics is harmful to poor and minority students. Leslie Patterson, a professor of education at the University of Houston, voices a common concern: "One of the risks, when we focus on the alphabetic principle and give tests in the first grade to identify kids with problems," she says, "is that we will end up identifying the kids who are growing up in poverty and who need much more than just letters and sounds." But it is the children growing up in poverty, in settings where little reading may be done, who need letters and sounds most of all. "Phonemic awareness," says Jack Fletcher, an NICHD researcher, "is going to be even more of a problem for kids without a print-rich environment."

Every day, the experience of Judy Cox, a kindergarten teacher at Reagan Webb Mading school in Houston, illustrates how phonics instruction can help the most disadvantaged students. Mading is in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods; 96% of the pupils are African American. Many come from homes that do not contain a single book. For 10 minutes a day, Cox does exercises that develop phonemic awareness. She goes around and around the class, sounding words out, breaking them into phonemes, then reassembling, or "blending," them. "Cuh-ast," she says, "cast. Fuh-ill, fill." And how well are Cox's pupils learning to read and write? Earlier, one named Denise stood at the blackboard: "I like the pink flamingo..." she wrote. "Very good," said Cox. But Denise was not finished: "...because it has a long neck and it is pink." Only 72% of the third-graders in the state passed a recent reading test; for Mading the figure was 86%.

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