The Problems with Whole Word (and Whole Language)
As part of my research on Flesch, I actually read or tried to read “Reading Without Nonsense” by Frank Smith. Not easy to understand. It’s almost druidical, sort of floating above the real world. He casually mentions children learning 50,000 sight-words. He casually mentions children memorizing new words as easily as they memorize new faces. Sounds good, until you try to imagine somebody memorizng thousands of faces. Or tens of thousands of faces.
Reading Smith made me really focus on how insanely difficult look-say (or whole word) is for children. Mainly, there’s a vast quantity of words in English–almost a million now. (A person has to know at le
ast 20,000 words not to be illiterate, for all practical purposes.)
Second is a factor nobody talks about, certainly not Smith. English has lower case and upper case letters. The same word has many forms, for example: teachers, Teachers, TEACHERS. Plus, there are the italic and hand-written variations. Plus, there are the exotic typefaces we have so many of. Consider this word: dale. Having memorized that shape, would you even realize that DALE is the same word?
Smith and Company like to pretend that look-say simply means an American child is learning English words the same way Chinese children learn their ideograms. Wrong. Those ideograms come in only one form; and there’s not nearly as many of them; and most of those ideograms contain picture elements–i.e. the symbol for “man” will reappear inside many other symbols, so there’s visual clues all over the place. The English alphabet is lean and efficient when used phonetically. Used ideogrammatically, it’s hopeless. Too many similar shapes, too many variations.
In my article “A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch,” I conclude that look-say is a form of child abuse. If you have a photographic memory, maybe then it could work. Otherwise, how could it?
Please see #21 on Improve-Education.org.
I am thrilled that Flesch is receiving the praise he deserves. I can’t agree with you more on how you categorize Whole Language as child abuse. I teach reading by intensive, systematic phonics only after establishing a strong base of phonemic awareness first. It is a crime to see so many children suffering (needlessly) from reading disabilities. Which I tell most of my parents that their child is not learning diabled, but curriculum disabled. They are being taught by the wrong methods and often these methods cause a life long reading disability.
To see the flipping of words like ‘was’ and ’saw’ and ‘felt’ and ‘left’ is an example of whole word memorization gone wrong. Simple phonemic awareness or being taught the alphabetic principle would tell these kids that ‘left’ could not say ‘felt’. Witnessing the reliance on pictures (which quickly disappear after 3rd grade), or guessing words in controlled text and not being corrected when substituting ‘horse’ for ‘pony’ in a passage, because it doesn’t affect overall meaning, makes my blood boil. I don’t consider saying ‘horse’ for ‘pony’ reading. No wonder we have an epidemic of children failing to read.
We are teaching our children to memorize, read pictures, and guess instead of teaching them to read. English is a phonemic language (95% or better) which was encoded by speech sounds. (Anyone who argues this point, does not understand phonetics entirely.) Lastly, if English print (written words) was develped or encoded this way, shouldn’t we teach our children the CODE to decode or read print the was it was designed (encoded)? I don’t think so, I know so!
I can’t wait to see your next installment! Thank you for your tribute; it is FAR overdue!
Writing succincly is my passion beginning with word conservation. Would you read some examples? John S.