Critical Look at New Reading Program : Education: New whole-language approach to teaching reading may be a prelude to future problems for pupils.

Sharp-eyed readers of the recent California Assessment Program scores may have noticed that the third-grade children in San Diego usually scored higher in reading than the sixth-graders.

Of the 80 elementary schools tested in the San Diego Unified School District, in only 16, or 20%, did sixth-graders score as high or higher than the third-graders.

The foremost reason for this poorer performance by sixth-graders, according to the state Department of Education, is that the tests for sixth-graders contain about 40% more critical-reading items. These questions require the student to make inferences about what they read.

What this would seem to signify is that San Diego sixth-graders have received less than the ideal instruction in how to read critically. CAP expects teachers to develop more critical-reading ability in their sixth-grade pupils than they actually do.

Critical reading is certainly more difficult than reading literally.

In literal reading, the goal is to comprehend precisely what an author intended. Critical reading, on the other hand, requires the student to evaluate the ideas--to decide whether they are accurate, honorable, relevant, complete, up-to-date, metaphoric or symbolic, accompanied by supporting evidence, or whether they meet a host of other criteria.

But, although critical reading is more complicated than literal reading, its success depends on good literal-reading skills. Only after literal knowledge is obtained, can critical reading commence.

The San Diego city schools and many others around the state have recently adopted a new way to teach reading: the so-called whole-language approach. Under this teaching philosophy, students are no longer grouped by ability; and the reading texts contain a higher quality of literature and less emphasis on word recognition.

But will this new approach produce sixth-graders who are better critical readers? Or is this just another educational fad?

The whole-language theory of reading development has at least five disabling suppositions. Taken together they comprise an invitation for disaster for reading instruction:

1) Whole language insists that children best learn to read the same way they learn to speak, that is, with no formal instruction. The reading research, to the contrary, supports direct, systematic and intensive teaching of reading.

2) Whole language de-emphasizes word recognition. Children can comprehend the meaning of a written sentence before they can recognize the words in it, says the state Department of Education’s “English-Language Arts Framework,” which mandates whole-language instruction for teachers. The truth is that there has been no reading factor more closely related to comprehension than quick and accurate word recognition.

3) Whole language encourages children to omit, substitute and insert words in sentences they read--at will. Students thus are encouraged to make eccentric decisions as to precisely what an author intended to impart. No accurate literal or critical reading is possible under these circumstances.

4) Whole language denies that there is any sequence of reading skills. Everything about reading must be taught simultaneously, whole-language proponents maintain. Quite the contrary, says the research. Teaching a hierarchy of reading skills, from the easiest to the more difficult, works best.

5) Since the whole-language theory has fared badly when examined experimentally, leaders in the movement now claim that experimental research findings in reading are fraudulent. According to whole-language proponents, the only proper way to evaluate progress in reading development is to write subjective anecdotes of children’s reading behavior. It goes without saying that this disavowal of the scientific method raises alarms about the merit of its other propositions.

The delivery of critical reading skills is the most important function of the schools. One cannot participate effectively in a democratic society without this ability. People without reading skills often find themselves on welfare rolls or in prison. Poor readers require costly remedial instruction.

The taxpaying public must provide for all these services. It is not only parents, therefore, who have a vital stake in making sure that the schools are not indulging in transitory fads and theories, which Harvard President Derek Bok recently chastised them for doing.

A critical question for our school board members therefore should be: “Did you understand what you were approving when you authorized the whole-language approach to reading development?”