Teachers Speak Out in Favor of Reading Aloud : Education: Convention focuses on increasingly controversial method, sometimes criticized as replacing phonics.

Though they were far from their classrooms, down the street from Disneyland and surrounded by peers rather than pupils, many teachers attending the 40th annual International Reading Assn. convention here this week could not resist the urge to settle into the big red chair and read aloud.

Set in a vast exhibition hall alive with the hustle and bustle of publishers peddling their wares, the overstuffed chair was a primary-colored island of calm as well as a symbol of the theory of reading dominant in most schools today--that children learn to read best when surrounded by good literature.

And there, without a tick of self-consciousness, teachers such as Deloris Foxx of Durham, N.C., were eager to summon the same repertoire of arched eyebrows and dramatic voices they would have used with a roomful of fidgety first-graders.

“They love it,” she said of the time she spends every day reading to her young students. “They’ll ask me to read the same book over and over.”

Yet that simple restorative act--reading aloud to children--is becoming increasingly controversial in states across the country, as politicians, parents and some educators worry that it has replaced systematic instruction of the fundamental building blocks of literacy. In California last week, Gov. Pete Wilson and his top education adviser blamed proponents of “whole language” methods that do not explicitly teach children phonics for national test scores that ranked the state with Louisiana, 39th out of 39 participating states.

And a reading task force put together by state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin met for the first time Thursday to begin re-examining reading curriculum guidelines that stress the literature-based whole language approach.

Methods of teaching reading are being reconsidered in Minnesota, Missouri, Colorado, Indiana, Maryland and other states as well, as school districts find themselves spending more money than ever on special tutoring programs aimed at students who are struggling to read in regular classrooms.

When it comes to reading instruction, “California . . . has been the shining example . . . that the rest of the world was trying to catch up to,” said Kenneth S. Goodman, a University of Arizona professor credited with formulating whole language instruction.

Now, he fears, the criticism in California will fuel the backlash nationally.

That prospect dismays many of the 12,000 educators attending the convention, which ended Thursday. Fearing that a retreat from literature-based programs in California could influence other states to return to phonics drills and mind-numbing “Dick and Jane” texts, many teachers are defending their methods and arguing that phonics and literature are not incompatible.

“Whole language is not a system, it’s a belief about the way kids learn best,” said Joan F. Smith of Westerville, Ohio, a second-grade teacher who was honored by the reading teachers group this week as one of the best in the nation.

“Whole language teachers use phonics all the time, they just use it differently. People who are afraid of whole language are just afraid of doing something different from when they were a child.”

But phonics proponents--whose leading voices include respected researchers, minority parents, Christian fundamentalists and conservative politicians--argue that teachers today are failing to teach reading skills in a systematic way. And that argument appears to be making its mark.

Many whole language advocates are tempering their rhetoric, or even abandoning the label, which is actually an umbrella term for several instructional approaches stressing literature, rather than skills, in the classroom.

And the term whole language has all but disappeared from the convention’s 165-page program, said Susan Mandel Glazer, a New Jersey reading professor who is the organization’s outgoing president. She now calls the method she uses at her Center for Reading and Writing at Rider University in Lawrenceville “a holistic approach” to reading instruction.

“It’s become a bad word,” Glazer said. “It’s such a politically hot debate . . . people are afraid.”

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The polarization within and outside the teaching profession does little to help children learn, she said. “We need to stop breaking into camps that support phonics or no phonics, basals or real books, standardized testing or alternative assessment, and start thinking about the students.”

Good teachers, she said, teach phonics, grammar, spelling and a love of literature all at the same time. But she acknowledged that some of those elements may get lost when ill-trained teachers allow reading aloud to substitute for reading instruction.

The methodological debate is one of the oldest and bitterest in all of education. But in recent years it has gone beyond an internecine battle among educators and become part of the growing political gap between liberals and conservatives, teachers said.

“It’s almost as if you don’t believe in phonics, you’re not an American,” said Dorothy S. Strickland, a past president of the teachers group and an expert in reading instruction who teaches at Rutgers University.

Despite the rhetoric of researchers and politicians, many teachers wandering among the hundreds of exhibits and lining up to purchase armloads of books at discount prices professed to have always occupied a methodological middle ground.

“My job is to introduce good stories,” said Gail Tress-Nardoni, a reading specialist from Lambertville, N.J. But skills have to be taught at the same time, by drawing on the words in those stories, she said.

Marylou Capelle, a first- and second-grade teacher from Rochester, Minn., said her district is getting ready to buy textbooks emphasizing phonics, although she intends to continue reading to her students.

Re-emphasizing phonics, she said, does not have to squeeze literature out of the curriculum. And the debate itself can be healthy. “If the pendulum swung a little bit too far (toward whole language) and we’re criticized as a result of that, I think it will benefit children.”

Others, however, worry that all of what makes the progressive approach work for children, including literature in classrooms, is at risk.

“Whole language has been very important but . . . I think it’s coming to a grinding halt now,” said Patricia Smith, a second- and third-grade reading specialist from Terre Haute, Ind., where conservative school board members refused to allow the district’s teachers to attend a state-sponsored training session on whole language testing methods.

For others, however, the move back toward phonics is creating opportunities and a gratifying sense of vindication.

For the past 10 years, Charlene Wrightson and her sister, Gigi Bradshaw, two former special education teachers from Groveland, Calif., have been marketing a phonics-based program that uses animals in the shape of letters to help children develop the automatic recognition of sounds that experts now consider essential to reading fluency.

For years, sales were slow. Now things are picking up, and schools in 13 states, including 300 in California, have purchased their materials. Although their convention booth was assigned space on the little-trafficked fringe of the exhibition hall, they were getting some interest from the passing parade.

“We’re excited . . . because the phone is ringing off the wall with calls from . . . school board presidents, teachers, principals and parents,” Wrightson said. “It feels real good to know we’ve been right this whole time.”