Phonics Is Best Aid for Reading, Study Shows

Adding new ammunition to the fight over how best to teach reading, a federally funded study has demonstrated in real-world classrooms what had previously only been theorized--that intensive drills in phonics and the building blocks of words make young students better readers.

The study at the University of Houston, to be presented next week at a legislative hearing on teaching methods in Sacramento, is expected by many reading researchers to become a turning point in the long-running but unproductive debate between advocates of phonics and those who favor the whole language approach, which emphasizes stories and discussion and eschews drills.

The Houston study comes down solidly on the side of phonics instruction. Reading gains for students taught the phonics way averaged twice those notched by students taught using whole language.

Conducted among 374 first- and second-graders lagging behind in a suburban school district there, the study found that students exposed to intensive phonics drills performed at the 42nd percentile on a nationally administered standardized test, while those in whole language classes were at the 23rd percentile. Another group of students who were taught phonics, but mostly using only the words appearing in their reading, ranked just slightly better, at the 27th percentile.

“What we’re doing here . . . is getting these economically disadvantaged, low achievers almost up to the national average with just good classroom instruction,” said Barbara Foorman, the University of Houston educational psychologist who directed the study. “Whereas the percentiles that the whole language kids end up with are indicative of a reading disability.”

In California, the debate has stalled changes in the state’s instructional philosophy recommended in September by a task force appointed by state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin. The task force said the state needed to increase its emphasis on basic grammar, spelling and phonics skills and on direct instruction--as opposed to allowing children great leeway in guiding their own learning--to improve test results that found 60% of fourth-graders were not yet reading at a basic level.

However, the task force also embraced elements of the whole language philosophy, which stresses writing, speaking and the reading of engaging children’s literature. Instead of using the report as the starting point for a truce, the two sides have been wrangling ever since over which view should dominate.

Now it appears that policymakers in the two camps may finally be working out their differences. The State Board of Education next week is expected to adopt a policy statement that puts upfront many of the instructional elements that Foorman’s study finds to be valuable as complements to compelling literature--exercises to help beginning readers understand that every word is a sequence of sounds, instruction in the different ways those sounds can be represented with letters, and practice with common spelling patterns.

Widely accepted research has found that beginning readers need such sound and letter skills to become fluent enough with words to understand and analyze the meaning of what they are reading. But a large part of the debate has been over how such skills are acquired.

Foorman, using sophisticated mathematical models, found that old-fashioned word and flashcard drills can develop those critical skills and, furthermore, that those skills help readers improve.

Former state schools chief Bill Honig, who since leaving office has written an influential book about the importance of phonics and other skills in beginning reading, said Foorman’s research “frames the debate.”

“It’s like in science when you get a theory, and you have evidence to back it up and the results are what you predicted, you know you have something,” he said. “Here’s the various instructional techniques vying for prominence, and it turns out there’s no contest.”

Glen Thomas, a top curriculum official with the state Department of Education who heads up efforts to improve reading, said Foorman’s research should help California steer a proper course.

“I’m particularly interested in those elements of reading instruction that have been shown to work with low-performing, disadvantaged kids, and I hope to see some of that infused into our reading instruction,” Thomas said.

But Kenneth Goodman, a University of Arizona professor who is a prominent force among whole language advocates, said Foorman’s results are not surprising given the way they were measured. He said drills and phonics exercises do enable students to perform better on standardized tests but do not necessarily add to what is reading’s bottom line--understanding and comprehension.

“If you are going to reduce everything to a single measure, it’s always going to favor the group whose instruction is closest to that measure,” he said.

Jack Pikulski, a University of Delaware professor who is president-elect of the International Reading Assn., said that phonics and word skills are essential to get most kids started with reading, especially those whose parents have not read to them and taught them the alphabet before they start kindergarten. But, he said, that’s not enough.

“I want to get kids off to an early start and then make sure they are building their oral language, conceptual and critical thinking, and skills that will help them achieve beyond the early years,” he said.

The highest-performing group in Foorman’s study used the newest version of an instructional program called Open Court. An older version of that program is used with substantial success at the Kelso and Bennett-Kew schools in Inglewood, in the “10 Schools” project in the Los Angeles Unified School District and in about 25 to 35 other districts in Southern California. But because Open Court is seen as a phonics-based program, many school districts have rejected it and even prevented schools that wanted to use it from doing so.

At Inglewood’s Kelso, first-grade teacher Kelli Raycraft recently put her 31 charges through lessons in basic skills of reading at the pace of an aerobic workout.

“Faster, faster,” she urges as they chant the sounds of vowels and consonants, cued by flashcards of a pig, a bird, a tugboat and other objects. Next is an up-tempo, rock ‘n’ roll rendition of the alphabet song. Then, a brief exercise in compound words that is disguised as a snappy dialogue between the class and a bright yellow bird puppet.

Entertaining but repetitive, such exercises do not take the place of reading itself. Nonetheless, pro-phonics educators have long contended that practicing the sounds and combinations of the alphabet helps transform halting readers into skillful ones. Not only does it enable readers to automatically recognize familiar words, it gives them tools to figure out ones they have never before encountered.

Teachers at Kelso, which sits beneath the landing path of Los Angeles International Airport and serves a largely poor African American and Latino population, credit the Open Court program for first- and second-grade test scores that frequently are in the 70th and 80th percentile. The school is the highest-ranking school in the district and is on par with schools serving far more affluent students in Manhattan Beach and Torrance.

Raycraft said every one of her first-graders--many of whom started the year not knowing their alphabet or even how to hold a pencil--is now reading and writing. And although time is spent each day on the regimen of drills and chants and songs, as well as on grammar and spelling lessons, the students also read every day, discuss what they have read and write essays.

“I bring in whole language a lot, but this program has the phonetic base, and if they encounter a word next year that they don’t know, at least they can decode it or attack it,” she said.

Kelso Principal Marjorie Thompson said that, increasingly, students who are in the fourth or fifth grade are showing up at Kelso having previously attended school in other California districts without being taught to read. And she puts them into first-grade classes for reading instruction and, in many cases, they learn.

“It’s taking all the resources of the school to deal with these kids and they are not kids with learning problems,” she said.