DAVE ZIFFER - FORGET "BALANCED" APPROACH \doc\web\98\07\ziffer.txt Spoken vocabulary is acquired automatically, but written vocabulary is not. A typical first grader already knows over 14,000 spoken words and learns new spoken words at a rate of between 3,000 and 5,000 per year, all without any formal training. If his teacher spends just two years teaching him to convert written words into spoken words (i.e. phonics), then he automatically acquires a phenomenal reading capability because he already knows the meanings of so many spoken words. From: David Ziffer To: "Mary Damer (E-mail)" Subject: My Response to the Press/Republican Reading Instruction Article Date sent: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 12:52:37 -0500 Dear RedYarrow: My response to the Press/Republican article on reading instruction follows. I am hoping they will publish it as a "guest opinion") since it is too long for an ordinary letter. Please forward it to the loop. -Dave ===================================== An "Unbalanced" View of Reading In your recent article on reading instruction there was much talk about using a "balanced" approach, combining phonics and whole language into some sort of unified curriculum. This is a pleasant sounding idea and it's very PC, but unfortunately it is contradictory. The fundamental premise of whole language has always been that children should memorize words "as wholes", and that phonics is either unnecessary or detrimental. The people promoting whole language have always been stridently opposed to any systematic use of phonics and they still are today. The bottom line is that English contains far too many words for anyone to memorize "as wholes". Even the most aggressive sight-memorization curricula teach only about 600 words per year. If a child were to practice sight memorization drills perfectly and indefinitely at this rate, he would be over 160 years old before recognizing the 100,000 root words in English and over a thousand years old before recognizing all of the 600,000+ distinct English words. In reality, the typical adult taught in this manner has long since given up after memorizing about 5,000 written words - enough to read a simple story in a newspaper or an eighth grade book, but little else. Spoken vocabulary is acquired automatically, but written vocabulary is not. A typical first grader already knows over 14,000 spoken words and learns new spoken words at a rate of between 3,000 and 5,000 per year, all without any formal training. If his teacher spends just two years teaching him to convert written words into spoken words (i.e. phonics), then he automatically acquires a phenomenal reading capability because he already knows the meanings of so many spoken words. The child hears or imagines the sound of each sentence as he reads it, just as if it had been spoken, allowing him to read almost anything he can discuss. Further, the written vocabulary of the phonics- trained child continually grows along with his spoken vocabulary, since the same phonetic rules apply to about 97% of the new spoken words he's learning automatically. In contrast, the student who has memorized the appearance of a thousand written words knows only those words. If he wants to know another thousand words, he'll have to memorize them too. With no connection between written and spoken vocabulary, he does not gain written vocabulary automatically. Considering that whole word memorization has been the dominant teaching approach over the past 50 years, it is no wonder that the U.S. Department of Education describes 40% of all fourth graders nationwide as "below basic" in reading skill (i.e. essentially illiterate) and another 30% as "below proficient". Phonics and whole word memorization do not produce even remotely comparable results. The two most famous reading researchers of this century (Chall in 1967 and Adams in 1988) both studied the entire body of comparative reading research since 1900 and both came to the same conclusion: the support for phonics is simply overwhelming. Both were noncommittal before their research and both became strident phonics advocates afterwards. The research arm of the U.S. Department of Education is equally enthusiastic in its unilateral recommendations that children be taught reading initially using comprehensive, systematic phonics, based on 30 solid years of long term large scale research. Despite the talk of balance, most of our classrooms are extremely unbalanced in the wrong way. The leaders of most national teachers' associations argue against using phonics, based on the unsupported notions that written vocabulary is acquired naturally and that phonics students somehow fail to understand what they're decoding. Few of the hundreds of teachers' colleges across America teach anything at all about phonics. In fact, a new teacher graduating after six years with a master's degree and a specialization in elementary reading instruction is unlikely to have taken a single course involving the use of phonics. These colleges are dominated by professors who have an average of about 20 years' worth of remaining tenure, so even if we could change the attitudes of all new entering professors immediately, we could expect that it will be decades before we start seeing any significant number of new teachers using systematic phonics in the classroom. It's been four thousand years since alphabetic languages replaced the earlier generation of icon-based languages. Icon-based languages were discarded because people could neither memorize nor distinguish hundreds of thousands of written symbols "as wholes". Our modern words are more easily distinguishable than the ancient icons only because we can convert them directly into spoken language. By presenting children with the impossible task of memorizing all the words in English, we are hobbling them with the reading technology of the Bronze Age. Let's hope that we can turn this around before it's too late. ============================= Dave Ziffer owns and operates "I Can Read!", an after-school reading program that teaches comprehensive, systematic phonics. =============================