ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, May 5, 1996 TAG: 9605070010
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD LEE COLVIN LOS ANGELES TIMES
WHOLE LANGUAGE SUPPORTERS argue that flashcards may produce good test results, but not real understanding.
Adding new ammunition to the fight over how best to teach reading, a federally funded study has demonstrated in classrooms what had previously only been theorized - that intensive drills in phonics and the building blocks of words makes young students into better readers.
The study at the University of Houston, to be presented this week in Sacramento, Calif., at a legislative hearing on teaching methods, 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 of 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.''
Widely accepted research has found that beginning readers need 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.
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 Association, said in an interview that phonics and word skills are essential for getting 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.
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