Helping Children Learn to Read: A Program That Is Making the Grade

摘要

Introduction Standardized test results confirm that the majority of children in public schools in America are not learning the English language skills they need to function successfully in society. The inability to read, write, speak, listen and think in English stands as an obstacle to their becoming fulfilled and productive citizens. Private enterprise has an important stake in solving this problem. Today's students are tomorrow's customers and citizens. A better-educated America is essential to continued economic stability and growth into the next millennium. When the problem and issues related to reading are discussed, phonics and whole language are often topics of conversation. Most everyone has a powerful opinion, either positively or negatively, about each approach, and reading experts offer various viewpoints concerning the use of each method. However, more and more research supports the use of phonics as a viable method in teaching children and adults to read. This manuscript will offer the reader practical information concerning the use of phonics in the early developmental reading years and a highly successful program that has a proven track record for improving reading and comprehension skills of elementary school children in California. Historical Perspective During the 1930s and 1940s, phonics was not perceived as an important approach to reading. Its primary function then was to serve as a last-ditch effort when a child did not respond to other reading approaches (Groff, 1977). It was only when Rudolph Flesch wrote, Why Johnny Can't Read in the 1950s, did the phonics approach gain some well-needed promotion and validation (Groff, 1977). Flesch's phonetic approach to reading utilized some 72 lessons that taught the relationship between letters and sounds in an alphabetic code. The code consisted of approximately 200 letter and letter groups that stood for the each of the 44 English sounds. The rationale behind this approach was that once a child learns the code, s/he can read by sounding out each of the words--a process called decoding. Phonics provides the critical foundation for decoding words. Phonics gained more positive attention during the 1960s with the publication of Learning to Read: The Great Debate by Jeanne Chalk Since that time, phonics has been at the forefront of reading debates (Groff, 1977). Unlike learning to read through sight recognition or memorization, phonics provides children a method of reading with individual sounds and the blending of sounds together. In an edition of Reader's Digest, a report, Becoming a Nation of Readers produced by the United States Department of Education, a nine-member commission on reading recommended that, ... teachers of beginning reading should present well-designed phonics instruction (Ziegler, 1985, p. 85). Debate Over Phonics Although phonics has gained much support over the years, it is not foolproof. There are some educators that believe that phonics is nothing more than a `kill-and-drill' method where children become robotic in their reading approach. Others see the emphasis on decoding as a distracter--turning children off to reading. Still, there are children with reading disabilities who cannot decode words or children with poor visual memories or who may be perceptually impaired and unable to learn the code (Glazer, 1997; Wingert & Hancock, 1996). For the most part, children who have a visual, auditory or visual-auditory memory deficit have difficulty with phonics (Glazer, 1997), but these same children would more than likely have problems with the sight recognition and memory approach. However, there is an innovative program that provides much more than phonics and it has gained a growing support group. The MetaPhonics Approach MetaPhonics is a comprehensive English Language Arts Program. It is the result of more than 25 years of classroom experience. …