ABOUT LOOK/SAY (WHOLE WORD) and WHOLE LANGUAGE:
- 1929: Neuropsychiatrist Dr. Samuel T. Orton, a pioneer in the study of learning disabilities and dyslexia, warns educators: “The sight word method would cause reading disabilities among a very large number of children…”
- 1935-36: Orton and educator/psychologist Anna Gillingham develop the Orton-Gillingham approach, emphasizing phonics instruction. A “step-by-step learning process, it was the first to use explicit, direct, sequential, systematic, multi-sensory instruction to teach reading, effective for all students and essential for teaching students with dyslexia.”
- 1940s: Remedial reading departments increase in number, as do reading clinics—a new growth industry.
- 1955: Justin Flesch’s best-selling Why Johnny Can’t Read, described as the classic book on phonics, calls Look/Say ineffective and attacks the education system for not teaching phonics.MEANWHILE:
- 1956: Gray and his colleagues combine the National Association for Remedial Teaching and the International Council for the Improvement of Reading Instruction, forming the International Reading Association, known today as the International Literacy Association. Educator/author Samuel Blumenfeld describes it as “the impregnable citadel of the Whole Word method.” Gray is its first president, with a starting membership of 7,000; today it boasts some 35,000 members.
- 1965: Congress passes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, with Title 1, the largest federal education program, sending billions of dollars every year to high-poverty schools.
- 1967: Jeanne Chall, author of Learning to Read (1970) and Stages of Reading Development (updated in 1983), responds to the literacy crisis of the 50s and 60s and promotes Synthetic Phonics over Whole Word, thus confirming Flesch.
- 1967: Called the “Founding Father of Whole Language and Balanced Literacy,” Kenneth Goodman’s Reading: A Psycholinguistic Guessing Game Via the Whole Language Method, he says that meaning and understanding can be gained by “guessing only a few key parts of the text via context cues.” As for decoding, he calls it “a flat view of the world, since it rejects modern science about reading and writing and how they develop.”
- 1970s: California goes with Whole Language for beginning readers, focusing on meaning and the context of words in literature, not decoding. Other states follow its lead.
On the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)
*** California’s students hit the bottom with D.C., Guam, Hawaii, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
*** More than 66% of its 4th, 8th, and 12th graders were NOT proficient in reading.
*** More than 50% of its 4th graders “couldn’t read well enough to understand a basic text.”
And it keeps right on going… (to be continued)
~ With thanks, Carol
