A Whole Saturday Of Whole Language

I just got back from eight hours of whole language hell. I volunteered with a private unaffiliated organization that teaches illiterate adults how to read but it turned out that there were two groups under one umbrella organization: one that uses phonics, one that uses whole-language and I signed with up with the wrong group.

At the beginning of an all-day training session, the trainer asked us who had been taught phonics as a child. Fourteen of the fifteen trainees raised their hands. She repeated over and over again the motto, "Phonics is no fun." She went out of her way to convince us that knowing phonics contributes nothing to reading success. Here is how she did it. She began by showing us a paragraph of nonsense words on an overhead projector that was very similar to Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky so I'll just use that to replicate the activity:

And, as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came
whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came!

After one of the tutors-to-be read the passage aloud to the class the trainer asked us comprehension questions such as, "What did the Jabberwock do through the woods? What kind of woods were they? What sorts of thoughts did Jabberwock have? And to be honest, the passage she used was almost entirely nonsense words so the answers to the questions had to use them as well. One could easily tell by the morphemes what was a noun or verb, but they were not real things. I didn't follow the comprehension questions as she asked them and had to look back at the passage, (which was much longer than the above) to find the key words. Meanwhile, one student was quickly and vociferously answering all the questions which were fired off in rapid succession; the rest of the class was very quiet. Victory in hand, the trainer triumphantly announced that even though we used our knowledge of phonics to say the unknown words in the passage, and even though we successfully answered her reading comprehension questions (all one of us, actually), that our failure to identify the meaning of the individual words was proof that phonics doesn't work.

She was so pleased with this air tight proof.

No one said a word.

Then she gave us a paragraph which appeared to be a bunch of techno-garble, and this was supposed to show how "knowing the words" doesn't work either. (It was actually a passage on material atomism by Bertrand Russell, and I wondered if this wasn't intentional since he was the inventor of the "Quadruplicity drinks procrastination" phrase that's inflicted on college students in any sort of classroom discussion on how nonsense phrases can be grammatical.) A very sweet white-haired older lady sitting next to me started slowly sifting through the meaning out loud, and it became clear to me that she had some background in either philosophy or linguistics. Simultaneously, I recognized it as Bertrand Russellish...and after hearing us collaborate, the trainer abruptly interrupted us within only 30 seconds to announce that the failure of the class to extract meaning from the passage was another successful demonstration. The white-haired lady and I were still talking to each other so I missed the trainer's specific point on that one.

There was yet another demonstration about how whole language worked and phonics was pointless. In a given normal English paragraph several words were replaced with what was supposed to be nonsense symbols. She told us the meaning of those words and then held up a card with those words on them and asked us to tell her what the word said. The class obliged and parroted back the words and this was then pronounced more proof that whole language worked. Then she did something really sneaky, she held up two cards with words which were not in the passage and that we hadn't seen before. What did they mean? No one could answer. Except, the "nonsense" symbols were Attic Greek and so were the words. Because I have studied Attic Greek I was able to call out the English meaning of one of the cards that no one was supposed to know. (I never imagined that studying this language would pay off in such a delicious way--although trivia. It was a beautiful Myrtle moment.) The trainer ignored my out of turn response and told the class that these words, the meanings to which they couldn't identify, were proof that words can't be learned outside of "the whole context". I didn't come there for a confrontation so I didn't say, "But I learned all those words from vocabulary lists and I learned to read Attic Greek by studying rules of how it's pronounced." Nope. I kept my mouth shut. The white-haired old lady nearly high-fived me.

Turned out she's a retired public school reading specialist with a couple of decades of experience under her belt.

And now the punchline: The trainer was proud of the fact that she had three successes in five years. I've had three successes as well with my own three children who are reading at grade level thanks to phonics. That gives me a 100% success rate.

Next Saturday we'll learn how to teach ESL to Mexican immigrants. Since I can speak Spanish and I've taught ESL this should be interesting.