New Zealand is currently regarded as a centre for the whole language approach to the teaching of reading. This approach emphasises the importance of reading in context. It also encourages the beginning reader to think of reading as a psycholinguistic guessing game, rather than as a process of accurately reading every word. The child is taught to guess what is meant, and to use a sample of letters to confirm the guess. And even though the child may make a mistake (for example, reads"grey paint" as"green paint"), this may not be taken too seriously, as long as the general meaning is sustained. The idea is that children will make little mistakes at first, but gradually, with more reading experience, they will become better and better readers.

However, whole language is controversial. The approach is currently under the microscope, as researchers argue about whether or not it works. But if there is so much debate about whole language, why is it so popular in New Zealand? To answer this question, I will use New Zealand as an example of the influence of historical and current thinking about the teaching of reading (see also Nicholson, 1993, 1996). One reason for doing so is that New Zealand is regarded as a success story for whole language. Another reason is that the history of reading in New Zealand is relevant to the history of the whole language movement, since New Zealand is seen as part of its"roots"(Goodman, 1989).

This article gives a brief survey of the history of reading in New Zealand to show how whole language methods emerged. The New Zealand experience up until the 1960s was very similar to that of North America. But after that there was a gradual change in teaching methods, where phonics was increasingly downplayed.

However, what happened in New Zealand has now happened on a wider scale in other countries as well, including Australia, Canada, England, and the United States, so the recent New Zealand experience will be useful for those who are currently being asked to teach whole language, and would like to know whether it has stood the test of time.

The article contains the following sections:

• Teaching Reading in the 1800s: The ABC Method
• "Look and Say": Reading From the 1920s to the 1950s
• From Janet and John to Ready to Read: The 1960s
• Whole Language and the Revised Ready to Read: The 1980s
• Paradigm Wars: The 1980s and 1990s
• Where to Now?
• References

In New Zealand in the 1870s, reading was still being taught by the ABC method (Price, 1987). Everyone started by learning the letters of the alphabet. Then they moved to two-letter words, three-letter words, and so on. As Price (1987) put it:

The finely graded and structured reading was ingenious, but in the primers and infant readers it was excruciatingly boring to read, and difficult too, as the succession of two-letter words,"I am on my ox. It is to go in, so am I. No, my ox is to go on. Am I by my ox?" made meaningless tongue-twisters. (p. 182)

According to Price (1987), who reviewed inspectors' reports during that period, children were not taught very well. At many schools they were hardly able to read even the simplest of material. Inspectors complained about the way children were made to memorise their text material so as to appear to be good readers. As one inspector put it,"... children read as well with the book shut as open" (p. 188). Another of their complaints was that children would mindlessly chant their lessons in unison. A third complaint was that children were being asked to learn words by spelling them, even though this technique distorted the sound of the word totally, as in tee, haitch, ee spells the. To summarise, the reading lesson involved lots of practice and drill, in an atmosphere of fear and trepidation, and although no one liked the ABC method, it probably endured because the alphabet seemed the obvious place to begin. Also, despite the problems, many children were able to learn with this approach.

The long reign of the hated ABC method seems quite amazing, given that numerous alternative approaches had been waiting in the wings for centuries. The phonics approach, which taught children the sounds of letters and how to blend them together (unlike the ABC method, where children named the letters), had been around in various forms since the 1700s. This was also the case for the whole word approach, where children were taught to recognise words by their overall look. In addition, there were other holistic approaches, such as the sentence method, where children recognised sentences by their look, and the storybook method, where children looked at the whole story.

According to Huey (1908/1968), the theory behind the holistic approaches was to start with something more interesting than a list of letters of the alphabet. A word actually means something and is more likely to catch the interest of a child. Even more interesting is a sentence, or better still, a book. Analysis would come later as children realised that a book was made of paragraphs, a paragraph was made of sentences, a sentence was made of words, and words were made of letters.

The holistic methods certainly had street appeal. It would have been obvious to teachers that children would be more interested in reading words and sentences right from the start, rather than wrestling with letters sounds. But Huey (1908/1968) reported that holistic methods, by themselves, did not work very well. Here are his comments on the sentence method:

The method goes famously at first, like the word method, and naturally gives more legato reading than does the latter; but it breaks down when the child tries to read new matter for himself, so the teachers commonly say. Hence the sentence method, too, is usually combined with or supplemented by phonics. (p. 274)

It is hoped that the type of sentence common in the older books and reading sheets, such as"I am on the ox. Are you on? No, I am up," and similar absurd statements, has long since been abandoned in all schools. By the time the pupil has acquired by the so-called"look and say" method a knowledge of a few names and sentences -- that is, after the first school term -- he is ready for the examination of sounds, and the process of analysing and synthesising them as components of suitable words will form one of the principal means of progress. The more skillful he becomes in utilising phonics in interpreting words and sentences in the reading material before him, the more rapidly will he become independent of the teacher's aid. (p. 76)

Mathews (1966), in his review of reading instruction in the United States, mentioned that these ideas were part of the new"progressive" thinking about education, initiated by theorists like John Dewey. The word and sentence methods were clearly much more interesting than learning by the ABC method, or by"sounding out" words, as in phonics, since children were, from the start, reading words in sentences and stories.

As noted earlier, the assumption was that children who started to read this way would then infer the letter-sound rules. For example, the child would notice that words starting with sh all have the same initial sound, and so on. The argument was that phonics would serve as a back-up, and would be introduced at a later point in the reading programme. When introducing phonics, the idea was to capitalise on the inferences children had already made, as part of the look and say approach. For example, the teacher would take some known sight words (like book) and then generate a list of similar words (like big, beach, blow, bagpipes), and focus on the letter-sound correspondence between b and /b/. The teacher would start with consonant sounds, then move to vowels, and so on.

New Zealand schools in the 1930s were using Beacon Readers, first developed in the United States by the publishing firm Ginn. These readers included look and say (with flash cards) and phonics. By side-stepping phonics in the early stages, the new materials could start with much more interesting stories as well. For example, Beacon materials had appealing stories like Chicken Licken and Three Billy Goats Gruff.

Another example of a 1930s look and say series from the United States was the Elson-Gray basal readers published by Scott, Foresman. (Click here to see a sample page from a story called Something Funny from one of the preprimers -- an early version of Dick and Jane.)

Towards the end of the Depression, from 1937 on and particularly during the 1939-1945 Second World War, when money for imports was scarce, New Zealand schools relied on home-grown materials, especially the locally produced Progressive Readers, published by Whitcombes. They still had the same mix of look and say, and phonics. But these readers were apparently not as popular as the imported Beacon readers, so there was a market gap for something new. This came in 1951, with the import of the Janet and John series, published by Nisbet in London. According to Price (1975, unpaged):

The Janet and John series was widely welcomed because it was colourful, up-to-date, and obviously planned thoroughly and professionally. The series had originated in the USA and had been adapted by Nisbet's for use in British schools.

Was look and say a better way of learning to read? Many children learned to read this way, but there were problems with this associative learning approach. It was strongly criticised in a book called Why Johnny Can't Read(Flesch, 1955). Crowder (1982) summarised Flesch's argument in this way:

Phonics gives a way of figuring out new words and connecting print, generally, with the spoken language already partially mastered. The whole word system, typified in standard basal readers, was sacrificing these benefits in order to give children a cheap way of recognising the shapes of familiar words right off the bat. (p. 206)

So, although the child might appear to be reading, it was really a kind of rote learning that would eventually come unstuck. For example, if the child recognises dog because of the"tail" on the end, what happens with frog? This was the kind of criticism that was being levelled at look and say, that although children could learn to read that way, many might not.

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The new series was different in three ways. First, it seemed untouched by the phonics debate that was taking place in the United States during the 1960s. Second, it reflected the experiences of New Zealand children. Third, it aimed to use more"natural language" than did the old Janet and John books. In the new readers, children went to New Zealand schools, lived in New Zealand homes, and took their pet lambs and goats to pet shows. The first little books were titled Early in the Morning, Grandma Comes to Stay, and The Fire Engine. (Click here for a sample page from Early in the Morning.)

Yet, though the language in the books was more natural and predictable, and the experiences were home-grown, they still tended to be those of Pakeha and middle-class children. By the 1970s and early 1980s, the Ready to Read series was starting to look dated, as new debates related to social class, biculturalism, and gender gained prominence. As Ruth Evans (as quoted in Openshaw, 1991) put it:

There were difficulties at first. The subject matter was middle class, not suited to Maori or Polynesian children. I can remember thinking of one book, Grandma Comes to Stay, and here is Grandma landing in an aeroplane to stay with her relations and father going to meet her in the car after having shaved himself with an electric razor. People thought,"Well, what on earth did that have to do with the Maori child down in the Urewera country?" (p. 53)

Reading for meaning should be thought of as a habit to be insisted on rather than as a skill to be taught. A child who has learned from the beginning to expect all reading to make sense, and who has not been allowed to get away with mere word calling, will be unlikely to make nonsensical guesses at a new word. He will instinctively use all the clues in his possession -- the picture, his understanding of the situation in the story, the context in which the word occurs, and its phonetic elements. And if his first guess is wrong, he will often correct it himself. (p. 48)

From what I remember, Myrtle Simpson got the idea that if children learned to read using their natural language, through the experience of reading, and talking through a story with an adult, probably a teacher or mature reader, that they could actually learn in that way. Rather than having to be taught the words and taught phonics, they developed a reading system for themselves. I believe that she developed some texts and piloted them with groups of children around the country, and that was the forerunner of the original Ready to Read series. (p. 69)

In the 1970s,"teaching in the course of reading" (Simpson, 1962, p. 61) was developed even further with the idea of"shared books," where reading was taught by using enlarged copies of children's books, that is, big books. By using big books, teachers could work with the whole class at a time. Teacher and pupils could read the book together, they could use context and picture clues, and do word analysis activities where there was an opportunity. For example, the teacher could place a mask around a word (Holdaway, 1979) on the page, so that the class could focus on an individual word while still working in context.

During that time the Department of Education also made available considerable resources to provide inservice courses for teachers. Holdaway's (1979) ideas on"shared-book experience" (or big books) were given prominence, along with Clay's ideas on"running records," that is, how to record children's reading strategies while they were reading. In this way, both the teaching and assessment of reading came to involve reading words in stories, not in isolation. Frank Smith's ideas on predicting meaning in reading also underpinned the new wisdom, as did his comment,"It is only through reading that children learn to read" (Smith, 1975, p. 305). Reading had become"contextualised."

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You are a skilled reader. You didn't read every word. You sampled or selected some parts of the text and, drawing on experience, you built up expectations of the passage which were refined and extended as you became familiar with its intent, mood, and style. These expectations became predictions, which you confirmed by sampling the text further, but only to the least extent necessary to establish meaning. It is only when meaning is lost that a reader has to attend more closely to the print, perhaps rereading or reading on, and looking to other sources for information. (p. 23)

In the revised 1985 series children are taught to use grapho-phonic cues, such as the initial letters of a word, to confirm their predictions. The idea of sounding out words directly is discouraged. As the handbook for teachers put it:

Using grapho-phonic cues, therefore, as the first method of dealing with a problem often interferes with understanding ... it is better that children predict meaning from other cues at the outset and use their knowledge of the relationships of letters and sounds for confirmation. (p. 48)

But the revised Ready to Read of the 1980s was different again. In the new series the ideas of the old series were now supported by whole language theory and the research of Marie Clay, Ken Goodman, Yetta Goodman, and Frank Smith. In the 1985 handbook for teachers, we are told that skilled readers do not read every word, that they sample the text, and so on. According to this theory, children do not learn to read by learning letter-sound rules. If they learn these rules, it will be almost a by-product of reading. The implication was that the reading process did not involve recoding letters to sounds, though writing did require recoding sounds to letters. But by 1985, this theory of the reading process was being hotly debated. To find out the reasons for the debate will require a bit more discussion.

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The second paradigm, associated with the ideas of Philip Gough and Connie Juel, argues that there are qualitative differences between the reading processes of beginning readers and skilled readers (Juel, Giffith, & Gough, 1986). As a consequence, children do not just get better at the strategies they are using. Rather, they acquire different and more efficient skills. These skills involve using letter-sound rules to the point where children can read words effortlessly. It is also argued that these skills do not come easily. Also, many novice readers do not realise that they must learn these rules. They rely on contextual and sampling strategies recommended by Smith and Goodman, but do not figure out the letter-sound rules that are needed to become accurate and effective readers. As a result, they become poor readers.

According to this second paradigm, phonics (which tries to teach rules) is not strictly necessary to learn the letter-sound rules. Firstly, phonics is too slow. For example the good reader does not have time to do a conscious analysis of a word using the silent e rule. Second, there are too many letter-sound rules to be taught explicitly. The good reader, however, has internalised these letter-sound rules, along with a set of exceptions, and can use this knowledge with ease and without having to think about it.

Many letter-sound rules can be learned through reading. For example, the child can use context to figure out the ow sound of the letters ow in clown (that is, it is not the same as ow in crow). The child can also use context to figure out exceptions to letter-sound rules (Tunmer, 1990), such as in pint (it is not pronounced pinnt) and yacht (it is not pronounced yach-t). If this does not happen, however, and the child remains a guesser, then the child is destined to become a poor reader. As Gough, Juel, and Griffith (1992) argue, given that it is possible for many children to figure out the letter-sound rules no matter what the method, it may be more important for the teacher to focus on making sure that the child learns to decode rather than assuming that any one method will guarantee it.

To summarise, these conflicting reading paradigms have generated a great deal of research. One is saying that all children will learn to read by reading, whereas the other is saying that many children may not do so and will fall by the wayside. Which way is less likely to produce casualties? The answer, in the end, will depend on the evidence. But what counts as evidence? Some say that the search for evidence is just a strategy used by the ruling paradigm to oppress the proponents of whole language. For example, an experiment to compare the relative merits of whole language with another approach, such as phonics, may not be acceptable to whole language supporters, especially because it implies that the decision about Which works better? is to be based on relative efficiency. Such a comparison about relative efficiency would be seen as the move of a modernist, and something to be resisted by whole language supporters (Edelsky, 1990). Why? Because modernists argue along the following lines. Education is a product that can be quantified. Reading is something that can be tested and given a number. Learning can be measured; children can be categorised.

In contrast, the post-modernist position would be to critically interrogate the assumptions of modernism. For example, a post-modernist view of modernism could be along the following lines, according to Marshall and Peters (1994):

The modern individual has in part been constructed by techniques of examination, measurement and categorisation in disciplinary blocks by professionals in the human sciences, so as to be normalised, i.e., a being who leads a useful, docile and practical life because (s)he is politically dominated or subjected. (p. 4641)

Some have called for an end to these wars, arguing that each methodology can make a positive contribution to the many issues that beset the field of reading research. Stanovich (1990) has made the following plea:

Actual scientific practice is highly pragmatic in nature and not amenable to a priori philosophical pronouncements about its methodologies. Drawing these strong philosophical demarcations contributes to the destructive zero-sum mentality in reading research that I have alluded to earlier. Of course, I am not saying that philosophical analysis is useless, but this tendency to prematurely announce divisions among researchers in a nascent and confusing area -- researchers who may well be seeking common ground - wreaks havoc with the communal scientific spirit that is always at risk in such a politicised area as reading. (p. 226)

In an article in Education Week titled"Studies Cast Doubt on Benefits of Using Whole Language Teaching," Rothman (1992) reported interviews with researchers involved in both sides of the debate. In the Education Week article, Frank Vellutino (State University of New York at Albany) was quoted as saying that"children must know how sounds are used in reading, as well as how sounds are represented by letters of the alphabet" (p. 12). Yet in the same article, Ken Goodman (University of Arizona) was reported as saying that such a view was outmoded:"A small group of people," Mr Goodman said,"thinks that making sense of text depends first on identifying words.... They talk to each other; they are not talking to teachers or to researchers in cognition" (p. 12).

In another article, this time in Science News (Bower, 1992), a number of researchers with different opinions were interviewed. On the one hand, Charles Perfetti (University of Pittsburgh) was quoted as saying that decoding was essential for skilled reading:

Good readers don't rely on a story's context to identify words, because their alphabetic coding ability is so fluent and automatic. Poor readers lack coding skill and have to use context. (p. 139)

Experimental research conducted during the 1980s provides additional support for code oriented instruction with beginning readers, Keith Stanovich remarks. The data suggest that basic perceptual tasks such as reading, proceed automatically in discrete regions of the brain with no reference to real-world knowledge or expectations.

For instance, studies of eye movements during reading directed by psychologist Keith Rayner of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst indicate that good readers focus for at least a fraction of a second on all or nearly all of the words in a passage, allowing for immediate integration of each word into the overall context of the passage. Given a text missing various words, skilled readers correctly guess only one in four of the absent words, according to research directed by Philip B. Gough of the University of Texas at Austin. (Bower, 1992, p. 139)

Speaking and reading ability, including knowledge of phonemes and the alphabet, develop naturally in young children who are constantly exposed to spoken and written language, Goodman asserts. In his view, direct phonetic instruction sidetracks the learning process. (Bower, 1992, p. 139)

Investigators have yet to develop a generally accepted measure of reading ability, says Jerome Harste of Indiana University in Bloomington. The focus on decoding of individual words should expand to examine the number of books actually read by nascent readers, what children talk about while reading, and what they plan in their lives as a result of reading, he maintains. (Bower, 1992, p. 140)

In New Zealand, the debate has also attracted media attention. In an article in the New Zealand Listener (O'Hare, 1995), a number of queries were raised about the negative effects of whole language teaching, which is mandatory in schools. Despite New Zealand's reputation for success in reading, the article pointed out that there are problems with the present method. First, one-in-four children receive remedial reading tuition at the age of six. Second, trainee teachers are given virtually no instruction in how to teach phonics, so they have no alternative ways of teaching reading which might reduce the high casualty rate. Third, researchers are finding that those who are least well-served by whole language are children from disadvantaged backgrounds, whose parents do not have the"cultural capital" to overcome the deficiencies of whole language.

The debate about reading is still making news. It is a debate that has a long history. It is also a debate that has been emotionally charged. In the last 30 or so years, however, the debate has become increasingly influenced by research of the kind we have been discussing. Jeanne Chall's (1967) Learning to Read: The Great Debate was essentially a summary of research data on the topic. And Marilyn Adams (1990), in her book Beginning to Read: Learning and Thinking About Print, has updated once again our knowledge of research on the reading process. The conclusions reached here are in line with those of Chall and Adams, that children will get off to a better start in reading if they receive early, intensive instruction in how to decode. This does not mean going back to the"drill and kill" of the old ABC method. The challenge ahead will be to bring together the best features of both whole language teaching (reading for meaning, reading for fun) and phonics (skill in decoding) to produce a generation of children who are literate, and who enjoy using their literacy.

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