Folio Books: Review of Learning to Read by Jeanne Chall

Education

Learning to Read: The Great Debate

By Jeanne S Chall

McGraw-Hill Book Company
New York, 1983, updated edition
ISBN 0-07-010382-8,
Hardcover, 372 pp, bibliography, index

What is the best way to teach children to read? What are phonics and do they matter? When is the best time for children to learn the alphabet? All these questions and more are answered in this book.

The debate of the title concerns the two main methods of teaching reading, "phonics" and "look-say".

Phonics, also known as the "code-emphasis" method, is teaching the sounds associated with the symbols (the letters of the alphabet) and includes what today would be called "word-attack skills". Children learn to read by sounding out new words bit by bit.

Look-say, or "meaning-emphasis," is teaching whole words using a flash-card method, in which the focus is not on the individual letters but on the meaning of the word and its overall shape. Children are taught to recognise whole words at sight ("sight words") without breaking them into parts.

Which method is best? The subject is not merely of academic interest since reading is the most essential skill a child will ever learn and is the basis of all other education.

Vast quantities of research have been done on the benefits or otherwise of both methods but most of it is hidden away in journals in university libraries and much of it never filters down to those who need it most, parents and front-line teachers in primary schools and writers of textbooks.

The great difficulty at the time the book was written was that the existing research data was in hopeless conflict. Either side could point to dozens of studies proving their method to be best. Some studies received a lot of publicity. This had repercussions since textbook publishers used the research to produce reading series. One method could easily become entrenched in a school system to the exclusion of the other.

There was a need for all that conflicting data to be weighed and judged. Dr. Jeanne Chall, of the Department of Education at Harvard, was commissioned to do the job. She reviewed and evaluated hundreds of research studies covering the period 1910 to 1965, and in addition visited classrooms and interviewed teachers and textbook publishers. The introduction to the 1983 edition covers the further period up to 1981. Sifting through the literature took Chall three years, writing up her conclusions took a further two. The study was funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The result is a valuable book which summarises and makes sense of a vast body of scattered knowledge and comes to a definite conclusion. It is aimed at parents as well as educators and is written in a clear and readable style.

Not to beat around the bush, Dr. Chall comes down firmly in favour of phonics. She concludes that the research shows convincingly that children who are taught phonics have a clear advantage over those who are not. Children who have been taught only with look-say methods appear to do better in the early years but tend to fall behind later because they lack the word-attack skills needed for the transition to independent reading. One of the reasons for the conflicting results was that many of the look-say studies were carried out only over the first school year which was not long enough to bring out the drawback. Also, some children learn to read regardless of method and that too caused confusion. And then there were studies with bias, unconscious or otherwise, and others with flawed statistics. Dr. Chall supports her arguments with quotes and figures from her in-depth analysis of the literature.

At the end of the book it was unclear why the debate became so polarized into rigid "either-or" positions in the first place, though one could see why it gained momentum once begun.

Combined methods are now more or less the norm. Dr. Chall mentions the case for combined methods though it isn't her main focus. Sight words have an important place, especially for irregular words which don't sound as they are spelt, and to give children a jump-start in the early years. The sight method relies on memory, however, whereas phonics is based on logic, and logic is always preferable as a teaching method. In the long run children need a good grounding in phonics if they are to become independent self-educating readers.

Learning to Read: The Great Debate is available at the Public Library in Port of Spain.

M.A., August 11, 1997

See also:

Teaching Them To Read, a textbook for teachers of reading by Dolores Durkin.

The Reading Crisis: Why Poor Children Fall Behind, results of a research study by Chall and others.

The Great Debate Revisited -- an article by Art Levine in The Atlantic Monthly, Dec 1994, expressing concern that phonics teaching may once again be on the decline.