Brumer, Phonics and the politics of reading instruction.
- In Brumer’s article, what does she feel led to the back-to-basics backlash; and, what events precipitated this backlash? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the whole—language and phonics approaches, respectively?
- And, what would an amalgamation of the two seemingly disparate approaches look like?
Pearson, Reading Wars.
- On page 223 of the original text, first full paragraph, Pearson argues that schools and educational staff have appropriated the “whole-language label without honoring its fundamental principles…(223).” Why do you think this is, and, is the elision of issues of empowerment consistent with Freire’s critique of the banking model of education?
- Pearson argues that issues of literacy education in general and reading research in particular are inherently political: do you agree? Please explain.
In Brumer’s article, the debate of phonics and whole language continued in a political setting. According to her, the transition from phonics to whole language was not successful due to many factors such as teachers not actually incorporating the art of whole language in their teaching since they have no fully accepted or have a lack of resources to engage in this method. The actual effectiveness of this ideology is up for question, however, the large part that led to the back-to-basic backlash was actually due to how the effectiveness is measured. The test scores from NAEP were used to quantify whether the switch was a wise decision leading to an increase of understanding of the English language and becoming more literate. This metric encompasses many innate problems that could have skewed the results. As an example, Brumer lists the large number of students who don’t speak English at home, per-pupil spending was lowest in the country, and school library access has been dramatically slashed. The main reason however, was the political effect that pushed for phonics due to the obvious straightforward benefits coupled with the history of it was how it was done in the old days mentality. Phonics or whole language by itself is dangerous to the development of literacy in students. Strengths of phonics is the understanding of sounds and words, knowing how to sound out what you see, but the main argument against phonics is that it does not teach “literacy”, the context and meaning of the word. Whole language on the other hand does allow students to think for themselves what makes sense in the sentence, however in a trial and error format. For teaching to be successful, it must be the combination of the two, instead of viewing them as opposing methods, we should think of them as complements of each other. One covers the weakness of the other resulting in a good balance of literacy.
ReplyDelete