1a. Whole Word / Look and Say / La methode globale (France) Ganzheitsmethode (Germany)
1b. 'A hydra-headed beast' (Turner.1990 p2) / Whole Language / 'A psycholinguistic guessing game'/ Real Books / Literature-based Approach / Holistic Approach / Discovery Method / Emergent Literacy / Language Experience / Apprenticeship Approach / Acquisition of reading in authentic contexts through a progressive and invisible pedagogy (Goouch/Lambirth p110); the Emperor's New Clothes, indeed!

With this method reading is taught almost exclusively through the use of a leveled reading scheme with patterned or predictive text, or 'real books'. Children are expected to memorise the high frequency words as whole units through the constant repetition of these words in their reading books and predict (guess) the other words using the first letter, word shape, context or picture clues, a near guess being acceptable if it preserves meaning, e.g. 'pony' rather than 'horse' -see the whole language definition of reading below. Direct, explicit and systematic alphabet code instruction will not be given and any phonics instruction will be cursory and done in context. If the children are lucky they will 'discover' the alphabet code for themselves and reading will 'emerge'. Although a pure whole language approach is rarely used in UK primary schools nowadays, its most recent mutation, the National Literacy Strategy's (NLS) mixed methods / balanced approach, continues in most* classrooms and is used extensively for remedial intervention - see Your Options and Room 101

'(I)n 1991 three Whole Language professors wrote a book, Whole Language: What’s the Difference?, in which they defined what they mean by reading. They wrote: From a whole language perspective, reading (and language use in general) is a process of generating hypotheses in a meaning-making transaction in a sociohistorical context. As a transactional process reading is not a matter of “getting the meaning” from text, as if that meaning were in the text waiting to be decoded by the reader. Rather, reading is a matter of readers using the cues print provide and the knowledge they bring with them to construct a unique interpretation.…This view of reading implies that there is no single “correct” meaning for a given text, only plausible meanings' (Blumenfeld. Why Johnny STILL can't read. 11/02/11)

An in-depth examination of writing systems, ancient and modern, reveals, amongst other things, that the average visual-memory limit for whole word units is approximately 2,000 (D.McGuinness GRB p214), but a good English dictionary contains from 250,000 to 500,000 words. A writing system based on whole-words will never work as for each learner it would be like trying to remember the contents of a telephone directory (McGuinness ERI p17) Victor Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, comes to the same conclusion; 'there is a natural upper limit to the number of unique forms that can be tolerated in a functioning script. For most individuals, this amount seems to lie in the range of approximately 2,000-2,500' (The World's Writing Systems p200)

Contrary to the myth that they are ideographic writing systems (the symbols conveying meaning without regard to sound), Japanese writing consists, mostly, of sequences of different consonant-vowel pairs (diphones) whilst Chinese writing is based on monosyllabic-morphemic units fused with category symbols (DeFrancis) There are only about 1,200 syllables in Chinese (English has nearer to 60,000) which is why their written language can be based on this size of sound unit.

*Whole word methods lead some children to believe that they can memorize each word as a random string of letters. This makes learning to read exactly like trying to memorise the telephone directory. 'Like printed letter strings, telephone numbers contain a small set of symbols … Unless all numbers are dialled correctly and in the right order the connection will fail … Unfortunately, there are no systematic or predictable relationships between these strings and their corresponding entries; so each of the many thousands of such associations must be painstakingly committed to memory. There may exist a few rare individuals who are capable of memorizing entire telephone directories, but for the average child about to learn to read, the absurdity of this task should be obvious' (Share. Cognition 55/2.1995. quoted in Goswami)

The very first whole-word programme was invented in France, by Abbe Bertaud in 1744; the Quadrille programme. Derivatives of this programme spread through continental Europe - endorsed by the King of Prussia, used by Basedow and Gedike in Germany, and Jacatot in Belgium. Back in France, Abbe de l'Epee (circa 1760) was inspired by the Quadrille programme to produce his own whole-word programme, which he used with deaf-mutes. By 1826 whole-word books were being promoted both sides of the Atlantic, Abbe de l'Epee's method being used by Thomas Gallaudet, with deaf-mutes in America. Gallaudet also produced a beginners' reading book (1836) for hearing children 'The Mother's Primer'. This taught reading by the whole-word method with all mention of the deaf-mute connection erased (Rodgers. Born Yesterday)

Whole-word reading methods were pushed into schools by a procession of self-appointed education 'experts', working in the new teacher-training colleges, who had political clout. They ordered teachers to use the whole-word, look-say method using 'flash-cards'. The look-say method metamorphosised into the whole-sentence 'meaning' method using reading schemes (basal readers.USA), written using high frequency words. The disappearance of phonics and its replacement by these methods caused reading scores to plummet.

Professor Thorndike of Columbia teacher-training college identified the 10,000 most frequently used words in the English language (1921). Just 1,000 of these words form 90% of all reading material. It is these words that children taught with whole-word methods partially memorize in order to read. Unfortunately, for these children, it is the remaining 499,000 words without which '...almost nothing of any real importance can be written or read with real understanding.' (Rodgers p75)

One of the continuing stream of education 'experts', Dr. Russell of California University, produced a book in 1949 that included the following strategies, in order of importance, to aid recognition of new words:
1. The general pattern, or configuration, of the word.
2. Special characteristics of the appearance of the word.
3. Similarity to known words.
4. Recognition of familiar parts in longer words.
5. The use of picture clues.
6. The use of context clues.
7. Phonetic and structural analysis of the word.
(Flesch p55)
These strategies (1-6 are forms of guessing) are almost identical to those advocated by some reading 'experts' today.

The whole-word reading methods crossed to Britain from both America and the European continent and were used in some areas of England from about 1840 or so onwards' (Diack p45), at first, usually in combination with phonics. The change to almost exclusive use of whole word methods began during the first quarter of the twentieth century and they have remained in place ever since, the latest guise being 'a mixture of methods' which is no more than whole-word reading schemes used alongside the teaching of a bare minimum of phonics - see Method 2. There is no scientific evidence to support the whole word /language method. The research cited by the whole language advocates consists almost entirely of collections of anecdotes or 'kidwatching' (Allen)

The look and say reading schemes were very dull and repetitive and taught new words at a very slow rate, but proved lucrative for the newly emerging educational publishers. The whole-language movement, founded by Kenneth Goodman and Frank Smith (an ex-journalist who, by his own admission, has never taught anyone to read), was the next mutation, appearing (circa1960) as a reaction to the dreary schemes. "Matching letters with sounds is a flat-earth view of the world," Goodman declared in his 1986 book, What's Whole in Whole Language (Allen)

Whole-language purists were hostile to the look-say method and even more so to phonics. Children were given 'authentic texts' i.e. real books, to read from the very start. No reading instruction was given as it was decided that children could and would learn to read as easily as they learnt to talk and walk, simply by having access to plenty of lovely picture books with helpful adults on hand; the 'guide on the side'.

Reading scores hit the floor in LEAs that took on the whole language fashion with unquestioning enthusiasm; in his 1990 paper, 'Sponsored Reading Failure', the late Martin Turner wrote that about 25% of pupils arriving at South London comprehensive schools regularly had a reading age below 9 years,10% below 8, whilst approx. 50% of the intake of East London (an area of high deprivation) comprehensives had a reading age below 9 years (Turner p10) Turner commented, 'So to the other achievements of the 'real books' movement may be added that of creating dyslexia' (Turner p19) The statistics didn't improve very much with the addition of a small amount of (analytic) phonics to the mix, in the NLS; in December 2010 the BBC reported that, 'One in 11 boys in England - one in seven in some areas - starts secondary school with, at best, the reading skills of an average seven-year-old' http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12000886

American Professor, Martin Kozloff, says, 'In fact, the revolutionary whole language conception of reading as a "psycholinguistic guessing game" is a bizarre fantasy--a fantasy that managed to catch on (and make many thousands of children illiterate) because students in schools of education naively trusted their "literacy" professors--who were more interested in getting tenure, making a reputation, and selling themselves as innovators and self-inflating champions of social justice than they were at making sure new teachers (1) are guided by scientific research (which does not support whole language) and (2) know exactly how to teach reading effectively.  In some fields (medicine, law, engineering) this combination of self-aggrandizement, immorality, and ineptitude is called malpractice, fraud, and criminal negligence.  In education, it is called "philosophical differences" and "academic freedom."  Apparently, school children and new teachers are supposed to pay for the academic freedom of education professors' (http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/wlquotes.html) The general public pay for this academic freedom too; if professionals aren't capable of accurately sounding out 'all through the word', accidents will happen. The New York Times (NYT 3/6/99) reported how pharmacists are increasingly giving out incorrect prescriptions. In one incident, chlorpromazine, a drug which lowers blood sugar, was wrongly substituted for chlorpropamide, an anti-psychotic, with fatal results.

In their guidance document on, 'Dyslexia, literacy and psychological assessment', The British Psychological Society say that, ''The whole language model of reading conceives word reading as a ‘psycho-linguistic guessing game’. It is argued that, driven by a search for meaning, the fluent reader makes educated guesses on the basis of the text already read. A crucial assumption is that most words can be ‘read’ as wholes, visually. The evidence against such an account of reading behaviour is by now incontrovertible. Accurate and fluent word decoding is a pre-requisite for efficient reading for interest and information'' (BPS 2005 .p26)

In 2002 Ofsted (the government's education inspection dept.) reported that student primary school teachers at Cambridge University, one of the country's top teacher training courses, still did not know how to teach reading at the end of a four-year degree course. In particular the teaching of phonics "left much to be desired" and was hardly touched on (RRF50 p12) Disturbingly, it appears that many teacher trainers are still strongly wedded to whole language theory as a result of their progressive ideology and are extremely reluctant to implement the 2006 Rose Report recommendations. In 2009, a government survey showed that less than half of the teachers who responded rated their training in preparation to teach phonics as good or very good.

Trainee primary teachers are still not being taught exactly how to teach children to read and write. To put it bluntly, there 'is an overwhelming bias in teacher training courses against teaching phonics' (Turner/Burkard p24) Evidence of this bias can be easily seen in the choice of authors on reading lists for trainee primary teachers. The lists are totally dominated by authors who are committed to the whole-word / language philosophy whilst books by pre-eminent, pro-synthetic phonics reading experts, such as Professor Diane McGuinness, Professor Rhona Johnston and Dr. Bonnie Macmillan, rarely appear.

In his article, 'The Education White Paper: a CPS Postnatum' (Nov. 2010), Tom Burkard wrote that, '(T)eacher training was first identified as the major obstacle to the implementation of effective practices in the 1996 report, Reading Fever. In an unpublished CPS report that was sent to Nick Gibb just prior to the general election, we suggested that new arrangements were needed to train teachers to use synthetic phonics effectively. We included a survey of reading lists for 46 initial teacher training (ITT) courses, which revealed an overwhelming hostility to this method, and indeed a profound disagreement with the coalition’s overall vision of educational reform.

http://www.rrf.org.uk/pdf/ITT%20reading%20lists%20Jan%2010.pdf
Burkard: 46 ITT reading lists.

''My uni was very anti the Rose report, and one of our assignments was to do a presentation about how poor the data were, and why the whole lot of it should be taken with a pinch of salt.'' (Mumsnet Primary Education forum 2011)

See Resources for RECOMMENDED books on teaching reading.

Emeritus professor of education and whole language proponent, Henrietta Dombey, described the 2006 Rose Report as 'amateurish' (!) and said that it 'takes the profession along a dangerous path, not supported by sound research evidence, into some dangerous territory' (Wyse/Styles. Editorial), She has yet to produce any 'sound (scientific) research evidence' to support the type and timing of reading instruction she prefers; ''Those who have an opposing view [of synthetic phonics] have yet to produce any data showing that their favoured approach produces greater long-term benefits'' (R.Johnston. www.publicservice.co.uk issue 20. p82). 'Unfortunately, education has become the preserve of ideologues who consider that their own wisdom should prevail over empirical evidence' (Turner/Burkard)

The Y1 synthetic phonics screening check was piloted in approximately 300 schools in June 2011. The results, released in December 2011, showed that only 32% of six-year-olds who took the screening check reached an “appropriately challenging” expected level, which was set by about 50 teachers whose schools were involved in the pilot.This low level of achievement can be explained by the fact that *only 27% of the pilot schools said they taught phonics systematically, as opposed to teaching children mixed methods such as picture clues and sight memory to read words. This ratio is believed to be broadly in line with the picture across England’s primary schools.

http://education.gov.uk/inthenews/inthenews/a00200672/a-third-of-children-reach-expected-level-in-pilot-of-phonics-check?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Anybody can use whole- language methods to teach reading; it doesn't need any skill or training; just provide lots of lovely story-books or a glossy whole-word reading scheme and let the children 'discover' how to read for themselves - if they can. Many (see the statistics above) don't ever figure out how the alphabet code works and, as a result, get put on the schools' 'special educational need' register, and there they are likely to stay.

Professor Steven Pinker, a leading cognitive scientist, says, 'In the dominant technique, called 'whole language', the insight that language is a naturally developing human instinct has been garbled into the evolutionarily improbable claim that reading is a naturally developing human instinct. Old-fashioned practice at connecting letters to sounds is replaced by immersion in a text-rich social environment and the children don't learn to read' (Pinker p342). In other words, although speech and language are 'hard wired' into our brains, reading, which is a relatively recent cultural phenomenon, cannot possibly be fixed in this way. “We were never born to read.”(Wolf p3)

http://www.nrrf.org/CIMSE.pdf
Why Reading Teachers Are Not Trained to Use a Research-Based Pedagogy.

www.nctq.org/nctq/images/nctq_reading_study_app.pdf
What education schools aren't teaching about reading (USA)

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/the-crazy-politics-of-learning-to-read-20090320-94dg.html
Ideological promoters of the discredited "whole language" method of teaching children to read have been unmasked

www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/readytoread.pdf
Ready to Read? Covers UK teacher training, the NLS and lots more.

http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/wlquotes.html
Whole Language quotes examined.

http://my.execpc.com/~presswis/phonics.html
Learning To Read and Whole Language Ideology

www.illinoisloop.org/anon_thankyouwl.html
A personal essay:Thank you Whole Language

www.pisd.org/academic/reading.htm
Reading.

www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j17/fonicsfobia.php
PhonicsPhobia

http://nurtureareader.blogspot.com/2009/03/keith-stanovich-on-context-clues.html
Stanovich on context clues

http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/u81/Stanovich__1986_.pdf
Stanovich: Matthew Effects in Reading.

www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html
The ideographic myth.

www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/visible/
Chinese written language - morphosyllabic.

http://nurtureareader.blogspot.com/2011/10/learning-words-as-whole-experiment.html
Learning words as whole: an experiment

http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/
Internet meme: Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy...

www.rrf.org.uk/messageforum/viewtopic.php?t=543
Burkard's 'Schools of Bricklaying' :-)

www.nrrf.org/satire_golf.html
Whole language takes on golf :-)

www.nrrf.org/satire_WL_at_Fork.html
Whole language at the Fork in the Road :-)

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