New Readings on Reading

One five-year-old sits on the floor comparing the sounds of rattles filled with sand and BB shot. Another carefully spoons dried beans from a full bowl into an empty one. Four children tell stories to a teacher, who writes them down on a large pad. Sample: "The tiger is under the bed. He is playing rough. The tiger is wild. He is very happy."

Strangely enough, the children are all learning to read at a public school in Merrick, N.Y., on Long Island's South Shore. The rattles are supposed to enhance "reading readiness" by sharpening a child's hearing discrimination; the dictated stories enable the teacher to show students how their spoken words actually look in print. Moreover, when the children seem ready to decipher print, Merrick teachers can match each one to any of 14 reading curriculums put out by ten different publishers. "Most kids can learn with any of several methods," says Primary Coordinator Karlyn Wood. "But they all learn in slightly different ways, and some need particular stress on certain skills. We're not regimented to any one way for every child."

TV Goad. Such diversity is now the most hopeful U.S. trend in the teaching of reading. Convinced that orthodox methods have misfired (more than one-third of public school pupils read below the minimum standard for their ages), reading teachers are also goaded by TV's remarkable series for preschoolers, Sesame Street, whose "graduates" now enter school knowing the alphabet and bored by many traditional reading exercises (TIME cover, Nov. 23). Twenty-five years ago, most schools used three "basal" reading programs of stories and workbooks; today there are 20, three introduced in the past year, each splintered into as many as 250 books, tests and assorted props.

This month many schools are considering which books to buy for next year, and salesmen are eagerly proclaiming that they have "the" curriculum. In fact, reading researchers now warn, no one technique works for everyone and schools should provide a broad range of materials. The major new options:

RELEVANCE. More than half the nation's adults were drilled on numbing incantations of the Dick and Jane readers ("See Dick run. See Jane run."). Born in 1931 to Scott, Foresman & Co. of Glenview, Ill., Dick and Jane inspired competing publishers to beget their own families of white, suburban, middle-class Pollyannish imitations: Alice and Jerry, Mark and Janet, Jack and Jean. Now those ninnies are slowly being phased out. With a fanfare of press conferences last fall, Scott, Foresman launched new "reading systems" primers with an interracial cast of characters who change from story to story. Subjects now range from scary folk tales to nonfiction manuals for performing scientific experiments.

LINGERING "LOOK-SAY." In the new Scott Foresman program, the children begin with simple pictures and simple captions ("A girl got on a bus"). Told that the words say what the picture shows, the kids have little trouble "reading" the sentence aloud. Under the teacher's guidance, they soon recognize and recall more new words each day.

Since adults decode printed words largely by familiarity with their shapes and placement in sentences, the Scott, Foresman authors argue that children should start the same way and later add systematic phonics, which involves the teaching of sounds of individual letters, diphthongs and the like. In short, the old "look-say" reading method has survived in new forms despite all the critics who prefer phonics from the start. On balance, says Dr. Carl Smith of Indiana University's Reading and Evaluation Center, "Many of our traditional approaches have been successful with many children, but chiefly those with normal cultural experiences, a typical vocabulary and no dialect problems."

BACK TO PHONICS. Fortunately, the others can benefit from a parallel revival of phonics. In a program offered by New Dimensions in Education Inc., for instance, each letter is given a zany personality that makes use of onomatopoeia. Sample sentence: "When umbrella-faced Miss U stands between Mr. H's horrible hair and Mr. M's munching mouth, things begin to H.U.M."

To ease the confusions of English spelling, which uses different letters for similar sounds ("shoe" and "nation"), the "Initial Teaching Alphabet" adds 18 made-up letters to the regular 26 so that all sounds can be spelled identically. Example: "too bee, or not too bee: that is the kwestion." Children later switch to conventional spelling with little apparent strain. Still other systems concentrate on the 80% of English words that are phonetically regular. To teach letter sounds, they use goof-proof sentences like "I ran. The man ran. Dan ran." Despite the resemblance to deadly Dick and Jane, the authors claim that such repetitions build remarkable phonic clarity in young minds.

An overemphasis on phonics instruction, though, can make some children miss the meaning of the words they sound out. Recalling Rudolf Flesch's 1955 pro-phonics polemic, Why Johnny Can't Read, Harvard Education Professor Jeanne Chall, a phonics authority, quips that "soon I can expect to see a book out called Why Robert Can't Understand."

Precisely because textbook publishers now offer so many alternative methods, the old fuss and fury over reading techniques may be a thing of the past. But the familiar truism remains: for most children, learning in school depends primarily on the caliber of the teacher. Perhaps the greatest danger in the new wealth of reading materials is that it will tempt some schools to spend money on flashy hardware and neglect the job of teaching teachers how to use it effectively.

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