Moving Beyond the Reading Wars

By Dr. Deborah Duncan Owens

The science of reading movement proponents assert that our country has a reading crisis because phonics is either not being taught in schools – or, at least, not adequately taught. They want us to think that this is a new issue. However, discussions and debates about what constitutes effective phonics instruction go back to the late 1800s.

The following is an excerpt from chapter 2 of my upcoming book Enlightened Literacy: Providing Hope for Democracy, Global Citizenship, and the Human Condition. Chapter 2 is entitled The Fixation on Phonics: Challenging the Presumptions.

The assumption that phonics was lacking in reading instruction is easily challenged historically and, in fact, I am not the first to do so.  Nila Banton Smith began chronicling reading instruction in the United States with her 1934 book American Reading Instruction with revised and updated editions in 1962, 1965, and 1967. Smith points out the fallacies that have undergirded claims that phonics has not been and is not being taught in elementary classrooms. In the 1967 edition of her book she wrote, “Phonics has been a subject of high controversy during the present period.” While she doesn’t name Rudolf Flesch, his impact and others who joined in his critique of reading instruction during the years surrounding the publication of his book, are the subject of her commentary. Smith includes the following 1955 quote from Gerald A. Yoakam, who served as a school superintendent in Iowa and later as director of teaching training at State Teachers College in Nebraska:

  ” Not a reputable system of teaching reading exists today that does not give extensive attention to phonetic training throughout the entire primary and middle grades. The same thing can be said of the modern spelling programs in which phonetic training is a part of the program from the second grade on through the eighth. The writer who accuses the school of doing nothing about phonetics is simply saying things that are not true.”

 Amidst criticism of the educational system in the United States and claims that teachers were not teaching phonics, Yoakam and others were asserting that these claims about a lack of phonics instruction were simply false. As Professor of English and Chairman of the Department of Integrated Liberal Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Robert C. Pooley made clear in 1961:

“In recent years, two major complaints have been hurled at teachers of reading: (a) they have abandoned the teaching of phonics to the detriment of the children’s progress in reading and writing skills. (b) they no longer teach any sounds of English, leaving the child helpless to sound out new words as he encounters them. … But no basic system of reading instruction ever eliminated the teaching of the sounds of words.”

 Nila Banton Smith noted that claims by parents and laymen that phonics instruction is not taught in classrooms across the nation are due to the fact that they only see their own children’s basal readers. They are not seeing the teachers’ manuals or guides that accompany the basal readers, which provide instructions for teaching phonics as a component of reading instruction. Thus, they are “quick to accept the critics’ statements that phonics is no longer taught in the public schools of the United States.” Parents, therefore, blame school boards and administrators and demand that phonics programs are adopted or more emphasis on phonics is included in the school curriculum. As a result, publishers of basal readers and textbooks are pressured to revise reading programs by both parents and organized groups to accommodate calls for more intensive attention on phonics instruction.

 Based on Smith’s historical account of reading instruction in the United States, I believe it is clear that some form of phonics has always been a consistent component of reading instruction. This points to my question about the reading wars. Is the disagreement really about the absence of phonics or is it about the type of phonics being taught?

Synthetic and Analytic Phonics:

 As Smith astutely points out, synthetic phonics as opposed to analytic phonics was a topic discussed in the 1800s. Rebecca Smith Pollard published the Complete Manual: Pollard’s Synthetic Method of Reading and Spelling in 1889.In this book, Pollard stated:

“Instead of teaching the word as a whole and afterward subjecting it to phonic analysis, is it not infinitely better to take the sounds of the letters for our starting point, and with these sounds lay a foundation firm and broad upon which we can build whole families of words for instant recognition?”

  This description illustrates the difference between synthetic and analytic phonics methodologies.  While Pollard advocated for a synthetic approach to teaching phonics, ten years later, in 1899, Sarah Louise Arnold provided a rationale for analytic phonics in her book Reading: How to Teach It. Arnold cautioned against a synthetic phonics approach because so many English words do not comply with “common phonics laws.” Instead, she advocated for an analytic phonics method in which words are studied to discover word classifications. For example, she explained, “Whenever a type [of] word is represented, as black, for example, the children should be taught to suggest other words which rhyme with the pattern, as crack, back, lack, etc.”  Arnold explained that students should continue to study the sounds in words through the first five years of school. This process of analyzing words into separate sounds, accompanied by the classification of similar words would become a habit and enable students to become independent readers.

 The synthetic phonics promoted by Pollard has become associated with what is described as a “part to whole” or “bottoms up” approach. The analytic phonics approach, as promoted by Arnold in 1899, has become associated with what is described as a “whole to part” or “top down” approach.  Over time analytic phonic methods would be viewed as aligned with the whole word method, the subject of so much derision in the 1950s by Flesch and critics of education.  In current debates, analytic phonics is associated with balanced literacy approaches that have been deemed ineffective and not aligned with science. Therefore, it is assumed by critics that synthetic phonics is the superior approach. 

  However, according to scientifically based reading research that has been accepted as part of the canon of literature about effective reading instruction since the Report of the National Reading Panel in 2000, one must ask if synthetic phonics really is more effective than analytic phonics in developing successful readers.  Timothy Shanahan, Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Founding Director of the Center for Literacy as well as a member of the ILA’s Reading Hall of Fame, served on the committee investigating phonics instruction for the National Reading Panel, the esteemed reading researchers who developed what is considered a definitive guide for best practices in reading instruction. According to Shanahan, after reviewing 38 experimental studies on teaching phonics, “there was no clear difference in effectiveness between synthetic and analytic phonics.”  Any difference between the type of phonics that was the subject of the studies was not statistically significant.  In other words, according to Shanahan, the benefit for students is found in teaching phonics, not in the type of phonics.  What should have been a definitive conclusion by one of the researchers on the National Reading Panel, however, has not impacted the current education critics who are resurrecting the old trope about a lack of phonics instruction in schools in the United States.

Selected Resources:

Sarah Louise Arnold. Reading: How to Teach It. (Burdett Publishing, 1899).

Rebecca Smith Pollard, A Complete Manual: Pollard’s Synthetic Method of Reading and Spelling. (American Book Company, 1889).

Timothy Shanahan, “Which Is Best? Analytic or Synthetic Phonics?” Shanahan on Literacy. Reading Rockets,” n.d. https://www.readingrockets.org/blogs/shanahan-on-literacy/which-best-analytic-or-synthetic-phonics.

Nila Banton Smith, American Reading Instruction. (Newark: Delaware: International Reading Association, 1967).