Why Johnny {Can't/Can} Read

Not since its music critic called Liberace a "butcher" musician and "Chic Sale" humorist did the San Francisco Examiner get as many irate letters on a single subject. Other papers across the U.S. have had the same experience. "People jumped into this thing with both feet," says Managing Editor Frank Angelo of the Detroit Free Press Reason for all the fuss was a syndicated version of Rudolf Flesch's best-selling (over 60,000 copies since March) Why Johnny Can't Read. Said one school official in St. Louis after the Globe-Democrat started its series: "I've never seen a book more discussed than this one. My phone practically rang itself off the wall.

In a sweeping condemnation, Flesch had accused the schools of an almost total failure to teach children to read because they had abandoned phonics (the letter-by-letter, syllable-by-syllable method) in favor of sight recognition (recognizing whole words by their appearance). "Do you know," wrote Flesch, "that the teaching of reading never was a problem anywhere in the world until the United States switched to the present method around about 1925?" Bald and exaggerated as his statements were, Flesch had in a sense done the nation a favor. He had brought the extremists out into the open, and he had forced the educators to explain just why they teach as they do.

Bowl to Pot. Though it may vary somewhat from city to city, the method now used in most schools is a combination of systems. The educators admit that word recognitlon has its dangers. It is quite possible, as one Louisville mother reported of her son, for a third grader to type out b-o-w-l and call it pot, or for a pupil to develop the annoying habit of putting the President in the White Horse or assembling stamp collisions. But phonics alone can be equally disastrous. Though a pupil might be able to read the word institute right off, says Elementary Education Supervisor Mary O'Rourke of Massachusetts, he can without other training be completely confused as to its meaning. In one case a phonics-trained girl defined it: "When two people don't know each other, you institute them."

After years of research, the educators are now agreed that phonics is wrong for beginners. "When I was in school," says ames E Greene, professor of education the University of Georgia, "I spent days learning the letters of the alphabet and a lot of meaningless syllables like AA, BB and AB. What the hell did I care for AB? The whole idea is not to drill the pupil in abstract symbols at first but to bring about what the educators call "reading readiness."

Bear to Pear. In determining a child's readiness to read, the teacher must make sure not only of his eye, but also of his ear. Thus, the pupil may be given a series of pictures and asked to circle the object that the teacher names. If he mistakes a comb for a cone or a bear for a pear, he is obviously on his way to mistaking "institute for "introduce." In another series of pictures, the teacher may try to put across certain abstract concepts. A pupil will be asked to draw a ball beside, under or above another object; or, he may have to mark which line in a series is the longest. If he can't yet make such distinctions, he is not ready for the written word

Throughout the first months of school teachers use other devices. In Chicago there are storytelling times and tell-and-do periods. But whatever the device the goal is the same. The class may take a walk around the room or a trip to the zoo. Then they dictate to the teacher a story about what they have seen. The story appears on the blackboard or on a posterlike "experience chart" and is later read back. As such dictation proceeds, says San Francisco's Assistant School Superintendent (Elementary Schools) Alda Harris, "the children see that their own words can be transformed into written symbols."

Rabbit & Rattle. By such methods, the pupil is expected to build up a vocabulary of 50 to 100 words he can recognize at sight. Some teachers use flashcards; others may have a "daily newspaper" for which the children can recite a one-sentence story about themselves ("I played ball yesterday"). Detroit schools use a pre-primer called Before We Read. This teaches the beginner to distinguish shapes (e.g., by picking out a sailboat from a series of trucks) and sounds (e.g., by picking out objects with similar names, as in rabbit and rattle, turtle and turkey). The next book also contains a number of word captions which through repetition the child learns to recognize at sight. With this small vocabulary the pupil is ready for elementary phonics.

Soon pupils are confronted with rhymes (cat, fat, bat, etc.) and lists of words beginning with the same consonant. Thev might also be asked to pick out from a series of words (boy, toy, boy, dog, box) the two that are alike. They learn other words by how they are used in a sentence (e.g., milk, from "The cat drinks milk") are encouraged to look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary. Prefixes and suffixes, vowels and diphthongs, combination words such as oatmeal and airplane are all taught in their place.

Educators agree that phonics alone can be the most effective instruction in some cases. But Rudolf Flesch to the contrary, most children seem to need a combination of methods. Whether the modern school has hit upon the best possible combination is probably a question that could probably be answered only by entering today's pupils into a wholesale competition with their phonics-trained parents. In the Birmingham News, Managing Editor Charles 11 reported that there was some indication that the adults might not come off too well. Among the letters rallying to the Flesch banner, he noted that one teacher had spelled differentiate with one "f" and another wrote seperately. Several grown ups used alright for all right; one mother put two "l's" in personality, and three fathers had written such oddities as begining, forth grade, and uncerten. Editor Fell's conclusion: "A lot of grownups aren't any hotter with their spelling than some of them think you are, Johnny, with your reading."

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