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The Magical Blend: Phonics AND Whole Language!!

The San Diego Union-Tribune recently published a front page article entitled "Reading It Right - Educators are again tussling with best way to teach subject." The author asked the question: "What method -- whole language, phonics or some magical blend of the two -- is the best way to teach California's children to read?"

Using a talking word processor on the computer gives novice readers and writers a multi-sensory approach to learning. When children write with a talking word processor, they see the letters and hear every letter's name spoken by the computer as they type it, they hear their combination of letters turned into a word by the speech synthesizer when they press spacebar to go on, and they hear their sentence pronounced out loud by the talking word processor when they type a period.

• If they are writing words and sentences that are important, meaningful and INTERESTING to them, they are following the whole language approach.
• Since they are getting instant auditory feedback for everything they type, the computer is acting as an experimental phonics tool for them.

A strong consensus is forming among educators that the best way to teach beginning literacy is an eclectic approach. Without auditory feedback, children trying to invent spellings of their favorite power words may have difficulty if they are using only their knowledge of the letter names. They might try to invent words like Bill Steig, the great New Yorker cartoonist, in his book C D B! (one of his little characters, the speaker, pointing out a bumblebee to the other).

When teaching letter-sound correspondences, such as the effect of final "E," it is quite effective doing a "final E" lesson on a talking word processor. If you TELL children that writing an "e" after the letters "s k a t" turns "skat" to "skate,"they might not understand. But if you type "s k a t," and they hear the computer say each letter as you type, and then they actually HEAR the computer say "skate" when you add the final "e," you have made a lasting impression -- one which they can expand upon independently. If emergent readers are given free time to experiment with a talking word processor, they will turn that lasting impression into a key text-to-speech rule in their emerging grammars for written English.

We encourage you to e-mail us your reactions to this "Magical Blend" article!