A Reaction to Sister Mary Edward Dolan's Linguistics in Teaching Reading

Abstract

Sister Mary Edward Dolan's recent article, Effects of a modified linguistics word recognition program on fourth-grade reading achievement, describes results of a three-year experiment in teaching reading with a basal system to a control group of ten classrooms with 407 children in Dubuque, Iowa, and with a modified linguistic system to ten classrooms with 403 children in Detroit, Michigan. Frequent reference is made to the linguistic approach to teaching of reading. In order to determine what has been measured, it is necessary to define a linguistic system and extent to which it has been modified in this experiment. Most proponents of a linguistic method of teaching reading regard first step in learning to read a code-breaking process in which child learns to relate printed symbols in words to spoken sounds in words that he already knows. In Bloomfield's words, great task of learning to read-one of major intellectual feats in anyone's life-consists in learning abstract equation: printed letter = speech sound to be spoken. It is a way of making child's reading vocabulary equal to his spoken vocabulary. Even before he starts to school, child has learned to attach meaning to words, to distinguish in his talk man from Nan or pat from rat or pan from pat or pan from pin, etc., and to use common sentence patterns. Advocates of a linguistic method, then, assume that first task is to break alphabetical code and grade words according to their phonetic difficulty, not their semantic difficulty. They control spelling patterns so that only regular patterns are presented in lists and in reading; after regular spelling patterns are learned, irregular spellings are grouped and introduced in patterns. Pupils are taught to associate specific letters in words with specific sounds in words without consciously analyzing a word into individual sounds by presenting whole word in lists and contexts. The teacher depends on principle of association of like facts to enable child to make unconscious association of spelling and sound.