Germany forbids all teaching of Whole Language

Anyone’s feelings about what you’re calling ‘whole language’ aside, what significance does this suggested information have?

German schools have historically been noted for impressive rigidity and an emphasis on collective behavior eg. World War II and the mass destruction of civilians that occurred there with the knowledge and consent of many people educated in the German schools.

Are you suggesting that German schools have a great deal in common with American schools or that American schools should strive to be more like German schools?

Your opinion of Germany may be a touch dated — a lot has happened there since 1945, and it is not the same country 57 years later any more than the US or Canada are the same countries we were back then.

German schools have been leaders in education in the last several decades. And no, they are not producing militaristic robots; quite the contrary, post-war German society has been very anti-military and it is only recently that their soldiers have been allowed to serve outside the country.

In fact, *modern* Germans and other Europeans tend to view the USA as militaristic, a view that could perhaps be supported by some recent history in Vietnam, Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan, … whether one supports these actions as necessary or not, they are indeed militaristic approaches. This is not a forum for politics, so let’s please not get too involved with this, just please take a look at the present generation — I’m one of the older people around her (51) and I’m a post-WWII person, as is over 90% of the present German population.

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Once we get over the stereotyping, we can look at schools in other places as examples we can learn from, whether good or bad.

Various international studies — using *American* tests — have shown that the USA (and also Canada) don’t stand up very well on the world stage in education. The Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) placed American twelfth-graders once again near the bottom of industrialized countries, and noted very ineffective rote-learning teaching practices being standard in the US. (And before someone trots out the old excuse that the other countries only educate an elite, no, that has changed, and this study in particular made a point of testing all students, not just university-bound. Also they have just as much TV as we do by now so that excuse doesn’t hold water either.)

Getting back to reading and some other places we can learn from, by coincidence I just happened to receive my new French reading texts from France yesterday (amazon.fr — expensive but what fun! Books from all over!) As I looked over the Grade 1 book, I was trying to think how this exact format could be published in English, because it is *exactly* what we need. There are about fifty lessons, each with a short story about a green rat (amusing, kids like this series), followed by a set of words to study and some comprehension questions. There’s a little teacher’s guide of a couple of sentences at the bottom of each page. The first thirty or so lessons concentrate each on one phoneme and its most common one or two spellings, and the remaining twenty concentrate on variant and difficult spellings, mostly vowels and vowel/consonant combinations. By the way, French spelling is as much of a nightmare as English; almost every word contains a number of silent letters, and the silent letter endings change depending on the person: I laugh, je ris (pronounced ree) but he laughs, il rit (also pronounced ree), they laugh, ils rient (once again pronounced ree); the vowels are something else as any student of French can tell you are something else: er sounds like ay in parler, like air in cher. Yet this little book presents all of that sensibly and amusingly in a nice one-year program with good continuous text and funny stories. Besides the texts, there is a series of little story books about the same characters, graded by difficulty, a total of more than fifty titles available Grades 1 to 4; I’ve been using these tutoring two kids for the last four months and they actually *enjoy* their reading lessons with them. The Grade 2 reading textbook assumes that the kids know pretty much all the phonics and just need practice and reinforcement, so it just presents stories and comprehension work graded by difficulty; there is no reading text after Grade 2 because it’s assumed the kids are now independent readers. As I said, boy do we need something like this in English-language schools!

The French schools and immersion schools in my area in Montreal also have been dabbling in whole-language, with the same bad results as in English — that’s why I’m ordering from France. That’s also why I have these tutoring students.

Hi Victoria,

I have been wanting to get some Spanish easy books for my 9 yr. old. about 2nd grade level.

I think all kids should learn a foreign language and here in Pa we have a growing spanish population. As does the rest of the US.

I’m not sure what makes any country a ‘leader’ in education but it’s an interesting thought. How has Germany eclipsed America on the world front if their educational system is so superior? Germany has certainly cost the world a great deal. What has it given back and how do its schools play a role in that process?

And what makes Germany a leader in education?

And of what significance would it be that American students score lower than other countries on any standardized test? The concern over that is very political and nativistic it seems to me. The results of such ‘tests’ are used as part of the great continuing witch-hunt enacted on American education. Scare tactics abound here.

Looking to learn what we can from each other is one thing. Following blindly one country’s system makes no sense. I simply don’t care what the Germans do in their schools. Nor they do have a population similiar to that of America either in size or composition.

Scare tactics have created a climate of fear surrounding our educational system
in America that serves no one well and leads Washington to frantically search for quick fixes that solve nothing.

Perhaps you are behind on your history. Germany is considered one of the most economically successful and progressive societies in the world. I am posting for those who are too familiar with the term Whole Language. perhaps you would be interested in reading an article “whole Language Lives” under LD in depth at this site.

I’m not sure if it is worth answering this diatribe of yours as you seem fixed in your views no matter what. But one more try:

Umm… *who* is using scare tactics here, those of us who are looking at what is happening in the world with an open mind, or you who are convinced that America is right and everyone else is wrong no matter what the evidence?

I can’t see how looking at the rest of the world can be classed as “following blindly” or “nativistic”; quite the opposite.

In the 1980’s Germany’s economy *was* outperforming the US. Then West Germany took over the poverty-stricken East after the collapse of communism in 1991-92, more economic need than would occur if the US merged with Mexico, and their economy shook a little but is coming back. Again world leaders, including US, do take this as an issue of grave concern — tell me, are the people of your area buying Mercedes and BMWs and new Volkswagens like the rest of the continent? And are the car plants in your area closing down like many others in North America? Maybe there is a reason to look at why local performance is not competing?

In fact, standardized tests, as I mentioned previously, are an *American* phenomenon. Other countries still test their students mostly or entirely by essay exams and oral exams. The fact that students who speak different languages and who are used to a different exam format outperform American students on American tests in American format should give one pause for thought.

What makes a country a leader in education? All sorts of things, including but very much not limited to high test scores. Students going to universities and then to graduate schools, research coming out of their universities and hospitals and other scientific institutions, and so on; high rates of literacy in the general public; comparative studies such as the TIMSS which not only tested but observed classes and interviewed teachers and students; performance of skilled workers for example automakers; etcetera.

Thanks, Victoria, for responding to this. In Switzerland, too, some Cantons experimented with whole language teaching in the late Seventies in an drive to follow the “modern” German approach, but quickly dropped it again when the failure of the method became evident in Germany.

I understand that one of the attractions in whole language teaching is that it is much easier to turn out teachers, since phonics teaching requires considerable knowledge and education in phonics. At the time Germany was experimenting with whole language, Germany was going through a severe teacher shortage.

However, research into the effect of the method showed that the remedial aftercare was soaking up far more resources than were being saved by speeding up teacher training. Under normal circumstances, about 5-8% of pupils show dyslexia, while whole language teaching was four times as likely to produce dyslexics as phonic teaching.

Educational policies in Switzerland, though not federally mandated, generally stick to the tried-and-tested; by and large, we have avoided experimenting with fashions such as whole language, new maths, comprehensive schools, etc., all of which the Socialist Democratic party government introduced to Germany in an effort to break up to stodgy educational establishment in the 70s, but were discarded in the 80s after a lot of cost and grief.

Child psychologists and educational academics in Switzerland consider US research on these matter to be several years ahead of Europe, and much of the German-language research seems to draw on US sources. The mystery is why the US (and, for that matter, England) insists on preserving teaching methods that are self-destructive, and been shown to be so by your own research.

Best regards,

Jürg

Hi Jurg,

It’s nice to hear from a European on this topic, as few Americans really know enough about what goes on in Europe, especially because every country is different! Even in American, it depends on what State you live in what type of education you will get, and although I know a lot about education in my particular state, I don’t claim to be an expert about other states, let alone Europe.

I do want to refer people, though, to the article on dyslexia that appeared in Science Magazine last year, in which dyslexia was compared across three languages: French, Italian, and English. Although the brain structures and “signature” was identical, and dyslexia occured at about identical frequencies in all three cultures, it was much more likely to affect actual reading/writing in English — second most common in French, and least common in Italian. This was explained by the multitude of variant spellings used in both English and French, of which there are very few in Italian. The study found that there were individuals in Italy who were dyslexic, but didn’t know it because they’d successfully been educated to read and write. To me this suggests that if we use the right methods, dyslexics in any language CAN learn to read and write!

I agree that it is “easier” to turn out teachers who can teach whole language, and harder to teach teachers what they need to know about phonics — a study conducted here in California showed that about two-thirds of our TEACHERS could not pass a simple phonics test! Didn’t surprise me, of course, because I remember that in my basic teaching credential program there was only one required “teaching reading” course — mine happened to be phonics-based, but what if you’re not so lucky? It’s becoming increasingly clear that teaching teachers phonics is the only real alternative if we want a truly literate society. The problem in America is that for the most part our teacher training institutions are not on the same page, here, so maybe that explains why we are “preserving teaching methods that are self-destructive, and been shown to be so by your own research”. Thank you for the valuable contributions to this discussion…

Sharon
www.angelfire.com/on2/thepuzzle

Hi AA, I have heard this argument for as long as Whole language (WL) has been reigning out there as the reading ‘method’ of choice. By all of the reading statistics polls out there, reading comprehension and reading in general for children of all ages are at an all time low. The average senior is graduating at a 9th grade reading level. What the WL enthusiates advocate is for a student to read until he comes to a word that he doesn’t know, skip it, finish the sentence and by using context cues guess what the sentence means. The problem is when a child doesn’t have decoding skills and he doesn’t know 5 out of 8 words, and guesses wrong, the deficiency shows up in comprehension. There can be a reading program to fit all. Teach the child to segment, blend and the English code, as well as how to decode multi-syllable words, let him practice those skills to gain fluency, teach vocabulary, take him away from computer games and have him read books. What a novel idea! Whole Language has never taught anyone to read. The kids that have learned to read through no teaching are those 40% who would have learned to read no matter how you teach them. The problem is when those students get to the upper grades and don’t know how to decode Multi-Syllable words, they start having problems. I have taught a class of gifted and tatented kids PG for spelling strategies and MS decoding strategies. They were just reading on grade level and needed to read at a higher grade level for their Advanced Placement courses. In a very short time, they were reading way above grade level. We know what the research says, teach them phonics (not the program) and phonemic awareness first and the comprehension will follow. If the student still can’t comprehend, then it may well be a visualizing problem. Torgeson said at a Lindamood-Bell conference that if we put a good reading program that teaches phonics and phonemic awareness and a visualizing program like V/V, it would stop 95% of the referrels to special ed. If I can remediate high school kids in about 10 hours who are ‘reading disabled’, have they really been disabled all these years? We have to quit ruining kids lives and use the reading research that is out there, accept it and use reading programs that work with most kids. We also have to quit looking at reading as a religion, admit that WL has ruined a whole generation not only in reading but also in written expression and teach these kids directly. Hear, Hear!! Enough already.

YOu’re right, AA — it’s not a good thing to say “gotta do explicit phonics with everyone.” (I *won’t* say that it’s as bad as saying “gotta do whole language with everyone” — but lots of WL advocates do admit that gosh, kids with dyslexia might need something different). At New Community, we did teach a structured multisensory program to *every* kid in the school — and some of these kiddos were there for NVLDs and had reading levels ‘way above their grade levels. However, we simply didn’t spend the time working on teh sounds and the nitty gritty decoding skills — we *did* teach the organization and logic behind the language, and we *did* teach comprehension skills separately and explicitly.

You talk about which reading method is “best” for comprehension. I half expected you to wax into the whole business about “reading is getting meaning from print” and it doesn’t *really* matter how many words you miss as long as you get meaning. For the overwhelming majority of the students I taught, as their accuracy improved, their comprehension shot up even faster. The thing holding back their understanding was the fluent, accurate skill at figuring out what words were on the page — and that took breaking that skill down a bit. We did fairly extensive testing every year on every kid, so I had a pretty hefty database to look at (and I was in charge of the database so I saw ‘em all :)).

It would be a mistake to teach decoding to death and assume comprehension “just happens” (even though some times it does, especially if good, lively discussions and the kinds of activities that are the great part of whole language are happening). One of hte things that really impressed me about New Community was that we were trained in breaking the comprehension skills down, too, and *teaching* them.

AA — Please take a little time and read through this long post, as there are many issues here and many grey areas and a lot of details.Both Shay and I are really trying to have a reasoned discussion and to be helpful here, but sometimes limitations of the web board medium allow misunderstandings.

I read your first post and felt it was a really good question and was planning a long and serious reply. I read Shay’s answer, with which I agree in large part, and did not see anything terribly inflammatory in it; of course, in a couple of paragraphs on a website, she can’t go into every subsection and special case and we do tend to generalize. Then I read your reply to Shay which starts out discussing issues and then tends to become a flame. This worries me. There is more to this than meets the eye — more on this later.

Shay has been a reading professional in the schools for many years and has succeeded with hundreds of high school kids that the system had written off as “unteachable”. I have been tutoring for eighteen years and teaching before that and have succeeded with a number of kids who the school system had given up as “disturbed” and “retarded” and “slow learners” and “problems” and so forth. We speak from experience.

When you speak of “impressive credentials” we have learned to be very cynical and mistrustful here — a PhD is of no consequence if you can’t do anything out in the real world; on the other hand, many of the people posting here are high-school educated parents who have made themselves into experts in LD and reading teaching in order to help their own children. As the old British saying goes, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Your credentials are as good as ours if you have informed yourself and gotten a former non-reader reading and *continuing* to read and succeed. (I do have to stress continuing, because there is a constant problem of dead-end approaches that seem to work for a while and then leave the kids in the lurch.)

Now, there is the issue of reading methods as religion. This comes up on this board every few months. If you argue a scientific fact, you state the facts and point the person to the information; a logical person looks at the proof and decides if it is well-enough demonstrated and if so tries to accept the new idea and integrate it into their world-view; if they feel the proof is not truly a proof because of certain defects, they outline these defects specifically in a reasoned rebuttal.
If you argue religion, each person states their point of view and then one person becomes very angry at what they see as sin and heresy, calls the other names, and charges off in a huff. I hope you will take this as a constructive suggestion; your increasing anger in your second post is something we see a lot of in the “reading wars”, and it means you have taken certain theories into your mind as absolute truths and that anyone argument against them is felt as an attack on the basic fundamentals of decency and life. Some people are taught such attitudes in colleges of education (one problem we fight is that many people have been taught, literally, that phonics is bad-tasting medicine that should be used as little as possible); others are taught them in their own reading instruction.

Apparently you were told somewhere along the line that you and students like you didn’t learn by phonics. Well, Shay and I have seen an awful lot of students who were told that, and in our experience it really meant that the system didn’t like to teach phonics. One school system I tutored around had a long and complex testing program and said that they placed the students in the reading program that suited each student best; except that they *never* placed a single student that I could find into a phonics program, the tests all came out that the “best” program just happened to be the exact same reading program they had bought for their schools anyway (How convenient! How cheap! How easy to avoid extra work! And they call the *kids* lazy??) Maybe there are kids who can’t learn phonics ever — but in twenty-five years I haven’t met one. I *have* met incredibly prejudiced directors of education who took tens of thousands of dollars of wages from an Indian band and then said that “Indian kids’ ears don’t work the way ours do”.(so we don’t teach them phonics). As I said about credentials and becoming cynical …

Now, as for comprehension, OF COURSE you teach comprehension. And fluency, the other big issue, of course! It’s just that those of us with experience and logical minds have noticed that if you are saying the *wrong* words, you are rather unlikely to comprehend well. And your fluency is either bad or schizophrenic (My students read an Earth Science book “The Earth travels around the sun in an elephant orange.” Fluent speed, but does not sound sane.) Sure, you can miss one or two words and get by, and in fact all of us skim and leave things out at times. But there is a level of errors, two or three or more words per sentence, that turns a reading selection into mush. And if you accept the elephant orange, you cannot get either facts or enjoyment out of reading. And fluency does *not* equal speed; I keep having to remind my students that there is no value in a fast mistake. Not in school and not in the real world.

A good teacher — and there are many experienced teachers posting here — works *both* ways. Letters to words to sentences to paragraphs (synthetic) and paragraphs to sentences to words to letters (analytic). As in most things, there is a reasonable balance. In your Grade 1 class you teach the sounds of the letter c and simple three-letter words in the morning, you read continuous text from the reader, you have the kids do some workbook or spelling or writing work with c and simple words, you have independent reading after lunch, and you read aloud from Little House in the afternoon. *All* these activities are valuable and have their place.

The problem which is like the Hydra — for every head you cut off, it grows three more — is that people love to oversimplify. It’s so complicated to have a phonics/spelling lesson and a writing lesson and independent reading time and read-aloud time; let’s combine them all in one reading hour and we can be so much more “efficient” by doing everything as a whole. It’s so complicated and expensive and irritating to have a phonics book and two graded basal readers and a library of independent readers and a library of read-aloud books; let’s forget the graded books and workbooks (much cheaper too!) and just have the kids read library books. It’s complicated and expensive and dull to have workbooks; let’s just have the students write their own stories. Phonics is complicated and takes all this work and doesn’t come naturally to kids; let’s just have them discover their own ways to read “naturally”. (The fact that reading is *not* natural but a recent cultural invention may be ignored.) Let’s teach comprehension and the skills will follow “naturally”. Easier, cheaper, less time, so much more “efficient” — so what was that you said about reading/writing skills levels? Well, we don’t believe in that kind of testing any more because it doesn’t test the new skills we are teaching.

This is what happened to “whole language”. Actually, many of the *original* ideas of whole language made good sense — having kids read real books and not be tied entirely to artificial readers (yes, absolutely, as soon as they have the minimal skills so that they *can* read the real beginner books, within the first few months usually); teaching phonics and spelling through real-life writing work (yes, absolutely, as long as you *do* teach, and don’t just omit the subject), concentrating on comprehension and not drilling for multiple-choice tests (yes, absolutely, as long as you *do* in one way or another teach the skills that allow the students to read and comprehend). Good intentions, and unfortunately we know what road they pave. A good whole-language program will take as much time as or more than a good basal program and will include as much practice or more in writing and spelling and will require a well-trained and knowledgeable teacher; what happens in fact is that poorly-trained teachers are given insufficient materials and time and are allowed to leave out anything that is hard and neither teachers nor students are held to any standards until middle school when it’s too late for many kids. In actual implementation, it is comprehension that suffers worst in whole language classes, because the students don’t have the skills to read or write the material they are supposed to be using.

*Nobody* here is ever saying to use *only* phonics — this is a deliberate political insult used by the religionists who oppose phonics. We just recommend phonics as a solid skills base that you use to hold all the real stuff (real books, real writing) together. On the other hand, the phonics oppositionists do get pretty extreme about using *only* their programs.

My comments, concerning Whole Language, was not accusing you of anything. My comments were not to be understood as a personal attack, I don’t do that. Just general statements. Sorry that you took it as such. I do believe that one size can fit all. Here are my reasons. Fifty percent of the kids will learn to read by even using ‘Whole Language’ but there are areas that will be lacking as they get older as I have said, such as spelling and decoding multi-syllable words. First, you have to use a decoding/spelling program. This program should include segmenting, blending and auditory processing exercises. You really can even create exercises for these areas and then have them read. What do you need next? The students have to be taught the advanced code so they will know what symbol patterns correspond to the different sounds, phonemic awareness.This can be done at the same time as you are teaching blending and segmenting of the sounds. You don’t need to combine different programs for this. You can do this using all of the different ways in which children learn. Now what? You have to teach vocabulary, another program. This is so necessary because in our society of deversity, it is so necessary. Fluency has to be next. There are great fluency programs out there but you have to give the children time to practice their skills before you decide that they aren’t reading fast enough. Also, many students read at different rates of speed and can comprehend at those. We have to stop deciding that ‘one size fits all’ here. What’s next, Moats has stated that writing should not be taught until they kids are in second grade. I agree with her. That should be another program. So you see, I believe that one program can fit all, if you use a lot of programs for each of the ‘pieces’ of reading. I don’t advocate mixing programs. These statements are not based just in my philosophy but in my actual teaching. I want to apologize to you about thinking that I was making a personal attack on you. As I said, I don’t do that. I was just stating what I have personally seen in the classroom. I have never used any other reading program, decoding/spelling, other than Phono-Graphix, because it has worked for all of the kids that I have ever taught. When I refer to reading being a religion, this is what I mean. There are many teachers that even when given a better program, will not change because they are so loyal to that program even when there are a lot of children referred to sped. The philosophy of many of these teachers are that there will always be a lot of children that won’t be able to read so that’s okay to continue using the program that they won’t give up. If, in time, I have a child that seems not to learn how to read using PG, I will find one that does.
I have about three students out of about 20 that are actually LD. Most of these kids are reading and writing disabled. I have remediated both their reading and writing with the programs that I have mentioned in another quote. They are headed to regular ed classes next year and some will exit sped as well. Now, if these same students would have been directly taught in elementary school, would they ever have been in special ed? Most of these students are African American and Hispanic. The statements that I have made concerning statistics are not mine, they are many people who have done the research in the past. These people are Lyons, Torgeson, Silvers and Moats, to name a few. You can get these research documents from the Fordham foundation. These figures are being used to rework IDEA, the laws that regulate special ed. I have to get to work. Again, I wasn’t flaming you or anyone. Shay

AA,

From my reading of these boards, it seems that many NVLD kids pick up the decoding part of reading pretty easily but have a harder time with comprehension.
For many other kids, they comprehend once they can decode. So obviously, it is important that kids can decode automatically.

Is your point that we must not forget that some kids need explict teaching of comprehension? If so, I don’t think any one will disagree. My son seems to be one but he has also needed explicit teaching of decoding.

Beth

AA,

So you think that NVLD kids learn better generally by other methods than decoding or are you just trying to make the point that we have to be careful of “one size fits all” mentality? I ask because it is my impression that NVLD kids usually learn to read easily, in terms of decoding.

I think comprehension is complicated. Nan posted today about all the different skills needed in comprehension and suggested some books. Visualization is only one of them. My son too has memory problems as well and I think V & V may help him. But you are right that may not help all types of comprehension problems. I think problems with inference like my son is experiencing are more connected to the ability to think abstractly, which V & V doesn’t directly address.

I also have wondered whether NVLD kids can be taught to visualize or if it is simply something beyond their capability. If it is the case that some can and some can’t (and that is what I interpret from your post) then it
may only be trial and error. It would seem that it would help, if they could, and as a parent, I certainly would try the program.

I also think it makes sense to teach using “best practices”–what works most of the time for LD kids. Overall, we will have the highest success rate. Still, I am sympathetic to your point. My son is a complicated LD case and a lot of the standard things haven’t worked as easily or as well as they do on
other kids. He has required continual adjustment on our part and many of the professionals that have worked with him.

Beth

I wonder which of the “six strategies” that falls under…

I have kids to exercises to separate big ideas from littler ones and gradually get more adept at organizing them. I start with mini-outlines — a heading topic that they’re supposed to fill in details for, or the details that they figure out the big idea for (Maine, Massachusetts, Florida, Ohio…) This can be very adaptable as far as the abstract level of the ideas, etc.

Then I mix ‘em up and the student has to sort them and make the outline. Everything’s spelled out — that “outline form” isn’t something they’re supposed to intuit.

*Then* we go to short passages from things like Single Skills booklets. They’ve got paragraphs designed just for picking out the main idea and the supporting details. First we just figure out the subject (and remember this is only a paragraph or two). A real cognitive leap is getting from “the passage is about fish” to “the passage says that fish have many ways of reproducing.” Checking sentence by sentence to see whether most of the sentences support what the “main idea’ is is a way to help the kiddo understand that no, this isn’t some bizarre guessing game.

Once the kid’s got getting the main idea of a short passage down, the next stage is highlighting the main idea in one color and picking out supporting ideas and using another color. Depending on the student we may write some of that out as outlines. The passages in the materials behave themselves reasonably well, but I do include paragraphs where it’s really a list of things and you have to figure out the main idea, so there’s nothing to highlight.
Then we move to longer passages.

I find students do tend to lean one way or the other — they will summarize ten pages in a sentence, but that’s all they have to say about it… it takes time to teach them to expand on that kernel. Others see details, details, details and have to be taught about the common threads.

Now, here we have another “one size fits all” problem. My daughter and I and my brother and many others of us just cannot function in your outline system. To us it is a rigid straitjacket. We write very well, thanks, and we read excellently, we just don’t do it by your recipe.

We tend to think in complex interrelated gestalts, and our problem is finding the best way into the kaleidoscope to put it down in the linearity of words.

My daughter was frustrated literally to screaming point by exactly the sort of outlining exercise you are recommending plus the “writing process” which tried to teach creative writing by means of the most rigid uncreative structuire imaginable.

What do you tell a student who has already answered the essay question clearly and in an original and creative manner, but hasn’t put down a single highlight or outline because she doesn’t think that way? Her teachers forced her through the process anyway and almost succeeded in teaching her to hate writing.

You and I keep saying vey much the same thing in different words. Yes, I teach reading by phonics because it worked for me and for every kid I’ve had a chance to teach, and other methods *didn’t*. Yes, of course you teach all the other stuff, in a complex and interrelated program. Take a look at my very long post answering AA when you have the time.

I always wrote the outline after I wrote the paper!!! How can you see what you are going to say until you say it!!! I write professionally now (journal articles) and still never use outlines.

Beth