Learning to Read: The Great Debate" & "The Shape of the Book

In Learning to Read: The Great Debate, Jeanne Chall argues that it is critically important to teach children phonics as a first step on their path to becoming good readers.  Chall’s stance is in opposition to the whole language approach to literacy which advocated teaching reading primarily through immersion and contextual clues rather than alphabetic decoding.  Instead, Chall claimed that phonics, not only produced better word recognition and spelling, but also made it easier for the child eventually to read with understanding. 

Another claim that Chall made is that phonics was especially effective for disadvantaged and poor children, who were not likely to live in homes surrounded with books or adults or with adults who could help them to learn to read.  Basically Chall is saying that knowing the alphabet and the awareness of the sounds that make up words are powerful predictors of reading success. 

I learned to read in the mid-1970s, and I was taught to read using phonics, along with vocabulary and lots of spelling drills. Before reading Chall’s article, I did not realize that teaching phonics had been so controversial.  Chall spends a great deal of time defending her advocacy for phonics because I think she saw the writing on the wall: the movement towards the whole language approach to literacy.

On the other hand, I can see why whole language advocates might have difficulties with accepting phonics instruction as desirable.  Phonics offers a piecemeal approach to literacy instead of placing reading and writing in some kind of socio-cultural context.  To me, phonics is a tool that can eventually get the emergent reader to a place where they can interpret and gain meaning from texts in various forms and contexts.

Yet, another way to books in context is by studying the shapes of them.  In “The Shape of the Book,” Manguel discusses how the changing shapes of books brought them from inside the library to the outside world where they became traveling companions.   To Manguel’s point, I cannot help but think about how technology, specifically tablets, has allowed readers to carry an almost a limitless amount of books with them no matter where they go.  This “outside world” that Manguel touts is a world of cloud storage and digital texts.  In a sense, these digital texts are amporphous—existing in the ethers of a cyberworld that is virtually unlimited and formless.

Manguel suggests that “publishers were producing books meant to be taken out into the open, books made specifically to travel. In nineteenth century England, the newly leisured bourgeoisie and the expansion of the railway combined to create a sudden urge for long journeys, and literate travelers found that they required reading material of specific content and size.” (141)  Basically, Manguel demonstrates how the socio-cultural context in which literacy is situated influences the shape, size, and form of the books and texts that we read, study, and analyze.