TEACHING CHILDREN TO READ REQUIRES FLEXIBILITY.

Byline: Jeff Zorn

RECENT weeks have seen the most bitter pronouncements about reading instruction since 1955 and the late Rudolf Flesch's pro-phonics best-seller, ``Why Johnny Can't Read, and What You Can Do About It.''

California's low scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress have snapped state Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin into action against the ``disaster'' of ``whole language'' teaching.

Big money will now be poured into cleansing the elementary schools of anti-phonics heresy.

My plea is for balance and for concentration on the big picture. The attainment of literacy is a complex matter, cognitively and culturally, so we must be extremely suspicious of simple dualistic thinking.

``Whole language'' cogently addresses significant problems with the traditional drill-to-skill curriculum. Reading is much more than letter-by-letter decoding; writing is much more than spelling and punctuation. In real life, neither proceeds in the linear, additive fashion envisioned in workbooks. Neither has meaning or purpose except in the communication of whole messages completed ideas and images.

Young kids' invented spellings make for flashy evidence that ``whole language'' is a gross stupidity until you realize that the alternative is not to let kids write until they have mastered spelling.

When will that be?

Likewise, if the mastery of sentence grammar is treated as a precondition for a class in composition, few students will receive instruction and practice at even the paragraph level before leaving high school.

Arranging classrooms as busy centers of authentic communication, ``whole language'' practitioners get kids reading and writing early and often. Their classrooms are clear improvements on those of my youth, where we were trained like B.F. Skinner's pigeons to score at grade level and higher on standardized tests.

We learned the skills but not the strategies of reading and writing. At all levels past the rudimentary, strategies for abstracting meaning from text and imparting meaning into text count for nearly everything.

Past the strategies, how can the joys of reading and writing be even hinted at in the Basics Skills Forever classroom? The United States has millions of adults who can read but do not. I attribute much of this unused literacy to the phonics-spelling curriculum.

That said, it is also clear that ``whole language'' zealots are way off base in disdaining all direct instruction in basic skills. None but the most culturally advantaged pupils - those whose are read to and otherwise cognitively stimulated from birth - will coast through the initial stages of reading, teaching themselves a most quirky and unphonetic code.

To sniff that pupils must take responsibility for their own learning is in this case a gross abdication of the teacher's responsibility to teach.

A useful analogy here might be to piano playing. We can arpeggio kids to bored distraction, and they will give up the instrument as soon as they can. Or we can let them hack at the keyboard with terrible hand position and no sight-reading skills, hoping they will progress past a heart-felt ``Eensy Weensy Spider'' in a year or three.

Or we can balance the training with the musicality, offering more of some or the other to different pupils.

Optimal practice in elementary school language arts will have similar balance. Turning away from dogmatism, it will combine readings by the teacher, dialogues on these and other subjects, tentative readings by pupils, ``free'' writings, writings assigned, guided and corrected by the teacher, and comprehensive instruction in foundational skills.

A flexible curriculum of this sort respects the difficulty of mastering print-language even while respecting pupils as active creators and potential lovers of print-language. The end-in-view is the literate, motivated middle school student, technically competent and intellectually dynamic, ready for more, ready to fly.

MEMO: Jeff Zorn is a senior lecturer in English at Santa Clara University.