Phonics

Remember "Hooked on Phonics"? Actually, who could forget? A few years back, you'd hear the company's farfetched claims of success--"I read a 120-page book after using one tape"--every time you turned on the radio. In 1995, however, the ads were silenced when the Orange-based company went belly-up. Bankruptcy, though, didn't alter the value of the name. Tens of millions of advertising dollars had created a public awareness that, as with Kleenex or Xerox, transcended the product itself.

California today is expected to complete its return to phonics as the foundation of reading instruction when the State Board of Education adopts new guidelines calling for students to learn basic word skills before tackling literature and other material. The blueprint for classroom lessons will cap four years of reading reform in California and drive fundamental changes in curricula, textbooks and teacher training.

Remember "Hooked on Phonics"? Actually, who could forget? A few years back, you'd hear the company's farfetched claims of success--"I read a 120-page book after using one tape"--every time you turned on the radio. In 1995, however, the ads were silenced when the Orange, Calif.-based company went belly-up. Bankruptcy, though, didn't alter the value of the name. Tens of millions of advertising dollars had created a public awareness that, as with Kleenex or Xerox, transcended the product itself.

A long-awaited report on how to best teach children to read calls for a mix of early phonics training and lots of reading, the approach now taken in California after its embrace of the controversial "whole language" method. In endorsing such a balance, the report, released Wednesday by the National Research Council in Washington, said it is time for a truce in the "reading wars" that have plagued schools for decades.

In an effort to improve dismal reading scores, the superintendent of Los Angeles schools has ordered that phonics be made a mandatory part of curriculum districtwide, officials disclosed Friday. The program, including several other plans to improve reading, could be put into effect within a few months. The move toward phonics aims to clarify a jumble of ambiguous guidelines that has resulted in a variety of uncoordinated approaches to reading instruction.

Don't be fooled by the hokey name or the zebra-striped rug on the office floor. Zoo-phonics means business. And this is a banner year for the thriving company that was hatched in a garage. "We're crazy busy," says President Charlene Wrighton. Phonics is back in California, and that means business is booming for entrepreneurs large and small.

Research used to justify a return to a "back-to-basics" method of teaching U.S. children how to read is flawed, according to a study presented at a national reading conference in Orlando. The traditional phonics method teaches children to sound out words, as opposed to the so-called whole language approach in which children learn to identify words through their context in sentences or stories.

Given that reading instruction has become one of the major exports of this emerald green spine of islands, right up there with kiwi and lamb, the critics here seem almost unpatriotic when they spout off like naysayers everywhere: What's wrong with our schools? Reading has been a source of national pride in this tiny nation since 1970, when its students finished first in the world on an international test. Within two years, Marie M.

A year ago, the California Legislature declared a return of phonics to classrooms. Sixty percent of the state's fourth-graders could barely read and, after a decade of experimenting with "whole language," politicians and parents had lost their patience. The state offered school districts $40 million for teacher training and $150 million for new reading books--as long as the training stressed letters and their sounds and the books gave students phonics practice.

A year ago, the state of California declared in no uncertain terms that children in their early school years were to be taught phonics--systematically and explicitly--to boost reading scores that lag behind those in more than 40 states. But some members of the Los Angeles Board of Education fear that district instructional leaders haven't gotten the message.