Role; *Whole Language Approach

Presently, reading is much discussed by senators, representatives, and state legislatures--the debate is on the following issues in reading instruction: (1) having all students in public school achieve at grade level as a reading minimum; (2) accountability of teachers for student achievement; (3) teachers having high achievement expectations from each student; (4) teacher testing to demonstrate teaching skills/abilities; and (5) educational bankruptcy laws and vouchers for schools whose students do poorly on tests. What is minimized or avoided in the discussion is what legislative bodies can do, such as provide moneys for constructing school buildings, give verbal and moral support to the public schools, and offer adequate salaries to teachers. An issue that has been with reading specialists for some time is the whole language versus phonics debate. Recommended is the following in phonics instruction: use phonics instruction as needed to assist a student to identify the unknown word; use a more systematic approach if a learner can benefit from phonics to recognize unknown words; use phonics in an informal way to make these learnings enjoyable; use phonics as a functional approach in recognizing unknown words and not phonics for its own sake; and use work book pages in phonics if they serve a useful purpose. Another question arises as to who should sequence student learning in the reading curriculum. These and other issues, such as technology use in reading instruction, need to be discussed with an attempt made at achieving synthesis. (NKA) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document