ABSTRACT
Over 20 years ago, Jeanne Chall (1967) coined the phrase ‘the great debate’ with reference to contemporary controversies about the teaching of reading. By this phrase she referred to the debate between those who at the time advocated an approach to teaching reading which emphasised sound-symbol correspondences and those who argued in favour of what were termed ‘meaning-based’ approaches but which tended, in fact, to involve an emphasis on the recognition of whole words. Arguments about the relative merits of ‘phonics’ and ‘look-and-say’ have raged over the intervening 20 years, and, indeed, these terms are still regularly used as slogans in what seems a perennial battle. More recently, however, the terms of the debate have shifted and new controversies have arisen, fuelled by an apparent decline in the standards of reading achievement by 7-year-olds (although it must be admitted that the nature, extent and very existence of such a decline are in themselves controversial issues). The current ‘great debate’ concerns the relative efficacy of teaching approaches which are based upon radically different psychological and philosophical positions. On the one side there are those who argue that the teaching of reading should proceed according to ‘bottom-up’ principles, with children being taught first to decipher words or parts of words and then to put these words together to make meaning. On the other side there are those who advocate a ‘top-down’ approach in which children begin with meaningful units of language, either sentences arising from their spoken language or whole stories, and only later have their attention focused on the individual elements of these units. Both phonics and look-and-say are essentially ‘bottom-up’ approaches, in that they focus first on the building blocks of meaning: letters, sounds and words. The new element in the debate about reading is the growth in adherence to ‘top-down’ approaches. The ‘great debate’ is, therefore, rather old-fashioned in its terms of reference, and there is a need to shift the emphasis in discussions about reading teaching and also a need to question the polarisation of attitudes which the very terms of the debate seem to exacerbate.
