The "reading wars," one of the most confusing and disabling conflicts in the history of education, went on heatedly in the 1980s and then peace came. Advocates of phonics (learning by being taught the sound of each letter group) seemed to defeat advocates of whole language (learning by using cues like context and being exposed to much good literature).

Recent events suggest the conflict of complicated concepts is far from over. Teachers, parents and experts appear to agree that phonics is crucial, but what is going on in classrooms is not in agreement with what research studies say is required, which has aroused a national debate over the meaning of the word "phonics. "

Lucy M. Calkins, a professor at Columbia University's Teachers College and a much-respected expert on how to teach reading, has drawn attention with an eight-page essay. Here is part of her argument: "The important thing is to teach kids that they needn't freeze when they come to a hard word, nor skip past it. The important thing is to teach them that they have resources to draw upon, and to use those resources to develop endurance. "

To Calkins'scritics, it is cruel and wasteful to encourage 6-year-olds to look for clues if they don't immediately know the correct sounds. They should work on decoding — knowing the pronunciation of every letter group — until they master it, say the critics, backed by much research.

Calkins'sapproach "is a slow, unreliable way to read words and an inefficient way to develop word recognition skill," Mark S. Seidenberg, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, said in a blog post. "Dr. Calkins treats word recognition as a reasoning problem — like solving a puzzle. She is committed to the educational principle that children learn best by discovering how systems work rather than being told. "

Many others share his view. "Children should learn to decode — i. e. ,go from print on the page to words in the mind — not by clever guesswork and inference, but by learning to decode," Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, told me. He said the inferences Calkins applauds are "cognitively(认知地) demanding, and readers don't have much endurance for it. … It disturbs the flow of what you're reading, and doing a lot of it gets frustrating. "

Yet a recent survey found that only 22 percent of 670 early-reading teachers are using the approach of phonics and what they mean by phonics is often no more than marking up a worksheet. 

Both sides agree that children need to acquire the vocabulary and background information that gives meaning to words. But first, they have to pronounce them correctly to connect the words they have learned to speak. 

Calkins said in her essay: "Much of what the phonics people are saying is praiseworthy," but it would be a mistake to teach phonics "at the expense of reading and writing. "

The two sides appear to agree with her on that.