What's the best way to spark a child's passion for reading?
Is it by drilling first-graders in the relationship between spoken sounds and the ABCs they see posted on classrooms walls?Is it by challenging them to recognize words as they look through children's books?
Until recently, only the most traditional educators advocated the use of phonics - a 100-year-old system of teaching children to match sounds to the alphabet.
For most of this century, classroom teachers and academics have put their faith in a variety of other methods - from the 1960s' "look-say" word recognition system featuring Sally, Dick and Jane books to the 1980s' literature-based "whole language."
But phonics has some surprising new converts these days.
National Institutes of Health investigator Reid Lyon is among a growing group of researchers who say phonics would solve the problems of the estimated 50 percent of American kids who do not naturally look at storybooks and figure out the words.
Lyon's 1990s research shows that half of children need formal phonics instruction to become good readers - and that's probably why so many American kids struggle with basic reading, writing and spelling.
Other born-again phonics supporters include first-grade teacher Jamie Klein. She's one of a number of classroom teachers who didn't learn to teach phonics in college but are training to do so now.
"I didn't specifically learn to teach phonics in college - it was just thrown into a discussion about a variety of teaching methods," said Klein, who graduated from Northern Arizona University six years ago with a bachelor's degree in education.
Earlier, this year, pupils at her school, Cesar Chavez Community in south Phoenix, ranked at the bottom of the nation - the 14th percentile - on the Word Study Skills Test. The standardized test shows how well third-graders know their sounds and letters.
Arizona ranked in the 39th percentile, a score that Kelly Powell, research and evaluation director for the Arizona Department of Education, calls "extraordinarily low."
Last summer, Klein and two other Cesar Chavez teachers trained to use a phonics program called Action Reading. It teaches kids sounds, letters and words through picture cards, songs, coloring sheets and games. The one-time cost per class for materials is $1,600.
"With the system I used before, I never knew whether kids were actually reading words in books or had just memorized them" when adults read the books aloud, Klein said.
"With this method, kids learn how to break words down into sounds, and they learn to sound out new words without help from a teacher."
Now, Klein has a class of exuberant readers like Jennifer Cordoza who rush through their drills and worksheets then visit a small library in the corner of the classroom.
"I read a lot," said the bilingual 6-year-old, who speaks Spanish at home and owns two storybooks.
"I've read 10 - no, maybe 100 - books: `Go Dog Go,' `Ten Apples on Top,' `Green Eggs and Ham,' " Jennifer said.
"I got a certificate for a free pizza for reading lots of books."
Cesar Chavez principal Pablo Curiel says the real measure of whether Action Reading is working will be future standardized test scores. But he noted that he is pleased with the results he has seen so far.
Research by National Institutes of Health's Lyon indicates that 50 percent of kids may be born with a natural ability to match sounds and letters. They quickly get the knack of reading without phonics.
But everyone else struggles to "crack the code" of letter and sound relationships without formal instruction. Some, Lyon says, never read at all without help.
"Research shows that if you first give kids the tools to crack the code - that the sounds `aah, buh, kuh' relate to the letters A, B and C - they will then have the tools to read anything," said Jeanie Eller. The Cave Creek educator trained the Cesar Chavez teachers to use Action Reading.
Armed with research that supports the use of phonics, two Arizona legislators plan to introduce bills in early 1998 that would require both public elementary schools and Arizona universities to teach phonics to kids and aspiring teachers.
States that have enacted similar legislation include California, Ohio, Texas, Georgia, Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington and North Carolina.
"It's criminal that schools have kids in programs that don't teach them how to read," said one bill sponsor, Rep. Karen Johnson, a Mesa Republican.
"Parents keep coming to me and saying `Why can't my child read? He's in fourth grade.' "
Critics of the legislation include Arizona professors and some teachers who are staunch advocates of the whole language literature approach to reading.