Whole Language or Phonics: Which Approach Is Best?

Whole Language is an approach to spelling that encourages a lot of reading

aloud to your child (a good thing!)but it also encourages kids to read by sight
rather than by sounding out words.
In reality, there are very few words that don't follow any phonics rules and that
must be learned by sight. All About Spelling teaches these words (they are
called "rule breakers" and they get put in jail, which my students love!), but the
majority of words actually do follow the rules and can be sounded out.
"With phonics, students need only learn the basic phonograms and
their corresponding sounds, which will give them a strategy for figuring
out new words."
There are a couple of problems with the sight-word only method. First, it
encourages kids to guess. Words like house and horse look almost identical
they begin with ho and end with se, have the same shape if you draw an outline
around the word, and are the same lengthbut as you know, they are very
different words. A child who only knows how to read by sight will confuse words
like these.
Second, sight-reading doesn't give the child strategies for reading unknown
words; he has to hear the word, look it up, or ask someone what the word is.
These students rely on pictures and context clues; they have to take a mental
picture of that word and store it, andto become fluent in readingthey have to
do that with thousands of words. With phonics, on the other hand, students need
only learn the basic phonograms and their corresponding sounds, which will give
them a strategy for figuring out new words. And once a student has decoded a
word, he can use context as another strategy to confirm what he has read.
Understanding the phonograms really demystifies reading and spelling. English
letters and letter combinations (phonemes or phonograms) stand for sounds, and
kids appreciate being let into this "secret" or "code" of how our written language
works.
Another aspect of Whole Language is that it encourages students to
use "invented" spelling as they write. That's not necessarily a bad strategy for
helping a young writer express herself, but without also teaching the skills of
how to spell, the student is left on her own to figure out spellingor to continue
struggling.
An alternative to invented spelling is to allow young writers to write without
being required to edit everything. For items that require editing, have students
look at their work the next day and see if they can correct any words or spelling
patterns that they have already learned. This strategy keeps students from
getting overly frustrated and from giving up on words they don't know how to
spell.
"Understanding phonograms demystifies spelling and reading for
children."
All About Spelling includes dictation exercises that give students the opportunity
to practice writing in sentences. The dictation reviews previous and current

spelling patterns, and ensures that students don't just memorize a list of words,
but that they retain the patterns long-term. Dictation is a great exercise for
helping kids break words down into sounds (segmenting) and syllables for
writing, without actually having to come up with original writing themselves. Try
emphasizing spelling instruction in the context of dictation and, when it comes to
their own writing, only hold students accountable for words and patterns already
learned.

Phonics - methods of teaching

Synthetic phonics - an approach associated with the teaching of reading in
which phonemes (sounds) associated with particular graphemes (letters) are
pronounced in isolation and blended together (synthesised). For example,
children are taught to take a single-syllable word such as cat apart into its three
letters, pronounce a phoneme for each letter in turn /k, , t/, and blend the
phonemes together to form a word.
Analytical phonics - an approach associated with the teaching of reading in
which the phonemes associated with particular graphemes are not pronounced
in isolation. Children identify (analyse) the common phoneme in a set of words in
which each word contains the phoneme under study. For example, teacher and
pupils discuss how the following words are alike: pat, park, push and pen.
Analogy phonics - a type of analytic phonics in which children analyse phonic
elements according to the phonograms in the word. A phonogram, known in
linguistics as a rime, is composed of the vowel and all the sounds that follow it,
such as ake in the word cake. Children use these phonograms to learn about
word families for example cake, make, bake, fake.
Embedded phonics - an approach to the teaching of reading in which phonics
forms one part of a whole language programme. Embedded phonics differs from
other methods in that the instruction is always in the context of literature rather
than in separate lessons, and the skills to be taught are identified
opportunistically rather than systematically.
What is phonics?
The phonics approach teaches children to decode words by sounds, rather than
recognising whole words. The emphasis in early years teaching is on synthetic
phonics, in which words are broken up into the smallest units of sound
(phonemes).
Children are taught the letters (graphemes) that represent these phonemes and
also learn to blend them into words. So, at its most basic, children are taught to
read the letters in a word like c-a-t, and then merge them to pronounce the word
cat.
A phoneme can be represented by one, two, three or four letters (such as "ough"
in "dough").
Children are systematically taught around 40 phonic sounds and the combination
of letters used to represent each sound.

Most sounds, however, have more than one way to spell them. For example, "e"
in "egg" can also be spelt "ea" as in "head" or "ai" as in "said".
Graphemes are grouped together and children progress from one group to the
other and will be tested at the end of year one, when they are six years old.
So is everybody agreed that phonics is the best way to teach a child?
No. The government's phonics-only approach is controversial, with many
teachers and educationalists advocating a more balanced approach in which
other reading strategies are also used.
"Some children will need more phonics-teaching more than others," says Andrew
Lambirth, professor of education at the University of Greenwich.
There are some who feel "reading" phonetically, decoding, is not the same as
reading, says Lambirth. "It is not necessarily reading for meaning or for
pleasure."
The books that have been devised in order to support synthetic phonics offer a
restrictive diet, says Lambirth.
He says the worry is that some teachers will focus too much on these books in
order to teach to the test and "may not include the other wonderful books that
are out there."
"Teachers and parents need to complement the emphasis on decoding with the
delights of meaning-making."
Another problem, says Dr Lambirth, is that the English language is not written in
a consistently phonetic way.
What are the other methods of teaching reading?
The alphabetic method of teaching reading - ie not phonics - dominated the
teaching of reading up until the 19th Century. This involved teaching children to
recognise and name the letters of the alphabet, both capital and lower case, in
alphabetical order.
How do children learn to read?

"Teachers will use a variety of strategies because no child learns in the same
way," says Ian McNeilly of the National Association for the teaching of English.
"There are many methods which may be used in combination.
"In the look and saymethod, children are exposed to pictures and stories from
an early age and will learn to recognise complete words. This is, if you like, at the
opposite end of the spectrum to synthetic phonics.

"Different publishers will havereading schemes - sets of books on the same

theme which get progressively harder at each level. These are used as support
material to underpin any given reading strategy
"The use of learning aidslike letter cards and alphabet guides,
recognising rhyming patterns and the use ofpowerful texts to engage
children's interest are among some of the strategies used."
National Association for the Teaching of English
Another method, the "look and say" teaching technique, also known as the whole
word method, was promoted by American psychologist Edmund Huey from 1908
and became established in the UK in the 1940s.
In the 1950s and 1960s the main characters used to promote this method were
Janet and John, who became hugely popular with school children. The "whole
word" approach was to repeat words on each page enough times that children
memorised them.
Phonics is not new. It began to be used after 1850, according to Sounds Familar:
The History of Phonics Teaching.
It has often been combined with other strategies, including using the context of a
story or the syntax to help predict the next word. The idea is that a child knows
how language works implicitly.
In 1955, American reading expert Rudolph Flesch published what became the
"bible" of the phonics movement, Why Johnny Can't Read, on the state of
education in US schools.
Flesch maintained that the "look and say" method was encouraging illiteracy. The
book also influenced policy in the UK.
Why are children being taught made-up words?
One controversial aspect of a phonics-based approach is the use of fabricate
words to test children.
Children at the end of Year 1 will be asked to read 20 words and 20 "made-up
words". According to a number of teachers' unions, the non-words include "voo",
"terg", "bim", "thazz", "spron", "geck", "blan" and "fape".
Unions have suggested that including made-up words will frustrate youngsters
who can already read, and confuse those with special educational needs, or for
whom English is a second language.
"The reason behind them is to show that children are able to decode, despite not
knowing the meaning of a word," says Dr Lambirth.
"The idea is that once a child has the skills to decode they can then go on to
think about meaning. Other people though say this is not the basics that the
basics also includes engaging in the delight of meaning-making right from the
beginning."
Why does the reading debate keep returning?

This debate has been going on for decades, with the pendulum swinging in one
direction and back again.
There was a more balanced approach in the 1970s and 1980s, where a range of
schemes were used and teachers had more freedom on how to read, says Dr
Lambirth.
"These influences can still be found but the current government sees the other
influences as just wasting time. To the government, the phonics only approach
seems to be a logical one.
There has been a shift in focus for government from secondary to primary
education, says Dr Kathy Goouch reader in education at the department of
Professional Development Canterbury Christ Church University.
"Learning about phonics is just a tiny part of learning to read. If children learn to
read by using other strategies as well, it sometimes takes longer than simply
being taught to decode words. Phonics information is something that can be
tested easily and it provides short-term results. Governments often look for
easily measurable options, so that they can tick boxes and say they have
successfully raised standards."
But whatever the state of the debate about phonics v other methods, many
education experts agree that one of the key factors for children is the status of
reading at home.
"Research has shown that where children are born into a family where reading
and talking about books is part of their world, the culture of reading is already
pleasurable," says Lambirth.
This helps to produce better readers.
"In some homes, however, books aren't that important. Children sometimes need
to be introduced to the pleasure of reading books in school from an early age and
this becomes one of the most important jobs teachers need to do."