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Whole Language: Child
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The most effective beginning reading programs provide a whole language framework for teaching children the knowledge and skills they need for success in reading. The two approaches teach different things, but complement each other to provide the basis for really effective programs in teaching beginning reading.
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This method has produced wretched literacy rates — but its proponents still insist that children can learn to read when whole language methods are used. As it turns out, they're partly right. Award-winning journalist Andrea Neal, writing in the Indianapolis Star, cites scientific research for the following conclusions:
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"A whole-language approach represents a philosophy about reading rather than anyone instructional method. According to this philosophy, language is a natural phenomenon and literacy is promoted through natural, purposeful language function. It has as its foundation current knowledge about language development as a constructive, meaning-oriented process in which language is viewed as an authentic, natural, real-world experience, and language learning is perceived as taking place through functional reading and writing situations." (p. 458) (Lapp, D. & Flood, J. (1992). Teaching reading to every child.
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Almost every premise advanced by whole language proponents about how reading is learned has been contradicted by scientific investigations. Almost every practice stemming from these premises has been less successful with groups of both normally developing and reading-disabled children than practices based on reading science. As Michael Pressley, editor of Educational Psychologist, has remarked, “At best, much of whole-language thinking…is obsolete, and at worst, much of it never was well informed about children and their intellectual development….”23
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[This is an example of airy whole language twaddle that barely rises to the level of a wish passed off as if it were a universal law of anthropology. Of course it is true for some children. But without systematic instruction, many children remain illiterate. What sort of morality allows writers to make such hyperbolic claims that are akin to sales pitches at medicine shows?]
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The whole language approach has provoked much discussion and controversy. Proponents of the approach say that it works- children not only learn to read and write with more pleasure and ease, but they become eager, independent, confident, lifelong readers and learners.
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