Whole language is great for Chinese ideograms.
It’s totally inappropriate for English. It encourages kids to guess at words. Words like “horse” and “house” will be confused by whole language learners. Also, site-reading doesn’t give children strategies for reading unknown words. And they have to memorize every word they learn (which explains the small vocabulary of today’s students).
Via Joanne Jacobs:
Children in Upper Arlington, Ohio, are now taught to read using a phonics-based approach. Photo: Emily Hanford/APM
Parents of children with dyslexia forced their school district to teach phonics, reports Emily Hanford on NPR. Upper Arlington, Ohio schools had been using the whole-language method, which “holds that learning to read is a natural process” that doesn’t require direct instruction, she writes. Instead, children were surrounded by books.
That didn’t work for dyslexic students — or for many of their classmates.
People with dyslexia have an especially hard time learning to read because their brains are wired in a way that makes understanding the relationship between sounds and letters difficult.
Research shows that they learn to read better when they are explicitly taught the ways that sounds and letters correspond. And research shows that even students without dyslexia learn better this way.
“I have started to call it not dyslexia but ‘dysteachia,’” says Brett Tingley, one of of the parents who signed the group complaint. Teachers “are not giving the right kind of instruction.”