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The
first is "whole word" which is essentially teaching
children to recognize words in isolation from stories. Glen Doman
is an advocate of this method of teaching. His method of teaching
uses flashcards from as early as ten months. Words such as "mummy",
"daddy", "Johnny", "Fido", "hand",
etc are presented 5" high by 4" across on cards to children.
back to top
The second
method for teaching children to read is whole language. This is
a relatively new method of teaching children which has already
been
largely discredited. The "whole language" method involves
using specially
designed first reader books that use simple repeated words and
phrases and
lots of pictures that describe what is being said with the words.
The idea
is that the children can learn to "guess" what the words
are by referring
to the picture and remembering the sentence structures from previous
pages. A Tasmanian study of 650 fourteen year old children found
that "about 83 percent of children fail to guess words accurately
by the age of five but by the end of primary school, 62 per cent
still guess wrongly". (Study by B. Harrison and J. Zollner
reported in the New Zealand Herald)
Books based on the whole language approach are designed to appeal
to a child's imagination so the content is not educational. This
method was developed in New Zealand in the 70's by Marie Clay
and taken to America where it was used in 49 states. It was developed
into a "Reading Recovery" program in the late 70's for
children having difficulty reading. A report prepared for the
NZ Ministry of Education by Chapman, Tunmer & Prochnow summarize
"the Reading Recovery programme did not meet the goal of
accelerating to average levels of reading performance the progress
of 6-year old children who showed early signs of reading difficulty."
And …"the results clearly showed that both the Reading
Recovery and Poor Reader Comparison children had deficiencies
in phonological processing skills during the year preceding the
Reading Recovery programme" and, "…..participation
in the Reading Recovery programme did not eliminate or reduce
these phonological processing deficiencies."
In 1996, books using this whole language method, were removed
from the Californian State Board of Educations Approved List because
of a decline in reading levels in the U.S. Now there is a return
to phonics instruction - the third recognized
method for teaching children to read. back
to top
Phonics was
the method used to teach reading up until the mid 1960's in
most parts of the Western world and is now being reestablished
in the 90's
in most countries. It is not the whole solution, as there are
words in English that defy phonological attack but it is a major
component of the solution - particularly as used and integrated
with other methods in the ReadingMaster System. Phonics is a method
of instruction that breaks words down into their components. There
are 44 sounds in English and these are depicted in 70 different
phonograms. E.g. a, b, c, ow, ph, oo, etc.
Phonograms are the smallest sound units and include all the single
letters
of the alphabet through to 4 letter blends such as "ough".
For example cow" is not
sounded out c-o-w but c-ow. "Cow" is a combination of
2
sounds represented by two phonograms. There are a number of different
phonic systems now coming back onto the market. Reading Master
was released into the New Zealand market in 1996 in response to
the growing need and has been the solution of choice in its target
market for the 8
years that it has been in the market. Reading Master uses whole
word, whole language and phonics in its program. Whole word teaching
gets children reading the key common words of English as early
as two, the time when it is easiest to learn, the time when the
brain is developing the most. Phonics are important to equip anyone
with word attack skills needed for most of the rest of all the
words in the English language.
Which Method Should
I as a Parent Use? back
to top
In New Zealand, the government generally
favours leaving it up to the individual schools to decide what
they use although they do stipulate schools use publications from
one particular publisher to supply school materials. Other systems
are never endorsed or even advocated by the Ministry of Education.
In fact, they warn against using other material. Basically what
this points to is that it falls on the abilities, skills and leanings
of the particular teacher your child ends up with, as to which
method is used. It comes down to chance how your child will be
taught once he or she reaches school.
In a New Zealand Education Review Office report
from July 2000 a study found that when teachers were asked to
assess children's knowledge of phonograms most could not. They
tended to fall back on the children's knowledge of the alphabet
instead. "The lack of any structured assessment of phonological
awareness results in an interesting gap in the information available
to the teachers, since it is believed that phonological awareness
is important for the development of reading."
This, we have raised purely because we think it is advantageous
for a parent
to be aware of such things. If you lean towards one particular
method of
teaching for your child, more than another, then use it. It is
your choice
for your child. Generally, a combination of methods is now accepted
as
being the most acceptable. Obviously this combination needs to
be tailored
to fit the special requirements of your child.
In America, they have moved very heavily away from whole language
and
phonics has made a huge resurgence. Pendulums swing backwards
and forwards with individual learning
styles dictating which combination of Whole Word, Phonics
and Whole Language (better thought of as contextual learning works
best) back to top
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