phonics vs whole word

how we should teach kids

linguists and educators debate over how we should teach children to read and the biggest rivals are the phonic and the whole word approaches

the phonics approach

learning what combinations of graphemes correspond to sounds e.g. they would learn that the orthographic aligns with /d/, with /ɒ/ and

popularity of phonics approach

incredibly prominent in schools currently, as a result you may hear younger children pronounce their alphabet as /æ b k/ rather than the traditional pronunciation, as this gets children learning the most common pronunciation of letters

issues with phonics approach

it doesn’t teach meaning and it doesn’t prepare children for words that have no phoneme-grapheme correspondence

phoneme-grapheme correspondence

the link between the sound and the letters of a word e.g. the word ‘cat’ has PGC as it is pronounced as it’s written

partial/no PGC

a word like ‘coat’ isn’t fully pronounced as it’s written as it would be pronounced using phonetics as ‘co-at’

therefore it only has partial PGC

a word like ‘hour’ has no PGC

whole word approach

opposed to the phonics approach - the idea of this is for the child to learn/memorise how each word is pronounced

importance of meaning

meaning is at the heart of the approach and focuses also on getting children to understand what each word means by starting with the common words and making your way up

sometimes nicknamed the look and say approach

issues with whole word approach

it doesn’t prepare children to pronounce words they haven’t learned. it also assumes that a child will be able to memorise a great number of words

the psycholinguistic model

challenges both the phonics and whole word approach

environmental cues

the child learns based on the environment in which they live and their interactions with caregivers

this works by the child having to think about what a word might mean through the use of clues like other words they have encountered before, pictures and other contextual knowledge

decoding meaning

the approach focuses on decoding - when a child potentially breaks down a word - meaning rather than the symbols

issues with psycholinguistic model

doesn’t aways cover all bases and has the potential of the child not guessing or guessing wrong - it’s up to luck as to whether a child learns a certain word

support for psycholinguistic model

supported by the Gray oral reading tests which proved that the bottom 5% of adults can understand shapes of graphemes, but generally don’t decode them or find meaning

real use - learning language

these approaches don’t exist in isolation of each other - many caregivers will use a mixture and combination of all of these models to effectively learn to read