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Concept
Whole language
Summary
Whole language is a philosophy of reading and a discredited educational method originally developed for teaching literacy in English to young children. The method became a major model for education in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Great Britain in the 1980s and 1990s, despite there being no scientific support for the method's effectiveness. It is based on the premise that learning to read English comes naturally to humans, especially young children, in the same way that learning to speak develops naturally.
Whole-language approaches to reading instruction are typically contrasted with phonics-based methods of teaching reading and writing. Phonics-based methods emphasize instruction for decoding and spelling. Whole-language practitioners disagree with that view and instead focus on teaching meaning and making students read more. The scientific consensus is that whole-language-based methods of reading instruction (e.g., teaching children to use context cues to guess the meaning of a printed word) are not as effective as phonics-based approaches.
Whole language is an educational philosophy that is complex to describe, particularly because it is informed by multiple research fields, including but not limited to education, linguistics, psychology, sociology, and anthropology (see also Language Experience Approach). It can be viewed as being founded on the educational philosophy of John Amos Comenius in the early 17th century. Yetta Goodman has also cited the contributions of Dewey, Vygotsky, Rosenblatt, and Ashton Warner, among other writers, in the development of the whole language movement. One description of whole language is "a concept that embodies both a philosophy of language development as well as the instructional approaches embedded within, and supportive of that philosophy".
Several strands run through descriptions of whole language.
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Phonics
Phonics is a method for teaching people how to read and write an alphabetic language (such as English or Russian). It is done by demonstrating the relationship between the sounds of the spoken language (phonemes), and the letters or groups of letters (graphemes) or syllables of the written language. In English, this is also known as the alphabetic principle or the alphabetic code. While the principles of phonics generally apply regardless of the language or region, the examples in this article are from General American English pronunciation.
Reading
Reading is the process of taking in the sense or meaning of letters, symbols, etc., especially by sight or touch. For educators and researchers, reading is a multifaceted process involving such areas as word recognition, orthography (spelling), alphabetics, phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, comprehension, fluency, and motivation. Other types of reading and writing, such as pictograms (e.g., a hazard symbol and an emoji), are not based on speech-based writing systems.
Synthetic phonics
Synthetic phonics, also known as blended phonics or inductive phonics, is a method of teaching English reading which first teaches the letter sounds and then builds up to blending these sounds together to achieve full pronunciation of whole words. Synthetic phonics refers to a family of programmes which aim to teach reading and writing through the following methods: Teaching students the correspondence between written letters (graphemes) and speech sounds (phonemes).