Do you know anything about the “whole language” approach to reading? It’s used at my daughter’s grade school, and other mothers tell me it’s all the rage. But parts of it strike me as weird. Phonics seems to be out, for one thing. When I told my daughter to “sound out” a word in a book we were reading, she told me, “We don’t do that anymore, mom.” Somehow they’re supposed to grasp the word as a whole or pick it up from the context or something. I don’t get it. Is this one of those educational fads that’s supposed to spare my child the horror of having to learn anything boring, such as facts? –Peggy Gavin, Lisle, Illinois
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If you think gun-control debates are wild, wait till you get a load of the reading wars. There are two schools of thought on teaching kids to read, phonics and whole language. To judge from their public pronouncements, they don’t agree on anything, including whether we should call it “teaching kids to read.” (Whole-language advocates say you don’t teach kids to read; you expose them to books, and they learn.)
The problem is that some whole-language programs neglect basic skills. The movement’s extremists say that doesn’t matter–get the kids sufficiently involved in reading, and they’ll pick up the skills they need effortlessly, the same way they learn to speak. That flies in the face of common experience, and whole language’s more realistic advocates concede the need to devote some attention to skills development. But they say it’s foolish, particularly in the early going, to fixate on skills if it drains all the enjoyment out of reading.
