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Whole language is a philosophy of reading and a discredited [8] 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 the UK in the 1980s and 1990s, [7] despite there being no scientific support for the method's effectiveness. [9]
Goodman's concept of written language development views it as parallel to oral language development. Goodman's theory was a basis for the whole language movement, which was further developed by Yetta Goodman, Regie Routman, Frank Smith and others.
This "sounding out" words is a phonics, rather than a whole language, technique which is rooted in intellectual independence. The whole-language theory explained reading as a "language experience," where the reader interacts with the text/content and this in turn facilitates the link – "knowledge" – between the text and meaning.
Reading by using phonics is often referred to as decoding words, sounding-out words or using print-to-sound relationships.Since phonics focuses on the sounds and letters within words (i.e. sublexical), [13] it is often contrasted with whole language (a word-level-up philosophy for teaching reading) and a compromise approach called balanced literacy (the attempt to combine whole language and ...
Balanced literacy is a theory of teaching reading and writing the English language that arose in the 1990s and has a variety of interpretations. For some, balanced literacy strikes a balance between whole language and phonics and puts an end to the so called "reading wars". Others say balanced literacy, in practice, usually means the whole ...
On the other hand, some of the practices of whole language are evident, such as: "use language prediction skills to identify unknown words"; "using three cueing systems: meaning, structure, and visual"; "reading on, omitting words, rereading and making substitutions"; "predict on the basis of what makes sense"; and "a wide variety of sight words".
An advantage of the comprehension approach of language learning is the fact that when the learner eventually understands the meaning and the correct application of the words, the language will sound more effortless when he or she speaks it in contrast to other forms of language learning, which may result in more stilted efforts.
Critics of teaching reading using whole word and whole language methods (and proponents of phonics) maintain that memorizing whole words may do more harm than good because it takes time away from the important aspect of practicing basic decoding techniques. [3]