If you’ve spent any time researching whole language vs. phonics you are well versed in the argument. Here are the very basic tenets:

Whole Language: learning to read through immersion and by learning whole words

Phonics: decoding phonetic, syllabic, and morphemic units

The original argument for whole language was that it allowed children to move at their own pace and it cultivated curiosity. Plus, a teacher was not required to know the ins and outs of phonics to “teach” children to read. On the outset, this approach sounds lovely. Read, read, read to your children and they will in turn learn to read. Here’s the problem… this approach requires students to memorize the landscapes of words without attending to actual internal components. Many teachers paired pictures with words to help children lock in the word meaning. They provided kids with word landscape boxes in which kids fit the letters in the boxes to help them memorize the “shape” of a word. You might already see the pitfall. As words become more complex, the landscapes become more difficult to memorize. Also, there are a finite number of words one can hold in memory this way. Although Babies Can Read may appear to work on the outset, it doesn’t generalize to novel texts.

Back in the No Child Left Behind era, tons of research was done to officially evaluate the way in which children learned to read. TONS! Hundreds of elegant, peer-reviewed, replicable studies have carefully examined whole language vs phonics instruction. (We’re not talking position papers, editorials, or iffy science. We’re talking giant, meta-analysis-based, data-driven articles).

Here’s what they found: Because there are a finite amount of words one can store in memory using the whole language approach to reading and memory capacities vary, whole language does not work. Let me say that again, whole language does not work. Children are unable to generalize any knowledge beyond word to word. California implemented whole language statewide back in 1987, and within 6 years reading scores plummeted for 75% of the children in the state. They took a California-state sized sample of students down the road of whole language and failed them miserably.

Brain research now supports the phonics camp as well. As our understanding of learning in the brain continues to evolve, what we now know is that our brain does in fact process each unit of a word- not a word as a whole. (There’s tons of really deep, incredible brain information available from brilliant people such as Guinevere Eden and Ken Pugh, who have wonderful fMRI imaging to help explain how our brain learns to read.) Here’s the main point as described by Dr. Stanislas Dehaene in his book, Reading in the Brain:

“We do not recognize a printed word through a holistic grasping of its contour, but because our brain breaks it down into letters and graphemes. The letterbox area in our occipito-temporal cortex processes all of a word’s letters in parallel….Today we know that the immediacy of reading is just an illusion engendered by the extreme automaticity of its component stages, which operate outside our conscious awareness.”

This explains why, as adults, it’s easy to get sucked into this trap of whole language. As an adult reader, it feels as if we are reading each word as a unit and certainly this approach should work for children as well. However, brain research tells us that as we mature as readers, our brains process the phonetic information so quickly it merely feels automatic. Young children’s letterboxes process words much more laboriously.

There is no shortcut to this automaticity. Students must be taught how to decode in order to become fluent, competent readers. In Italy, and other countries with more transparent phonetically based languages, children learn to read quickly. The rules are so much clearer. In French and English, our children must be taught to decode across several years in order to teach all the permutations of our more complex phonetic world. For some children this journey seems like a fairly easy road, but for many, it’s a long deliberate path.

Balanced literacy is whole language in a new outfit. Even though phonics instruction may be present in our classrooms, it’s often jumbled with whole language. Teachers and administrators are behind the curve. They continue to mix and mingle these approaches to the detriment of our students. It’s no wonder our children still struggle. Examples of this jumble include: pairing a word with an image, recognizing whole contours of words, and sight recognition of children’s names. These instructional strategies teach children that it’s ok to guess at words based on contours rather than attending to the letter-sound correspondences. Illustrations can give children and teachers the illusion that a child is reading, but in fact, illustrations divert attention away from text. Good readers don’t guess at words based on illustrations. Good readers actually process words more quickly in their brains. Science proves that this is what good readers do.

Here are the arguments that continue to rage:

Myth 1: The English language is too phonetically complex and irregular for phonics-based instruction to work.

The English language is complex. Teaching phonics-based instruction requires an incredibly high level of knowledge on the part of the teacher. There is a flexibility that has to come with the English language that must be explicitly taught. For example, in a word with an ea vowel team, most of the time it says long e, sometimes it says short e, and very rarely it will say long a. Teachers should impart as much care into designing lessons as scientists do when performing experiments. Teachers should start with the most regular, controlled information and patterns and move from there.

Myth 2: Phonics instruction deprives a child of developing a love of language and books.

Children who are exposed to phonics instruction are able to self-teach themselves 1000s of words based on their knowledge of decoding. Self-teaching is the biggest step to deep comprehension and independent reading. This is the only approach that frees a child to read words in any medium he chooses (scientific, science fiction, Harry Potter-esque words, etc.).

Truth: This phonics-based approach to reading is slow going, but it is steady in its progress and generalizes to novel words.

It must be implemented deliberately and explicitly. This is especially true for our struggling readers. They need more exposure and more practice manipulating sounds. They need practice working with spelling and reading in tandem to help build the connections in the brain. Teachers of children who struggle to decode must have an incredible wealth of knowledge in order to ensure success.

It’s easy to see why the reading wars still rage. Whole language is easier to teach and implement despite the irrefutable scientific research that tells us that our brains do not learn to read this way. Everyone has roughly the same brain that takes a word and breaks it apart into phonemes, syllables, and morphemes. Shouldn’t we teach the way that our brains learn?