Human Growth and Development / Unit 7 HGD 0970 review, 2 to 3 minutes
The Reading Wars
The idea
The reading wars are the long debate over how to teach reading. Phonics instruction teaches children to translate letters into their sounds and blend them into words; English, with about forty-four sounds for twenty-six letters, makes that code complex. The whole-language approach holds that children learn to read best in natural context, meeting words in real books. Balanced literacy, popular from the early two thousands, blends the two, including sight words memorized as wholes. The research record is lopsided. The National Early Literacy Panel found that phonemic awareness and phonics knowledge predict reading, and that phonics instruction improves reading scores, and a major review by Castles and colleagues reached a similar conclusion. Balanced literacy is often presented as the settled compromise, but the evidence most directly favours systematic phonics.
In practice
Two first-graders meeting the word "ship" in a story: one taught to sound out each letter and blend the sounds, the other taught to recognize the word from its context.
Where people slip
The misconception is that the debate is a matter of taste. Reading proficiency matters: early reading difficulty predicts later mental-health, academic and vocational problems, and dropout. Phonemic awareness, the ability to hear and work with the separate sounds in words, underlies phonics. Stating what the research supports is not advice to any family or school; it is a description of the evidence. Unit one's lesson on evidence applies: a method's popularity is not evidence that it works, and the course separates what teachers prefer from what studies have measured. For the exam, know the three approaches by their definitions, and know which predictors the research identifies: phonemic awareness and phonics knowledge, the skills that systematic phonics teaches directly.
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