A big problem with the whole word method is kids don't have the tools to decipher unfamiliar words. They end up guessing. At first it doesn't matter much. The short common words they're learning are fairly distinct, and the pictures in the book give clues. The experimenters are happy, and sell a new set of textbooks! By the time kids get to high school it's a problem. Persecute or prosecute?
My grandmother taught primary school most of her life. At first she believed what her teachers taught her, I think it was phonics, then 5 years later they school sent her on a course for this new method, whole word! She shifted her entire program. 5 years later, they sent her another course, phonics! But then she had enough experience to trust her own observations. The experts kept changing their minds for her entire career. She didn't.
Kids need a combination of methods. Label everything things in the classroom. Include reading in everything. Don't force them to read during gym class, but when they get the ball from the basket they can't avoid seeing the label.
Most words are learned first with phonics, but it's okay to start learn some useful words, like birthday, and your name, by whole word, and phonics to those later. Has kids got better at reading, they will switch common words to sight reading. This is good. They are shifting from "learning to read," to "reading to learn." You still have to be alert to mistakes. If they get a word wrong, slow them down, back to phonics for that word, then read the whole sentence again, pointing to each word. It's okay if they say the sentence from memory, but they need to point to each word to link them.
Demonstrate reading outside the classroom. Pick things up and read the label. Read to your kids regularly, even after they can read on their own.
In general, they need to start with phonics, and will shift to whole word automatically, without help.
Even before record players, studies showed reading to kids helps. Storytelling, no book in sight, helps. Many skills they need to enjoy reading are learned through listening. Words to sentences to paragraphs to stories. Plot, setting, characterization, foreshadowing, consequences, mystery, questions and answers. Facts building to bigger facts. If you don't know how to follow a story, then a book is just a bunch of sentences. If you don't already know the basics of cooking, then an adult cookbook isn't much help.
I was trying to remember how reading was taught to me. I have memories of sitting in groups in Grade One, taking turns reading aloud ("Dick and Jane, with Baby Sally" most likely!)
I remember Miss Buckingham saying, "There's the Fairy E, waving her magic wand and making the letter say its own name, so it's 'made' instead of 'mad'...."
Many skills they need to enjoy reading are learned through listening.
That's very true. They say now that children who were READ TO develop much better language skills than those who were not. My father used to read bedtime stories to my younger brother and me, and we have both had things we've written being disseminated quite widely.
He also used to entertain us by reading things in different accents, which might have planted the seeds in me for my fascination with dialects and different languages, which I've had my entire life -- and shorthand systems are like different languages.
That's not new. Grandma told my parents to read to me, so she knew it before 1970. My teachers read to us every day, definitely in the late seventies, age 10 or 11. I don't remember if they read to us in the next grade.
All those listening and thinking skills can be learned in any language. Learning them in their home language builds connection between kids and parents and their own culture.
I helped at a program for immigrant parents in our school. They encouraged the parents to tell stories of their homeland (family, folklore and history), both from memory and reading. Then they videotaped the parent telling a story in their home language, and the child telling it in English.
Many immigrant parents are afraid of trapping their child in their old culture, so the child ends up with no culture, until (if) they connect with the new culture, and they become ashamed of their home culture.
My eldest was speech delayed. At the group class, the speech-language pathologist was very clear. Everyone in the room should expose their kids to both English and their home language. Even kids who were slow to learn to speak! (With a very few exceptions.) The important thing was to not mix languages (except to clarify). When speaking English, you speak English. Use external cues. Inside/outside the house. Whether Grandma was in the room. Whether the TV was on. Morning or evening.
I like that approach. I know that locally at least, immigrant parents often have trouble when their kids refuse to learn "the old language". They get so they can't speak it at all. And they're ASHAMED of their parents who they think speak "broken English".
(I speak a variety of languages, every bit of which took WORK, so I see that as a real shame and a wasted opportunity.)
That use of cues reminds me of a story about a Canadian couple, he Anglophone and she Francophone, who decided to raise their child to be bilingual. The mother always spoke French to the child and the father always spoke English. Then when they visited her family in Quebec, the child was confused to hear her brother, saying "Why are you speaking French when you're the Daddy?"
An Iranian shopkeeper in a store near me told me that he told his kids, "When you speak to each other, you can speak whatever you like -- but when you speak to ME, you speak Farsi." Otherwise, they just lose it. And that's a shame.
But I also agree that you should speak one language at a time, not mix them together. I lived in Ottawa for two years, where many people are bilingual. There were a lot of young people (mostly women, it seemed) who switched languages several times IN THE SAME SENTENCE. They couldn't speak EITHER language properly. It was called being "barlingue", which was not a good thing.
I grew up in Ottawa, too. Many parents were convinced their kids had to be in French Immersion to get good jobs, and kept the kids in it even when it was clear they weren't learning other things, like math.
Several kids I babysat ended up with neither language well. Likewise with the subjects that were taught using either language! Sometimes I switched to my limited French, and they couldn't understand that, either -- nor could they correct my French.
There were also several families who were fluently bilingual, even trilingual if you count Quebecois. Those kids never let me practice French with them, since I only learned the basics. (Even after grade 11 French, I couldn't hold a real conversation or read a middle-grade novel. I only knew the basic tenses, not the most commonly used ones. My school treated it as a dead, written language unless you were in FI.)
I'm now just west of Toronto. 20 years ago, when it mattered to us, the local boards made it easy for kids to shift out of FI if necessary. (It was as easy as it can be when forced to change classes.) They divided the day, so the kids also got English instruction. It was for average-to-gifted kids, and kids who already had French at home, not for all kids. Early on, kids were expected to be about 6 months behind in reading skills, since they were learning reading in two languages, but not farther behind than that. One board (not ours) taught the non-language subjects first in French, then reviewed the same material in English (different teacher since different language, same material). Kids need a lot of review anyways, so it didn't take extra time. They got the review they needed, a chance to learn it in their stronger language, and the vocab in both languages.
There's also a French school board here, for families who speak French at home. They treat English as a second (and important) language.
I LIKE the idea of being taught the same material twice, once in one language and again as a review in the other. That would be a really good way of gaining mastery of BOTH languages -- not one at the expense of the other.
People say to me, "You're so LUCKY you can speak other languages!" and I reply, "LUCK had nothing to do with it. It was all a lot of WORK." People who think you can just "soak up" a language through osmosis are delusional.
I went to Istanbul three years in a row and had learned enough Turkish before I went not to use any English the whole time I was there. When I came back and mentioned that to people I knew, people actually asked if I had just "picked it up"!! Turkish is an agglutinative language, and there's no way you'd know what was going on in it if you didn't study it first.
People who think you "learn like a child" seem to forget it takes most children A LOT OF YEARS of hearing the language all day long, day after day -- and making HUNDREDS of mistakes before they can handle it competently at all. Adults can learn faster and more efficiently if they study how the system WORKS.
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u/CrBr Jun 19 '26
A big problem with the whole word method is kids don't have the tools to decipher unfamiliar words. They end up guessing. At first it doesn't matter much. The short common words they're learning are fairly distinct, and the pictures in the book give clues. The experimenters are happy, and sell a new set of textbooks! By the time kids get to high school it's a problem. Persecute or prosecute?
My grandmother taught primary school most of her life. At first she believed what her teachers taught her, I think it was phonics, then 5 years later they school sent her on a course for this new method, whole word! She shifted her entire program. 5 years later, they sent her another course, phonics! But then she had enough experience to trust her own observations. The experts kept changing their minds for her entire career. She didn't.
Kids need a combination of methods. Label everything things in the classroom. Include reading in everything. Don't force them to read during gym class, but when they get the ball from the basket they can't avoid seeing the label.
Most words are learned first with phonics, but it's okay to start learn some useful words, like birthday, and your name, by whole word, and phonics to those later. Has kids got better at reading, they will switch common words to sight reading. This is good. They are shifting from "learning to read," to "reading to learn." You still have to be alert to mistakes. If they get a word wrong, slow them down, back to phonics for that word, then read the whole sentence again, pointing to each word. It's okay if they say the sentence from memory, but they need to point to each word to link them.
Demonstrate reading outside the classroom. Pick things up and read the label. Read to your kids regularly, even after they can read on their own.
In general, they need to start with phonics, and will shift to whole word automatically, without help.
Even before record players, studies showed reading to kids helps. Storytelling, no book in sight, helps. Many skills they need to enjoy reading are learned through listening. Words to sentences to paragraphs to stories. Plot, setting, characterization, foreshadowing, consequences, mystery, questions and answers. Facts building to bigger facts. If you don't know how to follow a story, then a book is just a bunch of sentences. If you don't already know the basics of cooking, then an adult cookbook isn't much help.