What Is Whole Language Approach to Reading Instruction
When I was younger I decided to learn Greek. I learned the letter-sound correspondences and could say the words—the sounds, that is. But although I could and still can decode these words, I can't actually read Greek because I don't know what the words hateful.
Beingness able to make the connection between the messages, their combinations and the sounds that make up the words wasn't all I needed to be able to read. It was an like shooting fish in a barrel way to larn but it didn't provide me with the whole motion-picture show.
Equally we read, and understand what nosotros are reading, we don't just utilise our cognition of the letter-audio correspondences, which you may know as phonics or phonemic awareness, nosotros also utilize other cues. These include our knowledge of the topic, the significant of words in the context of the topic, and the catamenia and sequence of the words in a sentence.
Skillful readers use a full repertoire of skills, each dependent on the other. And a whole linguistic communication arroyo to teaching reading is nearly arming new readers with this repertoire.
What is the whole language approach?
A whole language approach to teaching reading was introduced into principal schools in the belatedly 1970s. There have been many developments in this area since, so the approach has been adapted and today looks quite different from twoscore years ago.
To begin with, allow's dispel some myths near a whole language arroyo to teaching reading. It is not learning to read individual words by sight. Nor is it learning a list of vocabulary only.
A whole linguistic communication arroyo to instruction reading is not opposed to instruction the correspondence of a letter or letters to sounds to help sound out unfamiliar words. Nor is information technology opposed to learning how to alloy sounds together to decode a discussion past using the first letter/south of a word, the end of the word and the alphabetic character/s in the middle.
But simply knowing sounds is not the same as knowing how to read. In 2000, the US National Reading Panel's analysis of scientific literature on educational activity children to read institute systematic phonics instruction (education sounds and blending them together) should exist integrated with other reading pedagogy to create a counterbalanced reading program.
The panel adamant that phonics instruction should non be a full reading program, nor should information technology be a dominant component.
In 2011, the UK introduced a mandatory phonics screening bank check, for year 1 students, to address the decline in literacy achievement in the middle years of schoolhouse. Children were prepared for the test using a government-canonical synthetic phonics program. Simply in 2019 around 25% of year 6 students failed to reach the minimum requirements in reading.
Commonwealth of australia'due south own national research into pedagogy literacy noted the same conclusions equally the US national reading console.
This view aligns with the whole language approach in the 21st century, which advocates a counterbalanced way of teaching reading in the early years. This includes:
- explicit teaching of decoding skills (how to break upwardly a word to work out how information technology is pronounced)
- connecting the decoding of discussion/south to their meaning
- learning to read frequently used words that can't be sounded out or cleaved up into different sounds (the, were)
- learning the meaning of new words from the context they are in (looking at the words before and after and at what the sentence is about)
- understanding what the text being read is virtually (literally and interpretively)
- building a wide vocabulary
- understanding how images and words work together
- promoting a love of the English language and an involvement in reading.
Let'south non put kids off reading
The whole language arroyo provides children learning to read with more than one style to work out unfamiliar words. They can begin with decoding—breaking the word into its parts and trying to sound them out and so blend them together. This may or may not work.
They tin can also look at where the word is in the sentence and consider what word most likely would come next based on what they have read so far. They tin look beyond the word to see if the rest of the judgement can assist to decode the give-and-take and pronounce it.
We practise not read texts one word at a time. We make best guesses as nosotros read and acquire to read. We learn from our errors. Sometimes these errors are not that significant—does it matter if I read Sydenham every bit "SID-EN-HAM" or "SID-N-AM"? Perhaps not.
Does it matter that I can decode the word "wind" but don't pronounce the two differently in "the current of air was besides strong to wind the sail"? Yeah, it probably does.
Teaching children to read or to run into reading with a focus on phonics and phonemic awareness gives them the illusion "proper" reading is mere decoding and blending. In fact, it has been argued this tin can put children off reading when entering school. While some gain may occur in the first years, over time accomplishment deteriorates for children in high-performing and depression-performing schools.
A whole linguistic communication approach doesn't argue confronting the importance of phonemic awareness. But it acknowledges it is non all that should exist included in reading pedagogy.
It is of import to assess children's reading from the beginning of schooling and continually determine how they are progressing. Teachers can then select specific strategies to improve individual children's reading competence and increase their skills to build fluent and confident readers.
A whole linguistic communication approach to teaching reading advocates for teaching phonics and phonemic awareness in the context of real texts—that employ the richness of the English language language—not artificial, highly constructed texts. Still, it besides acknowledges this is not sufficient. Being able to decode the written word is essential, but it isn't enough to set up a child to be a competent reader and to be successful during and subsequently school.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Citation: Whole language approach: Reading is more than than sounding out words and decoding (2019, November 12) retrieved iii March 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2019-eleven-language-arroyo-words-decoding.html
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