Teaching Children to Read: Which Method is Best?

In today's schools many children struggle with learning how to read. Reading failure has tremendous longterm consequences for children. It impacts their motivations to learn, and thus affects their later school performance. Well aware of the difficulties children experience while learning to read, educators have given a great deal of thought as to how they can best help them.

Much research has been done to find a sound basis for teaching children to read. Today, there are two main approaches to reading instruction. The first approach is commonly referred to as the whole word method or whole language. The second is a more traditional method called phonics.

Whole-word reading instruction is not only the most widely used method in the United States, but for over a decade has been the dominate teaching approach in most English-speaking countries. The whole word method is based on the theory that that children should learn to read in a way similar to how they learn to speak. The main idea behind this approach is that reading is natural. Whole word requires children to memorize thousands of words, each as a discrete and separate unit.

This method stresses reading aloud from children's literature. The sounding out of words is not taught. Instead, children are encouraged to sight-read words. advocates argue that the whole sounding out of words is cumbersome, time consuming and unnecessary. As reading is supposed to be just like learning how to speak, the child needs to be exposed to good children's literature, using books and stories which use natural or "normal" language.

Students are read stories and are taught to recognize words or guess them in the context of the story. The idea is that if children hear natural language from books while they are looking at the print as it is being read, they will naturally teach themselves to read by trial and error. Teaching is not focused on rules or repetition, but on the flow and meaning of the text.

The U.S Office of Education did a study to find out how many Americans had the skills to get by in everyday life. The study showed that 21.7 percent of adults between the ages of 18 and 65, or 23 million people, could not read a want ad, a job application form, a medicine label, or a safety sign at the workplace. Of those 23 million, 16 percent had never gone beyond the third grade. This left 19 million who'd had four or more years of schooling but had never learned how to read. Why? Because almost all of them had been taught by whole word.

One of the problems with whole word learning is that there are more than 500,000 words in the English language. By the time children complete the fourth grade they may be able to recognize only around 1,400 simple words. Children should not be expected to guess words based on the context of a story. This method will not produce good readers. Instead of merely memorizing words, children should learn how words work, how they are put together and how they sound. Knowing the sounds of the alphabet and learning how to properly piece letters and sounds together is much more beneficial to children than simply memorizing words.

The other method used to teach reading is phonics. The phonetic approach is quite different from whole word. Phonics is based on sounding out and blending letters. With phonics, children can read and understand as many words as they have in their spoken vocabulary. They learn the 44 phenomes, or sounds of the alphabet. Once they know the sounds of the alphabet, they can break down multi-syllabic words into their discrete sounds. Phonics instruction teaches children how to use letter-sound relations to read or spell words and how to manipulate phenomes in spoken syllables and words.

Phonics advocates believe children should know how the sounds on words work before they learn to read. Children who have phonemic awareness skills will have an easier time learning to read than children who have little or none of these skills. The main focus of phonics is to help children understand how letters are linked to sounds to form letter-sound correspondences and spelling patterns and to help them learn how to apply this to their reading. Since there are 26 letters in the English alphabet but there are 44 sounds to the alphabet, phonics is a much easier and more efficient approach to reading instruction.

The National Reading Panel performed a literature search to identify studies published since 1970 that compared phonics instruction to other forms of instruction for their impact on reading ability. The initial searches found 1,373 studies that were relevant to phonics instruction. The data indicated that systematic phonics instruction enhances children's success in learning to read and that systematic phonics instruction is significantly more effective than instruction that uses little or no phonics. These facts provide ample evidence that phonics instruction is a valuable part of teaching children to read.

Learning to read can be a very difficult task for some children. Phonics is one key that simplifies this task. While whole word requires children to memorize hundreds of words, phonics helps children sound out words. There is no guesswork with the phonics method, whereas whole word requires children to guess words based on the context in which they are used. While it is good for children to be exposed to literature and encouraged to read books, this alone is not a good means to teach reading. If children know the sounds of the alphabet and can manipulate and put letters together, they will be able to read many more words and will greatly enhance their reading fluency and comprehension. Reading instruction that teaches the rules of phonics clearly will ultimately be more successful than teaching that does not.

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Flesch, R. (1981). Why Johnny Still Can't Read: A new look at the scandal of our schools. New York: Harper & Row.

McGuiness, D. (1997). Why Our Children Can't Read and What We Can Do About It. New York: The Free Press.

National Reading Panel (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read (Report No. 00-4796). NIH Pub.