[senco-forum] Reading

The true dichotomy is not whether you believe in 'phonics' or 'whole word' approaches to the teaching of reading - it is whether you are talking about the initial teaching of reading or the remediation of reading difficulty in older children.

When children learn to read the word cat, they sound out the letters ki - ah - ti    After encountering the word 'cat' a number of times, they no longer sound out the letters because they recognise the text word 'cat' as a whole and the associated sound of the word 'cat'   In time, they internalise a few thousand of these discrete visual text images with links to the sounds of the actual words. So we have both 'phonics' and 'whole word' in the same learning process ie inclusively - not exclusively.

I always test the ability of older poor readers to recognise individual letters/sounds and they invariable score 100% on this test, yet the same children scored less than 20% on a sight vocabulary test!   Using synthetic phonics as the initial means of teaching reading will in all probability, produce a higher percentage of good readers than any other single approach.  It is not however, the holy grail for poor readers in secondary schools whose principal difficulty is the ability to acquire an effective vocabulary, invariably as a consequence of poor short term memory function.