Reading Approach

What does a "balanced approach" to reading instruction mean?

Sebastian Wren, Ph.D. ~ © 2003, BalancedReading.com

There have been, over the years, two general instructional approaches that have governed reading education. They have gone by many names, but today they are generally known as Phonics and Whole Language approaches. These approaches to reading instruction reflect very differentunderlying philosophies and stress very different skills. The philosophy underlying the Whole Language approach is that reading is a natural process, much like learning to speak, and that children exposed to a great deal of authentic, connected text will naturally become literate without much in the way of explicit instruction in the rules and conventions of printed text. The philosophyunderlying the Phonics approach is quite different -- Phonics advocates argue that in order to learn to read, most children require a great deal of explicit instruction in the rules of printed text.
Whole Language and Phonics Approaches

A young child in a Whole Language classroom is provided with simple, predictable and repetitive text -- frequently the text is already familiar to the child, makingit that much easier to understand. Emphasis in a Whole Language classroom is not placed on reading precision and accuracy, but on comprehension and appreciation -- children are not expected to read the text verbatim, they are allowed to insert and substitute words as long as the story still makes sense, and as long as the child is understanding the gist of the story. The primary goal of theWhole Language teacher is to foster a love for the act of reading authentic and connected text, and to keep the process of reading instruction uncontrived.

In a Phonics classroom, by contrast, a great emphasis is placed on reading precision, and children are encouraged to read the words exactly as they appear on the page. Children are explicitly taught "rules" about the way words are written andspelled, and they are taught spelling-sound relationships. After a teacher provides an explicit lesson in a particular Phonics rule (e.g. if the last letter of a word is an "e," then the first vowel is usually long), the child is presented with a passage of text that contains many words consistent with that rule (called decodable text); this provides the child with the opportunity to apply eachPhonics rule on a variety of words in the context of a passage. The goal of the Phonics teacher, then, is to instill children with the Phonics rules and the common spelling-sound relationships, and to teach children to apply this knowledge in sounding-out each word they encounter, making the assumption that comprehension and appreciation will be a natural consequence of accuracy.

Some peoplehave characterized the fundamental difference between these two philosophies as being a debate between whether reading is "top-down" or "bottom-up." The Whole Language advocates state that reading is "top-down" in that the meaning of the text is dependent upon the background knowledge and understanding that the reader brings. The reader forms hypotheses and makes predictions, and only samplesthe text occasionally to confirm those predictions.

By contrast, the Phonics approach could be described as "bottom-up" -- Phonics advocates argue that if a person is able to correctly decode text, meaning and understanding will follow. The text contains the message, and through the act of decoding the text, the reader discovers what that message is.

The Great Debate (a.k.a. The ReadingWars)

Educators have debated over which is the best approach to teach children to read for many years. The ancient Greeks began reading instruction by teaching the letters and the letter-sound relationships, and children did not attempt to decode any real words until they had mastered these basics. In the middle of the 19th century, the great education reformer Horace Mann criticized the...