I recently found this http://www.news-medical.net/?id=28191 article on how phonics, whole word and whole language all contribute to reading speed. Sorry if this has been posted before, I’m new here.
Thanks for that interesting article!
Here’s an excerpt:
[i]Reading specialists have often pitted phonics against holistic word recognition and whole language approaches in the war over how to teach children to read. However, a new study by researchers at New York University shows that the three reading processes do not conflict, but, rather, work together to determine speed.
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Pelli and Tillman’s results show that letter-by-letter decoding, or phonics, is the dominant reading process, accounting for 62 percent of reading speed. However, both holistic word recognition (16 percent) and whole-language processes (22 percent) do contribute substantially to reading speed. Remarkably, the results show that the contributions of these three processes to reading speed are additive. The contribution of each process to reading speed is the same whether the other processes are working or not.
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“The fact that letters, words, and sentences are all involved in reading is nothing new,” Pelli added. “But finding that their contributions to reading speed are additive is startling.”
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Karma for the contribution!
Will add this to the Whole Words vs Phonics debate article and discussions!