Whole language is a method of teaching children to read by recognizing words as whole pieces of language. Proponents of the whole language philosophy believe that language should not be broken down into letters and combinations of letters and “decoded.” Instead, they believe that language is a complete system of making meaning, with words functioning in relation to each other in context. In whole language, learning is built upon the real experiences and background knowledge of the learner.
The whole language movement has been grounded in three basic beliefs:
Children learn to read by actually reading full texts, not worksheets;
Reading is part of language learning:
Learning in any one area of language helps learning in other areas.
Children learn best when language is whole, meaningful, and functional. The language of literature becomes the heart of reading and writing programs; thus, whole language and literature are inseparable (Cuillinan, 1992).
Interview with Dr. Wendy Crocker, early education specialist
Whole Language approach
Dr. Crocker was most recently an Associate Teaching Professor in the Graduate School of Education, at Northeastern university. Dr. Crocker's research interests stem from over 30 years in public education in Ontario, Canada where she was a teacher, a consultant, and an elementary principal. She has written and assisted on countless books and articles. She has been involved in k-12 education for all of her career, spending many of those years in early education.
Dr. Crocker understands whole language to be “ an idea that it is about not only explicit teaching of reading skills and application of these reading skills, but it is also incorporating some of the literature that children and adults might find surrounding their everyday home situation and make those connections between what I see when looking at reading materials and what I see in my everyday world.”
Whole language is one approach that takes from other approaches such as phonics and balanced literacy, to name a few, to build a method of reading for young readers. It is rare to find reading instruction that is purely whole language. Most teachers of whole language reading use “embedded phonics.” This is a technique where children are instructed in letter-sound relationships when they read text (as opposed to being taught the relationships in isolation prior to practicing reading). This is an indirect method of using phonics instruction. Whole language reading instruction requires that students memorize words so that they can recognize them on sight. These are called “sight words.” Embedded phonics instruction is always conducted using literature to provide context, and teachers use this reading strategy when the opportunity presents itself, rather than systematically and in isolation from literature.
“One cannot draw from the literature a concise definition for whole language because no such definition exists. Whole language represents many things to many people and has been used to define many different elements of classroom reading instruction.”( Goodman, 1992)
Kenneth Goodman was a major influence in the whole language approach when he first introduced it in the 1970’s. Goodman believed that, “Reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game”. He believed that the reading process developed naturally as a result of a child’s experiences with language and therefore was not something that could be forced but rather would happen gradually the more children were exposed to literacy - books and print. As such Goodman believed that attempting to teach children rules for decoding words (phonics) was not helpful and would delay the child more and therefore not a likely way to help children succeed in becoming good readers. However, in recent years this idea has created great debate among educators, arguing that reading does not develop naturally in the absence of some kind of reading instruction.
Goodman’s classroom-based analyses of students’ oral reading, and how they retold the stories they’d read, was the ground work for most of his own research. Students’ errors, or “miscues,” he believed, provided insight into the reading strategies each student was using. Analysis of these miscues suggested that even young students were inferring things about language systems. The miscues showed they were always engaged in meaning-making, not just identifying new words.
Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words. Instead, he argued that as people read, they make predictions about the words on the page using these three cues:
Graphic cues (what do the letters tell you about what the word might be?)
Syntactic cues (what kind of word could it be, for example, a noun or a verb?)
Semantic cues (what word would make sense here, based on the context?)
Through Goodman's work with whole language it was concluded that:
Skill in reading involves not greater precision, but more accurate first guesses based on better sampling techniques, greater control over language structure, broadened experiences and increased conceptual development. As the child develops reading skill and speed, he uses increasingly fewer graphic cues.
Wendy’s Book Recommendations
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin Jr.
Versus this version....
Check out both versions.
Which version of Brown Bear is more in keeping with a whole language approach?
Which is more explicit, speaking to the child in real world context?
Here are my hands by Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault
What is special about this read aloud according to Dr. Crocker is the "teacher talk" that is occurring throughout the text and the focus on the illustrations to help the children to make meaning from the rhyme.
Comments