The science of how kids learn to read (at least for English an phonetic languages like it) is pretty much settled. But how curricula are built on the theory is another question.
And studies show that the "cueing" approach is not effective or even counter-productive. Yet how those curricula are laid out with "leveled books" allows children to appear like they know how to read at advancing levels. Actually they're just memorizing and using context clues to "read", without being able to read the words in isolation.
That's what makes the "whole language" approach so insidious: it can be years before parents and teachers recognize that the kids can't really read. And in some cases, breaking the bad habits of guessing and using context instead of decoding makes it take even longer to properly teach the kids to read.
The science of how kids learn to read (at least for English an phonetic languages like it) is pretty much settled. But how curricula are built on the theory is another question.
And studies show that the "cueing" approach is not effective or even counter-productive. Yet how those curricula are laid out with "leveled books" allows children to appear like they know how to read at advancing levels. Actually they're just memorizing and using context clues to "read", without being able to read the words in isolation.
That's what makes the "whole language" approach so insidious: it can be years before parents and teachers recognize that the kids can't really read. And in some cases, breaking the bad habits of guessing and using context instead of decoding makes it take even longer to properly teach the kids to read.