2.3.2

Phonics vs Whole Word

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Phonics

Linguists (and educators) debate over how we should teach children to read and the biggest rivals are the phonic and the whole word approaches.

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The phonics approach

  • The phonics approach is all about learning what combinations of graphemes (letters) correspond to sounds.
    • For example, they would learn that the orthographic aligns with /d/, with /ɒ/ and with /g/ to pronounce as /dɒg/.
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Popularity

  • This approach is incredibly prominent in schools currently.
  • As a result, you may hear younger children pronounce their alphabet as /æ b k/ rather than the traditional pronunciation, as this gets children learning the most common pronunciation of letters.
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Issues

  • The issues with this approach are that:
    • It does not teach meaning.
    • It doesn’t prepare children for words that have no phoneme-grapheme correspondence.
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Phoneme-grapheme correspondence

  • Phoneme-grapheme correspondence (also known as PGC and grapheme-phoneme correspondence) is the link between the sound and the letters of a word.
    • For example, the word ‘cat’ has phoneme-grapheme correspondence, as it is pronounced as it is written.
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Partial/no phoneme-grapheme correspondence

  • A word like ‘coat’ isn’t fully pronounced as it is written, as it would be pronounced (using phonetics) as ‘co – at’.
  • Therefore it only has partial phoneme-grapheme correspondence.
  • A word like ‘hour’ has no phoneme-grapheme correspondence.

Whole Word Approach

Linguists (and educators) debate over how we should teach children to read and the biggest rivals are the phonic and the whole word approaches.

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Whole word approach

  • Opposed to the phonics approach is the whole word approach.
  • The idea of this is for the child to learn (memorise) how each word is pronounced.
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Importance of meaning

  • In this approach, meaning is at the heart and focuses also on getting children to understand what each word means (starts with common words and works its way up).
  • In this sense, it is sometimes nicknamed the ‘look and say’ approach.
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Issues

  • The issues with this approach are that:
    • It doesn’t prepare children to pronounce words that they haven’t learned.
    • It assumes that a child will be able to memorise great numbers of words.

The Psycholinguistic Model

An approach which challenges the phonics and whole word approach is the psycholinguistic model.

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Environmental cues

  • In this approach, the child learns based on the environment from which they live and their interactions with caregivers.
  • This works by the child having to think about what a word might mean through the use of clues like other words they have encountered before, pictures and other contextual knowledge.
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Decoding meaning

  • In this sense, the approach focuses on decoding (when a child phonetically breaks down a word) meaning rather than the symbols.
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Issues

  • However, the method does not always cover all bases and has the potential of the child not guessing or guessing wrong – it is up to luck as to whether a child learns certain words.
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Support

  • This model has been supported, however, by the ‘Gray Oral Reading Tests’ (GORTs) which proved that the bottom 5% of adults can understand shapes of graphemes, but generally do not decode them or find meaning.
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Real use

  • It is worthy of note that often these approaches do not exist in isolation of each other – many caregivers will uses a mixture and combination of all of these models to effectively learn to read – you should state this in your answer to let your examiner know you know about the ‘real’ use of these models.
  • In reality, most caregivers use multiple methods.

Jump to other topics

1Language Levels

2Language, The Individual & Society

3Language Diversity & Change

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