Whole language is a discredited philosophy of reading and an educational method originally developed for teaching literacy in English to young children. The method became a major model for education in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom in the 1980s and 1990s, despite there being no scientific support for the method's effectiveness. It is based on the premise that learning to read English comes naturally to humans, especially young children, in the same way that learning to speak develops naturally. However, researchers such as Reid Lyon say that "reading is not a natural process", and many students, when learning to read, require direct instruction in alphabetic coding, phonemic awareness, phonics, spelling, and comprehension.
Whole language approaches to reading instruction are typically contrasted with the far more effective phonics-based methods of teaching reading and writing. Phonics-based methods emphasize instruction for decoding and spelling. Whole language practitioners disagree with that view, instead focusing on teaching meaning and making students read more. The scientific consensus is that whole language-based methods of reading instruction (e.g., teaching children to use context cues to guess the meaning of a printed word) are not as effective as phonics-based approaches. Rejection of whole language (and its offshoot, balanced literacy) was a key component in the Mississippi Miracle of increased academic performance across the Southern United States in the 2010s and 2020s.
Overview Whole language is an educational philosophy that is complex to describe, particularly because it runs counter to research fields including education, linguistics, psychology, sociology, and anthropology (see also Language Experience Approach). It can be viewed as being founded on the educational philosophy of John Amos Comenius in the early 17th century. Yetta Goodman has also cited the contributions of John Dewey, Lev Vygotsky, Louise Rosenblatt, and Ashton Warner, among other writers, in the development of the whole language movement. One description of whole language is "a concept that embodies both a philosophy of language development as well as the instructional approaches embedded within, and supportive of that philosophy".
Several strands run through descriptions of whole language. These include: focus on making meaning in reading and expressing meaning in writing; constructivist approaches to knowledge creation, emphasizing students' interpretations of texts and free expression of ideas in writing (often through daily journal entries); emphasis on high-quality and culturally diverse literature; integrating literacy into other areas of the curriculum, especially math, science, and social studies; frequent reading; with students in small guided reading groups to students with read-alouds by students independently; reading and writing for real purposes; focus on motivational aspects of literacy, emphasizing the love of books and engaging reading materials; meaning-centered whole– to part-to-whole instruction where phonics are taught contextually in embedded phonics (different from synthetic phonics or analytical phonics); and emphasis on using and understanding the meaning-making role of phonics, grammar, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation in diverse social contexts.
Attempts to empirically verify the benefits of whole language have repeatedly resulted in evidence that whole language is less effective than phonics-based reading instruction. Research psychologist Keith Stanovich has asserted, "The idea that learning to read is just like learning to speak is accepted by no responsible linguist, psychologist, or cognitive scientist in the research community." In a systematic review of the reading research literature, Louisa Moats concluded that "Almost every premise advanced by whole language about how reading is learned has been contradicted by scientific investigations". Harvard professor Jeanne Chall surveyed the research on literacy and conducted her own classroom observations and found that the "code-emphasis method" (phonics) produces substantially better readers, not only in the mechanical aspects of reading but also in terms of reading for meaning and reading for enjoyment, contrary to the claims of whole-language theorists.
Underlying premises Cognitive skills of reading Sub-lexical reading
Sub-lexical reading involves teaching reading by associating characters or groups of characters with sounds or by using phonics learning and teaching methodology.
Lexical reading
Lexical reading involves acquiring words or phrases without attention to the characters or groups of characters that compose them or by using whole language learning and teaching methodology.
Learning theory According to researchers Jack C. Richards and Theodore S. Rogers, the idea of whole language has its basis in holism, the belief that a system should be viewed as a whole and not merely as a collection of parts.
Ken Goodman's linguistic hypothesis In 1967, Ken Goodman set out to show that the views of Noam Chomsky, with regard to human speech, could be applied to serve as psychological models of the reading process. He chided educators for attempting to apply what he saw as unnecessary orthographic order to a process that relied on holistic examination of words. Whether or not Goodman was indeed inspired by Chomsky, neither Chomsky himself nor his followers have ever accepted Goodman's views, as learning to speak is very different from learning to read.
Goodman's four proposed cueing systems Goodman proposed, though he did not show through research, that there are four "cueing systems" that readers have to guess to determine what word comes next: graphophonemic: the shapes of the letters and the sounds that they evoke (see phonetics); semantic: what word one would expect to occur based on the meaning of the sentence so far; syntactic: what part of speech or word would make sense based on the grammar of the language; and pragmatic: what the function of the text is.
The "graph" part of the word "graphophonemic" means the shape or symbol of the graphic input, i.e., the text. According to Goodman, these systems work together to help readers guess the right word. He emphasized that pronouncing individual words will involve the use of all three systems (letter clues, meaning clues from context, and syntactical structure of the sentence).
The graphophonemic cues are related to the sounds we hear (the phonological system including individual letters and letter combinations), the letters of the alphabet, and the conventions of spelling, punctuation, and print. Students who are emerging readers use these cues considerably. However, in the English language, there is not a perfectly precise relationship between written symbols and sound symbols. Sometimes the relationships and their patterns do not work, as in the example of great and head.
Theories about how children learn to pronounce these words is part and parcel of the reading wars. Goodman suggested, but did not prove experimentally, that proficient readers and writers draw on their prior experiences with text and the other cueing systems as well as the phonological system, as their reading and writing develops. He wrote that "The cue systems are used simultaneously and interdependently. What constitutes useful graphic information depends on how much syntactic and semantic information is available. Within high contextual constraints, an initial consonant may be all that is needed to identify an element and make possible the prediction of an ensuing sequence or the confirmation of prior predictions." He continued with "Reading requires not so much skills as strategies that make it possible to select the most productive cues." He believed that reading involves the interrelationship of all the language systems, that is, that readers sample and make judgments about which cues from each system will provide the most useful information in making predictions that will get them to meaning. Goodman provides a partial list of the various systems readers use as they interact with text. Within the grapho-phonemic system, there are: Letter–sound relationships Shape (or word configuration) Known 'little words' in bigger words Whole known words Recurrent spelling patterns
The semantic cuing system is the one in which meaning is constructed. "So focused is reading on making sense that the visual input, the perceptions we form, and the syntactic patterns we assign are all directed by our meaning construction." The key component of the semantic system is context. A reader must be able to attach meaning to words and have some prior knowledge to use as a context for understanding the word. They must be able to relate the newly learned word to prior knowledge through personal associations with text and the structure of text.
The semantic system is developed from the beginning through early interactions with adults. At first, this usually involves labeling (e.g., "This is a dog"). Then labeling becomes more detailed (e.g., "It is a Labrador dog. Its coat is black.") The child learns that there is a set of "dog attributes" and that within the category "dog", there are subsets of "dog" (e.g., long-hair, short-hair). The development of this system and the development of the important concepts that relate to the system are largely accomplished as children begin to explore language independently. As children speak about what they've done and play out their experiences, they are making personal associations between their experiences and language. This is critical to success in later literacy practices, such as reading comprehension and writing. The meaning people bring to the reading is available to them through every cuing system, but it's particularly influential as we move from our sense of the syntactic patterns to the semantic structures.
The syntactic system, according to Goodman and Watson, includes the interrelation of words and sentences within connected text. In the English language, syntactic relations include word order, tense, number, and gender. The syntactic system is also concerned with word parts that change the meaning of a word, called morphemes. For example, adding the suffix "less" or adding "s" to the end of a word changes its meaning or tense. As speakers of English, people know where to place subjects, which pronoun to use, and where adjectives occur. Individual word meaning is determined by the place of the word in the sentence and the particular semantic or syntactic role it occupies. For example:
The mayor was present when he received a beautiful present from the present members of the board.
The syntactic system is usually in place when native English-speaking children begin school. Immersed in language, children begin to recognize that phrases and sentences are usually ordered in certain ways. This notion of ordering is the development of syntax. Like all the cuing systems, Goodman suggested that the semantic system provides the possibility of correct prediction when trying to make sense or meaning of written language. Goodman categorized the cues found in the flow of language as: Patterns of words (or function order) Inflection and inflectional agreement Function words such as noun markers (the, a, that) Intonation (which is poorly represented in writing by punctuation)