Phonic Instruction vs. Whole Language

Paper Summary:

An evaluation of two methods of teaching English to children-- 'phonic instruction' method and 'whole language' method. The author reviews many studies investigating the effectiveness of these methods and discusses incorporating both methods into a lesson plan. The conclusion is to gear one's methods towards each individual child's needs and preferences.

From the Paper:

"There have been many studies done on the effectiveness of phonetic instruction and those studies have been positive. The National Reading Panel conducted a meta-analysis on the effectiveness of phonetic instruction on reading and spelling. Overall, the impact of phonetic instruction on children had a large result of (.86) within this meta-analysis. Using phonetic instruction, reading and spelling improved moderately at (.53) and (.56) respectively (Ehri, Nunes, Willows, Schuster, Yaghoub-Zadeh, & Shanahan, 2001). However, there are some critics of phonics that find that the NRP study on phonetic instruction is flawed and does not prove that phonetic instruction is the way to teach. One critic claims that the NRP study choice of methodology, research, and subjects provided unreliable results (Garan, 2001)."

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