[philman_36]

Whole word does not work.
Perhaps you should modify your statement. Maybe...Whole word does not work for my kids.
It does work, no matter what you say as my kids are living proof that it does. The problem is that it doesn't work well in institutional settings.
I taught my kids to read, not the public schools.

[BenKenobi]

“It does work, no matter what you say as my kids are living proof that it does. The problem is that it doesn’t work well in institutional settings.”

Fine. Explain to me how you teach that the sound, “berrd” is the same as the written word ‘bird’ using whole word.

[achilles2000]

Your children probably figured out the phonetic code on their own.

Whole word does work to a degree. It is like learning Chinese characters. This invariably limits literacy severely for all but a few who have lots of time and extraordinary memories.

Phonics, on the other hand, allows for a rapid connection between spoken and written language. Once the simple “phonetic code” is learned a child’s reading vocabulary almost immediately expands to match his speaking vocabulary. If words are treated as ideographs (whole word/chinese), there is no such easy correlation because the sounds and the symbols are unrelated. In China, Vietnam, and Japan, for example, Chinese characters are (were) used as the writing system for completely different languages.

I have seen this in action. Once a child learns to read in English phonetically, if he is also fluent in another phonetic language the child realizes that there is a phonetic code in that language, too. As a result, reading in the other language requires almost no instruction. In Chinese, on the other hand, progress is painfully slow because of the memorization required. This is why China has a massive hidden literacy problem.

Whole language is destructive. I’m pleased your children did well, but unless they have photographic memories they learned to read well in spite of Whole Language, not because of it.

[BobL]

“Perhaps you should modify your statement. Maybe...Whole word does not work for my kids.
It does work, no matter what you say as my kids are living proof that it does. The problem is that it doesn’t work well in institutional settings.
I taught my kids to read, not the public schools. “

Your kids must have an AMAZING memory. As stated in the article, they can now recognize 100,000 words by sight (in all forms), assuming college level. And to think they could NEVER sound out a word...because that would show they learned PHONICS somewhere along the way...can’t do that, now can we.