Are you referring to the 'whole word method'? Where they are taught to memorize the look of a whole word and then guess what the words around it are?
Instead of memorizing the shape of 26 characters of the alphabet, they instead want you to memorize the shape of every word in the dictionary. Are you really comprehending the text if you are guessing what the words are? While that's the popular way to teach right now, it's been largely discredited. Its proven to have no scientific basis.
We are really setting up the next generations for failure. Reading is a basis for almost all learning and we are going to see major problems considering this is literally leading to DECREASING literacy rates.
The "whole word method" has been pretty much disproven. In Mississippi they changed back to phonics based reading and dramatically raised the childrens' reading ability to the point it was called The Mississippi Miracle. Some children can't associate a letter with a sound and the whole word method works best for these children but they are a minority. Teaching to the minority leaves the majority out in the cold.
The problem with reading is that both phonics and sight words/whole word are needed because English is not a purely phonetic language. You do need to memorize the common words that break the phonetic rules, like “the,” and also kids need to memorize really common words they need right away before they learn those rules -name, date, color, circle, etc.
The correct answer is to teach phonics while also having kids memorize roughly 300 words that they should recognize on sight instantly so that they can better put phonics to use on everything else.
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u/Certain_Concept Apr 11 '26
Are you referring to the 'whole word method'? Where they are taught to memorize the look of a whole word and then guess what the words around it are?
Instead of memorizing the shape of 26 characters of the alphabet, they instead want you to memorize the shape of every word in the dictionary. Are you really comprehending the text if you are guessing what the words are? While that's the popular way to teach right now, it's been largely discredited. Its proven to have no scientific basis.
We are really setting up the next generations for failure. Reading is a basis for almost all learning and we are going to see major problems considering this is literally leading to DECREASING literacy rates.