An Exploration of Phonics vs. Whole Language Methods
This paper provides a brief five-chapter survey of whole language versus phonics reading assessment for students at the K-2 grades. The study of phonics as a language training strategy is highly controversial. Phonics involves the extraction of information from the concept, and thus is believed to minimize the students later abilities to work with larger information sets. Those who support the whole language teaching strategy believe that the student needs to approach language as a whole, and not minimize their later ability to learn through focusing specifically on phonics.