Does the “whole language” approach to reading work?
Dear Cecil: Do you know anything about the “whole language” approach to reading? It’s used at my daughter’s grade school and other mothers tell me it’s all the rage, but parts of it strike me as weird. Phonics seems to be out, for one thing. When I told my daughter to “sound out” a word in a book we were reading, she told me “we don’t do that anymore, Mom.” Somehow they’re supposed to grasp the word as a whole or pick it up from the context or something. I don’t get it. Is this one of those educational fads that’s supposed to spare my child the horror of having to learn anything boring, such as facts? — Peggy Gavin, Lisle, Illinois Cecil replies: If you think gun control debates are intense, wait till you get a load of the reading wars. There are two schools of thought on teaching kids to read, phonics vs. whole language. To judge from their public pronouncements, they don’t agree on anything, including whether we should call it “teaching kids to read.” (Whole language advocates say yo
