My Reading Life-Blog Post 1

The fact that literacy is a fundamental cornerstone to a student’s academic success is extremely powerful.  I look at this from two different angles, my own reading experience and then my experience with my children.  As a young child I remember my teachers making reading fun. If we read multiple books, we would be rewarded with free pizza from Pizza Hut.    

Now I see my children who are in kindergarten and first grade receive enthusiastic reader awards, which is accompanied by an award ceremony.  Chances are given to receive tickets to a baseball game for reading multiple books and completing a short book evaluation.  They have multiple opportunities to purchase books, which yields free books for their classroom.  Their teachers also make reading fun.  I have also noticed that at their current levels, they do utilize both whole language as well as phonics approaches to literacy.   

The debate between the two differing types of instructional methods used to develop reading fluency and improve spelling has shown that although there are no real statistical differences, phonics has presented greater improvement in both reading fluency and spelling.  When I think of the phonics method, my mind goes directly to the old commercial; “hooked on phonics worked for me.”    

After reading this case study, I have come to the conclusion that it is important for students to develop reading skills by utilizing both methods.  It is important for students to develop language using real literature to decipher the meaning of words through the context of a story.  Through this method, students learn how to decode words.  It is just as important however, for learners to be able to take apart the language and sound out the words.  

Kenneth Goodman discussed how phonics works for isolating sounds, but he did find that it delays the communication of meaning.  Whole language is not taught separately, instead it is taught contextually, making frequency of exposure to words key in the development of fluency and spelling.

Phonics stresses letter-sounds, and in return provides attainment in sounding out words and fosters better spelling habits.  Phonics awareness enables learners to develop recognition of new patterns.  When analyzed it was determined that phonics does improve decoding and comprehending text at a much faster rate, but should not go on beyond the first grade level.

I totally understand the argument of English spellings being too irregular for phonics sounds.  Teaching my first-grader to read and spell can be difficult at times, especially when we come across exceptions to rules.  I have seen how this can frustrate the young mind.

From all of the various research conducted on how phonics compares to whole language, it is found that incorporating phonics provided greater acceleration of fluency and spelling accuracy.  Whole language concepts, like sight words and decoding words for meaning, did prove to help students move on to the next level of comprehension.

I believe that using both of these methods together will provide learners with the best of both worlds.  They will be able to comprehend the English language through literary text, sounding-out, and recognizing sight words when necessary.  Utilizing multiple methods will also provide help to learners at varying levels and with differing learning styles.