habet, then the sounds of each letter, how they blended intosyllables, and how those syllables made up words. They were taught that English spelling is logical and systematic, and that to become a fluent reader it wasnecessary to master the alphabetic "code" in which English words are written, to the point where it (the code) is used automatically with little conscious thoughtgiven to it.Once a child learned the mechanics of the code, attention could be turned to more advanced content. It seldom, if ever, occurred to teachers to give children wordlists to read, or to make beginning readers memorize whole words before learning the components of those words, or to memorize whole stories as today'sproponents of the "whole language approach" recommend.Several recent studies funded by the U.S. Department of Education, including "Preventing Reading Failure: The Myths of Reading Instruction," found that 90percent of remedial reading students today are not able to decode fluently, accurately, and at an automatic level of response. In a March, 1989, Phi Delta Kappanarticle, Harvard Professor Jeanne Chall (author of "Learning to Read: The Great Debate") cites a study by Peter Freebody and Brian Byrne, that confirms the samefinding. Today's students are not being taught the fundamental structure of language, but rather are engaged in what Dr. Kenneth Goodman (a proponent of "thewhole language approach") has called a "psycholinguistic guessing game."One philosophy of teaching reading is usually called "whole language" but many other labels are used to describe it, such as: the whole-word method; languageexperience; psycholinguistics; look and say; reading recovery; balanced literacy; or integrated reading instruction. The "whole language" or "look and say" methodteaches that children should memorize or "guess" at words in context by using initial letter or picture clues. According to estimates given in one widely used "lookand say" reading series, ...
