Multisensory Reading Clinic

"Teaching reading is complex and challenging," and "without a doubt, teaching reading and language is a job for a quick-minded, informed, committed, flexible, and knowledgeable professional."- Moats. L. C. 2001

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Whole Language Approach vs. Code/phonics Approach

to Literacy Instruction

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Whole language approach

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• Is still used (or has been dominant until recent shifts) in many schools in Canada, the United States, and other English-speaking countries.

• Is frequently cited by critics as a primary contributor to persistent low literacy rates and the so-called "reading crisis," where large percentages of children (e.g., roughly one-third of U.S. fourth graders) do not read proficiently.

• Treats reading as a natural process, similar to learning spoken language, emphasizing immersion in meaningful texts and literature rather than explicit, systematic breakdown of language into phonemes, graphemes, and decoding rules.

• Minimizes or avoids structured phonics instruction, often treating phonics as incidental or "on-demand" rather than systematic and explicit.

Encourages strategies like using pictures (semantic cues), context, sentence structure, or initial letters to predict or guess unknown words, rather than sounding them out fully.

• Prioritizes guessing or predicting words based on meaning and visuals over accurate decoding.

• Critics, including proponents of the "science of reading" (which emphasizes explicit, systematic phonics and aligns with cognitive research on how the brain learns to read), argue this has led to many children struggling because they never master reliable word-decoding skills. Instead of breaking words into parts (e.g., phonemic awareness and letter-sound correspondences), children are taught to rely on cues that become less effective as texts get more complex and pictures disappear (e.g., in upper grades).

• Recent movements in places like Ontario, Nova Scotia, Alberta, Mississippi, and other U.S. states have shifted curricula toward structured literacy (heavy on phonics) to address this, moving away from balanced literacy/whole language approaches.

• The bullet points align closely with critiques of whole language and three-cueing systems (picture cues, context cues, and limited phonics), which have been linked to these issues in reports, podcasts, and educational research.

 

to be continued...

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