Phonics Document For Balanced Literacy Handbook Analysis

Phonics Document for Balanced Literacy Handbook

How to teach children to read is a controversial subject. In the United States there have been Reading Wars between proponents of the Phonics approach versus the Whole Language approach. In an article written by Martin Cothran he writes about the history of phonics. Teaching of Phonics in the United States dates back to the very first school text: the New England Primer, published in 1690. The first challenges to the phonetic approach came from people like Benjamin Franklin and Noah Webster who wanted to reform English spelling partly to iron out some of the language’s irregularities. Their attempts at such reforms were met with little success. In the middle of the 1800’s Horace Mann, the father of American public schools, came back to America after a visit to Europe determined to change the way reading was taught. Instead of a bottom-up approach in which letters and sounds were learned before words to a top-down approach in which words were learned first. Mann’s approach took hold in many parts of the country and inaugurated the “reading wars” as we have come to know them.

In the 80’s and 90’s this educational and political battle was fought in newspapers, editorial pages, in state legislatures and congress. Proponents of phonics point to a decline

The advantage for students is that once the students get the basics down, they can go to the library and read a wide variety of children’s literature. Whole language teachers are expected to provide a literacy rich environment for their students to combine speaking, listening, reading and writing. Whole language teachers emphasize the meaning of texts over the sounds of letters. Whole Language is considered a “top down” approach where the reader constructs personal meaning for a text based on using their prior knowledge to interpret the meaning of what they are