ABSTRACT
The educational pendulum has been swinging from whole words to phonics for more than 100 years. The tide is now rising upon the new wave of whole language that claims to be the most effective way to understand written language. Pure whole-language advocates recommend that children experience and respond to written selections as a whole, without ever isolating phonographemic cues out of context. According to Goodman, word identification is best developed through the use of contextual material in which the word, its meaning, and its grammatical function becomes apparent through the reader’s understanding of the text (Goodman, 1989). Context provides the maximum opportunity for word attack. Words are learned as wholes by virtue of seeing them over and over again.
