ABSTRACT
Reading instruction in the classroom has been at the mercy of the “Reading Wars” for much of the last century. This “great debate” has been focused on the best way to teach children how to read. The debate revolves around whether words should be broken down into component parts when teaching children to read them, usually known as phonics, or whether they should be left intact, which includes approaches such as “look-say”, “whole-word”, and more recently, “whole-language”. One of the main reasons for the perversity of this debate is that this argument has focused on the right method, or approach, to teach children how to read. Liberman and Liberman (1990) argued that up to 75 percent of children will learn to read, regardless of the method of instruction. It cannot follow that children learn to read by way of the theory underpinning an approach to teaching reading, rather there must be something in what children bring to the task that enables them to learn to read regardless of approach. What is needed is knowledge of how children acquire reading skills, and the cognitive developmental processes needed for learning to read (Tunmer and Nicholson, 2011). We will argue that the most effective form of reading instruction starts with the reading-related knowledge, skills, and experiences that each child brings to the process of learning to read, and that attention needs to be focused on the specific literacy-related learning needs required by each child.
