ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of psychological research that has helped to resolve the long history of conflict about the most effective way to teach children how to read in alphabetic orthographies, especially deep orthographies such as English. Tunmer William and Nicholson examined the theoretical underpinnings of the whole language and phonics approaches to beginning reading instruction and concluded that there are major conceptual problems with both approaches. However, when they did rely on context to assist them in identifying unknown words, they were much more likely to identify the words than less skilled decoders. Whole language views literacy learning as largely the by-product of active mental engagement where the focus is on learning to read by reading with little or no direct instruction in letter-sound patterns. To benefit from phonics instruction, children must be able to segment spoken words into subcomponents; they must know that the spoken word 'ship' has three sounds.
