ABSTRACT
In the dispute about the effectiveness of the "real books" approach, or of the "whole language" approach as it is often called in America, the real disagreement is about what it is that children have to learn in order to be able to read. The contrary position is that children should be taught "phonics" first of all: They have to be thoroughly at home with letter–sound relationships before they can make any real progress in reading or writing. Children's difficulty in making explicit judgements about phonemes was also demonstrated in the well-known tapping task devised by Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, and Carter. A small group of children was given extra practice with rhyme and alliteration over a two-year period, while they were 6 and 7 years old, and this experience had an effect—albeit a modest one—on their reading. Rhyming sounds in one-syllable words usually represent a speech unit that lies somewhere between the phoneme and the syllable.
