Teaching children can be a challenging task for some educators. Many of them have raised this concern. Then again, there are some approaches that can be used in order to help educators when it comes to reading instructions. This study will present the characteristics of whole language, whole word, and phonics in relation to such instructions.
According to the National Institute of Health (n.d.), there are multiple ways that educators can teach reading and thus, learners have various options to learn. One of the approaches is the whole language technique. This method teaches children to recognize different words as a whole piece of language (Maddox & Feng, 2013). On the other hand, the phonics approach, otherwise known as synthetic phonics in the UK, is a technique teaches the learners to read throughthe blending of sounds in order to form a word. There are differences in a way how teachers teach their students based on the approach that is used. The whole language is more of familiarization of how the word is written, while the phonics is particular with how such words should be pronounced. Another difference is that the whole word or whole language approach uses the learners’ visual skill, while the phonics approach uses the learners’ ability to pronounce the letters’ sounds based on their arrangement.
Between these approaches, I can say that the phonics is the most effective because it does not only help the children identify the letters’ arrangement in every word, but it also helps them pronounce the words correctly. In the long run, learners will be able to achieve the learning outcomes of whole word and whole language approaches and at the same time, they will be able improve their pronunciation accordingly.