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Notes -
"Whole-language" might be a bad technique for trying to teach illiterate kids to read in a classroom setting, but I think the insight that it's better for readers to parse written language as whole words as opposed to a stream of phonemes is correct. I remember sitting in elementary school reading classes, where kids would be randomly picked to read some passage out of a book, and it was painfully obvious which of my fellow students could only read by sounding out syllables based on the spelling of words; they had absolutely no idea what the semantic content of what they just read actually was.
I was privileged to have parents who made teaching me how to read a priority, by reading to me/with me as a toddler, and before I ever set foot in a public school classroom I was already reading books by myself. At this point it feels like they gave me a superpower. Maybe not every kid is capable of learning to read this way. I have no memory of how much or little my parents may have been teaching me about how the spelling of written words mapped to the phonemes that make up spoken words.
Anyway, I think learning to read is far too foundational a skill for any parent who cares about their child's success in life to leave up to schools, no matter how elite. I'm kind of baffled by some of the other comments in this thread about parents who spend the money to send their kids to private schools having the clout to demand that the schools adequately teach their kids to read; I would really assume that anybody who has that kind of money would understand that it's their job to teach their kid basic reading skills, just as it's their job to teach their kid how to speak, and other things like hygiene and how to dress themselves. Like, you wouldn't send your kid off to their first day at kindergarten without being potty trained; why are you sending them there without being able to read at least, like, Thomas the Tank Engine, if not Charlotte's Web? Oh, and if the parents really are too busy with their elite careers to read to their kids at night, hire an au pair/nanny/governess/tutor/whatever.
For a proficient reader of the language, it is. In fact, that's how I was taught to speed-read. But you can't train a toddler and an olympic athlete the same way. You first need to train your brain to be capable to automatically run this pattern creation/recognition mechanism when reading, and that's not something you have at birth. So teaching as if that has already been programmed is not going to be very successful.
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That propably means they (were made to) go too fast. If you can sound out the text, and you can understand speech, then you can understand the text. If you try to go very fast and throw every letter out of working memory as soon as you read it, thats bad. The teacher should make you repeat each word after you finish it, without looking back at the text, and same for sentences. Eventually youll learn to read fluidly just from practice - but better to read non-fluidly before that.
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And what do you think happens when whole-word kids encounter a novelty?
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If you check the teachers sub, they mention this problem regularly. I’m suspecting the real issue is at least in part parents who don’t want to put in the work of being parents, and teachers(to be fair, administrators) thinking that they can replace the work with better techniques if only people would give more money and authority to them, all combined in a toxic mix to try to replace something which can’t be replaced.
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It's certainly better for readers, but I'm not sure that translates to "better way to learn to read". Learning how to sound letters out is easier than memorising every word in full, and thus lets you make progress on your own without having to be told, or remember, every word every time. Sure it'll be slow, but you'll pick up the full words from experience, and be able to practice that on your own. Bootstrapping with the tools to teach yourself to read seems a strong strategy in learning to read, rather than trying to skip to the finish line.
Yeah - I have the same issue: I can't really remember a time before I could read, and so don't really have personal knowledge of what was actually effective. Save that yeah, my parents reading to and with me was probably a part of it. I'm pretty sure I started with the "sounding out" approach though: being able to read quickly a word at a time came from practice - letting me skip that more often as more words became familiar, not a different approach from the outset.
The converse applies too though: it's too foundational a skill for schools to trust that parents will have done it: it's vitally important that they ensure the kids who lacked such parents learn to do it too. And so I think it does become pretty important as to how they teach that if what they're using doesn't achieve that goal.
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