As Ramadiro worked his way through this period, he reached severaloverarching conclusions about the available materials. He concluded that muchof the available materials had been written in English, and back-translated toisiXhosa, and as such were not based on the linguistic logic of isiXhosa. They didnot take advantage of the home (oral) language resources of children in isiXhosaas the basis to build reading and writing skills. Second, taken together they didnot constitute a balanced reading programme guided by contemporary readingresearch (Pressley, 2006). There was no set of materials that combined a wholereading approach with systematic language skills (phonics, grammar etc.) inBefore... After...

Learners who knew all their letters at the end of grade 1 were on track with their reading by the time they reached grade 4. Learners with very limited letter-sound knowledge at the end of grade 1 were three years behind, only reaching grade 4 reading fluency levels in grade 7.

We found that far too many children were entering school with weak oral language skills and were acquiring alphabetic knowledge and fluency far too slowly. This limited their reading comprehension and academic progress through school.

A child needs at least two kinds of skills before they can comprehend what they’re reading. These are oral language skills (listening, speaking and knowing how spoken words sound) and decoding skills (knowledge of letter-sound relationships to turn a written word into a spoken word).

They then spent a couple of pages on the history of elementary education, followed by a discussion of the stages of instruction, beginning with "reading readiness" and continuing through "sight words" and "context clues", to mature skills that allow the reader to compare the views of different writers.

For children stuck on a difficult word, Professor Calkins said little about sounding-out and recommended a word-guessing method, sometimes called three-cueing. This practice is one of the most controversial legacies of balanced literacy. It directs children’s attention away from the only reliable source of information for reading a word: letters.

Thus, syllablessuch as ab, ac, ad, ib, ic were practiced for the sake of masteryof the language. When a child could name all of a determinednumber of combinations, he was said to know his ABC's.

while learning to talk is a natural process that occurs when children are surrounded by spoken language, learning to read is not. To become readers, kids need to learn how the words they know how to say connect to print on the page. They need explicit, systematic phonics instruction. There are hundreds of studies that back this up.

The battle between whole language and phonics got so heated that the U.S. Congress eventually got involved, convening a National Reading Panel to review all the research on reading. In 2000, the panel released a report. The sum of the research showed that explicitly teaching children the relationship between sounds and letters improved reading achievement. The panel concluded that phonics lessons help kids become better readers. There is no evidence to say the same about whole language.

Whole language was a movement of people who believed that children and teachers needed to be freed from the tedium of phonics instruction. Phonics lessons were seen as rote, old-fashioned, and kind of conservative. The essential idea in whole language was that children construct their own knowledge and meaning from experience. Teaching them phonics wasn't necessary because learning to read was a natural process that would occur if they were immersed in a print-rich environment. Whole language proponents thought phonics lessons might actually be bad for kids, might inhibit children from developing a love of reading by making them focus on tedious skills like breaking words into parts.