Whole Language vs. Isolated Phonics Instruction: A Longitudinal Study in Kindergarten With Reading and Writing Tasks

Whole Language v. Isolated Phonics Instruction: A Longitudinal Study in Kindergarten With Reading and Writing Tasks is an article published in Journal of Research in Childhood Education in the Fall 2000 by Maryann Manning and Constance Kamii. The article focuses on young children’s construction of glottographic theory, a theory based on sounds of speech (Manning & Kamii, 2000, p. 53).

The authors wanted to compare the effectiveness of two approaches to phonics instruction: one in context and one in isolation. To do so, they tested 38 kindergartners in two classes in a public school. 19 received phonics instruction from a phonics teacher. These students did daily worksheets, oral sound training and many chalkboard activities that included sounding out words and blending sounds together; used flashcards; and did constant repetition of words written on blackboard (Manning & Kamii, 2000, p. 54).  19 received phonics instruction from a whole language teacher. These teachers read out loud for an hour spread out over the day and taught phonics in context through shared reading, journal writing and writing demonstrations (Manning & Kamii, 2000, p. 54). The students were interviewed five times over the year. They were instructed to write words in four pairs (the shorter word part of longer word) and read  two to four sentences. They were scored by certain criteria (Manning & Kamii, 2000, p. 54). 

The whole language group started at a lower level, but by the end were at a higher level than the phonics group; as a result, they developed more. By May of the school year, the Whole Language group had a significantly greater percentage of children at a Level 3 and 4, which they defined as being able to identify written segments by making correspondences “between the temporal order in which words are spoken and the spatial sequence in which segments are written” (Manning & Kamii, 2000, p. 59).  

This concluded that the  difference in who attains the Level 3-4 milestone was attributable “to the general glottographic theory that the students in the whole language group had constructed” …concluded that the traditional behaviorist view of children’s learning to read and write based on the accumulation of “bits of grapho-phonic information” does not ring true here…rather the study’s results sided with  the Piaget constructivists that believe “that children are not empty vessels waiting to be filled with bits of information” but need to “try to make sense of everything they encounter in their daily lives and construct general frameworks (or theories) within which they can make sense of specific bits of knowledge” (Manning & Kamii, 2000, p. 64).

This case study concludes that the main advantage to phonics instruction in the context of a whole language approach as opposed to phonics taught in isolation is that the former allows the child to construct a framework to make sense of the phonics knowledge they receive.  As I suspected, the most effective results combines phonics and whole language. The whole language specialized teacher taught using a whole language approach, but also integrated phonics instruction, to get the best result.

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