Early literacy instruction

Learning to read is the critical task of early schooling and the foundational skill for all curricular learning. Teaching children to read has long been the subject of a “great debate” (Chall, 1967) centered on the relative efficacy of a code-based versus a whole language approach. The code-based, or phonics approach views ‘cracking the code’ of the alphabetic system as the essential task of early literacy learning, and calls for explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, the alphabetic principle, decoding, and word recognition (Adams & Bruck, 1995; Moats, 1998). By contrast, the whole language approach views reading as a developmental, meaning-making activity, and focuses on constructive interaction with varied reading materials, including literature-based texts (Goodman, 1965; Weaver, 1998).