How do we read?

Dean Pearson claims to be in the "radical middle," and I certainly get this impression from his essay, "Life in the Radical Middle." He writes that reading should be the whole point of reading instruction and that curricula should not postpone the experience of authentic reading. When any curriculum does this, it gives kids the impression that reading is just an afterthought, not the purpose of reading instruction. He also states that skills instruction is essential to the development of reading, but makes clear that phonics and other skills should be a means to an end. They should not be the ends in themselves. The end is reading and comprehension.

But from his presentation in class today, Dean Pearson seemed to privilege the whole language approach. For example, the videos of the two girls that he showed us. Of the first girl he said that she was too preoccupied with decoding. Of the second girl he said that she was interested in finding meaning and that she had acquired metacognition. One description just seems much more positive than the other. And this might just be me, but when he was comparing the two approaches side by side, he seemed to spend more time describing and explaining whole language. Now, I'm not advocating that he should have emphasized phonics more. Personally, I buy the argument that he makes in his essay: the best approach is a balanced approach to reading.

I think the skit we performed today successfully demonstrated that implementing just one approach is problematic, even if it's something as seemingly wonderful as whole language. With Dolores, we witnessed the problems she was having reading using the sounding out approach. She had been taught to read using phonics exclusively, and when she got stuck she tried to solve the problem by decoding every sound. That wasn't helping her and it was taking her forever. By the time she finished one sentence, she probably forgot what the sentence was about. Here, she is missing meaning. Andy, on the other hand, had been taught using exclusively the whole language approach. However, as we saw, it turned out that Andy was never really reading. He was just looking at the illustrations and coming up with his own story using his wonderful imagination. While this is probably great and plays some important part in he development of literacy, if a child doesn't learn to actually decode the symbols on the page, he'll be stuck at this stage forever. What happens when he is supposed to move on from picture books? I'm not quite sure what was going on in the case of Yong Joon. It seems that his was an extreme case of a child learning to read via the phonics-only approach. He was "successful" in the sense that he was able to decode every word and speed through the story. However, he had no idea what he was reading because he hadn't learned to extract meaning from the words that he was reading. Clearly, some aspects of whole language were needed here. But, we also see that he was unable to comprehend punctuation marks. What do you all think? Does the teaching of punctuation marks belong in the skills or in the whole language category? Punctuation marks are something that kids must be able to decode in order to read the sentence properly. But kids should also recognize that they give meaning to the sentence and changing a punctuation can change the entire meaning of the sentence.