Methods of Teaching Reading

 Whole-word (look-away) instruction:
Typically, in this type of instruction, a student  is shown a flash card with a word on it, and the teacher pronounces it and asks the child to repeat. The teacher usually starts with small words and gradually expands to bigger words.  One argument to support whole word instruction, is the low reliablity of letter-to-phoneme mapping.  Using whole word instruction allows the teacher to pronounce the words and distinguish between the different vowels and sounds. It is argued that it promotes reading for meaning at an early stage of reading and that words have meaning and sounds do not.
 Phonics Instruction
Phonics starts with a limited set of correspondences between letters and speech sounds.  The letters are used to build different kinds of words. Gradually, more letters are added, and then consonant digraphs and clusters are introduced.  As different words are presented over and over, students also develop a sight vocaubulary during the early stages.   The letters are taught by the sounds they make and the students are taught to blend.  Phonics instruction teaches both alphabetic principle and the specific letter-phoneme correspondance.
 Meaning emphasis instruction
This type focuses on the language experiences of the student.  The student dictates short stories and is taught to read the words that he or she has dictated.  It empasizes on memorizing whole words.  This type of instruction relies heavily on the student’s experience with language. The basic means of motivation of the method is to make reading fun for the child.  It usually includes frequent oral reading by the teacher and the use of authentic literature, rather than decodable text.   This type of instruction has various tenets which are reading in a natural extension of language, explicit teaching of phonics treats reading as a technical exercise rather than a natural extension,and  explicit teaching of phonics is unneccessary for learning.
  Prescriptive vs. responsive teaching
Prescripitve teaching may vary in the amount of whole-class versus small group instruction and in the amount of assessment.  Teachers that are adhering to prescriptive teaching tend to plan their lessons around the review of letter sounds previously taught, the introduction of new letter sounds, practice blending sounds into words, practice reading decodable texts, teacher read alouds from children’s literature to teach vocabulary and comprehension strategies, and language arts.
Responsive Teaching: Responsive teaching is loosely based on the constructivist notion of scaffolding.  The responsive teacher responds to what the child is perceived  to need at the moment in the context of reading real books.  Responsive teaching is based on the belief that children inherit three cuing systems which are syntactic, semantic, and graphophonic knowledge.  The responsive teacher keeps a running record of reding miscues  to inform the next day’s alphabetic activities of making words and breaking words into constituent elements.  The most popular part of responsive teaching is guided reading which starts with whole class discussion of a reading selection elicit prior knowledge and introduce difficult vocabulary.  Leveled readers are also used in the small groups of guided reading.  Lower grades have also included a section of their schedule for phonics instruction.
 What is your best take on the best method to teach reading?
Between the whole word instruction, phonics instruction, and meaning emphasis, I believe that a combination of all types are needed to teach reading at a successful level. I believe this to be true because each student learns in a different way at a different speed. By using some of each strategy, I am reaching more of my students on their independent learning levels and meeting individual needs more closely.
 How would you characterize the reading instruction in your school? Why?
The reading instruction in my school is very balanced.  When I did my student teaching in first grade, there was the guided reading time and there was different activites for the reading story.  Also there was small group time when the phonics instruction came into play.  They called these "Flex Groups". That is when we taught word patterns, vowels and sounds, and blends.  I thought it was a great balance and a great way to teach reading.