>>I was talking to a guy I work with this morning, and he was talking about how his son is struggling with read in kindergarten. Apparently, teachers don't feel the need to teach phonics anymore - instead, they are attempting to teach reading by memorization of words. If they ask him to read a work, and they can tell that he is sounding it out, then it doesn't count.
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>I'm responding both as a parent and as the daughter of a long-time first-grade teacher.
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>Neither phonics nor a whole-language (word recognition) approach alone is right for every kid. (While I'm not going to dig for it now, I think you'd find that research bears this out.) For most kids, some combination of the two gives the best results.
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>As Hilmar pointed out, English is a highly irregular language. Phonics will never teach you how to read all the words on this list:
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>tough
>though
>through
>thought
>trough
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>OTOH, phonics is a good way to learn large families of words.
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>A good reading program offers both approaches. I can still remember my kindergarten classroom, where almost every object had a tag on it with its name. That's whole language and kids do learn to recognize the shape of many words that way. However, we also learned the sounds of the letters, so we could work out unfamiliar words.
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>My mother tells me that at one stage her school district went to a whole language approach. However, she and other good teachers included phonics in their classrooms as well, giving kids the benefit of both approaches. Too many people have trouble with middle ground, and that sounds like what your friend is seeing. Oh, but don't blame the teachers; it's almost certainly coming from above.
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>One more point. Is this just for kindergarten? Will they introduce phonics in first grade, or are they doing whole language throughout.
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>Tamar

I don't know about his situation, but I know for my little brother they didn't teach phonics at all. I seem to remember the principal saying something to the effect of "phonics is bad". However, that school was also the freakin' twilight zone with teachers sexually harassing students and other teachers threatening students and roughing them up, so that was the least of his problems.