Beginning reading

The purpose of this paper is to review recent literature in whole language, phonemic awareness, phoneme-grapheme correspondence, and alphabetic instruction. The reason for examining the literature is to discern the appropriateness of discrete skills instruction in a whole language classroom for first-grade students at the beginning of the year. This paper begins with an explanation of whole language and of a hierarchy of discrete skills. It concludes with a discussion of the implications for instruction of the research reviewed