Comparing the effect of phonics instruction and whole-language instruction on written literacy of the first-grade primary schoolboys.

Language is the foundation of all education, and language skills include the four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing (Saffarpour, 2000). Written language is one of the essential forms of language learned after other forms of language. Among necessary skills, writing is the most tangible, because writing itself leaves a written document (Nader Tabare, 2001). Today, writing failure is the most common disability in communication skills. One of the most important reasons for this is that the written form of the language is the most excellent and complex form of communication and is the last skill that is learned (Gorji, 1995).   Writing includes a set of related writing skills such as spelling, written expression, and handwriting. Spelling means memorizing words, and written expression means the ability to create ideas and express them in an acceptable grammatical structure in a way that conforms to the principles of literary stylistics (Andalibi, 2007). Teaching reading and writing skills should begin after learning to speak and hear because reading and writing are more sophisticated techniques that are primarily based on the ability of human language. Unfortunately, learning to write often stops at the point of spelling. While writing should be taught to store and transfer information (Zarghamian, 1999).   Until a few decades ago, some people thought that literacy was easy to learn and that children did not need special education in this field. However, the results of research (Pressley, 2006; Davis, 2010; Gilles, 2006) have shown the undeniable effect of correct methods on children educational achievements. Based on real and experimental research, and considering theories of learning and teaching methods, numerous and sometimes contradictory theories about the correct way of literacy have been presented. While most proponents of the methods claim that their methods are the key to proper education, there is no conclusive evidence that any of the methods have been proven, or that they have been successful in real effectiveness or that they have failed (Brooks & Brooks, 2005). The multiplicity of educational theories and disagreements about the optimal method of teaching is to the extent that some have described it as the term "Great Debate" for it (Chall, Jajobs & Baldwin, 1990). The problem is that some of these methods apply completely contradictory training strategies to each other (Maddox & Feng, 2013).   In terms of learning theories, there are two predominant methods in literacy: Phonics and Whole-language. The phonics method is attributed to the behaviorist perspective, and the whole-language method is attributed to the constructivist perspective (Tracey & Morrow, 2012, P.201). The whole-language teaching method emphasizes learning through the meaningful components of language and the growth of literacy. First, general language units, i.e., text and sentences, are taught, and later, smaller units are taught (McKenna, Stratton, Grindler, & Jenkins, 1995). Experts believe that teaching in a whole-language style encourages reading and writing and leads students to authentic literature (Schmitt, 2009). In the whole-language method, learners first encounter with words that have a tangible meaning when they learn to read, and this makes the training sessions not dull, but the students feel that they are learning to read since the first session and this strengthens their motivation (Zafari Nejad, Javadi, & Dortaj, 2004).   The phonics has been used for a long time, and it has also been called the skill-based method (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 2001) or the bottom-up mental processing method (Evans, Bozonnet, Wang, Fredouille, & Troncy, 2012). The phonics method can be considered as explicit, step-by-step training that each phoneme or sound is learned by placing, combining, decoding, or playing exercises and manipulating words and changing them (Maddox & Feng, 2013). Proponents of phonics believe that direct, step-by-step instruction can help students master reading and writing skills in a planned way (Cromwell, 1997). The phonological teaching method emphasizes the skill of word analysis (Pressley, 2001). The goal of this skill-based training model is to help students change their focus during reading and writing experiences by breaking codes and deciphering words to grow in word and text comprehension (Hall-Kenyon & Bingham, 2011). This study has been implemented to compare the written literacy of two groups of Iranian first-grade primary schoolboys. Each group learned to read and write with a different instructional method at two different schools; one was trained with traditional phonics procedure, and the other was trained with the whole-language approach. Commencing the writing instruction at the first group was concurrent with starting the reading instruction, but the writing instruction in the whole-language group began two months after the beginning of reading instruction. The research method was quasi-experimental, and the statistical community was all the students of the two schools. The whole-language school had 65 students, and traditional phonics school had 45 students. The non-random convenient sampling method was used in this study, so 30 students from each school, and totally, 60 students were chosen as a sample. The research tool was the first-grade Academic writing achievement Test (Ragheb, 1384) that was administrated in each group at pre-test and post-test jointly. For the statistical analysis, the Covariance method was used. The results indicated that whole-language students were better than traditional phonics students in the spelling (P<0/005). However, no significant difference was obtained between the two groups in the Composition. The results of this research are useable for a broad range of educators, teachers, and decision-makers of first-grade education and enable them to reconsider their instruction method.