Skills-Based or Whole Language Reading Instruction? A Comparative Study in the Improvement of the Reading Comprehension of High School Students.

Practitioners and researchers argue about how reading should be taught, about what students should read, and about how best to organize reading instruction in the classroom. Diverse methods are used to teach reading. These range from isolated skills-based (intensive phonics/basal reading programs) to integrated, whole language approaches that stress language experience, reading, writing, and critical thinking. Since a sobering percentage of American children have difficulty in learning to read, an inquiry was made into how best to reverse this trend in a high school remedial reading classroom. The study's purpose was to compare the teaching of an integrated, whole language approach to remedial reading using the novel to a traditional, skills-based approach. The area of interest was reading comprehension. Subjects were 54 students enrolled in high school remedial reading classes at North Marion High School in north central West Virginia. The measuring device was the Metropolitan Achievement Test. Data were obtained from a control group and an experimental group. Analysis of the data indicated that an experimental group of high school remedial reading students who received whole language instruction using the novel and a control group that received traditional, skills-based instruction scored equally on a standardized reading comprehension test. Since no significant difference was shown in the two methods of reading instruction, the conclusion is that individualization and a balance between whole language and skills-based instruction is most beneficial to high school remedial reading students. (Contains 6 tables of data and 65 references.) (CR)