Critic review of the postulates of whole language and psicogenesis in writing

Abstract

Most of the reading teaching programs implemented in our country during the last three decades follow the assertions of Whole Language (Goodman, 1967) and Psychogenesis (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1979) advocate. These perspectives reject the explicit teaching of spelling-sound relationships and the development of phonological awareness since they postulate that words are read by its global form. Furthermore, practice for getting reading fluency is belittled, as it is considered to be behavioral, and the only comprehension strategy put forward is to advance and guess the feasible textual information. The present work aims to make a critical analysis of the whole language and psychogenesis assumptions taking into account the theoretical and empirical contributions about reading and writing processes made by Cognitive Psychology and Neurosciences researchers.