At different times, there have always been methods of teaching reading and other sciences. After some time, these methods are forgotten, and after some time, well-forgotten teaching methods pop up again, becoming the very new, which is the well-forgotten old. Each of these methods has its undeniable advantages, but it is also not without some drawbacks.
There are two main methods in pedagogical practice, which are fundamentally the opposite. One of them is called phonological, the other - the method of whole words. Discussions about whether children should be taught phonetics at the beginning of the 20th century ended by the thirtieth year after studies, as a result of which the teachers concluded that phonetics training is still necessary, but the question is how much giving it to children remained open.
An interesting experiment was set up during the research. Two groups of six-year-old children were taken, one of them was taught to read by the method of whole words, and the second by phonological method. The results were very entertaining: as a result of the first test (at the first stage), children from the first group who learned to read by the method of whole words read aloud better. But testing at the end of the second year of study showed that children engaged in the phonological method were much better at reading unfamiliar words and significantly outperformed children from the first group in terms of the richness of their vocabulary and level of perception.
Children who worked on the method of whole words often made completely typical, even the same mistakes. For example, when reading captions under pictures, they could replace words with close ones - instead of “lion” say “tiger” and the like. Since the word in the minds of children was assigned to a strictly defined meaning, the children from this group never learned to learn to read any new words without the help of adults in a year.
So it became clear that phonetics is absolutely necessary for young students. Recent studies have confirmed that most people still spell words. However, the reading process is almost instantaneous, so most people think that the word is perceived in its entirety.
Thus, it becomes clear that reading teaching methods cannot be applied in isolation, but must be used in combination. The whole word method allows you to learn to perceive the graphic image of the word, and with the help of the phonological method, the child can learn to read new words.
Moreover, psychologists have confirmed that reading is nothing more than pronouncing the text to oneself. Many people think that when reading words are perceived directly from the text. But, as experiments have shown, the same parts of the cerebral cortex are involved in reading as when pronouncing words. However, the ability to perceive the graphic image of a word can speed up the process of reading a text, and such an ability can be developed.
So we have come close to what can be characterized as intensive teaching methods, and all methods of teaching reading can be used both in the study of the native language and in a foreign language. However, one does not need to think that we can only talk about teaching children to read. There are also active methods of teaching students to read in foreign languages and speak them.
Active methods are based mainly on the practical assimilation of new knowledge with their simultaneous application in practice. This is the only way to learn a new foreign language in the shortest possible time. That is why such methods are widely used in a variety of cases, but they are especially applicable when teaching foreign languages, and not just reading in preschool age.