• Korean Journal of Child Studies
• /
• v.25 no.6
• /
• pp.259-277
• /
• 2004

The effects of two literacy programs, Balanced Literacy Instruction(BLI) and Phonics Instruction were studied in 40 three- and four-year old children. BLIwas created to compensate for the limits of the Whole Language Approach(WLA) and of Phonics Instruction(PI). The WLA focuses on writing and communication but lacks concrete instruction methods and overlooks technical aspects of reading and writing. On the contrary, PI is logical, stressing phonemic recognition, skill in distinguishing words, and the rules of consonants and vowels. By combining the best of both PI and WLA to create BLI, this study showed that children who received BLI significantly improved their ability of phoneme recognition, reading, writing and understanding of the content of a book, letting us conclude that BLI is the more effective method for teaching literacy.