Not the meaning, but the pronunciation. Phonics is about teaching the sounds each letter, or letter combination ("th", "sh", "ch", etc.) produces and equipping

Not the meaning, but the pronunciation. Phonics is about teaching the sounds each letter, or letter combination ("th", "sh", "ch", etc.) produces and equipping students with the ability to sound out words they don't recognize. "whole word" approach is geared around making students memorize entire words, and hope that they can guess at how to pronounce unrecognized words based on context. You're definitely still supposed to derive meaning from context and clues. But you should be able to pronounce the word without this context.