I hadn't heard of "whole word" reading or at least not to the point of reading about it, but from that article and the wiki page, my opinion is that it should b

I hadn't heard of "whole word" reading or at least not to the point of reading about it, but from that article and the wiki page, my opinion is that it should be combined with phonics, they complement each other. There is no need to compete. Most of the whole word stragity is describing how I coped and masked my hidden dyslexia throughout school (only learned about it as an adult). The whole word stragity of using context clues got me through standardize testing with perfect reading scores. Multiple times throughout school no one knew what to do with me in reading/English because I scored so highly, read so slowly, and hallucinated words if forced to read out loud (usually a word that meant the same thing but is written absolute nowhere, its the bane of my existence). I can not for the life of me sound out words to figure out the spelling, life would make a lot more sense if we all simply moved to using the phonetic transcription[0] way of spelling. I mean really, "realise" wrong in the US, correct in UK--but it sounds like guise, so why should "guize" be wrong? Yeah it is confusing, especially for spelling. The 'whole word' way to memorize as many words as possible--I mean you have to do that anyway to know when to use things like "ize" or "ise" in American English. I'm guessing there are more examples and occurs in other languages as well(?). This one in particular caused unnecessary frustration for me in school. Sounding out words(trying to) helps a little but it's more of a backup tool for me. My written vocabulary is vastly superior to my verbal simply because I can not pronounce all of the words I know. From my understanding, part of dyslexia can include the difficulty separating individual sounds. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_transcription https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_transcription