It is the basis for innumerable reading programs. It underlies many, many approaches to remediation in areas across the curriculum. It is profoundly mistaken. Everything we have learned about the structure and psychology of language in the twentieth century indicates that language is not a passive reaction to clearly defined elements transmitted unproblematically from speaker to speaker or reader to reader. While there are patterns, there are just as well interpretations.
Communication is a deep thing.
It is not a transfer, but an experiment, a probing, an interaction. Our sentences, our texts are not chainings of discrete gemstones, but bubbles and ripples on the surface of a stream. And from their surface whirls and eddies we look to understand the deep flow of mind beneath them. This is why learning a language is a lot more than memorizing word lists. Or why dictionaries seldom satisfy the deeply linguistically perplexed.