The teacher follows an approach which considers reading to be a type of guessing game, in which skilled readers glide over the print using as little visual information as possible. The idea is to extract meaning from print by a process of predicting upcoming words before they arise, and then using a few letters to confirm the identity of the word. There are two major problems with this model. In any event, the assertion about what skilled readers do is completely and demonstrably false. At the time it was proposed this assertion could not be tested, but eye movement studies have clearly shown that good readers do not only sample the text.
Good readers use rapid, context-free, automatic decoding skills.
They look at every letter of every word, and their decoding skills usually provide the meaning of what they see before prediction strategies can come into play. Whole language advocates believe that good readers use context strategies, and that poor readers would become good if they could be taught to do so. This involves guessing words, using clues based on what word would fit, and still preserve the sentence's meaning and grammatical structure. Unfortunately, this is also false - poor readers use context strategies at leas t as much as good readers, when the passage read is equally difficult for each group. Over-reliance on context strategies for word identification is thus an indicator of inadequate decoding skills, and not a cause for celebration.