arguing for phonics over whole language

I left the following comment on Instapundit:

I spent years as an EFL teacher (I now create content for EFL textbooks). I was also raised with phonics, so I may have a bit of a bias. Here's the thing: by the time we're reading fluently, it's all whole language. In the end, whole-language learning wins. And here's a bit of compelling evidence for that thesis: a few years back, a certain email went viral that showed how, even if you transpose certain letters in a word, you can still read the email pretty easily. (Here is an eaxmple of waht teh emial was tlaking abuot.) The point of the email was to show how our brains apprehend words in a whole-language way.

That said, I am firmly against using whole language to teach little kids how to read. I've seen the pitfalls of that approach up close: because kids are taught to take in the entire word at once, they are utterly stumped when they encounter a new word that they haven't had a chance to memorize. Meanwhile, a phonics kid has learned how to sound out unfamiliar words, so when they see elephant, they can silently go, "eh... leh... funt," and as they listen to themselves pronouncing the word, they suddenly realize they know it already. So the fatal flaw with whole language resides in how unhelpful it is for beginning learners. But ultimately, as kids grow and learn to read faster and faster, the whole-language process kicks in naturally, and we all eventually end up using the whole-language technique (see above parenthetical).

I should also note that this debate is more of a thing for speech communities whose writing systems use alphabets and syllabaries: English, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, Japanese, etc. The Chinese basically have to memorize how their characters look from the get-go, so in Chinese, whole-language learning is pretty much the only way to fly (although I've heard linguists like Mark Miyake argue that it is possible to "sound out" unfamiliar Chinese characters by knowing the pronunciation of their radicals).

ADDENDUM: amusingly, another Instapundit commenter referred us to Wikipedia, which calls whole-language learning a "discredited" technique. See for yourself here.