I think one of the issues with whole language vs. phonics involves what type of learner your child is. Some people have an easier time breaking down parts into whole; others have an easier time seeing the whole rather than parts - visual spatial learners.
I agree that it's best to work on both whole language and phonics as well as daily practice.
Yes, I think this is true and is one of the reason the argument continues to rage--if one way worked for everyone, it would be so obvious by now. Readers need to be able both to sound out and break apart words and to understand the sound-symbol system. Most of the argument has to do with which skill should be developed first. There also tends to be an alarming oversimplification of both "whole language" and "phonics" in debate and--too often--in practice. The field of education has not avoided the current cult(ure) of polarization.
My own kids are a great reminder to me that it isn't "either/or." DD was all about sound-symbol connection and was stringing sounds together to create words before she was reading them on the page. DS was much more of a whole word reader initially--something that was apparent when he would read multi-syllablic words and jumble the order of the sounds or syllables. He wears pretty strong glasses and I've often wondered how much that impacted his reading development. It took him longer to be comfortable with tiny print and I'm thinking that a phonic based development would require better control of visual tracking skills than would be needed to recognize the whole words.
