The “whole word” approach had been used to successfully teach children in the past without phonetics and it worked. This avoids the downsides of phonetics. In any case, my earliest memories of learning English involved the “whole word” approach where my mother had taken me to the library to read books with such profound literary prose as “This is Spot. See Spot run.” after I had learned the alphabet. There was substantial repetition before I learned. It worked for me as far as bootstrapping went.

All of the phonetics material included in my elementary school’s curriculum had been detrimental overall in hindsight. There were many times teachers would tell me to sound words out, I would do it wrong and I was considered the one at fault. If I asked how to sound out words correctly, I would get a non-answer, such as “you just do it”. That is a form of sadism that no child should have to endure.

Thanks to the inclusion of elements of phonetics into elementary school’s English curricula, I remember one time being asked to identify the syllables in words. I asked what a syllable was. I would be told it was the smallest subdivision of a word and be given an example. Then I would identify that I could say a vowel from it (not knowing that was a vowel) so by the definition, the example was not a syllable and just told I was wrong. At no point was how anything actually worked explained. Of course, this would be touched on as if it were important, but then would not be used for anything in the rest of the year, which illustrated how useless knowing this was for English. I would not learn what a syllable was until college when I studied Latin, where it actually matters somewhat due to the stress accent that English also has in some form, but goes untaught in school. :/