Cueing theory is not whole language, memorizing words, sight reading or Look-Say. I think you misread the text which says “instead of teaching kids phonics, or … memorize words, … [cueing]”. It’s an “Instead of (X or Y), Z” format. I added parentheses to indicate the grouping.
The Three-Cueing Systems Model is a flawed literacy instructional practice that teaches students to read based on meaning, structure and syntax, and visual cues—collectively known as “MSV.” While this sounds wonky, it can be boiled down to this: Teachers using this method instruct students to guess. This approach is soundly criticized by many reading experts, because it encourages students to guess, not sound out, words they do not know by using pictures or what they think might make sense given the context of the sentence.
Leonard Peikoff argued for phonics over Look-Say (learning whole words) in The American School: Why Johnny Can’t Think – ARI Campus I’m skeptical that Peikoff knows what he’s talking about on this subject.
I’ve found that people guess a lot when reading sentences and paragraphs. Instead of understanding every word and its role in the sentence, they guess at the overall meaning of sentences in ways that ignore or contradict some words. They also will write in the same way, so not all the words are meaningful or correct, so trying to analyze all their words doesn’t actually work well and the more guessing-based approach to reading actually makes some sense with their writing… One of the points of practicing sentence grammar trees is to consider the role of every word instead of skipping some words.
I also think people often learn new words by guessing the meaning from context without looking the words up. I’ve encouraged people to use dictionaries more.
I don’t know, but I suspect, that a ton of these college kids who have trouble reading whole books are decently literate on the individual word level – able to read single words – but struggle more with understanding sentences and paragraphs. I’d expect they have smaller vocabularies of known words (and some errors from guessing word meanings), but I doubt that’s the main problem. A lot of people blame attention span but I suspect that if they were understanding what they read better then they’d be more interested in it.
EDIT there may have been some misunderstandings. It turns out “whole language” is an umbrella term that includes both cueing and sight reading.