Posted on 02/14/2015 2:22:45 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
Do you agree? Good, then please pass this little summary to everyone you know.
Or were you thinking, that’s crazy talk. Afraid not. It’s quite accurate, comparable to saying, “The sky is blue.”
Reading instruction in our country has been insane and/or a criminal conspiracy for 80 years.
The resulting illiteracy is a giant hemorrhaging wound. We cannot have a successful school system or a successful civilization unless children typically learn to read in the first grade or two.
This is the 60th year since Rudolf Flesch wrote his famous book explaining why Johnny cannot read. Everything Flesch said in 1955 is just as true today. Here is the essence: “Teach a child what each letter stands for and he can read. I know, you say, it can’t be that simple. But it is.”
The Education Establishment, for ideological reasons, has concocted many different counterproposals. These have names such as Look-say, Whole Word, Whole Language, Balanced Literacy, high-frequency words, Dolch words, sight-words, and so on. Here is the shocking truth. They are all the same proposal, differing only in superficial details.
The common lie is that children can memorize thousands of sight-words, i. e., English words memorized as graphic designs. Can you memorize hundreds of license plates, currency symbols, Egyptian hieroglyphics, famous buildings, faces? Not just memorize them but memorize them with instantaneous recall? Many children never get to 100 sight-words! But to be literate in English you need at least 50,000 words and perhaps 100,000 words. The whole thing is blatantly absurd.
If a child memorizes "the," the child will probably not realize that "THE" is the same word. Many children confuse "the" and "is." Basically, to a sight-word reader, all the little words look alike: toe, lie, the, man, pit, sat, win, try, die, guy, hit, key. (If you want to experience how overwhelming sight-words are for a child, look at a page of English upside-down in a mirror.)
In short, sight-words are the central gimmick, the central fraud, the central sophistry, the central lie, whatever term you like, that has created a literacy crisis in this country.
How do you recognize that you are in the same room with this nonsense? Here are some of the clues you might hear: guess; skip; picture clues; preread; word wall; cueing systems; word callers; reading readiness; context; reading for meaning; reading recovery, and so many more.
Reading means that you can convert the marks on the page to sounds. That’s it. Phonics, phonetic, and phonemic mean the same thing: sounds. Even young children have a working vocabulary of 5000 to 10,000 words. When children convert the printed symbols to spoken words, they usually recognize them. And if they don’t, they look them up in a dictionary. That’s what reading is and always has been in a phonetic language.
It is vitally important to our entire civilization that we fix the reading problem. Here are three items that you can easily check out in a total of 15 minutes, then you will know:
A four-minute graphic video that explains why “Reading Is Easy.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JV0tPGn-Ws
A six-minute graphic video that explains why sight-words are best eliminated from the schools. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w56H8WBcvUo
A good relevant article on American Thinker: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/06/reading_the_con_continues.html
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ADDENDUM: A better example of sight-words that look almost identical would be this sort of cluster: fate, hat, mate, hated, bate, heat, rate, dated, late, date, hats, later, hates, etc. A real reader can rattle these off in about 10 seconds with few or no mistakes. A sight-word reader will take longer and make many mistakes. And then the school will declare the child dyslexic!
I have reprints of McGuffy and a computer version. Both are excellent tools for home schooling.
When the trader/silversmith Sequoyah - George Gist- introduced his syllabary the Cherokee people were suspicious of it and tried him for witchcraft but after proving it was just symbols of sounds by testing communication between him and his daughter, they asked him to teach them how to use it. In one week he taught the first group of men to read and write in their own language.
Within mere months a large part of the nation learned the new skill.
In short order literacy among the Cherokee and halfbreeds was higher than the average of white settlers.
And he did it all without the federal government. Phonics.
It’s the same as their character for “blips” — for some reason.
This happened. My little sister called me from college with an emergency. She was having trouble reading. She did not know phonics and “sight words” was not cutting it. I bought tutoring for her. It changed her life.
Also my youngest was taught phonics by me before school. At school they did sight words - I called it guess words. He was terrible at reading but great at making up stories.
I'll never forget sitting there while one boy tried so hard and was so mortified in front of us all. It was the first time I realized that an adult could be so mean,
That was mean. : (
胸。
Or Sally and Puff, either...
the infowarrior
we knew it all along...
Been reading all my life and started at 4. Have a decent vocabulary and can’t claim to “read/sound out” most words these days because when i see a word, my brain recognizes it “by sight”. It would be a step backwards to have to mentally go through the process for each word as if it was new to me.
胸大無腦
As in "big breasts, no brains', bimbo.
Of course! Exactly!!Phonics is a crutch. After all, the Chinese system of drawing words is functional, so sight reading works.
But when I call Phonics a “crutch,” that is not a criticism, not at all. If your leg is broken, crutches are what you need. And if you don’t know the vocabulary by sight - because you lack long experience of reading - phonics is what you need. Phonics is the booster rocket that gets you off the ground; sight reading takes over gradually and naturally by the experience - of voluminous reading.
I learned phonics and have no experience of sight reading instruction - but I can’t imagine that it would be anything better than the long way around the barn. It looks like it would have to be painful to try to learn that way. Instructing in sight reading is putting the cart before the horse.
The same principle applies in learning the individual letters - you see an “e” and recognize it instantly. A Kindergarten or first grade student who had no experience of recognizing an “e” must be allowed the time to learn it; you would have the same difficulty yourself if you suddenly were faced with an alphabet - even the one you are familiar with - in which the letter shapes were utterly unfamiliar. Your phonics skills would suddenly be grossly inadequate - and your sight reading ability would be zero.
Back in the 1970s one of the systems prople hung three Calcomp Z-80 mini computers off one of the mainframe as print servers. Named them...
Sysops (of which I was one): Who the h**l are Jerry Alice and Jip?
Systems guy: You should have learned that in grade school.
Sysops: WTH?
Systems guy: You know first reader, “See Jip run. Run Jip, run.”
Sysops: No, that’s Dick, Jane and Spot. Where are you *from*?
Systems guy: Maine.
Sysops: [rolling eyes] Oh.
LOL!
bookmark
RE: “trader/silversmith Sequoyah - George Gist- introduced his syllabary”:
A wonderful story. It does recapitulate how apparently all symbol languages segued into phonetic languages because the latter are much more efficient. But the part that seems almost supernatural is where it says that the natives learned to write their language in a matter of weeks. This is very interesting because these people have no experience with written language and yet the brain seems to be wired and ready to do it.
Meanwhile, our public schools can’t do it in a matter of years.
http://www.cherokee.org/AboutTheNation/History/Facts/SequoyahandtheCherokeeSyllabary.aspx
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