Posted on 01/11/2018 2:31:46 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
IMHO that is exactly right. A good reader sight reads, and only resorts to phonics when faced with an unusual - or even completely unknown - word. But that does not gainsay the fact that phonics is the edge of the wedge that gets sight words into the brain in the first place.Spell It Out: The Curious, Enthralling, and Extraordinary Story of English Spelling describes the fact that written English was synthesized out of the Roman 24-letter alphabet, with “j" and “w” added. The monks who did it were doing their best to make spellings phonetic. But as linguist John McWhorter argues in Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally) was inevitable, they never really had a chance. So, English is not uniformly phonetic. But then, Chinese and Japanese use ideographs, and that is, AFAIK, the big bomb of sight-reading. And I guess the Chinese successfully teach Chinese literacy . . .
Costco has had Bob Books at a reasonable price.
Congratulations on making a business out of helping people.
One thing that most smart teachers agree on, avoid the exceptions and the difficult words for a few years, maybe five or 10 years.
Later, when you’re doing 50 things correctly, you can handle the oddball situations one by one. I think most people absorb a great deal of weirdness, linguistically speaking, without knowing it is weird. For example we do this routinely with foreign words and unusual names. People are entitled to spell their names any way they want. It’s our job to accept it, learn it, and don’t make a big deal of it.
I notice a hostile tendency by our Education Establishment to fuss over the weird words, so they can reach the conclusion that English is a nutty language and not phonetic.
Are you being sarcastic? I hope not.
In the process of trying to change the way reading was taught, I ran a group for concerned parents, which included doing several talk radio shows. This resulted in many parents calling me and asking if I would teach their children to read, spell and write. I agreed to try and all of the kids became proficient readers and spellers. Their attitudes changed completely and their parents were thrilled.
During this time I also volunteered in the neighbourhood school, even though by this time my two were in a private high school. I tutored every morning in the school, free of charge. I worked with small groups, and helped about 24 children over the course of a year. I feel I was quite generous with my time, but, yes, I did charge parents to tutor their children and they were happy to receive the help.
I'm very interested. Could you share some references?
You learned English that way. The Roman alphabet, and all the languages that use some variant of it, are phonetic in nature. The same is true of Greek and Cyrillic.
The best reference would be:
“Medieval Schools” by Nicholas Orme
Good to know!
Thank you. I have ordered it. Thanks to the many monks at Amazon, busily copying manuscripts with quill pens, it arrives Sunday.
Yep. That’s because “sight reading’ creates shothill reading abilities, instead of how a phonetic method creates literacy.
You are welcome. Let me know how you like it.
No, I was very serious. Everybody should do the same thing. The US is a big mess. Ideally, every educated person would be in the tutoring business, basically, helping everyone else to catch up.
My apologies to you. I wasn’t sure, but I’m sorry that I misunderstood.
I was interested to learn that learning to read hasn’t changed much over the centuries (except for the stupid introduction of the look-say, whole-word approach). Kids first learned the alphabet and the typical sounds of the letters. Independently they memorized Paternoster and some other prayers. They were given prayer books with the alphabet and printed versions of the prayers. With little guidance, I imagine, they could gradually associate the sequence of letters in each printed word with the memorized sounds.
Also interesting: most kids learned to read first in Latin, because the prayers were in Latin. This makes the introduction to reading easier, because Latin is a more nearly phonetic language, without multiple ways of spelling the same sound or multiple different sounds from the same sequence of letters.
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