Posted on 04/21/2010 4:48:38 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
A reading coach in California sent me this question: “I would like to know how you respond to teachers who are married to sight-word drills and describe their rationale as, ‘Well, there are just so many words that don't follow any rules.’”
My answer is a longish rumination and probably not for the casual reader. But if you’ve wondered what Sight Words, Dolch Words, and the rest are really all about, this is a good place to start.
Remember, our Education Establishment has spent 80 years promoting what I believe is a hoax and a crime, and in the process they’ve done their best to make it impossible for anyone to think clearly about any aspect of reading. In fairness, these are devilishly clever people.
Untangling this mess isn’t easy. But it is fun.
“48: Sight Words??!! You Still Teach Sight Words??!!!”
http://improve-education.org/id75.html
My kid’s HS Spanish teacher is attempting to teach written Spanish, without teaching any spoken Spanish.
Guess how well that is working.
So, without telling us anything here, you are for” phonics.”
That’s at least what your article actually suggests.
Phonics is an excellent study and method 80% of the time. But you have to teach some sight words. One of my proudest moments as a parent was watching my daughter foul out of a spelling bee at the age of 7 by spelling “light” L-I-T-E. She dealt with a high pressure situation and when confronted by a word she didn’t know, knew that she didn’t know it, but still fell back on exactly the right rule.
That said, she still spelled it L-I-T-E. We broke out the dolch cards dealing with ‘-ght’ words after that and she had mastered the list and included the principle in her revised set of phonics rules.
English looks to be following the path of latin -- a global language that is losing native speakers and then dies out completely.
I truly believe the only hope is to revise the spelling rules of English. English can survive that.
My two daughters learned to read by sitting on my lap while I read their books to them. One learned phonically from my reading and pointing at the words, the other by whole words. The latter learned a little faster, but the former had less trouble with new words.
really? people who only learn by "sight words" really do become readers? avid readers? i used both to teach my kids... mainly phonics, with some sight words thrown in... i don't know how you can do absolutely no sight words... my youngest was reading at 2.5 yrs... my older son, who was 5-years old when we adopted him, learned to read in less than 5 months... the youngest had no idea he was learning to read being that he was so young...
I have a hard time understanding this article, because I don’t know the terminology. When I learned to read, we learned with the Dick and Jane books. It was easy for me, maybe not for some of the others, but it always made sense for me. They got progressively harder, I remember one time peeking in the back of the book (which we weren’t supposed to do) and saw the word magnificent. I was able to figure it out all by myself, and could hardly wait til we got to that point in the book. But I don’t know what “method” they were using - whatever it was, it worked.
If phonics is so great, how come they don’t spell it f o n i k s?
Dick and Jane books are sight words - controlled vocabulary. Not phonics
Dick and Jane books are sight words - controlled vocabulary. Not phonics
What would the King James Bible be? ... just wondering... as that seemed to work well for us, for a long time ... :-)
Where in tarnation did you come up with that one.
The number of English speakers grows daily. It's the international language. Sorry that the spelling is tough for you; but that doesn't justify spouting silly predictions about its demise.
Sheesh.
Dick and Jane had magnificent? Are you sure?
If you could figure out that word, you already knew phonics. That’s the beauty of phonics. You can figure out very big words.
With sight-words, you can read magnificent only if you have already memorized the shape or design of this long configuration.
As for the article, it’s not for the casual reader, as I said. It’s for people who have struggled with this issue, and want another take.
Using the Bible to teach reading would be a form of Sight Word teaching.
The old “horn” books are the best example of old school phonics education
No, you don't.
A properly-designed phonics curriculum would have taught your daughter about the phonetic rules governing words like "taught" and "light". English is, despite the conventional wisdom, a perfectly phonetic language.
The phonetic rules, however, are more complex than many other languages.
No way.
English is the second language in every major country in the world. Italian or Spanish speakers better hope they know enough English to get by when they venture into the world.
Sorry, it must not happen. You’d have a different language in Australia, London, Boston, Georgia, etc. It’s the printed language that holds us together.
Additionally, you would render obsolete all books, libraries, archives, etc.
English is just mildly inconsistent and annoying. Almost all of the so-called problems are part of the propaganda campaign against phonics. There’s no lie those people won’t tell!
If look-say had never been concocted, virtually everyone would be happily literate, not knowing they had somehow done something difficult. This was the case circa 1920.
I get the satire of your remark; however, the term “phonics” was derived from the Phoenicians, who were among the first to create symbols to represent sounds. These symbols later became the alphabet.
Even the Orton-Gillingham method of phonics instruction acknowledges the need to teach some sight words.
While I agree that 75 percent of our language is perfectly phonetic, particularly the higher level vocabulary derived from Latin and Greek, there exists a number of words that must really be memorized.
Or more likely, since the most successful capitalist country gets to employ cultural imperialism: Mandarin Chinese. :)
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