Posted on 12/27/2010 7:18:17 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
There are two ways to teach children to read.
1) Whole Word enthusiasts say that children must memorize the shapes of words one by one, just as the Chinese memorize their ideograms. This is the wrong way.
English has far too many words for this approach ever to be considered.
Even if an industrious child could memorize 2,000 word-shapes (which is extremely difficult and takes MANY years), that child would still be functionally illiterate. The vast majority of the English language remains unknown.
Just as bad, words the child supposedly knows are rarely known with automaticity. Sight-word readers typically stumble, hesitate and sweat as they try to remember the meanings.
Furthermore, every English letter and word appears in a bewildering number of variations. Even if a child memorizes “bright,” it’s not likely that the child would recognize “BRIGHT.”
Whole Word is a Ponzi scheme. It creates an illusion of early success. A child might memorize 50 words, and seem to be reading. The bitter reality, however, is that things never get faster or easier.
There’s more bad news. After a few years, the child is increasingly adrift in a maddening vortex of words, some recognized, many half-known and slowly recognized if at all, and many thousands more not known at all and necessarily guessed at. Each sentence is a minefield, and might never be truly deciphered.
Note that the child speaks English all day with perfect fluency. But printed English has become an alien blur, an oozing wound. Words actually seem to slide on the page. Where there should be meaning, there is only mystification and pathology. Educators call this state dyslexia and typically try to pretend that the child was born with it. A more honest name might be schoolitis....
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Then how do you explain that I was reading on a third grade level in kindergarten, with no phonics? Ditto my younger siblings.
I find this article simplistic. It sounds like it was written by a liberal.
Sight words are ideal for children under the age of three, the ideal time to teach reading. When a child learns enough sight words the phonetics comes with it over time. Phonetics (without sight words) is contrived and less understandable for very young children.
Yes but how well do you learn new words.
Somewhere around here is a picture of me as a toddler sitting in bed “reading” a book in the dark. The book was upside down but it showed an eagerness to read that’s always been typical in my family.
My daughter at barely 4 learned phonics, it’s not that hard. With that basic beginning she grew her vocabulary on her own and was reading well above her age.
Shullbit. Whoops, my dyslexia is showing.
While there is nothing wrong with teaching kids phonics, English is the least “behaving” language to read and then pronounce.
Second, kids who crack the code by themselves memorize the words, then literally CRACK the CODE of English. Two of my three have done it. One is a high-IQ genius type who cracked the code of reading at 2.5 years of age, and the other one is developmentally delayed, and still taught himself to read that same way (because we homeschool, and I didn’t want to pressure him into learning too early for his development, but he surprised us!), at a later age. It’s quite normal.
Kids like my two very different sons (the middle one learned to read the phonics way by his kindergarten teacher, also a great way to learn) learn to read by using memorization skills, context (the story, the pictures) and they read lifelong and perfectly fine this way. Neither of my kids who learned this way has dyslexia, problems spelling, etc. In fact, they spell excellently, because they use the crazy English language when they write, the anti-logic language that they read, so they remember that tough is spelled “tough” and don’t write “tuff,” like a phonics learner could understandably do.
English is easy to learn to speak, but it’s hard to read and write because it doesn’t obey its own rules as do German and Italian, etc.
Give kids a break. However they learn to read is FINE. These posts talking about sight reading being dangerous are Pull of Foop.
Books are still the number one gift in my family.
My sister gave me a children’s book about Obama as a gag the other day. The tag she wrote said “Because you’re never too old to believe in fairy tails”. LOL
Context - the surrounding words I already knew.
Boy was I surprised when I found out how "Archaeopteryx" was actually pronounced, though.
Not to be pretentious, but I'm an anomaly, obviously. I was very fortunate to basically just have good genes for reading comprehension; I also had a good environment, was the last of 5 kids with the nearest sister 10 years older than me, giving me essentially extra parents, and was read to a lot, but other than that, there was nothing particularly special about my upbringing. Neither of my parents went to college, but they were smart people.
However, my experience suggests to me that there probably is a substantial segment of kids for whom sight-reading is going to be more effective than phonics. As has been mentioned, you're eventually going to be sight-reading anyway as an adult. There's perhaps 1-2% of kids such as myself that don't actually need to be "taught" to read at all. I'll take a SWAG and say there are probably another 10-20% of kids for whom phonics is a waste of time, and they should start out sight-reading.
Wow, what kids have you been hanging around? You really think very low of children. Both my admittedly very bright boy and my boy with serious intelligence delays, once they knew a word, recognized it not only in capitals but also in different fonts, and - surprising even to me - in handwritten script. A child's brain is quite incredible.
If you learn to read that’s great, any way you can. I just feel that you are at a disadvantage if you only learn by sight words.
I hope you two realize that the talent (or curse) that you both enjoy is the exception, rather than the rule.
Phonics didn't exist when I learned how to read, but sounding out syllables was the method I was blessed (or cursed) with.
Having subsequently learned Latin, Greek and French, my mind boggles at the suggestion that I could have done it as easily having to recognize entire words in those three languages in addition to English.
This reminds me of when I was little. (Yes, I too taught myself to read at 3, just by memorizing my favorite books.) I actually remember this, which took place when I was about 4.
I had a little kids' magazine, and in it was an illustrated story called "How the Squirrel Lost His Patience." That last word, "patience," was unfamiliar to me. So I decided it said "panties." I laughed myself SILLY through that whole story!!! It was hilarious, my way!
Basically, when you sight read and don't know a word, you let context fill it in. Eventually you become familiar with an awful lot of words, if you read enough.
I'd disagree with you. Phonics, in English, only helps a child LEARN what reading is. It helps him decipher the CODE, carefully, bit by bit. It's a great tool.
However, once the child "gets" it, that these letters form words, have sounds, and are meaningfully grouped, that child will be "sight learning" for the rest of his life. There are no phonics readers after a year of so of reading.
So I'd say that it's a disadvantage not to learn how to read. Either way. I am sure there are some children who benefit more from one or the other, but both methods are good for deciphering the code, though in the long run, the ones who crack the code on their own are already on their way to lifelong sight reading. The others will slowly approach the same.
I will give you this, though: I do not believe you can force a child to sight read. They either "get" the code or they don't. You can somewhat FORCE the phonics. Not sure what advantage any kind of forced learning is, but then again, I prefer learning to read to be at the child's motivation and not the teacher's.
In the early 60's my Mom had me read out loud to her while she was fix'n supper. That was my biggest help in reading. The problem was that my brain would skip printed words. Reading out loud exposed the gaps and forced my brain to bring those words back in to make a complete sentence.
It wasn't until college when a gal I was 'working' with discovered I was a dyslexic.
That was the reason I had to proof read everything several times and pay another gal a bucket of ice cream (Gandys) to do the final type my papers. Omitting words while typing did not make for a good grade.
Eh, the whole "Phonics Uber Alles" stuff is definitely, and unfortunately, associated with Conservative politics.
Don't get me wrong - I was subjected to idiotic Left-wing education "theory" when I was in my "open classroom" elementary school in the 1970s - the theory being that kids would be "enriched" by "interacting" with other classes. Thus each grade had four classes, but no walls between them.
Of course, in every such school, in about a millisecond, the teachers frantically tried to build walls out of cabinets and any other furniture they could find between the classes so they could have some semblance of order.
In the case of this whole phonics thing, though, as with many things, the truth is somewhere in between - some kids need it, some kids don't.
Obviously school had nothing to do with any of that, and by the time I was in school I was amazed that so many other children can't just glance at a page and "take it all in" as I often did. They couldn't read at all, imagine that! At some point a couple of psychologists showed up for some research and our class was picked as a sample. They gave a page of some text that children would understand, asked to read it, and then asked to tell them what the story was all about. Of course they measured time and all that. I think I was done with the story in 10-15 seconds, and they were quite impressed, I believe :-)
I don't read words glyph by glyph. That would be too slow. I recognize words and sequences of words. I also filter what is and what isn't important, in real time. This allows me to get a summary of a page within seconds; then I can focus on interesting parts, or read it all, or none. I will read unfamiliar words one character at a time, of course. There aren't too many of those left, except in some niche areas.
The benefit of this method is very obvious. Human eye doesn't just see one tiny dot in front of us; we see the whole 180 degrees, with various acuity and stereo perception. Generally one can say that everything within a 5 degree cone is sharp and can be seen at once. This area contains not just one letter - it contains a quarter of a page! If only you could process all that in parallel, instead of sequentially recognizing one character at a time, the speed of reading would be greatly improved. And that's exactly how it works.
I have no idea if this is suitable for everyone or for just me or for some group in between. This is how I read, and nobody was teaching me to read this way. It just came naturally. A side effect is that I see typos where other people miss them; a handy skill for a computer programmer. Those typos are seen as "something is wrong here" because the word doesn't look right. As another side effect, I have only some minimal understanding of the rules of the language; I seldom need them because I just remember how things are to be written.
But if I were to guess, this is not suitable for everyone. This method depends on a good associative memory (and on a good memory in general.) And besides, it's not like I completely ignored the principles of the written language; I know pretty well what those letters are there for, and I can even make a new word now and then if necessary :-)
All in all, I think the "one size fits all" approach is the problem here. It is certainly safe to start with phonetic method; but if a student is capable of doing more, we shouldn't build a brick wall for him, slowing him down only to allow his or her classmates to catch up.
Typically phonics is used up to roughly the third grade reading equivalent. It’s the foundational starting gate. From that point on you transition to majority whole word / whole language focus. Typically folks that are third grade level or higher reading level wise are able to tackle new words phonetically if needed on their own and move along quickly...
The above is a common strategy used by special education teachers when given students in middle school who somehow got through K-6 unnoticed. I’ve watched these teachers get ‘em caught up in about 6-8 months on average. Most were twice my age, ex-military, ex-nursing and had already raised kids and grandkids....i.e., been there, done that, seen-it-all kinda folks.
=8-)
You are right. The “experts” went from the fact that adult readers recognize words to the method of teaching whole words from the start. This is like teaching a baby to run before it can walk or even crawl. You can’t go backwards from the end result to the method. Why are they so stupid? Does it have something to do with being “educators”?
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