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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The posters of this thread as well as this forum are self selected for their reading fluency and their ability and willingness to write and many of the conclusions voiced hereing are a result of that attribute.
Phonics has worked well for many, many decades as it continues the phonically based learning patterns of early childhood. If it were used uniformly in the schools you would see a massive drop in illiteracy.
You don’t really understand word meanings until you learn foreign equivalents. It’s only then you fully understand the patterns of suffixes and prefixes. Typing forces you to learn spelling patterns through repetition. When you can sit down and type 20 pages of text without even trying, and you can pick up a magazine of a foreign language and pick out words with similar meanings that you have never seen before but you recognize the parts of the word, then you are literate.
I don’t think typing forces you to learn anything except where the keys of the keyboard are. I don’t look at the words I am typing when I type. I just type. I could even be typing a bunch of things that are not spelled correctly. In fact, that’s how I learned to type. I
I do think you are wrong about literacy. To put it bluntly, it’s offensive to those of us that don’t know a foreign language.
By the way, it’s not that hard to figure out the meaning of some foreign words. For example, it’s really easy to figure out what grandioso means, and there are lots of words like that in Spanish, French, and Italian.
You can only do that with Latin based languages. You would not be able to do that with Mandarin or Japanese.
So basically, you are saying you are only truly literate if you know another Latin based foreign language.
My daughter is a “family” Social worker..dealing with failing families. That experience plus her own 4 children have convinced her that each child has a set point to learn to read.. teaching them too early accomplishes nothing except frustration...BUT waiting too late may miss the window of opportunity .
You weren’t reading sight-words. Your brain cracked phonics, as often happens. Your brain was reading syllables. I believe. As the article says, like some kids “get” music.
I only mention this because one of the biggest problems we have when trying to eliminate sight-words is that many smart people sincerely believe the method worked for them. So they don’t oppose it. Alas.
You just have to ask this question; did you suddenly at the age of 5 or 7 memorize 10,000 designs? 25,000 designs?? Not humanly possible.
PS: I am also one of those people who learned to read almost automatically.
Even as an adult, I still don’t know any phonics rules. So I’m not promoting a heavy-handed regime. (I think you could create a one-year program of poems, singing, dramatic reading, jokes, etc, with no mention of phonics or sight-words, and MOST kids would figure out reading.)
But Marva Collins said she taught ALL her students to read with phonics by Christmas of the first year. Age not important. Hard to beat that efficiency.
Flesch, Blumenfeld and Engelmann, the grand men of American education, all say the same thing: be patient, don’t push, bring the kids along easily.
Main point is that sight-words don’t work and are an illusion. If you have any curiosity about this, please check my YouTube video titled “Phonics vs. Sight-words” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F63zjs-jChY
and many other titles that will come up with it.
Law students are required to know latin for good reason. I would say law students are the most literate of all of us. btw, I’m not fluent in any language other than english. I only know the very basics of french and spanish, and mostly only the written forms, not so much the spoken forms. 3 years of french in highschool and spanish just from picking things up here and there.
No. We never did use phonics. However, we probably all knew the alphabet first.
Here is how it happens: there is a little SIMPLE picture book (with only a few words or a sentence per page) that you love. Mommy reads it to you every day, sometimes three times a sitting. Pretty soon, you can tell the story in your own words too, and turn the pages at the right times. Then you start to notice that wherever they talk about the rabit, there is that word on that page. RABBIT. So you identify that word with the rabbit. When they tell him to STOP, there is that word STOP. So you learn the word STOP. And there you are in your carseat one day and see a stop sign and you crow, "Dat says STOP!" It happens every day.
Possibly, phonics must be taught to the less verbally gifted so that they won’t be left behind. If you teach whole-word only, you could end up with only the very brightest kids reading. Just a guess.
I used to think that too, until my late-talking child with developmental delays ALSO cracked the code and began to sight read. He can read anything now, though he tests very low on IQ etc.
No, you are wrong. I cracked the code, as did 2/3 of my kids. And I was fascinated with my first (he did have a genius IQ but also Asperger's - that affects the age at which he did this, nothing more) on exactly how he did it, so we would experiment. For example, in an ice cream store, my friend told my two-year-old that this word (on the label of an ice cream bin, on a dark tag with weird font) says CHOCOLATE. He did NOT know that word before. A few days later I saw the word written somewhere, different style, font, whatever, and asked him what that said. He did not take a millisecond to answer "chocolate."
They REALLY DO memorize the pattern of the letters. The ONLY rudiment he had before literally CRACKING the code (besides being read to all the time) was knowing the alphabet. He was not even taught the SOUNDS of the alphabet (for which every young child should receive the video The Letter Factory because they now all learn the sounds effortlessly from that genius video).
I appreciate your argument that phonics is valuable. It's pricelessly valuable. But if anyone doesn't need it, they will not be harmed or dyslexic or anything. Phonics is one good way to DECIPHER the code of the language. If the kid alread deciphered it, that's great too.
It looks like you learned to “speed read” at any early age. Most people would have to be taught to read that way. Lucky for you!
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