Blame sight-words. The essential fallacy here is that children are taught to NAME words, not to READ words. Introducing this fallacy into the schools is best understood as a colossal mistake. Or a crime of epic proportions.
2) Common sense: English is a phonetic language and obviously must be taught phonetically. That is, children are taught that printed letters represent sounds. Which is all that phonetic means.
Learn the 26 letters and the sounds they represent, and you are halfway home. Learn how two or three letters can blend together to form a new sound. Letters make syllables; and syllables make words.
Learning to read is like learning to play the piano. You learn the scales. You take baby steps. You practice. Each week you can do a little more. In a few months you are playing little songs. (Or reading little stories. Every highly regarded phonics program makes the same claim, a short lesson each day for four months will teach a child to read. Within a year, they can select their own books. Any good program plus patience, poetry, and the passage of time equals success.)
Phonics appears most difficult at the beginning. There seem to be a lot of little details and rules to deal with. This alleged difficulty was used by the “experts” to beat up on phonics. The main initial argument for sight-words was that learning phonics was boring and hard work, especially for the slower kids. So what was the idiotic answer? Make them memorize the English language one word at a time. Talk about boring, hard work that never ends!
Ironically, it turns out that the slower kids seem to be the ones that most need these details and rules. According to Joan Dunn, a teacher: “They want to be taught step by step, so that they can see their progress. The duller they are, the more important and immediate is this need."
That’s a powerful insight. Simply recall a subject that was VERY difficult for you; and you immediately know how most ordinary people want to be taught most subjects. With regard to reading, the more verbal kids can just pick it up, as musical kids will pick up music. But the slower kids desperately want to know the phonics details because those details give the child control over print. English has its inconsistencies but far too much is made of them. Typically, sounding out words will get you to the word or close. Sight-words, if you’re not totally sure, are like faces you see in a crowd--do you know that person? Did you ever meet that person. How can you be sure??
The astonishing thing for me when I look at videos on YouTube and the internet generally, there is so much material still pushing sight-words, and in a very smug way, despite the horrific fact that we have 50,000,000 functional illiterates. Isn’t that number obvious proof that the “experts” pushing sight-words don’t know what they’re doing? (The experts might counter that they are pushing sight-words mainly in the early grades; but once the whole-word reflex is developed, real reading becomes much more difficult!)
QED: Get sight-words out of the schools. Test the various phonics programs against each other to find the best. But even bad phonics is better than a “good” sight-word curriculum.
Because many schools insist on being obtuse, parents should protect their kids by teaching them letters and sounds early on. The basic idea is to familiarize a child with how English works. If the child later attends a school with phonics instruction, it will be very easy. If the child attends a school using sight-words, the child has been inoculated to a large degree. Once the child understands that letters on the page stand for sounds, that child is safe from the worst ravages of sight-words.
. ...For more on why sight-words are a dead-end, see “42: Reading Resources” on Improve-Education.org. This article also includes a list of phonics programs.
. ....All three videos deal with aspects of this discussion. (Titles left to right are: “Preemptive Reading -- Teach Your Child Early”; "Why Sight-Words Prevent Reading and Create Dyslexia"; "The Biggest Crime in American History."
. END ARTICLE .
If you want to learn English then learn Latin so that you can figure out what words mean.
Chinese is a picture language, English is not. Who ever heard of teaching English in this way? It’s lunacy.
“Why Johnny Can’t Read” was published in 1955, before I was born. I used the appendix as phonics lessons for my own sons because they were still using sight words in the 1990s.
I would say “sight words” is what people figure out on their own AFTER they learn how to read. You don’t truly know the english language until you’ve had time with at least one other language, and learned to type. I would say learn the basics of french and spanish and be able to type 50 words a minute(in english). Until then, you are only semi literate.
But one odd fact remains ... after 20 years or so of heavy reading, good readers are actually look-seeing ....except for new words. But one must start with phonics ... the alphabet "code."
BTW, it turns out that not all Egyptian hieroglyphics were not really "symbols," but sounds! IOW, a picture of a hawk did not necessarily mean "Hawk," but the "H" sound sort of thing. But just to make it interesting, sometimes the pictograph meant the picture!
BTW, I have actually ... me, no teacher here ... taught "dyslexic" kids to puzzle out words based on phonics ... Look at a "Hardy Boys" novel from the 1920s. You would find that a HS kid of today couldn't make it through a page!
Just from my personal perspective, I can’t fathom phonetics at all. It can’t be right for all children.
I was reading at 4 (was just read to a lot, no pre-school)and have NEVER “sounded out” a word in my entire life. In third grade I was reading at a 12th grade level, and I scored 780 on the SAT verbal, and 800 on the GRE verbal.
I’ve always sight-read or “whole word” read.
Had some embarassment over mispronouncing words I knew but had never heard or sounded out, but I can’t fathom how tedious it must be to have to learn to read by sounding out syllables.
On the other hand, I have some sort of learning disorder about learning foreign languages - just hopeless at all three of them I tried.
I learned to sight read, and have somehow limped along through grade school,high school and college, have a professional career and raise a literate family of college grads..
Maybe those “functional illiterates” have issues other than reading methods
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWN9rTc08GU&feature=related
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think however way people learn how to read the important thing is to make reading pleasurable. Some people never find the pleasure in it — it is as onerous as reading an instruction manual.
Baloney. Or for you, bologna.
bookmark
Honestly, a great teacher will use both phonics and sight learning with a touch of latin.
Phonics is important to understand each letter and sound and give a child the ability to sound out a word BUT there are lots of kids that read phonetically and don’t understand a single thing they just read. They have no reading comprehension. It is just words to them. They don’t realize there is a context and story.
Sight words are very important to teach children because there are some words that simply cannot be sounded out. The word THE is a good example.
Latin is excellent to teach the root of the word and emphasize meaning.
My daughter was taught phonics and sight words with an emphasis on comprehension. She loves reading and has no problems.
There is no single solution or method to teach reading and anyone claiming there is doesn’t understand how children learn.
When my daughter (who has speech problems due to a brain injury) was in 3rd grade, I complained about her reading. She got 100 percent on her spelling tests, but she still couldn’t read.
The district said she was okay, but I knew better. I had an independent evaluation done on her, and they concluded that she had poor phonemic awareness and other problems.
We put her in a private school with a multi-sensory, phonics based reading program, and my daughter finally learned how to read.
It was the best thing we did for our daughter. I’m very glad that we ignored what the district was saying. She would have struggled with reading for years if we hadn’t put her in that reading program.
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.