Posted on 02/18/2011 1:01:50 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
Following is review on Amazon:::::
"Memo To Teachers: Come Back To Real Reading--
Starting in 1931, the Education Establishment unleashed Look-Say upon the children of the United States. The result was a rising tide of illiteracy. The number of functional illiterates now exceeds 50,000,000.
The so-called experts who engineered this decline have shown a demonic cleverness in attacking the common sense of phonics, while piling up sophistries that supposedly justify the hoax of Whole Word or Sight Words. It is against this backdrop that Denise Eide writes her book "Uncovering the Logic of English."
Eide quantifies our unnecessary crisis: "The statistics are both numbing and consistent. 32% of fourth graders read well, 34% test below proficiency, and 34% cannot read. Every time I meet an elementary school teacher, I ask if this reflects their experience. They all say it does."
Think of Denise Eide as a professor of phonics. She has laid out all the rules that govern English spelling and pronunciation in an appealing way. Probably every elementary school teacher should have this book; and I suspect there might be some Scrabble and crossword-puzzle fanatics who would enjoy learning the technical aspects of English. (For example, did you know that no English words end with the letters i, u, v and j? Words that do have been borrowed from a foreign language.)
Eide acknowledges that "it is not as easy to learn and spell English as it is most other phonetic languages. Yet a finite number of tools unlock the mystery of 98% of the words in the English language. When these 104 tools are presented, all students can succeed." (Rudolf Flesch, in his 1981 book "Why Johnny STILL Can't Read," used a similar percentage, stating that 97.4% of English spelling is phonetic.)
REVIEW CONTINUES BELOW...
(Excerpt) Read more at amazon.com ...
One of the delights of moving to The South is discovering
that "y'all" is really singular ... "all y'all" is plural.
Who knew?
Yes, but if I understand it correctly, even those pictograms share certain root syllable/symbols within them. Each and every symbol/word is not necessarily unique. It's not exactly phonetic but not exclusively whole word either. Can anyone here verify this for me?
Coincidentally, I JUST got back from Target with Phase 1 of Hooked on Phonics for my 4 year old daughter. :)
My wife and I have taught our granddaughter phonics since she showed an interest in reading after being read to most every night from age of 2 or 3. Now in Kindergarten she has been tested as reading at 4th grade level and quickly zooming past that. The Sight Words method of teaching frustrates her to no end.
The books that are sent home for practice are really junk. Very limited in words. It is hard to read through these books as the sentence structure makes no sense.
Sight Words method is another example of junk science that was passed down by the great minds of the ivory towers. Then blindly accepted as gospel without question by the education establishment.
Not a wonder that half of the kids cannot read. Don't get me started on Math and Science......
True southerners are born knowing this. I came from California, so it took me awhile to catch on.
This is a series I’m glad to see come back:
Well, both are plural...it’s just that “y’all” can be a subset of “all y’all”, in which case it really means “summa y’all”. So you have to add the “all” in there to be clear that you mean the whole group.
By the way, I knew a guy from the Midwest — I can’t remember where — who used “yins” to indicate the plural “you”. I had heard “yous” and “you guys” from non-Southerners before, but that one was a new one on me.
And you wonder why there are Asian Tiger Mothers with the idea that learning is long, slow hard work?
Phonics works and produces good readers and spellers and very few ADD and ADHD problems. By the way , phonemic awareness is not the same thing but allows many teachers to assure parents they are USING phonics in their classrooms. SOUNDS like the same thing doesn't it?
Well, I think I can see why Johnnie still can't read.
**** “It’s an abbreviated form of “y’all”.” *****
Thank you!
That’s what we need to get back to in our Schools, Proper English!
:^) TT
Thru is, IIRC, a bastardized form of “through.”
Given a couple of billion [2bn] “1 in 100” is 20 Million.
You need to do more crossword puzzles, quite evidently. Then, likely, you wouldn't make such easily disproved generalisations about English/American spelling.
A fact which would probably become evident if we heard you speak ... but your writing is indistinguishable (to me) from that of any well educated American.
This isn’t new. This is how I was taught to read in the 50’s. I can assure you that in my fourth grade class only about 10-15% tested below proficiency and all could read.
Thank you very much; to hear (read) that is a relief, as I am very self-concious, in that I don’t really know how I talk differently.
I tend to remain silent in English-speaking company.
"You" goes back to a dative & accusative form of "ye" (Anglo-Saxon was inflected like Latin and other Indo-European languages). We didn't get any pronouns from French, at least none that comes to mind, but we did get ?they" and "their" from Old Norse (thanks to the Viking settlements in parts of England)--but "them" seems to be of Anglo-Saxon origin.
"Thou" is also a word of Anglo-Saxon origins that ends in -u.
We'll really be in trouble if English is ever forced to return all of its loanwords from other languages.
> “Personally, I’m persuaded that almost no one reads fluently using Sight Words. Many people learn to read with Sight Words in the sense that they use them as a stepping stone, finally seeing the phonics inside the Sight Words. But probably not even one person in 100 has such a retentive memory that they can actually memorize thousands and thousands of Sight Words, and recall them instantly.” <
I think the opposite is true. However they started to read (and I have no problem with phonics as a method of teaching), really fluent readers don’t have time to sound out letters (or even words), not when they are reading hundreds of words a minute. They take in complete words and even phrases at a single glance.
Doing so doesn’t require great intelligence. After all, imagine how many times we have seen most of the words in a typical English sentence. I’m in my sixties now, and I’ve probably seen every word in the previous sentence at least a hundred thousand times. Regular readers of Free Republic have seen most of them a thousand times on this forum alone. Try counting how often words such as ‘we’, ‘have’, ‘seen’, ‘of’, ‘the’, and ‘a’ appear just in the posts of a single day. Even slightly less common words like ‘imagine’, ‘times’, ‘most’, ‘typical’, and ‘sentence’ are easy for fluent readers because we’ve seen them many thousands of times.
What, they don't like kids to be truly EDUCATED? ;o)
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