New Book On Phonics Explains How Logical English Is

A couple of billion Asians can.
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They are learning pictographs ( a simplified picture of an object). The clues for the meaning of the object is found within the simplified picture ( pictograph). Just as deaf children learn sign language of thousands of words, Asian children can learn the “signs” of their written language because the signs ( pictographs) of their written language actually LOOK like the real object.

A pictograph of an Asian word for “house” actually resembles a **house**! Therefore, is it easier to learn. Our English word, H*o*u*s*e*, looks nothing like a real house found on the child's street and therefore there is absolutely no clue in the shape of this word to prompt the memory.

By the way,...I suggest that you do a little research on how our alphabet came to be. Many of the letters at one time were pictographs for actual objects. The first sound of the word of the object then became the sound of what later became a letter in our alphabet.

By the way...I think and interesting study would be to compare the reading abilities of Asian children in Asia who are born deaf to those children in U.S. who are born deaf. Since the Asian pictograph symbols actually resemble the object, my bet is that Asian deaf children have a much better success in learning to read their pictograph-based written language.

really fluent readers don’t have time to sound out letters (or even words),
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Just like learning to fluently sight-read music notes on a page.

Personally, I have never met anyone who can fluently sight-read music who has learned to do it by a “whole-music” method.

Everyone I know who can sight read music fluently learned it one note at a time. Only with years of practice they can now quickly and seamlessly read groups of notes, recognize cord patterns and transitions, and accurately predict what is likely to come next.

If we don't use “whole music” methods to teach people to read music notation on a page, why would we think that “whole word” methods would work for learn to read English?

By the way, three of my children were Suzuki violin students. Yes, they did learn to hear and reproduce music on their violin as preschoolers,...BUT...by first grade their teacher was teaching them to sight-read music notation on a page. That happened ONE NOTE AT A TIME.

So we agree!

Yes, I—a person with little patience for rules— have been DELIGHTED to run into similar anecdotes about kids getting all excited because they grasped some rule.

My brother’s girl friend teaches 4-year-olds; she just told me how much the kids loved arranging themselves in ALPHABETICAL ORDER. Think about that!

Once you get it, you’ve got it forever.

That’s what was so insane about Whole Word. The kids never had anything certain. If you memorize “house” and the next day you see mouse, louse, douse, horse, houses, hound, housed, etc, you can’t be sure if it’s the same word or not. There are no rules, no tools, nothing fixed so you can DEDUCE your own answers. Nothing but memory and that is often unreliable.

Really, Whole Word is like memorizing hundreds of phone numbers. I read that Warren Beatty knew all the phone numbers of his many present and former girl friends. I don’t think I’ve ever known even 15-20 phone numbers at any time. For sure. Then there might be another 15-20 that you get but with one or two digits wrong. THAT is exactly like Whole Word....That’s what life is like for functional illiterates. There are several hundred words they see every day and know for sure (Burger King). But beyond that it’s increasingly a land of uncertainty and guessing.

> If you memorize “house” and the next day you see mouse, louse, douse, horse, houses, hound, housed, etc, you can’t be sure if it’s the same word or not. There are no rules, no tools, nothing fixed so you can DEDUCE your own answers. <

Yet there’s such a thing as learning by induction. Human beings (and less intelligent creatures too) spot patterns in their experience, and naturally learn from them. I agree that it helps to spell out rules for reading — and drill them when necessary — but if I see and hear ‘house’ (many times) and see and hear ‘mouse’ and ‘louse’ (many times), I’m probably going to guess that ‘douse’ ends with the same sound, even without formal instruction. I don’t know what to call it when the readers themselves figure out the sound pattern (perhaps “inductive” phonics?).

Wintertime, I agree that music students learn to read one note at a time, and I said at the beginning that I have no problem with phonics itself as a method of teaching beginners to read. I’m essentially in support of BruceDeitrickPrice’s position on that. My objections concern the more advanced levels of achievement.

I just can’t accept some of the earlier generalizations about fluency in reading. I believe nearly all fluent readers skip some of the letters of the words that they read (that’s why typos are sometimes hard to spot), and good speedreaders take in entire words or phrases at a glance.

Let me describe my own path in learning to read, though I don’t recall the details. I started off as a mediocre reader (my first clear memory of reading was of being in the second of three reading groups in second or third grade — Dick and Jane readers, a sight method or so I’ve heard, though I recall no details of learning to read in elementary school). I did have some instruction in the spelling of sounds in one of my later spelling books (and maybe before — I just don’t recall).

I drifted along in mediocrity, doing enough to avoid unsatisfactory grades but having little interest in academics, until about the age of twelve. Then my intellectual curiosity awakened, and I became a voracious reader (and not just of simple books — though I did like books about exploration — mostly I liked to pursue difficult subjects on my own). I don’t recall worrying much about the pronunciation of new words or names (I saw the name of the German writer ‘Goethe’ only in books, and for years thought it was pronounced like ‘Goth’ :-). The only conscious effort to improve my reading that I can recall — actually my vocabulary — is that I tried to read a paperback copy of Soule’s Dictionary of Synonyms, not exactly memorizing it but trying to learn as much as I could. That did greatly improve my passive vocabulary in a matter of months. I also read some vocabulary books that taught roots. Roots were taught in school too, but not as thoroughly.

The reason I mention my own path from being a mediocre reader to a very good one is that when, as an undergraduate in college, I took a pretest for a non-credit speedreading course, I already qualified at a speed of over 400 words a minute (with satisfactory comprehension). I didn’t ordinarily read at that speed, of course, but that’s how fast I could read when I pushed myself to the maximum. At the end of the course, I cracked 1000 words a minute. I confess that was really just fast skimming, though. I answered enough questions to qualify, but all I really got out of what I was “reading” was the gist.

Still, I recall quite well that I didn’t subvocalize at either 400 or 1000 words a minute. Quite the contrary I’d had to suppress subvocalizing to attain those speeds, and had done so in my ordinary reading to acquire a somewhat slower speed. Of course, whether people read at sixty words a minute or several hundred is of little importance compared with the difference between literacy and illiteracy. Acquiring great speed in reading is a secondary consideration. So I encourage you to promote phonics if you think that method is the best way to help most students acquire competence.

[Still posting my response to the other post, I’ll get to the next one in a minute.]

I think it’s a mistake, though, to use the claim that phonics produces fluency better than sight reading (if by ‘fluency’ you mean speeds greater than ordinary speech). However you become a competent reader — and you and BruceDeitrickPrice may be right that phonics is the best way to get there — if you want to go beyond mere competence and become very fast, I believe you need to suppress subvocalizing and take in as much as you can at one glance.

I no longer do that myself because in my old age I’m no longer in much of a hurry. :-) (If I were in a hurry, I wouldn’t take the time to write these long posts.) Also I enjoy reading more when I proceed at a leisurely pace and hear the words in my mind. Still, even at the normal speed of speech, I’m not deciphering the individual letters. I’m just glancing at enough of them to recognize the words, then saying them in my mind as my eyes move ahead. If I ever needed to go back to reading fast again, I’d suppress the subvocalizing and force myself to take in more at a single glance — because I know from personal experience I can do it that way. Here’s an account of speed reading at Wikipedia — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading. Most of what’s said there is consistent with what I’ve experienced.

> So?....Who is suggesting that phonics ( letter by letter reading) should be a permanent strategy for reading?

This is what I originally objected to in the review quoted in the first post of the thread: “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.”

That seems to imply that letter-by-letter reading is the best way to attain fluency. Maybe that’s true if you set the level that qualifies as fluency at a relatively slow speed. If it means very fast reading, though, I believe you have move beyond that and start doing the opposite — stop hearing the words in your mind, and instead take in wide expanses of letters and words at a single glance.

I agree that phonics may be best for teaching students to read, but once readers become competent, I think they’ll stop paying much attention to the sounds implied by the various letter combinations, and instead use minimum clues to anticipate the words (and, if they wish to attain great speeds, will stop imagining the sounds in their minds).

I just spent some time browsing through your improve-education.org site. Wow! You really do have a special interest in this topic. Though I can’t agree with everything I saw there, I distrust the educational establishment myself and oppose many aspects of it.

With respect to our major difference in this area, how to achieve fluency — if by that you mean great speed — I’ll point out that the Wikipedia article about subvocalization lends some support to your position. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization You may want to check out its sources and add them to your collection, if you haven’t done so already.

Some of what’s claimed there contradicts what I recall of my own experience, though. So I wouldn’t accept it myself without very good proof. I don’t doubt that some remnants of subvocalization remained when I could read very fast, but I’m sure that I increased my speed by trying to avoid saying the words in my mind. I didn’t care if some slight movement of my throat muscles remained. I was no longer trying to say everything.

I felt as if I were moving from one focal point on the line to the next, grabbing the next batch of information, without hearing the sounds that would have conveyed it — or even being very conscious of the written symbols in which it was conveyed. I’m sure I had to be seeing some of the letters, but the translation of those clues to what they represented was unconscious. Only when I encountered something important that I couldn’t understand would I slow down and consciously decipher. (When merely practicing to attain speed, I kept going, but when really reading, I’d slow down or even go back and rethink some things.)

I don’t expect others to put much stock in my personal recollections, though, and if there’s good evidence to support the opposite, then I suggest you check it out. The bare claims on the Wikipedia page don’t convince me.

The Chinese character meaning “horse” still looks a bit like a horse, with little vertical strokes that could be the horse’s legs. At least the older version of the character does (the mainland government has simplified the characters so their version doesn’t bear much resemblance to a horse). The Japanese character for “horse” is the same even though the Japanese word is different (Chinese “ma” vs. Japanese “uma”—perhaps in this case the Japanese word is based on the Chinese word).

Well, just keep in mind that as you debate proposed theory, we have the fact of 50,000,000 functional illiterates.

Why do we have them? How were they created? Mainly, the Education Establishment introduced a bogus method and then spent the next 75 years keeping everyone tied in knots. How convenient.

Here’s a good article on reading: “Nine Reading Experts Explain the Sad State of Reading”: www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/123851

I’ve taken no position on the elementary reading instruction that produced “50,000,000 functional illiterates” beyond expressing sympathy for your position, and admitting that you may be right in essentials. (I don’t lay nearly as much blame on sight reading as you do, though, and would suggest that other important causes must be taken into account.) My comments are mostly focused on how advanced readers can best progress from being fast to very fast, and on my recollections of how I managed to do that myself.

This forum is news based and fast-paced, so I hesitate to continue writing here at great length (though I don’t mind doing so). I’ve sent you a private message with a slew of further comments and personal recollections — good practice for speed-reading. :-)

Not so much letter-by-letter reading, but etymology seeking readers appreciate the linguistic vocabulary from Greek, Latin, and Hebrew source languages, which English, French, and German are so well combined in our Americanized dialect of English.

While phonetics might assist the academic skill of spelling and speaking, the educational system of syntax, semantics, and etymology are more fundamental to our thinking.

Knowing roots, prefixes, and suffixes does make understanding the multitude of English words much easier. It’s not as though they were random combinations of letters. A particular multisyllabic word may be new to us, but its parts often provide clues to its meaning. Once we spot the connection of one or more of its parts, it’s easy to fix in our memories. Take ‘multi’ (Latin ‘many’) in ‘multitude’ above. Know that, and you’re half way to knowing ‘multisyllabic’, ‘multiply’, ‘multifarious’, ‘multilateral’, ‘multicultural’, ‘multimedia’, and ‘multilingual’.

[Switching to the Greek root ‘poly-’, I could have used ‘polysyllabic’ above, and that would tie in with ‘polygamy’, ‘polyandry’, ‘polygon’, ‘polynomial’, and ‘Polynesia’.]

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