Bogus reading instruction is the 800-pound quack in many classrooms

Edarticle ^ | June 8, 2013 | Bruce Deitrick Price

[Liberty Wins]

Here’s the proof the “experts” know that phonics works. Most school districts receive considerable money from Uncle Sam for remedial reading programs. Kids who have difficulty with reading end up in those classes, where they are taught PHONICS.

Follow the money.

[ntnychik]

Bttt.

[Tainan]

"How do chinese kids learn to read Chinese?"

Not very easily.
Repetition is the main thing used in teaching Chinese language (writing and speaking are taught separately).
There is also a "sound-like" techniques used called "Bo Po Mo Fo" which uses "sound-like" pictograms to learn how the combinations of pictograms should work together.
It is very hard. But it is mostly repetition.

My Son just came into my office and I asked him. He is 18 and a recent high school graduate.
He basically said the same thing as above - but added "It's no that hard. We used Bo Po Mo Fo and learned the sounds and then learned to put them together. It's only 3 pictograms, at most, for most words and then an accent mark. Tone rising, tone falling, or tone remaining flat, per word."

Trust me...it's hard...very very hard.

[dfwgator]

SEE SPOT RUN. SEE THE DOG RUN. OH OH OH SEE JANE RUN. SEE DICK RUN. SEE DICK FALL DOWN. SEE JANE LAUGH.

OH SEE THE DEER
DOES THE DEER HAVE A LITTLE DOE?

Sointenly, Two Bucks!

[Tainan]

Close...in Mandarin...中国, Zhōngguó
"china" in Chinese

[Tainan]

And does eat oats and mares eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.
Kids eat ivy too...wouldn't you?

[Tainan]

Although, what I presented is "Simplified Chinese"( and not "Traditional Chinese."

Which gets us into a whole other can of worms lingo-wise.

A good read on this is one by Wally Guo at:
What are the differences between Chinese Simplified and Chinese Traditional.

[terycarl]

don’t people like the Chinese and Japanese learn by sight..they certainly can’t use phonics.

[I still care]

Back in the early 90’s I had to take my child out of public school because at the age of 12 and after years of intensive effort by reading specialists he couldn’t even read a kindergarten book. They told me I would just have to accept my child would never really read.

After major arguments with district social workers and such I pulled out a library phonics book by Nancy Stevenson for dyslexic children and had taught him to read in a matter of a few weeks. They still chased me down and actually came to my house and tried to stop me from using phonics!

It was at that point I realize how clueless professional educators can be. It’s not that they didn’t care; they did. But they just “knew the best way to do it” and that was that.

[reed13k]

Actually the japanese use both traditional chinese characters (kanji in Japanese) and a syllabary system that is phoenitic (hiragana). They found that the Chinese wasn sufficient to cover all aspects of the Japanese language so they combined them. They did it again in the 1900s when they created a romanization syllabary specifically to be used for foreign words transliterated into Japanese...the new syllabary was called katakana. Katakana has the exact same pronunciation as hiragana but a slightly different set of characters. So while the Kanji has an idea behind it’s origin, the hiragana and katakana has phoenitics. Oh and if they use western letters then it is called romanji.

Interestingly I was worried about my younger daughter reading at one point because she was a bit slower than her sister who devoured books by age 5. The school was using sight words to a limited degree and I was driving phoenetics at home when I read to them prior to bed time. One day I walked into her room and she looked up at me from a book with eyes as big as saucers. “Dad,” she said, “it’s like a movie in my head.” My reply was a big grin and “Well I don’t need to be concerned about that anymore do I.” Ever since she’s been reading like crazy but does tend to be a bit more selective in what she will invest her time in compared to her sister.

[TomGuy]

Then, there is this:

Scrambled Words

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

It seems that it doesn't matter what order the letters of a word are in; as long as the first and last letters are in the proper place, your brain can unscramble the rest of the word and make it readable.

[Cincinatus]

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

How the heck are you able to look at my Word documents?

[old and tired]

Most kids can learn to read simply by watching along as they are being read to. WHole word, phonics, it just doesn't matter for most of us. In my own family, we have a bunch of early readers - most of my own children and grandchildren were able to read before 4 years of age, and several of them were able to read before age 2. If they received any phonics instruction, it was limited to Dr. Seuss' "Big A, Little A, what begins with A?" Some people just pick up reading and it doesn't matter what the school does as these kids will read anyway.

HOWEVER, there are some people who really need phonics. We have a grandson who struggled mightily learning to read. In March of second grade he could barely get through Go Dog Go! without assistance. He began receiving instruction in the Wilson Method that same March. Wilson has been described to me as "phonics on steroids." By September of that same year, a mere 6 months later, he could struggle through the Ready Freddy series with some help. I am happy to report that by March of this year - so one year after beginning the Wilson method - the boy can read the Magic Treehouse series completely on his own. In other words, he's reading at grade level. I'm actually tearing up as I'm typing that.

Unfortunately, Wilson is a one on one method and it's not currently possible for schools to spend that kind of money. However, most kids don't need it. I think schools should spend less money trying to teach everyone to read. Let the bulk of the kids learn organically and focus efforts and funding on those kids who can't read. The Wilson Method is costing my daughter $110 per week - most families don't have that. Thank God they do. Yet, without the Wilson Method, I have no doubt my grandson would be struggling along and his self esteem would be suffering mightily.

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

Here’s a short response to your good question about how kids learn Chinese.

The English language has 100,000 up to 1 million words. Chinese has maybe 5- or 10,000 words for ordinary people. They achieve this minimalism by getting rid of all the small words. “No pain, no gain” is a typical Chinese sentence.

Second, all the Chinese ideograms, just like Egyptian hieroglyphics, start from a pictorial basis. So each ideogram has some clues in there, some reminders of the word’s past. And note that the ideograms do not have upper and lower case or any other variations. They are designed to be read visually and each character has distinctive features that make this easy.

Third, the Chinese do what you have to do if you have a symbol language, which is to make the students practice all the time, drawing the symbols, over and over and over. Learning Chinese means endless calligraphy.

This was one of the giveaways going back to 1931 that the education establishment was engaged in a hoax. They actually said that the children just have to be shown the word, and they will know it, almost like waving a magic line. But English words look a lot alike. There’s so many of them. And if you have any hope of remembering even a simple word like house, you have to draw it over and over and over again. But this was never required in our public schools.

---

And really, from what I can tell, if you frankly admitted you were trying to prepare people that you could control, then you would just eliminate English vocabulary until you had perhaps 800 essential words, and you printed and presented these words the same way all the time (e.g., uppercase), and you made the children draw them over and over, then you could perhaps create a whole population that was reading via whole word. They would probably be hesitant, plotting readers. The amount of material they can read would be very limited and simple..... And in fact this weird extreme fantasy seems to be what was behind whole word all along. The commissars would create a semi-literate population, incapable of much abstract thought, without ever admitting that’s what they were doing. Remember, that was the whole point of Orwell’s Newspeak.

This little video tries to explain sight-words versus phonics in a few minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdiWO_Ntdxw

[ntnychik]

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