Posted on 12/05/2019 4:42:33 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
Important Ed News ///
Phonics is winning, finally, at long last, after 85 stupid years, after 50 million functional illiterates, after one of the most stubborn subversive schemes against common sense ever to brutalize a country. Finally, the one correct way to teach reading is again embraced as the one correct way to teach reading.
Go ahead, shout "OMG." The fix has been in for so many dumbed down decades that many people may have given up hope. You may think this is now crazy optimism on my part. But I will show you some signs that things have suddenly and surely changed.
First, conservatives must note that the New York Times is finally on the right side of a major debate. It was on the wrong side for a long, long time. I don't know what finally woke those people up. Toward the end of 2018, a seminal article appeared: "Why Are We Still Teaching Reading the Wrong Way?" by Emily Hanford.
The subtitle tells it all: "Teacher preparation programs continue to ignore the sound science behind how people become readers."
Hanford concluded, "To become readers, kids need to learn how the words they know how to say connect to print on the page. They need explicit, systematic phonics instruction. There are hundreds of studies that back this up."
Well, you can imagine the shockwaves circling the globe. Thousands of so-called literacy experts have been sent back to school. Two things kept the hoax going all these years. 1) A mountain of dubious research that 2) an army of education professors flogged to control the debate. The professors will have to work much harder now.
Next, The Atlantic, a prestigious lefty magazine, recently announced, "Phonics, Not Whole Word, Is Best for Teaching Reading."....
Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/10/k12_phonics_is_winning.html#ixzz67HadRmcu
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
If whole-word really didn’t work, the Japanese and Chinese languages would have collapsed long ago, as both cannot be read phonetically.
“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 porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.”
Phonics isn’t for everyone. Early readers...and I mean early. Like 2 year olds and under often can’t handle the abstraction of phonics. Better to teach whole words, which they can abstract, and let them learn the patterns of phonics by seeing a sufficient quantity of whole words. The arrogant tone of the article implies that the author knows best. Author doesn’t know enough to even know how much they don’t know.
When my daughter was in second grade she was diagnosed with a learning issue. She had a spatial memory issue that meant she could not do “sight” reading. So they put her in a special program where she was tutored every day in...wait for it...Phonics.
She is in graduate school now. Her reading scores were off the charts through high school. Phonics has always been the best way to learn reading.
This is something I’ve heard (and read, somewhat) about, but I’m not real up on - what are the pluses v. minuses re: phonics?
This really shows the evils of govt bureaucracy. Bad ideas live forever and all attempts to change for the better are fought tooth and nail.
Good article Bruce. I thank the Good Lord above I was taught phonics instead of the “meme of the week” system of learning to read.
Now that the barn door is closed. John Dewey and James Kirkpatrick wanted to dumb down the American public, to stop them from reading The Federalist Papers and the Bible and to stop reading the classics. They insisted that all the children would be equal if they were taught using the whole world word method, so that they looked at phonetic words like Chinese ideograms. Mission accomplished, American kids are safely stupid for Socialism.
Just in time for the educrats to screw up math instruction with Common Core methods.
You don’t read the whole kanji at first, as I understand it. You look at one sector of it, then another, then another, and gradually dial in toward the accurate meaning. It’s a puzzle. later on, as you recognize that kanji again, you may reach whole word familiarity with it, but your first go at a new kanji is definitely step-by-step.
(At least that’s my understanding from my daughter who has taken Japanese in high school and college. I’d say she knows about 500 kanji, and must piece her way through the others as best she can.)
Right you are.
I went to battle up here in Ontario over 25 years ago when my children went into Kindergarten. When I found out how they were teaching reading, and the child-centered philosophy of “educating”, I was stunned that anyone could fall for such nonsense. I immediately pulled my daughter out and home-schooled.
Long story short, I wrote a very good reading/spelling program, used to be a guest on talk radio in our area, started a tutoring business (which paid for my children to go to private schools at 7th grade) and have taught many, many children to read. Some of them were teacher’s children.
The system STILL uses whole language. It’s a guarantee for illiteracy, but that creates lots of make-work projects for the system. They create the illiterates and them put them into intense whole-language in an attempt to remedy the problem. Sadly, the teachers today follow whole-language with religious zeal - good luck changing them.
I am now home-schooling my grandchildren with my daughter. My little 5 year old has a spelling review list of 50 words, which gets updated every time a new spelling to sound association is introduced. She’s only as big as a minute and can out-spell any Grade 3 student.
I was a VERY early reader, and I had no problem with phonics. Fortunately, my mom was literally an “old-school” schoolteacher and used phonics to teach me reading at home. She was forced to use “whole-word” in her classroom and hated it.
One properly gets to “whole-word” THROUGH phonics. Trying to jump directly to “whole-word” just does not work, as proven by at least 75 years of total failure.
I didn't have any problem in reading what you wrote, and found that style of writing had me paying more attention to what I was reading. - Tom
Not much point in having a phonetic language if you don’t teach it that way.
“If whole-word really didn’t work, the Japanese and Chinese languages would have collapsed long ago, as both cannot be read phonetically.”
the difference is that every stroke in every pictogram in those languages has a story behind it, usually a story that is hundreds and often thousands of years old ... students must learn a lengthy history of those stories to learn to read and write ...
also a non-phonetic language like that is a HUGE disadvantage as there are several hundred spoken languages in China and so there are hundreds of different pronunciations for each character ... when i traveled china forty years ago at the behest of the PRC, we always traveled with a cadre of professional tour guides and at ever different major city we would have to acquire a local translator because the tour guides from Beijing couldn’t speak the local lingoes ...
Speed readers do not read with phonics, rather they read by image interpretation. The word “apple” is NOT sounded out but rather the image of the word “apple” is triggered by the letters “apple”.
Reading phonetically slows a person’s reading ability down to their speech rate - about 100 to 150 words per min. Speed readers routinely process text at 600 words per min.
BTW, I took a speed reading course in College as a “gimmie” 3 English credits. one of the most practical courses I ever took. Cut my reading load in half.
Hiragana and Katakana are both syllabaries, so yes Japan embraces phonetic alphabets.
Kanji is whole word but it isn’t used as much and people spend their whole lives learning...maybe a third of it.
“Speed readers do not read with phonics”
i’m a speed reader (and have been most of my life) and i do NOT have pictures in my head as i speed read ...
Really, that is odd. When I read something like “The wood dinner table was covered with a white table cloth.” I actually see those objects in my mind.
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