Posted on 07/16/2022 4:46:58 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
Why would a country undermine phonics?
One of the most startling queries I ever received came from a teacher in Israel. Here is the entire communication:
I watched some of your youtube videos with thirst and feel the frustration that I feel when I tutor private elementary students, who come without any clue as to how to read English, as if for 5-6 years all they had done was filling workbooks and learning word lists. Older students keep telling me their teachers insist on guessing from texts and looking for clues when words are unknown, and they fear to use a dictionary as the time allotted in tests is short. Within the framework of my lessons I work to change this situation. I would appreciate it if you could recommend to me any good source book for teaching phonics from the very beginning. I appreciate your attention.
This is a shocking communication. The teacher, who seemed to me totally sincere, reveals that Israel national policy is anti-phonics. Predictably, their schools will get bad results; and the teacher indicates that such is the usual outcome. But why?
My first reaction was excitement: wow, I and this teacher can save Israel from its bad experts. Then I sobered up. Israel could not be so naïve as to accidentally choose the worst method. I had to look deeper, as in a police investigation when the prime suspect has a perfect alibi and you have to find the next most logical suspect.
After a few days of wrestling with this bizarre situation, I constructed the only theory that felt at all credible. The elders, the most powerful rabbis, would certainly not want Hebrew to be the second language in the land where Hebrew was invented. That’s understandable. And consider that most of the biggest, most successful companies around the world use English because it’s the world’s most popular language. You can safely predict that the great majority of fancy innovative websites will be in English. Millions of them. So kids will be endlessly bombarded by English. Students will be irresistibly enticed away from giving their full attention to Hebrew. If you were the elders, what would you do?
I don’t think the teacher had ever realized the heavy political complexities. When I tried to suggest them, the teacher was startled and, a few days later, disappeared from my in-box.
Meanwhile, let’s consider the extraordinary parallel between what Israel did with students and what the US did with students. In both cases, they did what would get inferior results. They endorsed a bogus method. That’s what the United States did in 1931 when phonics was exiled.
The teacher testified to the dismal results gained in Israel. Anyone familiar with American K-12 knows we have tens of millions of functional illiterates; and reaching high school without being able to read is a common phenomenon.
Both these rich and clever countries had embraced the same solution to the same problem they saw: too much literacy.
In Israel, the problem was too much English literacy. In America the problem was too much literacy in general. The same basic problem. And the authorities adopted the same basic methods to slow things down. For simplicity’s sake, let’s call this method by any of its aliases: whole word, sight-words, whole language, three queuing system, balanced literacy, and all the other jargon perpetrated in the public schools.
The teacher’s email mentions all the identifying marks of whole language, sight-words, etc. Students are required to memorize word lists. They are told to finds clues and to guess.
Emily Hanford, with her work on the Science of Reading, has opened up the debate. Everything that Rudolf Flesch explained in 1955 (Why Johnny Can’t Read) has turned out to be the truth that teachers need to hear. For example, English is a vast language. Memorizing it one word at a time is purest folly.
Even the smarter students can rarely master more than 1000 sight-words. The ordinary kids are completely stymied well below that mark. It’s a nightmare. You have to ask yourself what kind of people run our school system? Well, they’re very practical people pursuing the wrong goals. Essentially, they are focused on social engineering goals.
The quick way to become literate in English is to learn the alphabet and then the sounds represented by the letters. Typically, students learn to read in the first grade.
The big question is why would anyone go away from the proven method?
Apparently, this happens because the Education Establishment has social and psychological goals, or national goals. Arguably, the Israelis wanted to protect the primacy of Hebrew in that country. Arguably, the American educators wanted to protect their vision of creating a more socialist society as envisioned by John Dewey.
A common sense person knows there is nothing more important than reading. But ideologues always think they have more important goals.
ADDENDUM: it should be noted that Canada has pursued similar policies. A reform group in Italy, much to my surprise, contacted me for advice on fighting sight-words. South Africa, at one point, also used this bogus method.
READING IS EASY -- Video produced by Bruce Deitrick Price __ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JV0tPGn-Ws
Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, poet, and education reformer. His new novel is Frankie, inspired by advances in AI and robots. Frankie is a harmless robot that unintentionally turns the state of New Jersey upside down. Visit Frankie.zone
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A friend of mine, an attorney, was appointed to a committee to create standard forms for the state bar association to promulgate for practitioners to use when dealing with a new statutory process. The committee was comprised of attorneys of varied backgrounds and several judges. Being apparently the only person on the committee with a private school primary education, she soon found herself continuously correcting phrases in the verbiage in the forms, which included syntax and grammar errors. It got so bad that some on the committee began to resent her interjections and she finally requested to be excused from participation on the committee. Rather than appreciating the expertise she offered, the committee chose to forge ahead in ignorance. The best and brightest, no less.
That’s lawyers!
Most I’ve met consider themselves Master’s of the Universe on every subject. Just ask them ! Legends in their own mind!
7th grade.
About 1960.
We had English grammar and sentence construction (diagramming) infused into us for a whole year!
That has served me well, to this day.
Me too. 7th grade, 1962. Mr. Doane, the only male teacher in a school full of nuns and a few laypersons.
Phonics works. All of my siblings and I learned to read with phonics before starting first grade, most of us by age 4.
I don’t know when they quit teaching sentence diagramming. That and formal English grammar should still be taught, from elementary grades through high school.
We used Strunk and White
Miss Walker prepared us for life in the literate world
Focus on phonics to teach reading is ‘failing children’, says landmark study
That's just one example, I can find dozens more.
In a more common sense era, American schools used rote memorization exclusively and anyone who managed to make it past third grade was more literate than half of high school graduates today who've been "schooled" with phonics.
As for the author's claim that, "English is a vast language. Memorizing it one word at a time is purest folly....", where is it written that you need to know, less have to MEMORIZE the entire language? The majority of the most highly educated Americans only has the command of +/-5% of the more than 1 million English words anyway. And phonics is destined to fail you because English is a higgledy-piggledy conglomeration of Angle, Saxon, Jute, Frisian, Latin, Old Norse, and Norman French. The language today is a logical disaster because it was largely frozen in time in 1453 when William Caxton began operating the first movable type printing press in England.
Plus we have "loan" words that have come to us in the last couple of centuries through commerce and military intrigue from Spanish, German, French, Italian, Yiddish/Hebrew and Hindi. If phonics were ever going to work (which it wasn't) you first would have to know the linguistic origins of every word, which leads directly back to -- you guessed it -- rote memorization.
That's why the old bromide was "The Three Rs," not "the P and Two Rs."
Phonics is how I learned to read and Paal G is not to be believed.
I’m not sure I agree with the article.
I’m Israeli and leaned English in state schools. I do reasonably well. Sure people can tell on FR that my English is not necessarily American English, but mutual comprehension is seldom a problem unless I don’t understand and idiom or I try to translate a Hebrew idiom or saying without context.
With the exception of new immigrants and some educationally recalcitrant Arab groups, I don’t know if any group that is not reasonably fluent in English. Indeed, with new immigrants (chiefly Russian and Ukraine) the problem is not speaking English, it’s that they get along by speaking English and don’t learn Hebrew, which really limits their job and social prospects.
And = an.
That’s not lack of English skill. It’s an evil iPhone quick correct
Older students keep telling me their teachers insist on guessing from texts and looking for clues when words are unknownI asked an Eng Dept. Chair at a large No.VA public school why his department doesn't teach grammar. He replied that kids need to learn language "holistically" as opposed to doing boring grammar exercises.
“It’s phonics that has failed.”
Your post is deceitful and uninformed. Next time, post about something you understand...if there is anything at all that you understand.
“You have to ask yourself what kind of people run our school system? Well, they’re very practical people pursuing the wrong goals. Essentially, they are focused on social engineering goals.”
They are not “practical” in any relevant sense; they are not educated in any relevant sense; and they are not intelligent or moral in any relevant sense. The people in the schools are, on the whole, inferior minds that have been indoctrinated in the evil ideologies of the left and who are daily committing educational, moral, spiritual, and, increasingly, physical child abuse. What parents should have done long ago, and what they can do now, is take their children out of the little whited sepulchres known as government schools. They cannot be reformed, although I know that that has been your belief. Do you still that now now in the face of the government schools promoting, in addition to profound illiteracy, gender ideology, CRT, and the chemical and surgical mutilation of children? Placing a child in a government school is child endangerment. Teaching phonics is a very good thing, but the evils of government schools go far beyond the choice of the correct reading pedagogy.
“I don’t know when they quit teaching sentence diagramming. That and formal English grammar should still
be taught, from elementary grades through high school”.
You are correct that one who knows how to diagram sentences knows grammar at the highest level. Alas, probably no more more than a handful of teachers themselves today know how to diagram a sentence. To say it “should be tuaght” assumes there’s someone to teach it.
We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes;
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese;
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen ?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet ?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth ?
Then one may be that, & three would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose;
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother & also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his & him,
But imagine the feminine: she, shis & shim !
Let's face it - English is a crazy language.
There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger;
Neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
English muffins weren't invented in England .
We take English for granted,
But if we explore its paradoxes,
We find that quicksand can work slowly,
Boxing rings are square;
A guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
Why is it that writers write, but fingers don't fing,
Grocers don't groce & hammers don't ham ?
Doesn't it seem crazy that ...
You can make amends but not one amend ?
If you have a bunch of odds and ends ...
And get rid of all but one of them,
What do you call it ?
If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught ?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables,
What does a humanitarian eat ?
Sometimes I think all people who speak English
Should be in an asylum for the verbally insane.
In what other language do people recite at a play,
And play at a recital ?
We ship by truck but send cargo by ship ....
We have noses that run & feet that smell;
We park in a driveway & drive in a parkway.
And how can a slim chance & a fat chance be the same,
While a wise man & a wise guy are opposites ?
You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language
In which your house can burn up as it burns down;
In which you fill in a form by filling it out,
& in which an alarm goes off by going on.
And in closing ....
If Father is Pop .....
How come Mother's not Mop ? ? ? ?Gallagher and English language
Then he made fun of words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently: good and food; bomb, tomb and comb; home and some; worse and horse; laughter and daughter; ache and mustache; beard and heard; go and do.
Why should I be serious about the language when the language isn’t serious enough to make sense?
I was one of those 1959 - 1960 kids who learned to read with Dick and Jane, Tip and Mitten in a rural Georgia county in a first through twelfth grade school.
Many years later my mother told me, after she began teaching there at the same school, that several of the old spinster teachers that I had through fifth grade had been hired, when the male teachers went to fight in WWII, with only two year teaching certificates, which were "grandfathered" to continue teaching with no requirement to upgrade their credentials.
I'll never forget when one of the fifth grade teachers was my first and second grade Sunday school teacher. One of the other kids in the class asked what something in our Sunday school lesson meant. The teacher said she didn't know. My mother was enrolled in Berry Collège at the time and had explained footnotes to me. I told the teacher that the footnote explained what it meant but the fifth grade teacher did not understand what a footnote was and looked at me like I was speaking Greek.
Fat chance that my first grade teacher would teach Phonetics in 1960. I hated and despised my first grade teacher but that's another story altogether.
I could teach it myself, with some review and relearning, but who would want to learn it? Ain’t nobody got time for that.
Phonics is the only thing that’s going to save literacy in this country.
While it is true that there are many exception, there are far more words that follow the rules well enough to make phonics workable.
You can take your liberal, literacy destroying agenda over to DU where they’ll cheer you on.
The Guardian is a left-wing whatever. You don’t go there for good information about education. On the contrary.
Also, please note that the article does not say that phonics doesn’t work. It says that teachers should teach all the different approaches and let students choose. This is nonsense from the theories of learning styles and balanced literacy. What happens here is that every student is overwhelmed by a multitude of useless methods.
Our problem is that bad methods have a big lobby in the government, and in the media, as you see.
“Sight Words are a Sick Joke” — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/k12_sightwords_are_a_sick_joke.html
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