Letters represent sounds. I used to read this to my son when he was a baby. He is now 17 and an honors student.
Using that technique, ALL words become "sight-words." Your brain has to be fast enough to translate the images the words invoke, but that's not that difficult. Your thoughts work a lot faster than your eyes.
But if the author's point is that phonics is the root of reading and comprehension, then I agree with him.
I’m also guessing they are less and less frequently read-to as toddlers.
Interesting article. Throw in the libtard penchant for arbitrarily changing the meaning of words and we have an illiterate generation, or two.
Always an excuse being invented so people are not accountable. That is what I read between the lines of that article.
As far as a “reading problem” - some of us were raised with reading (recreational) was high on the list of leisure activities. Not non-stop, unfettered video games, social media, etc.
A love of reading was instilled early-on by parents then teachers who read engaging stories to us, allowing us to follow along and learn from it.
Alas - we fail to train and raise kids - then blame something else for the “reading problems”...
Speaking of scanning - I had to get to the bottom of this article to find out what the title referred to. WAY too much phoneme/ eye movement detail. However, as a tutor, I abhore sight words. The kids have to memorize 1000 in Kdg. And you are right, the parents don’t read to them. There, two fixes.
I’ve also followed the Reading Wars.
Phonics is based on “sounding out” words. Eventually who can read everyone learned phonics, but it is WHEN you learn it and whether some other crap has been put in your brain first that will determine what kind of reader you are for life.
WHOLE LANGUAGE was 180 DEGREES OPPOSITE of Phonics. It basically went like this: If you put a kid in front of some of the great works of literature, they will literally ABSORB the skills needed to read. Just read plays from Shakespeare and Plato to the kid, and they’ll be reading Chemistry books in no time. Sounds nuts, but that is exactly what Whole Language was. Needless to say, the Education Establishment LOVED IT - since they didn’t have to do that yucky ‘drill and kill’ associated with Phonics and could instead ‘enjoy’ their literature while they taught it to their kids.
It took a generation of illiterates to finally convince parents that Whole Language was a bad thing, but the reason you don’t hear about it anymore is not because it’s gone, but because it has morphed into SIGHT WORDS (i.e., the subject of this article). Sight Words, I guess are a little better, as they don’t dump King Lear on to the laps of 6 year olds and then call those kids “Special Needs” when they can’t read a Chemistry book the next week, but it’s not much better.
The problem is that people cannot learn to read by sight before learning phonics. They may be able to memorize a hundred, maybe a few hundred words by sight alone (for real smart ones), but only if the FONT IS IDENTICAL, there’s no italics, no plurals, and God knows what else. You don’t learn reading by only knowing a few hundred words.
So INSTEAD of kids learning phonics at an early age, they given Sight Words, which not only delays the inevitable, it also CONFUSES THEM as they struggle to try to figure out how to approach new words (is it one of my Sight Words, or should I sound it out). FINALLY, in 4th Grade, they learn phonics, and with that will be slow readers for life - as most normal kids can learn reading at age 4 (if someone bothers to teach them), and virtually all normal kids can learn reading at age 5. The kids who’s parents made the effort to teach or have them taught reading at those ages are the ones that populate our top universities.
But I know, WHO AM I TO SAY, so go back to helping your kids Sight Word homework, but don’t blame me when they’re still trying to figure out what career they want when they’re living at home, playing video games, at age 26.
Ping a ling
Letters represent sounds. I used to read this to my son when he was a baby. He is now 17 and an honors student.
I find in my work that kids often have very limited vocabularies and that the only encounters they have with reading come at school. A big problem for teaching a subject only literate people can truly grasp.
Sight words once were words that were sounded out until they were encountered so frequently that any process of recognition became so fast that it was not really perceived. The dumb asses teaching my son reading this past year in kindergarten have the cart before the horse and are trying to teach “sight words” to a kid who doesn’t know ANY FECKIN WORDS. He stops struggling when I tell him to sound it i
out.
Sight words and gobbledegook, that’s why kids can’t read. A second grader is supposed to recognize 30,000 words but can’t sound out the words in a sentence they don’t know so the sentence has no meaning and they get frustrated and give up. This is the state of public education.
Ping for later
Nowadays many of the schools are not teaching cursive, either. Written communication not displayed in printed text (like Grandma’s old letters from Grandpa and the original written Constitution) will be “lost” to their comprehension. They’ll be at the mercy of their computers and iPhones (and the government) for information.
I believe that this author is attempting to excuse the entire teaching ‘community’.
I am 64 years old. I was reading the New York Times in SECOND GRADE!!!!
There’s nothing to explain.
The PC teachers suck, modern kids are taught to be stupid, and that’s the whole story.
Grasping at thin air...? Poor teaching at home and at school. .....P.or P.?
One child cracked the code of reading at age 2.5. One did it much later, at 5, and that one had a lot of delays in his intellect. A child will ask for a simple book read to him over and over. He will learn to say the words associated with each picture. He will notice the letters on the page, and most kids will have had exposure to singing the alphabet song and know that the letters have sounds. The famous letter factory video is INFALLIBLE at automatically teaching toddlers the sounds of letters.
So the child will then associate the words he sees with the words he says on that page. Bingo, the pattern starts to crack. And there isn't much sounding out. They just give the words names. If they aren't sure, they assign a different word it might be. When I was three, I remember reading a hilarious book. I had cracked the code a year earlier, so I was reading, but when I came upon a new word, I didn't sound it out, I assigned it a word. The book was called, "How the Squirrel Lost His Patience." I did not understand the word 'patience' so I assigned it the word 'panties.' Like I said, it was a hilarious book!
No harm at all comes from cracking the code. It is dumb to denigrate cracking a code with terms like "sight reading." Damn straight, we read with our sight. The third of my kids mentioned learned to read from school, sounding out words. All three are vitally fluent readers and writers. Don't let people like this author make formal education style learning to read so superior. It isn't.
A rich environment of books, words, and conversation is all your child needs to learn to read. Anything else is fine too, if you can't avoid it, like public school reading instruction or tutoring. No value judgements need be made.
I like the simpler explanation - reading comprehension is detrimental to the growth of the welfare state.