100% They need explicit, systematic phonics instruction.
Posted on 10/27/2018 7:17:20 AM PDT by reaganaut1
........EVERYTHING ELSE, the more you practice, the better you get.
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I agree, but what you said does not apply to me and skiing LOL. It also doesn’t apply to some golfers I know. 0:)
-—come to think of it , we may have had some of the same teachers—did you go to grade school in Fennimore?
Me and my brothers had McGuffey Readers and they were great.
Exactly! There is no money in the cure, only treatment.
Sight reading is a skill that one develops naturally when one is taught phonics. No one literally sounds out words like "the, an, copy" etc. when they have seen these words thousands of times over their lifetimes. But what happens when the reader encounters a word he/she has never seen before? If, for example, I use the word "tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin" that you have never seen before, and you have only been taught sight reading, how would you even know what the first phoneme is, much less figure out how to pronounce that word? But if you know phonics, you can figure out how to say that word and come close to the actual pronunciation if you don't get it exactly.
Those who teach sight reading are jumping ahead to the natural outcome of teaching phonetically and skipping all of the steps in between. It is analogous to teaching kids multiplication and division without bothering to teach them the processes that multiplication and division are built on--addition and subtraction.
I disagree with the premise of the article. I had a work study job in college helping other students with math and reading. That is when I first realized that people's minds do not all work the same. Before that I assumed that everyone’s mind worked basically the same as mine only with varying capacities.
But working with other students made me realize that especially the minds of people with learning disabilities use their brains in a way completely different from the way that I use mine. So various techniques often have widely varying results depending on the student.
Phonics are like training wheels for many of us. Those of us who read enough to recognize words as meaningful symbols and are able to give up sounding them out can typically comprehend written material several times faster when we give up the voice in our head. This has always been the key to “speed reading”. For difficult technical material of course most of us revert to low gear with the voice in our head, and of course for poetry or other material where the sound of the words are important the same is true. But once one becomes a proficient reader phonics can be a crutch that is no longer needed.
The best way to get rid of the voice in your head when you are trying to learn to read faster is to practice with machines or programs that flash lines of text on your screen at faster and faster rates and then take a quiz to see how much you have retained. When I was in school we used to have machines that did this. These days there are numerous speed reading programs that do the same thing.
We used phonics, as well, and threw in lots of etymology. Phonics instructions gives opportunity to teach Greek sounds, prefixes, suffixes, etc ... all of which, imho, contribute to the sounding out of most words.
Then you'll be happy! Your understanding of phonics has the cart before the horse. Phonics is not a process of teaching spelling through sounds, but of teaching sounds through spelling. It is a undisputed reality that people generally speak at a higher comprehension level than they can read (often several "grade" levels for children). Children have a natural, biological knack for absorbing language via speech. This is also undisputed fact. What phonics does is harness this knack for the purposes of teaching reading, which is NOT biologically based (though there are some pattern-recognition tricks that have been incorporated into written language that trigger certain brain functions... but that's off topic).
Simply put, by teaching children how to look at an unknown word and sound it out, phonics gives the child a chance to harness the biological mechanism that makes language learning easier. They can connect the shapes (written letters) they don't know with the sounds (spoken words) they do know. It's not foolproof, and it works best when a child has been exposed to lots of different words via regular conversation. But it does work, and has since time immemorial...
I know you are telling the truth. As many of you know, I presently eork with people with various disabilities. Ive often met people who tell me that they cant read because someone told them that they were “too retarded” to learn. Provided a person doesnt have a brain injury that stops them from connecting symbols with their meanings, teaching an adult to read using phonics, even the “too retarded” ones, is one of the easiest parts of my job.
Yes.
Yes, I doubt today’s classrooms have Reading Groups set up by ABILITY...as ours did in 1st grade...the ones needing the most help were in the same group...that way they got MORE help, and didn’t keep the rest of the group behind. I ALWAYS hated slow readers, even in 1st grade. (And, felt sorry for them, too) We were forced to read OUTLOUD to our class. It probably made some make more of an effort to LEARN to read. (This was 1956-7)
Phonics has been the way to learn English forever, but only since "whole language" and "look say" and "progressive" methods has illiteracy and grade levels behind in reading been an issue.
As a previous poster said, there's more money to be made in fixing a problem (which never gets fixed, by the way) than in doing it right the first time.
To your "correct answer not as important as how you arrived there" ... the lack of reading fluency in so many students is proving that they haven't arrived there.
Previous generations have learned phonics and learned to read. But now since those fabulous "progressive" methods have been installed the schools are turning out high school graduates who are poor readers.
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100% They need explicit, systematic phonics instruction.
Sight reading is what gave us one of my favorite malapropisms; when people use “defiantly” when the correct term is “definitely.”
Pardon my emphasis. Common core is a massive, expensive, nation-wide joke.
Then there is than and then being used interchangeably. All those poor folks who learned this wrong. I see it here on FR.
Brains are not all the same. Teaching is guiding other brains to discover. Children learn to read in different ways. Those who crack the code before they enter formal schooling do memorize stories and crack the code, literally, learning that “tough” means tough no matter how it looks. English is possibly the worst language for phonics, with all the exceptions with our crazy bastardized spelling.
Phonics should be taught because you can’t pick it up on your own. But sight reading, using memory, happens too - it cannot he stopped any more than recognizing colors or patterns can be stopped.
Teaching Reading is about guiding the child through phonics, exposing them through repetition, and HELPING THE CHILD WHO IS HAVING DIFFICULTIES, at their level and with whatever disability they may have to make reading harder. And definitely exposing them to parts of the world that depend on reading, which makes it fun and necessary! Including video games!
Let’s not get started on the language abuse on this forum. That deserves its own thread! Even just apo’stro’phe abu’se could have a separate thread.
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