Sight reading is best, IMO. Why learn something phonetically only to have to correct and relearn it. Seems like a waste of time. Are spelling cops and reading cops at odds with each other? I read some time ago cities were forced to spend $MMs to change all their street signs back to mixed case letters after some nitwit deemed it best to have them printed in all caps. Seems people don’t quickly recognize words in all caps and it was causing problems for drivers.
“Sight reading is best, IMO.”
Maybe in music, but I don’t see how you can go wrong with phonics. “Correct and relearn”? I never had to do that and I always was fastest reader in my classes, with best comprehension test results.
I do understand that how people learn is unique to individuals. My husband is dyslexic, but has a PhD in Physics, so he had to take a different — and difficult — path to comprehending what he read.
Correct and relearn it? What does that mean?
I learned to read in the 1960s using phonics i.e. every letter has one or two sounds. I taught my children this way. No one had to correct or relearn anything. What are you talking about? Not being flip ...
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.
Sight reading is what gave us one of my favorite malapropisms; when people use “defiantly” when the correct term is “definitely.”
Spell It Out: The Curious, Enthralling, and Extraordinary Story of English Spelling Dec 2, 2014 by David CrystalIt is an interesting fact that written English was derived by monks from the Latin alphabet. They were trying the best they could to make written English a phonetic language. But there was trouble inherent in that project, and even tho they added two letters to the latin alphabet, they couldn’t make it work and we ended up with the hash that we all know and “love.”
That being said, phonics is at least the ideal of the construction of written English. And it is sufficiently valid that everyone has some use of it when they encounter a written word that they are not familiar with. If you learn phonics reading, your written vocabulary will be initially limited to phonetically spelled words - but that has to be a bigger written vocabulary than you can start out with any other way.
It is absolutely true that every competent adult reader sight-reads; anyone who doubts that should encrypt an english text into the character set of some other language, and then attempt to read it. You would know the code - but you couldn't just read on sight, you’d have to think to extract each word from the text.
And that is the way I look at the problem of learning to read. The student has a harder job than s/he will have later, because the letters haven’t been engrained in her/his memory - and the student has to think all the time. But as learning 26 letters is transcendently less difficult than learning a 25,000 word written vocabulary, so learning phonics - which is merely the start of literacy - can get a student into the hunt quickly. You want the student to get a critical mass of reading facility as quickly as possible - and then you want to “arouse an eager want” for more reading material which will promote true literacy.