Should Phonics be taught in schools?

[zorq]

This is unrelated to the politics of this thread, but I thought I would mention this tangent.

The first comment below the article linked by Derec mentions a lack of phonics in the Detroit curriculum and how significantly that is affecting the literacy rate. Personally, I agree that teaching phonics is a key element that ought to be taught to children first learning to read. Teaching kids to read by forcing them to memorize sight words is far less productive for a huge portion of children. You might as well teach them to read Chinese characters instead of Roman if that's the way you want the kids to learn. I've seen it happen in Atlanta too and I noticed that Atlanta is near the bottom of the list of US school districts in literacy too. Anecdotally, my nephew who lives in that area (Atlanta) has been a victim of this. His reading is far below grade level and his 1st and 2nd grade teachers stressed sight words over everything else. By 3rd grade he had fallen behind.

The "look and say" technique for learning literacy might have some advantages for some students but the disadvantages for so many other students turns reading into more of a "look and guess" chore. The results of these techniques should speak for themselves, but for some reason, the newer "whole language" strategy to learning literacy keeps gaining ground even though the alphabet we use is phonetic!

If Detroit has indeed shunned phonics in their early literacy education, their poor literacy rate is unsurprising to me.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

This is unrelated to the politics of this thread, but I thought I would mention this tangent.

The first comment below the article linked by Derec mentions a lack of phonics in the Detroit curriculum and how significantly that is affecting the literacy rate. Personally, I agree that teaching phonics is a key element that ought to be taught to children first learning to read. Teaching kids to read by forcing them to memorize sight words is far less productive for a huge portion of children. You might as well teach them to read Chinese characters instead of Roman if that's the way you want the kids to learn. I've seen it happen in Atlanta too and I noticed that Atlanta is near the bottom of the list of US school districts in literacy too. Anecdotally, my nephew who lives in that area (Atlanta) has been a victim of this. His reading is far below grade level and his 1st and 2nd grade teachers stressed sight words over everything else. By 3rd grade he had fallen behind.

The "look and say" technique for learning literacy might have some advantages for some students but the disadvantages for so many other students turns reading into more of a "look and guess" chore.

From my experience, a child should be taught via the method that works for them to learn. My daughter is pretty bad and the 'look and say' and has a very expansive vocabulary, because she has been exposed to a lot of reading. But other kids "look and say" can be very effective. I hate it when people point to one single thing as to the primary problem. In an urban city, economics, violence, home situation, dreadfully underpaid and overstretched teachers, and an indifferent partisan education political system have a ton more to do with this than phonics.

 

[Copernicus]

English spelling is very complex for an alphabetic writing system, because there are so many arcane sound-symbol correspondences. Generally speaking, phonics is a method that associates alphabetic symbols with phonemes, the basic speech sounds of a language (See What is Phonics?). It works, because children already speak English, so they can theoretically recognize words by "sounding them out". However, that doesn't always work and can lead to some pretty funny spelling pronunciations.

There are a few problems with phonics, not the least of which is that teachers are often poorly trained in basic facts about how languages work. English has more or less 44 phonemes, but the English (aka "Latin") alphabet has only 26 letters. It was originally created to correspond to Latin phonemes, not English. So English spelling uses a lot of letter clusters and tricky rules to establish sound-symbol correspondences. For example, the word "fight" consists of five letters but only 3 phonemes--/f ay t/. The letter "c" sometimes represents an /s/ phoneme and sometimes a /k/ phoneme. And so on. So teaching phonics to young children is not necessarily an easy task.

Another problem is that materials based on phonics represent the phonemes in Standard American English, which is basically the pronunciation that most newscasters and radio announcers use. That is, it is based on a midwestern pronunciation of the Northern dialect of American English, but there are quite a few dialects of English. So a child who speaks  African-American Vernacular English or a version of the closely-related Southern dialect of American English may struggle with the pronunciations that phonics is based on. And many teachers will not understand the root cause of their problem, because they won't know what phonemes exist in the child's dialect. So phonics is always going to favor the performance of children who already speak the standard dialect.

Finally, the problem with phonics is that it is based a common misunderstanding about how reading and writing work. Reading is a visual skill, not an auditory skill. Writing is a tactile skill. If you always "sound out" words when reading, you will read much more slowly than you ought to. Generally speaking, mature English readers recognize words by their visual shapes--very much like Chinese speakers recognize words in their writing system. (Chinese writing is logographic rather than alphabetic, i.e. mostly based on word-to-symbol correspondences.)

In summary, my point has been that phonics is the best way to go for teaching young children to read English, but it is fraught with difficulties that the modern education system is not well-equipped to handle. At some point, as children begin to truly master reading, phonics can become a drag on progressing to the stage where quick reading skills are required. And it is a system that is skewed in favor of children who happen to already speak a standard version of American English.

 

[Bomb#20]

Yes, of course phonics should be taught in schools. The commonly encountered vocabulary in written English is much, much larger than the commonly encountered vocabulary in spoken English. Therefore any teaching method that's premised on the theory that what we're trying to teach children to do is recognize words is a guaranteed disaster from the get-go. Recognizing words is the easy part; dealing with words you aren't going to recognize because they aren't in your vocabulary yet, by adding them to your vocabulary, is the hard part. That's what needs to be taught; that's what phonics teaches. If instead we teach children to recognize words, then they will learn how to recognize words they learned from speech, they will acquire written vocabularies as impoverished as people's normal spoken vocabularies, and reading will always be a struggle for them.

On a personal note, my niece was crippled by "whole language". Listening to her read aloud was painful. She did as she'd been taught -- when she saw a word she didn't recognize she guessed a word and moved on. She guessed wrong, she guessed words that made no sense in context, what came out was content-free word salad, and she didn't realize it. For all she knew that was what written English was supposed to sound like.

 

[Bomb#20]

Teaching kids to read by forcing them to memorize sight words is far less productive for a huge portion of children. You might as well teach them to read Chinese characters instead of Roman if that's the way you want the kids to learn.

Even the Chinese know better than to teach children to read using Chinese characters. In China they teach reading phonetically, using little Roman characters printed along with each Chinese logogram.

 

[Copernicus]

Yes, of course phonics should be taught in schools. The commonly encountered vocabulary in written English is much, much larger than the commonly encountered vocabulary in spoken English. Therefore any teaching method that's premised on the theory that what we're trying to teach children to do is recognize words is a guaranteed disaster from the get-go. Recognizing words is the easy part; dealing with words you aren't going to recognize because they aren't in your vocabulary yet, by adding them to your vocabulary, is the hard part. That's what needs to be taught; that's what phonics teaches. If instead we teach children to recognize words, then they will learn how to recognize words they learned from speech, they will acquire written vocabularies as impoverished as people's normal spoken vocabularies, and reading will always be a struggle for them.

But the whole point of phonics is word recognition based on the reader's ability to sound out written symbols and match the sounds to known words. New vocabulary is about words that the reader is unfamiliar with, so figuring out how the written form is pronounced only helps in the sense that it expands their spoken vocabulary. That is still an important function, however, since the education system is supposed to improve communication skills. It's just that expanding the spoken vocabulary is not the primary goal in the earliest stages of learning to read. Getting children to expand visual recognition is, and that is the basic point of phonics.

On a personal note, my niece was crippled by "whole language". Listening to her read aloud was painful. She did as she'd been taught -- when she saw a word she didn't recognize she guessed a word and moved on. She guessed wrong, she guessed words that made no sense in context, what came out was content-free word salad, and she didn't realize it. For all she knew that was what written English was supposed to sound like.

I agree with you that the "whole language" approach is misguided and that phonics is the best way to teach children to read. But I understand why some educators think that it ought to work. I pointed this out in my earlier post. English spelling is notoriously complex for an alphabetic writing system, so a phonemic approach to sound-symbol correspondence is going to force the child to learn an extra "alphabet" to represent the phonemes. The phonic symbols are only useful as a teaching aid. Psychologists know that mature reading is not usually mediated by sound-symbol correspondences. People normally read English in the same way that the Chinese read their language--by recognizing the visual shapes of words. However, children learning to read cannot simply jump directly to that kind of reading strategy very easily. Phonics allows them to take advantage of the spoken vocabulary that they already possess to expand their visual recognition of words.

 

[Copernicus]

Teaching kids to read by forcing them to memorize sight words is far less productive for a huge portion of children. You might as well teach them to read Chinese characters instead of Roman if that's the way you want the kids to learn.

Even the Chinese know better than to teach children to read using Chinese characters. In China they teach reading phonetically, using little Roman characters printed along with each Chinese logogram.

Actually, I wasn't aware that this kind of teaching was going on in China, but it makes sense in the computer age. All children will need to be able to master English, which is the language of international trade. So teaching a romanized version of Chinese can be useful. Also, Pinyin is needed to use Chinese keyboards. This method of teaching was only introduced a few decades ago by the Communist regime. Children are taught Pinyin, whose written characters can be used to a create a kind of "phonic" version of Chinese. This version can then be used to learn more complex symbols. Chinese dictionaries are based on the number of strokes that occur in Chinese writing, so that is also an element of how the writing is taught.

See How is a native Chinese child taught to read Chinese?

When is reading education begun?

Officially, it starts from the first grade, which is six or seven years old. However, many parents and kindergartens do teach basic characters well before that.

When are the characters introduced?

Almost from the very beginning. First graders spend a few weeks learning pinyin, and then immediately start the characters. Using pinyin is not considered as "reading". It's just a phonetic notation tool.

 

[steve_bank]

The Moynihan report studied poverty in the 60s, controversial at the time.

The conclusion was that the primary correlation, black or white kids, to performance in schools was income and stable families. Poverty black or white correlated to poor performance in school.

From my experience in business I believe environment is far more important for group success than technique. I watched a show on a Harlem charter school. It started out all black. Kids wore uniforms, parents were required to participate, and respect for teachers was enforced. Kids taken in who were written off as poor performers started performing. It was so successful other parents wanted in.

People look for a siver bullet method that guarentees a homogenious high level of performance, it does not exist.

We are born with genetic capacity to learn. It is a matter of creating the environment from the start to engage kids. Without curiosity learning is a tough task.

I grew up in a lousy family environment. In Grammar school I had an aunt who worked with math and reading flash cards, games like scrabble, and helped with projects and encouragement. Looking back without that I'd have been a lost cause. I also attribute the discipline and stability in the Catholic schools I went to for getting me through.

I can remember 8th grade reading comprehension. There was a rectangular box with sheets of text and stories. Over time we worked from simple to more complex stories, taking quizzes on each story.

 

[Bomb#20]

Actually, I wasn't aware that this kind of teaching was going on in China, but it makes sense in the computer age. All children will need to be able to master English, which is the language of international trade. So teaching a romanized version of Chinese can be useful. Also, Pinyin is needed to use Chinese keyboards. This method of teaching was only introduced a few decades ago by the Communist regime. Children are taught Pinyin, whose written characters can be used to a create a kind of "phonic" version of Chinese. This version can then be used to learn more complex symbols.

The practice predates computers; it was adopted in order to make literacy available to the masses. It's true that it was the communists who put Pinyin in the schools, but they were just standardizing on one of the existing competing phonetic systems. The practice of teaching reading phonetically goes back to the 1911 revolution that overthrew the last emperor; the original republican government commissioned the development of Bopomofo, which is what Taiwan still uses for the same purposes the PRC uses Pinyin for. Taiwan even has Bopomofo keyboards and cell phones.

 

[Bomb#20]

Yes, of course phonics should be taught in schools. The commonly encountered vocabulary in written English is much, much larger than the commonly encountered vocabulary in spoken English. Therefore any teaching method that's premised on the theory that what we're trying to teach children to do is recognize words is a guaranteed disaster from the get-go. Recognizing words is the easy part; dealing with words you aren't going to recognize because they aren't in your vocabulary yet, by adding them to your vocabulary, is the hard part. That's what needs to be taught; that's what phonics teaches. If instead we teach children to recognize words, then they will learn how to recognize words they learned from speech, they will acquire written vocabularies as impoverished as people's normal spoken vocabularies, and reading will always be a struggle for them.

But the whole point of phonics is word recognition based on the reader's ability to sound out written symbols and match the sounds to known words.

Why do you think that? According to Wikipedia, "The goal of phonics is to enable beginning readers to decode new written words by sounding them out, or, in phonics terms, blending the sound-spelling patterns." Matching the sounds to known words is a recipe for failing to learn new words.

New vocabulary is about words that the reader is unfamiliar with, so figuring out how the written form is pronounced only helps in the sense that it expands their spoken vocabulary.

Why do you think that? Pronunciation helps whether the word ever enters their spoken vocabulary or not. We're auditory animals; most of us need to "hear" a pronunciation in our minds in order to remember the word, regardless of whether we or anyone else in our presence vocalizes it.

That is still an important function, however, since the education system is supposed to improve communication skills. It's just that expanding the spoken vocabulary is not the primary goal in the earliest stages of learning to read. Getting children to expand visual recognition is, and that is the basic point of phonics.

I disagree. Don't let the tail wag the dog. The primary goal is, and should be, comprehension. If occasionally children have to learn a word twice because its spelling is too different from its sound, whoop de do. As long as they're accustomed to seeing unfamiliar words and learning them, they'll be able to understand what they read; and sooner or later it will click that the word they're hearing and the word they're reading are one and the same.

I agree with you that the "whole language" approach is misguided and that phonics is the best way to teach children to read. But I understand why some educators think that it ought to work. I pointed this out in my earlier post. English spelling is notoriously complex for an alphabetic writing system, so a phonemic approach to sound-symbol correspondence is going to force the child to learn an extra "alphabet" to represent the phonemes. The phonic symbols are only useful as a teaching aid.

Not sure what you mean by learning an extra "alphabet". Are you talking about IPA symbols? Who the heck inflicts those on children? I was taught phonics (I'm so old we just called it "reading") and never saw those things until I was a teenager. You just teach children that "c" can stand for the sound in "city" or in "cat" and make them memorize complicated rules for figuring out which. Sure, it's hard, and sure, it's unfortunate that English spelling rules are so archaic, and sure, they'll come out with funny spelling pronunciations and people will laugh at them, but those are trivial downsides compared to not learning new words.

Psychologists know that mature reading is not usually mediated by sound-symbol correspondences. People normally read English in the same way that the Chinese read their language--by recognizing the visual shapes of words. However, children learning to read cannot simply jump directly to that kind of reading strategy very easily.

Bingo. It's true that sounding out words slows you down; but so what? Phonics is training wheels. Telling kids they can't have training wheels because adults can bike faster without them is stupid. Kids will take off the training wheels when they're ready. Speed doesn't come from mimicking fast people. Speed comes from practice. Practice comes from doing it slowly and succeeding so you get some payoff for your efforts. Trying to do it fast before you've learned to do it at all, and predictably failing, is a recipe for getting discouraged and not practicing. Psychologists who know how mature reading works and deduce that that's what they should tell teachers to teach children to do because it ought to work are idiots.

 

[barbos]

I read both russian and english by matching whole words. Sometimes when I quickly look at large page of text I recognize some particular word without knowing exact place, then I have to read the whole text to find it, don't know why I do it.
Also I noticed that italians who are not very good at english really like to read english words literally, I mean as if it was italian. It's both funny and annoying. Germans don't do that.

 

[Copernicus]

But the whole point of phonics is word recognition based on the reader's ability to sound out written symbols and match the sounds to known words.

Why do you think that? According to Wikipedia, "The goal of phonics is to enable beginning readers to decode new written words by sounding them out, or, in phonics terms, blending the sound-spelling patterns." Matching the sounds to known words is a recipe for failing to learn new words.

I think that you may have misunderstood the Wikipedia text. What it means to "decode new written words" is to recognize previously unseen written words by associating the written string of letters with an existing pronunciation in the child's spoken language. It doesn't refer to recognition of previously unknown words. If the author had intended that meaning, he could simply have written "decode new words" instead of "decode new written words". Moreover, your claim doesn't appear to make sense. If a child were looking at a word whose pronunciation the child did not already possess, then what good would it do him to figure out how to pronounce the unknown word? He would still need to discover what the word meant in order to incorporate it into his linguistic inventory. Once he learned that, he could then use the word in spoken English, although that can lead to rather awkward spelling pronunciations.

New vocabulary is about words that the reader is unfamiliar with, so figuring out how the written form is pronounced only helps in the sense that it expands their spoken vocabulary.

Why do you think that? Pronunciation helps whether the word ever enters their spoken vocabulary or not. We're auditory animals; most of us need to "hear" a pronunciation in our minds in order to remember the word, regardless of whether we or anyone else in our presence vocalizes it.

I'm not sure whether you realize that I am a retired professional linguist, so I have had more than a little experience with this subject matter. Yes, language is primarily a spoken medium, although people who are born deaf will develop a visual sign language that is just as complex as the spoken language. Writing systems are visual representations of spoken language (or gestures, in the case of people who lack hearing). It does help to associate words with pronunciations, but that isn't strictly necessary. In fact, mature readers don't normally use even mental pronunciations when they read English. They recognize vocabulary by visual patterns. The same is true of writing. Even when you type (unless you rely on hunt-and-peck), your words are largely communicated through tactile patterns. When you try to pronounce each word that you are reading, it slows down your reading speed quite dramatically.

That is still an important function, however, since the education system is supposed to improve communication skills. It's just that expanding the spoken vocabulary is not the primary goal in the earliest stages of learning to read. Getting children to expand visual recognition is, and that is the basic point of phonics.

I disagree. Don't let the tail wag the dog. The primary goal is, and should be, comprehension. If occasionally children have to learn a word twice because its spelling is too different from its sound, whoop de do. As long as they're accustomed to seeing unfamiliar words and learning them, they'll be able to understand what they read; and sooner or later it will click that the word they're hearing and the word they're reading are one and the same.

I have taken the liberty of putting the sentence in boldface above that you think contradicts what I said. It actually reaffirms what I said. Reading is actually a visual skill, so expanding visual recognition is exactly what a person does in order to comprehend text. Phonics in English is like Pinyin script in Chinese. It is a teaching aid that becomes unnecessary as the student's visual recognition of words expands.

I agree with you that the "whole language" approach is misguided and that phonics is the best way to teach children to read. But I understand why some educators think that it ought to work. I pointed this out in my earlier post. English spelling is notoriously complex for an alphabetic writing system, so a phonemic approach to sound-symbol correspondence is going to force the child to learn an extra "alphabet" to represent the phonemes. The phonic symbols are only useful as a teaching aid.

Not sure what you mean by learning an extra "alphabet". Are you talking about IPA symbols? Who the heck inflicts those on children? I was taught phonics (I'm so old we just called it "reading") and never saw those things until I was a teenager. You just teach children that "c" can stand for the sound in "city" or in "cat" and make them memorize complicated rules for figuring out which. Sure, it's hard, and sure, it's unfortunate that English spelling rules are so archaic, and sure, they'll come out with funny spelling pronunciations and people will laugh at them, but those are trivial downsides compared to not learning new words.

Actually, I may be older than you (at 72), and I was taught by a method that is sometimes called  synthetic phonics these days. So we were taught a kind of quasi-phonemic alphabet as a teaching aid. That allowed the teacher to talk about the rules for figuring out when the letter "c" was pronounced /k/ and when it was pronounced /s/. When I was first exposed to this system in third grade, I had never seen the "phonic alphabet" before, so I was horribly behind others in the class. Consequently, my report card contained my first "D" grade for English skills, in which I had been a straight-"A" student previously. I could read well enough, but I kept flunking out on the phonemic alphabet. I soon caught up, but the trauma hit me so hard that I remembered it the rest of my life. Of course, the Chinese "Pinyin" method is a synthetic phonics approach.

Psychologists know that mature reading is not usually mediated by sound-symbol correspondences. People normally read English in the same way that the Chinese read their language--by recognizing the visual shapes of words. However, children learning to read cannot simply jump directly to that kind of reading strategy very easily.

Bingo. It's true that sounding out words slows you down; but so what? Phonics is training wheels. Telling kids they can't have training wheels because adults can bike faster without them is stupid. Kids will take off the training wheels when they're ready. Speed doesn't come from mimicking fast people. Speed comes from practice. Practice comes from doing it slowly and succeeding so you get some payoff for your efforts. Trying to do it fast before you've learned to do it at all, and predictably failing, is a recipe for getting discouraged and not practicing. Psychologists who know how mature reading works and deduce that that's what they should tell teachers to teach children to do because it ought to work are idiots.

Well, that isn't what psychologists tell teachers. It is what they discovered experimentally about how people read. And I hope that you realize by now that we have been largely agreeing on the need for phonics, outside of your somewhat puzzling interpretation of the Wikipedia article on phonics.

 

[Copernicus]

I read both russian and english by matching whole words. Sometimes when I quickly look at large page of text I recognize some particular word without knowing exact place, then I have to read the whole text to find it, don't know why I do it.

You are quite fluent in English and native in Russian, so you should be recognizing lexical and phrasal chunks visually. That is quite normal for mature readers.

Russian children have an easier time learning to read because the Cyrillic alphabet is easier to associate with the phonemic patterns in Russian words. The alphabet has more vowel symbols (10) than vowel phonemes (5) and far fewer consonant symbols than actual consonant phonemes. However, the extra vowel symbols inform readers about whether the preceding consonant is a palatalized or velarized consonant phoneme. So Russian doesn't really need "phonics" in the sense that English and Chinese children do. Lucky you.

Also I noticed that italians who are not very good at english really like to read english words literally, I mean as if it was italian. It's both funny and annoying. Germans don't do that.

English is a Germanic language, so German speakers find it easier to learn than Italians do. German and Italian accents are typically full of spelling pronunciations based on an imperfect grasp of sound-symbol correspondences for English, but so are most foreign accents. The advantage that Germans have is that it is possible to set up sound correspondences between German and English pronunciations, whereas speakers of Romance languages struggle with the fact that English has a huge supply of Romance vocabulary (based mostly on the Parisian French dialect). When those words entered English, they were filtered through English pronunciation that was undergoing some rather profound changes at the transition between Middle and Modern English. So Italian, French, and Spanish speakers can't as easily match up their own "phonic" patterns with the unfamiliar English ones. There is more interference from their native language. That's my educated guess, anyway. I haven't really studied the literature surrounding these kinds of accents in English.

 

[barbos]

Solution is obvious, teach kids russian first

 

[Copernicus]

Solution is obvious, teach kids russian first

TBH, Russian is my favorite foreign language, and not just because modern linguistic theory was begun there in the last half of the 19th century. But it was then that the term "phoneme" was first coined in Russian (фонема) by  Jan Baudouin de Courtenay. Baudouin's work basically became the basis from which the "phonics" method of teaching evolved. Linguists in the West largely adopted Baudouin's term and his concept of phonemes, but, since most did not read Russian, he never got full credit for his historical role. To this day, most Western linguists don't know a lot about Baudouin's pioneering work, and I suspect that few modern Russian linguists really appreciate him the way they did during the Soviet period.

 

[Bomb#20]

Moreover, your claim doesn't appear to make sense. If a child were looking at a word whose pronunciation the child did not already possess, then what good would it do him to figure out how to pronounce the unknown word?

Really? Um, so he could file the word away for future use in his internal word table, which his brain indexes by phonemes, rather than in his internal incomprehensible squiggle table, which his brain indexes barely at all and which consequently stinks at recovering a word the second time he encounters it in writing? Figuring out how to pronounce unknown words is how I learned to read -- and it works so spectacularly well that my parents used to make fun of my many mispronunciations because I read so much I wound up with a huge vocabulary of words I'd never heard. The mispronunciations are corrected later with little effort once the words themselves have been mastered. Contrariwise, trying to memorize newly encountered words by the shapes of their markings without forming mental associations with sounds would be like, well, like trying to learn Chinese characters without the benefit of pinyin. It's the method the Chinese used for thousands of years, and it left 90+% of their population illiterate.

He would still need to discover what the word meant in order to incorporate it into his linguistic inventory.

Sure, but that comes from observing how the writer uses the word in context, the same way children figure out what spoken words mean.

Once he learned that, he could then use the word in spoken English, although that can lead to rather awkward spelling pronunciations.

Welcome to my childhood.

New vocabulary is about words that the reader is unfamiliar with, so figuring out how the written form is pronounced only helps in the sense that it expands their spoken vocabulary.

Why do you think that? Pronunciation helps whether the word ever enters their spoken vocabulary or not. We're auditory animals; most of us need to "hear" a pronunciation in our minds in order to remember the word, regardless of whether we or anyone else in our presence vocalizes it.

... It does help to associate words with pronunciations, but that isn't strictly necessary.

It certainly isn't. Pinyin or bopomofo aren't strictly necessary either -- you can also create the literate caste you need to man your imperial bureaucracy by recruiting them young and then spending ten or twenty years teaching them to read.

In fact, mature readers don't normally use even mental pronunciations when they read English. They recognize vocabulary by visual patterns. ...

It's true that sounding out words slows you down; but so what? Phonics is training wheels. Telling kids they can't have training wheels because adults can bike faster without them is stupid. Kids will take off the training wheels when they're ready. Speed doesn't come from mimicking fast people. Speed comes from practice. Practice comes from doing it slowly and succeeding so you get some payoff for your efforts. Trying to do it fast before you've learned to do it at all, and predictably failing, is a recipe for getting discouraged and not practicing. Psychologists who know how mature reading works and deduce that that's what they should tell teachers to teach children to do because it ought to work are idiots.

Well, that isn't what psychologists tell teachers.

It's what the "whole language" proponents told teachers.

It is what they discovered experimentally about how people adults read.

FIFY.

 

[Politesse]

I am baffled by the idea that one could learn phonics, "whole words", or analytical reading in isolation from the other three. They are addressing different facets of language - the phoneme, the morpheme, syntax, discourse - and you obviously need all of them in order to become a competent reader. Trying to just teach one at once, via whatever new catchy system comes into vogue, is ridiculous. Like trying to teach physics by only talking about atoms. Or geology by only talking about seismology. Or math by "focusing on addition". Written language is a complex beast, you can only simplify it so much.

I'm a college instructor, and I routinely encounter students who can sound out words but have no idea how to read in any meaningful sense. Similarly, I encounter students who can understand concepts and even enjoy reading, but cannot spell for shit.

 

[Copernicus]

I am baffled by the idea that one could learn phonics, "whole words", or analytical reading in isolation from the other three. They are addressing different facets of language - the phoneme, the morpheme, syntax, discourse - and you obviously need all of them in order to become a competent reader. Trying to just teach one at once, via whatever new catchy system comes into vogue, is ridiculous. Like trying to teach physics by only talking about atoms. Or geology by only talking about seismology. Or math by "focusing on addition". Written language is a complex beast, you can only simplify it so much.

The existence of alphabetic writing systems is objective evidence for the existence of phonemes (as is rhyme). So children come equipped with an intuitive knowledge of phonemic strings associated with words. Hence, phonics makes perfect sense as a means of getting them to recognize what the written symbols mean without having to have a teacher or dictionary at hand to explain them. That is the primary advantage of phonics, which is actually a very old method for the teaching of reading skills. Obviously, it is important to simplify learning tasks as much as possible for very young children. Like phonemes, morphemes, phrase structure, and discourse rules are already largely in place for children. It is just a matter of connecting those existing intuitions with visual symbols. As the individual matures, the need to sound out words disappears, and they use visual pattern recognition to read more quickly.

I'm a college instructor, and I routinely encounter students who can sound out words but have no idea how to read in any meaningful sense. Similarly, I encounter students who can understand concepts and even enjoy reading, but cannot spell for shit.

It is sad that students are allowed to graduate without mastering literacy properly, but the fault lies with the adults who failed to motivate them enough to make them want to learn. There is no real excuse for bad spelling in the age of spell checkers. Give them fair warning and then assign lower grades for sloppiness. I hate the thought of penalizing students who are dyslexic, so I can see making exceptions in those cases. I've had some excellent students who suffered from dyslexia. However, even they can see red squiggles on a computer screen these days, so typed papers should be held to a higher standard.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

I had a friend who learned by See-Say. He had an interesting set of problems. For example, if you write in dialect, to reflect the accent of the speaker, he can't read it.

Y'all know whut I mean? He's dun got no clue what some of these words are.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

I don't think you need to teach it a tall, so much as encourage the development of it. Kids will learn to read all on their own given time and enough interest in doing so. A few comic books and no teacher is how a lot of my friends growing up learned to read, believe it or not. Some of them can now read and write better than I can.