Posted on 04/20/2017 8:16:19 AM PDT by JimSEA
Research published today in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General has shown that learning to read by sounding out words (a teaching method known as phonics) has a dramatic impact on the accuracy of reading aloud and comprehension.
There has been intense debate concerning how children should be taught to read. Researchers from Royal Holloway, University of London and the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit tested whether learning to read by sounding out words is more effective than focusing on whole-word meanings. In order to assess the effectiveness of using phonics the researchers trained adults to read in a new language, printed in unfamiliar symbols, and then measured their learning with reading tests and brain scans.
Professor Kathy Rastle, from the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway said, "The results were striking; people who had focused on the meanings of the new words were much less accurate in reading aloud and comprehension than those who had used phonics, and our MRI scans revealed that their brains had to work harder to decipher what they were reading."
English-speaking countries should replicate UK use of phonics
In England, the provision of systematic phonics instruction is a legal requirement in state-funded primary schools. The impact of phonics is measured through a screening check administered to children in Year 1. The results of this screening check have shown year-on-year gains in the percentage of children reaching an expected standard -- from 58% in 2012 to 81% in 2016.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
I am not sure I understand your comment.
It seems like the phonics method provides tools for children to use to improve their reading and writing.
Our kindergartner granddaughter has been learning letter sounds/phonics approach since she could talk. She is reading probably about 3rd grade level, and writing probably about 2nd grade level. I have to believe that the spelling will improve over time, but for now she can certainly write words, phrases, and sentences that we are able to understand, even if there are spelling errors.
I am curious as to how much exposure to alphabet and sounds your wife received before going to school, and also whether or not books were read to her from infancy forward.
My personal feeling is that those factors, along with the phonics approach when actually in school, are big contributors to lifetime literacy.
“Good luck correcting your kid’s spelling for the rest of his/her life. Phonics is certainly the easiest (laziest) teaching method for teachers.”
When I was taught phonics, I was also taught the “exceptions to the rules”. The teachers were NOT lazy — they worked very hard on this aspect of learning to read and spell properly.
Perhaps some of today’s teachers are too lazy to work this hard?
Because teaching (and learning) phonics is cumbersome. Effective, but cumbersome.
Because there is a cluster of bureaucracies dedicated to:
1: Selling new school textbooks every few years at massive cost even though math is math and reading is reading, just like they have been since 1810, for the purpose of extracting public money.
2: Because there is a massive investment in people who go to college/university to validate their teaching theories and sufficient numbers of sufficiently gullible school boards who, when faced with diminishing performance of their students, are compelled to “try something different”. Not necessarily better, just different.
Adults ... a new language ... unfamiliar symbols ...
I’m all for phonics. But I question the value of this experiment. Most reading challenge is children, not adults. There is no automatic transference
Most reading challenge is in reading the language you heard for 9 months you were in the womb, and for 2 years after birth before most kids start learning to read at age 3. Most are not learning to read an unfamiliar language.
Most people learning to read are using symbols they have seen on for a couple years. They are not unfamiliar. Before he could walk, my grandson could “read” McDonalds, Arbys, etc. Before he could walk, he could correct grandmar (my wife) who confuses Steak-n-Shake with White Castle.
In teaching ESL and watching others learn to read English, and in watching my friends and me tr to learn to read Spanish, it seems that different people learn differently.
In ALL studies of children, there is one, and only one, statistical correlation that is always dominant.
When a child’s parents show interest and concern with the child learning, the child learns, regardless of the method used.
Compare two types of voucher/charter school methods.
A. In method A more sign up for the school than the seats available. Students are selected by a lottery method.
B. In method B, the parents and students who show the strongest desire to go to the school of their choice are the ones who get in. The strongest desire is a combination of applying early and often, petering and badgering the admissions people, physically moving to a house close to the school of choice, and many other voluntary actions of the parents and kids.
Guess which set of kids in ALT-schools do better?
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
The one thing I can guarantee, is learning to read is NOT a cookie cutter process.
What works for one child, may work for 80% of the population, but will NOT work for the other 20%.
Every child is different.
Well, just......... DUH.
Thanks for the post.
Wow! Talk about the obvious.
If we had a language with ideograms such as Chinese, (although “new Chinese” is sort of a combination of the two approaches), “whole language,” meaning recognizing words and not learning phonics, might make sense. But no Western language is like that, and this approach has condemned millions of children to functional illiteracy.
It’s been especially hard on black and poor white Americans, because in many cases they don’t have somebody to read to them and develop these concepts (because you can’t understand whole language learning unless you have the concepts to begin with).
Sound it out. In other words, I assume, pronounce each syllable in turn. Is that what it means? How does that work with words like promise and compromise?
What does that even mean? "know what the word was"
When someone learns by the phonics method, they learn the component parts that make up words and - how could it even be avoided - they learn to recognize the whole word and what the word means.
Much better to learn what makes up the whole, and then what the whole means. And that applies to most all learning, not just learning to read.
No surprise in our house. Phonics is how I taught Mel to read at age three. Now she’s getting her Master’s in early childhood literacy. (Despite the curriculum from the professor’s, she is teaching her students phonics with good results!)
However, Sanskrit based language can and is taught by phonics (i.e. Thai)
Did you intend to include a sarcasm tag on that comment?
Ironically, Chinese children do learn to read phonetically, using the pinyin notation developed specifically for this purpose. Eventually and slowly over time they do learn to read the Chinese symbols as well, but their first introduction to reading is through a phonetic alphabet, i.e., an alphabet having a one-to-one correspondence between symbols and sounds in the language, making it easier to learn to read (pinyin) Chinese than English.
Almost every study shows phonics is better. But for some reason the advocates for the look-say method just seem to try harder. They care about this issue more and that makes up for their lack of numbers and scientific evidence.
-PJ
taught four genetically and intellectually very different children how to read in homeschool. Used Abeka’s reading program. they all learned. All read well.
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