K2:
Posted on 01/28/2019 6:35:44 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
(More about reading):
The biggest promises in K-12 involve reading and sight-words. Children are told: Learn your sight-words and you will be good readers!
There is a strange tautology in sight-word instruction. When you learn to be a successful reader, you will be a successful reader. That's the weird boilerplate found throughout K-12.
Suppose you tell a bunch of six-year-olds that tight-rope walking is easy. Put one foot in front of the other; don’t look down; smile confidently and walk. Children, you stress, cannot enjoy fun on the high wire until they have learned to walk comfortably on the high wire.
The sin here is to make the first steps sound simple and routine. In fact, they might take years to master. Few children ever learn to walk on a high wire. And few master more than a small number of sight-words.
A huge site explains: "Sight words are words that appear frequently in most of the text people read, but can't easily be sounded out. Learning them helps children become more confident readers." In fact, attempting to learn these words renders many children depressed and defeated.
Another influential site promises: “Learning sight-words allows a child to recognize these words at a glance — on sight — without needing to break the words down into their individual letters and is the way strong readers recognize most words. Knowing common, or high frequency, words by sight makes reading easier and faster, because the reader does not need to stop to try and sound out each individual word, letter by letter.” Promises, promises.
Wikipedia says: “Sight words, often also called high frequency sight words, are commonly used words that young children are encouraged to memorize as a whole by sight, so that they can automatically recognize these words in print without having to use any strategies to decode….. The advantage for children being able to recognize sight-words automatically is that a beginning reader will be able to identify the majority of words in a beginning text before they even attempt to read it." You see, just like that, beginners will be able to identify the majority of words.
A famous site asks, “What are Dolch Words?" The answer begins: "The list contains 220 ‘Service words’ that must be quickly recognized in order to achieve reading fluency…Sight-words make up 50 to 70 percent of any general text. Therefore, teaching The Dolch Word List is a crucial goal of education grades kindergarten through 3.” Quickly recognized?? Typically this task takes several years. So “reading fluency” is not part of the child's life for a long time.
Of course, people selling a phony naturally take shots at phonics, the main competition. One teacher tells us: "My observations of students engaged in literacy activities have demonstrated that the students who are not fluent readers within this class lack a mastery of high frequency sight words. I have found that these students spend a significant amount of time decoding words rather than having an automatic recall of the commonly used sight words…Phonics is the most commonly used method to teach reading. Decoding words involves understanding the alphabetic principle, letter sound correspondences, and recoding unfamiliar words into a pattern that is recognizable. However, this process of word analysis decreases reading fluency and hinders reading comprehension." So there! The method that actually works decreases fluency and hinders comprehension.
Now we see some of the problems. Another teacher records: “We know sight-words are a core part of our literacy instruction...I can even confidently assume we are all teaching sight-words on a daily basis within our classrooms. So why do we still have students who stare at us blankly when they come to a sight-word that we know they know while reading a book?….Flash forward a week later. Those same students are reading a book at the guided reading table. On page three, one of the words the teacher just went over is written as plain as day on the page. The student skips the word as she whisper reads at the table. 'You know that word. We just went over it,' the teacher says. 'We even wrote the word in shaving cream. We rainbow wrote the word. We wrote it with our magic fingers in the sky. We did yoga while we chanted it. We sculpted the word from play-dough. We built the word with magnetic letters. We wrote the word with my fancy markers. I know you know that word.'”
With sight-words, success is a temporary thing. Think back to an exam where you memorized some formulas. You knew them for the test. Two weeks later you didn't know them.
Abstract for a Masters degree reports: “Data was collected through daily observation of students and recorded notes, formal and informal interviews, and student work samples. After analyzing the data, three major themes were found: sight word instruction improved students’ overall reading abilities, sight word instruction improved students’ confidence in reading, and sight word instruction alone is not beneficial without other literacy instruction...In order for students to become adequate readers, they must first learn to read sight-words...For some students learning to read is not an easy task, and they will require extra supports and instruction in order to become adequate readers…..Sight-word instruction is a successful strategy to use with all students, but especially when working with students with disabilities and struggling readers." In fact, reading disabilities are typically caused by sight-word instruction.
More promises in a Masters: “Even though it may take considerable effort and time for a student to learn the entire sight word list, it is beneficial. Having the ability to recognize these words quickly can dramatically increase confidence and improve reading proficiency of the beginning reader. Since complete fluency with sight-words is the foundation of literacy, a variety of techniques must be used to teach them.”
Note that prospective teachers are forced to prove, once again, the false promises that have created more than 40 million functional illiterates in this country. Probably these teachers will be forever wed to a fallacy, unable to walk away to a more literate world.
The better strategy is to teach children to read with phonics. Takes about four months, as opposed to struggling for years with lists of sight-words.
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For more on reading, see Improve-Education.org
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K2:
Sight Words:
Telling kids WHAT to Think
Phonics:
Teaching kids HOW to think.
Am I in some way dyslexic?
Really good readers read by site words - but only after learning to sound them out phonetically and lots and lots of practice. Gotta walk before you run.
How about this one... Antiestablishmentarianism?
Just try to sight read this one without needing to pick it apart.
Most 5 yo love to read mostv15 hate to read. 10 years of school and what kids learn is to hate to read.
Learning to read entails the introduction and practice of the individual sounds that make up words. When that was accomplished my boys went on to putting those sounds together to make words. One year of practice for that exercise.
The following year they cycled thru a similar go-around and added reading practice.
] The following year the did another practice with even harder words.
By the fourth year they were accomplished readers and could decipher any word given to them.
At the same time as they were learning to read I had the also go through practicing penmanship.
All this cemented the learning into their brains and the penmanship created a well rounded reader.
This is what schools used to do when they produced excellently educated students who were able to go on to higher and more challenging educational challenges - read math, science, writing.
If schools would spend the first four years on just reading and penmanship they would have students prepared for any educational challenge.
What the socialistic educationists have done is a crime to every school child and they should be prosecuted and jailed. (My opinion).
The education du jour scam. Destroying children’s scholastic capabilities since 1962!
In my Masters experience long ago, the various Phd physicists and other hard science wizards typically asked to called by their first names.
OTOH, the few Education Phds I’ve met were pompous a$$holes who demanded the “Doctor” address.
I suspect the K-12 Common Core math teachers must be fairly ignorant of mathematics.
K-12 is a money sluice for teachers unions and nothing else. What they are doing is criminal.
If a word is learned as a sight-word, and continues to be read as a sight-word, then it’s a sight-word. That usage is convenient, accurate and helpful.
If a word starts as a phonetic word, then it simply becomes a more and more automatic phonetic word. In fact, one expert says it if you sound out a word three or four times, it becomes permanently fixed in your brain.
Calling such a word a sight-word doesn’t help students but does help the bad guys keep Whole Word in play. I don’t think it’s a good idea to help the bad guys. On the contrary.
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