Posted on 03/24/2017 11:21:34 PM PDT by MarvinStinson
If you look at how reading is taught in the U.S., children are taught stupidly and then some. Every technique that will make reading difficult and unpleasant is employed.
To start with, Sight-words are the worst way to start. Instead of learning letters and the sounds they represent, children memorize graphic designs. Rudolf Flesch said that eleven studies had been conducted; all found that phonics is superior. (So the Education Establishment has always known that if you want a society to have low literacy, you will promote Sight-words. And that is what they relentlessly do.)
Children who rely entirely on Sight-words will invariably end up functionally illiterate.
If water in the fuel line is not enough, put some sugar in the gas tank and some sand in the engine, and while you're at it, punch a hole in the radiator. Examples include:
1) The "three cueing system" teaches children to rely on semantics or context. Second, use syntax. These rules turn the English language into an elusive puzzle you need to solve word by word and sentence by sentence, every time you read..
2) Professor Frank Smith mandated that children must, when not recognizing a word, guess and then skip. Once a child has acquired the tendency to use these techniques, that child will never be a good reader.
3) Public schools have for many years told children to look for Picture Clues, as if pictures will always be there and always mean one thing. Furthermore, in looking at a picture, the child stops looking at the text.
4) Prior Knowledge is constantly emphasized, as if children could use what they already know to decode text they have not seen before. This turns reading into a puzzle, a detective story.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
There is no ironclad rule; it depends on the language.
In English, the spelling conventions are consistent enough that phonics will work and are a great aid.
You can’t do that in, say, Japanese, and yet illiteracy is not a huge problem in Japan.
Ultimately, attitudes have to change. People need to want to learn to read because it’s going to make a difference in their world.
This article is about teaching English.
Well, they have a phonic alphabet, in fact TWO phonic alphabets, but I don't now how these figure in their educational program.
Sight reading is teaching children to read hieroglyphics. A tiny number will become very good at it. Most will remain functionally illiterate. The Chinese cultures teach their own ideographic system which is akin to hieroglyphics but they require intense and extensive practice and rote, all of which has been banned by the same educational technicians that instituted sight reading.
They learn two syllabaries and two Chinese systems. They use heavy practice and rote. Snowflake students can’t handle that and it is not used.
TO REPEAT:
This article is about teaching ENGLISH in the USA schools.
Interesting article
I taught each of my kids to read before kindergarden, using Hooked on Phonics, plus phonics-oriented books by Dr Seuss. All are now adult and strong readers.
i taught my kids and other people’s kids using phonetics... most sight words follow phonetic rules... and, some, if, been, the, by, but, just, them, they... it’s silly really...
All the western languages are phonics taught. All the eastern are rote character memorization. You can figure out words you havent seen before in western languages, but it isnt reall posible to do that with th eastern ones because there are no set patterns that clue you into a figure character you have never encountered before, if there is no one around who can tell you what it means.
You have to if you want them to be able to read well. The public schools will not do this.
They want whites and asians capabilities to go down to the levels of blacks and hispanics. Which are dropping fast in urban areas.
Still, Asians learn them and learn them well.
Don’t blame a certain approach to language for the lack of fundamental motivation to learn it.
Remember that Reading is “FUNdamental”in everything we do in life.... I have instilled this in my 3 children and see it reflected in my 6 Grandchildren, All A/B Honor Roll Students, even my 3 year old granddaughter can read some and she is just starting........
My Mom taught me to read when I was three years old. Here’s how!
1.) Taught me the alphabet
2.) Taught me the sounds the letters represented
3.) Taught me that they make words when you string them together
4.) Taught me to “sound it out”
I was past Dr. Seuss in a matter of months and could make my way through a newspaper by the time I was in Kindergarten. Once I was in school, the nuns taught reading the same way. But I suppose this method is too easy and sensible to be taught in this more modern and enlightened era.
I go through corporate documents all day at work and I certainly have an edge over co-workers who are the products of the sight-reading practice.
It was this harmful way of “teaching” reading, and the whole child-centered philosophy that caused me to pull my daughter out of kindergarten and home-school both of my kids years ago.
I wound up doing a lot of research regarding whole language and it was clear to me that it was the cause of the illiteracy problem in the schools. I wrote my own program and opened a tutoring business to teach these poor illiterate kids how to read and spell. I had no shortage of students! It paid for private Christian high school for my kids.
The whole language methodology is so wrong that I have decided its use is to intentionally dumb down the west, and it has certainly worked.
Not all. Consider the Korean alphabet, invented by King Sejong the Great in 1443. From the Wikipedia:
In its classical and modern forms, the alphabet has 19 consonant and 21 vowel letters. However, instead of being written sequentially like the letters of the Latin alphabet, Hangul letters are grouped into blocks, such as 한 han, each of which transcribes a syllable. That is, although the syllable 한 han may look like a single character, it is actually composed of three letters: ㅎ h, ㅏ a, and ㄴ n. Each syllabic block consists of two to six letters, including at least one consonant and one vowel. These blocks are then arranged horizontally from left to right or vertically from top to bottom. Each Korean word consists of one or more syllables, hence one or more blocks. The number of mathematically possible distinct blocks is 11,172, though there are far fewer possible syllables allowed by Korean phonotactics, and not all phonotactically possible syllables occur in actual Korean words. Of the 11,172 possible Hangul syllables, the most frequent 256 have a cumulative frequency of 88.2%; with the top 512, it reaches 99.9%.[2]
From King Sejong's Wikipedia entry:
King Sejong the Great profoundly affected Korean history with his introduction of hangul, the native phonetic alphabet system for the Korean language.[18]
Before the creation of Hangul, people in Korea (known as Joseon at the time) primarily wrote using Classical Chinese alongside native phonetic writing systems that predate Hangul by hundreds of years, including idu, hyangchal, gugyeol, and gakpil.[19][20][21][22] However, due to the fundamental differences between the Korean and Chinese languages,[23] and the large number of characters needed to be learned, there was much difficulty in learning how to write using Chinese characters for the lower classes, who often didn't have the privilege of education. To assuage this problem, King Sejong created the unique alphabet known as Hangul to promote literacy among the common people.[24] His intention was to establish a cultural identity for Korea through its unique script.
King Sejong presided over the introduction of the 28-letter Korean alphabet, with the explicit goal being that Koreans from all classes would read and write. Each hangul letter is based on a simplified diagram of the patterns made by the human speech organs (the mouth, tongue and teeth) when producing the sound related to the character. Morphemes are built by writing the characters in syllabic blocks. The blocks of letters are then strung together linearly.
The Hangul alphabet was completed in 1443 and published in 1446 along with a 33-page manual titled Hunmin Jeong-um, explaining what the letters are as well as the philosophical theories and motives behind them.[25] The Hunmin Jeong-um purported that anyone could learn Hangul in a matter of days. Persons previously unfamiliar with Hangul can typically pronounce Korean script accurately after only a few hours of study.
where did i blame them? i didn’t, stop making up crap.
Although hieroglyphics look pictographic, they are in fact phonetic with each symbol being a sound and words formed with multiple characters. Their highly stylized format is what threw people off from cracking the code for ancient egyptian hieroglyphics until the Rosetta stone was discovered.
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