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.
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.
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...
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.
When we read, we use both look/say and phonics. Kids need to learn both, and in the mid 1950’s we did learn both. But our government education system swings back between them with the one being used being prohibited. My mother, when she taught first grade in an urban school, always taught both, often having to hide her teaching the one that was at the moment out of favor by purchasing her own duplicating machine, (back in the stone age) and creating her lessons at home away from prying eyes.
And thank goodness they can’t read cursive.. only The Constitution is still in cursive and we don’t need that. This is how slaves were repressed by keeping them illiterate. Your public school child are genderless tax paying slaves.
Picture Clues and Activating Prior Knowledge are tools to help young readers learn how to comprehend what they read. People learn better by associating things; classifying them, etc. By showing children words and text have meaning, they begin to learn from reading.
As for phonics alone, this does not work due to dialects, the fact some children just don’t hear or pick up on the subtle nuances of the sounds. Having a program that combines phonics and sight words has the best success rate.
The leftists hang onto their power by:
1. Importing illegal aliens because they abort their own.
2. Being in charge of the educational system and creating future adults that are unable to discern the difference between good and evil.
Until we drain the educational swamp, we are at risk of being converted into a Marxist, communist, socialist, totalitarian state within 20 years.
Who needs to read?
“Siri? When did Columbus discover America?”
“Alexa? When does the next episode of Jerry Springer come on?”
My son grew up in California. When he was 3, we were always practicing the alphabet and he recognized all the letters, even out of order. Then we started with phonics cards, he would pick one and I would pick one to learn, every night before we would read a bedtime book. He was reading at 4. I had been told (by a very competitive co-worker) that kids in California knew how to read before they entered Kindergarten and thought we were lagging behind. Reading is essential to everything else every child will do in their lives. Sadly, I have read, in the last couple of years, that ‘White’ families are told to stop reading to their kids as it gives the kids an unfair advantage over minority children who are not read to. Socialism is bad, in every venue it invades. Keep reading to your kids........it will set the standard for their lives.
Thanks for posting this article. You got a lot of interesting comments, some of them really terrifying.
A friend of mine, who is in the Mensa IQ league, once told me that she is not smarter than anyone else, she just reads more than anyone else.
I have taught many children to read, years ago, and realized even then that standard textbooks and teaching methods seemed designed to make children stupid and hate reading. I used phonetics and did a lot of reading out loud, and other methods.