Posted on 01/02/2012 7:18:49 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
GOOD INSIGHTS ON WHY MILLIONS OF KIDS CAN'T READ. (A FOLLOW-UP FOR ANYONE INTERESTED IN EARLIER POST TITLED "FAKE READING THEORY IS THE SLAVE TRADE OF OUR ERA.")
The country continues to be plagued by illiteracy. The reason is simple. The country continues to be under the heel of some of the most reckless and reprehensible “experts” imaginable.
They make little children memorize the SHAPES of words, which most little children simply can’t do. Ergo, these children experience major reading and cognitive problems.
Don Potter, the phonics guru and as well a teacher in Texas, recently sent me this illuminating note: “This has been a banner year for me. I have rescued dozens of students from the clutches of the sight-word monster. I am looking forward to rescuing more in the year to come. The parents marvel that I have been able to improve their children's reading with phonics in a very short time. They are also very upset to learn that their children were suffering, not genetic defects that screwed up neural pathways, but old fashioned artificially induced whole-word dyslexia caused by sight-word instruction. Every student coming to me has a copy of the Dolch Sight Vocabulary List in their Homework Folder.”
Note that the parents had embraced the idea that their kids were mentally impaired (dyslexic) but are now shocked to find that the kids are normal! (In fact, it’s the school that is mentally impaired.) There in a few dozen words is the whole story of dyslexia in our time. Parents and kids accept the school’s nutty diagnosis but in many cases will be angry with you if you tell them, sorry, you’re fine but you are the victim of a hoax. (I have a video on YouTube called "The Strange Truth About Dyslexia." People leave really violent comments on it.)
QED: the Dolch Sight Vocabulary List should be removed from every school.
Now, I want to give you a little more detail about the reading debate...but not too much! Reading theory quickly becomes murky; and I believe our Education Establishment uses the general confusion to keep their bad ideas in play.
Happily, I’ve found an excellent way to explore some of the subtleties. Raymond Laurita was a major crusader 40 years ago; in 1967 he published an article titled “Errors Children Make in Reading.” I’ve cut his article down to the best parts; and I promise you will be glad you read them. They explain how Sight-Words do their evil work:
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On hearing the errors of these unfortunate children, the first impulse is to attribute them to a lack of intelligence or even some form of mental aberration. The linguistic monstrosities these children perpetrate appear to be without semblance of logic or consistency...
The primary cause of reading difficulties in virtually all of the over 700 cases of reading disability I have treated over the years was related to difficulties the child encountered in attempting to cope with the problems imposed by whole configurations....
When a child is exposed to a whole word configuration such as “could” for example, without sufficient preparation, we are literally opening a Pandora’s Box of possible confusions....
To the immature child who hasn’t developed adequate visual and auditory identity and association between individual language symbols and the words they form, the word “could” will undoubtedly be confused later with a variety of configurations; among them: cold, called, cloud, canned, cooled, clawed, cord, would, should, etc....It isn’t difficult for the more than casual observer to understand why so many children become reading problems. They simply cannot cope fast enough with the need to learn numerous and unrelated whole word configurations on a purely visual basis.
It must be remembered that children who learn by the sight method, and this constitutes the majority of children in the United States, have been scientifically conditioned during the initial exposure period to a learning experience which by its very nature elicits a purely visual response to a configuration without assistance from auditory clues. No sincere educator can pretend that this initial exposure period hasn’t a most profound and enduring effect on the immature child, for by a series of carefully arranged stimulus-response activities, he has been literally conditioned to a visual, configurational attack on language. The result is inevitable.
The argument of those who persist in exposing all children indiscriminately to a visual configurational attack is usually based on post-facto reasoning, for they tend to cite the large numbers of children who have learned to read without first making auditory and visual associations with the individual letters of the alphabet. It is my belief and that of others that children who learn to read using a gestalt approach which exposes them to whole word configurations at the outset, are children who have had either prior preparation which prepared them for the experience or are those children gifted with better than average capacities of visual perception, discrimination and memory....
Alex Bannatyne writing in The Disabled Reader, states “This latter method, commonly called look-and-say, may be effective with those two thirds of first- and second-grade pupils who are sufficiently gifted in the realm of language to be able to learn to read quickly. I believe that these verbally capable children rapidly teach themselves to analyze words phonetically in spite of a deliberate non-phonetic approach on the part of the teacher. That this is so can easily be tested by asking children who have learned to read well using the look-and-say method to sound out difficult words; this they usually do quite competently....”
The subtlety and infinite diversity of the errors that the child becomes subject to in his developing confusion have to be seen to be believed....
Another example saw a child respond to the word “grab” with the response “drag.” This is an extremely common type of error for it has in addition to the visual confusion an overlay of confused auditory association. The consonant blends gr and dr are extremely difficult to differentiate for the child with inadequate auditory perception and discrimination. The two sounds are very similar as are the lip movements which are made to create them. In addition to the auditory confusion and the close configurational pattern of the two words, the child was also reversing the initial and final consonants. This child also referred to a “furry” animal as a “funny” animal and read about a character who went swimming in the “winter” instead of in the “water.” Both of these errors had a configurational base with the error involving the words furry and funny complicated by a discrimination confusion between the n and the r. This child also made the following progression in mistaking the word “Oh.” He went from oh to on to no and finally concluded the series with not.
These confusions are not extreme examples of severely disabled children but are instead rather common samples that every remedial teacher will meet on a given day if the time is taken to record the mistakes children make.
Often a child will read a sentence such as: “The little boy went into the jungle and saw a big giraffe.” and substitute for the last word: elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus or even dinosaur. Most adults fail to realize the subtle yet logical cause for this kind of mistake. It is really very logical for the child who has been conditioned to respond to visual stimuli. He isn’t thinking in terms of auditory clues, rather he is sure only that the little boy has seen some kind of large jungle animal. Unless he is a capable, linguistically talented child, his auditory associational training hasn’t prepared him for a total attack on the word, thus why shouldn’t it be a hippopotamus, elephant, rhinoceros or even a dinosaur. They are all “big” words in terms of size; they are all large animals and to the small child the possibility of a dinosaur residing in the depths of the jungle is a distinct possibility....
Observing a child who has lost some of this marvelous human capacity to respond with reasoning and logic, is a terribly depressing sight, and when one considers the number of times that human frailty in the form of faulty teaching and inadequate methodology has been the cause of this loss, the situation takes on the aspects of a tragedy....
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QED: the Dolch Sight Vocabulary List is the reason we have 50 million functional illiterates. It should be removed from every school. All the phonics experts say that children learn to read in the first grade. The Whole Word maniacs say that children will read some day, maybe, perhaps in middle school, but don’t be surprised if they experience ADHD, depression, dyslexia, and chronic illiteracy.
Don Potter publishes this article and many like it on donpotter.net. His site is an archive of historically important material.
My own focus is on providing artillery for parents to use in their daily battles with school administrators. Many of these officials may actually have no idea how far over to the dark side they have drifted. (They make the mistake of trusting the pronouncements coming down from on high.) So send them a copy of this post or the article titled: “Fake Reading Theory is the Slave Trade of Our Era.” (on RightSideNews)
(Improve-Education.org also has 10 articles about reading.)
“If a child cannot adapt to one way of learning, I don’t know why another one can’t work instead. Who says there can be only one way to learn? Who says every child learns the same way?”
One of the things constantly pointed out by right-wing extremist critics of education (you know, the types that would prefer first graders learn math without calculators) is that the people pushing Whole Language and Fuzzy Math never seem to be able to provide any scientific studies to prove that their new system works better than what’s been around for hundreds of years. Now, if there is that data, I’m all ears.
“It is just our WHOLE educational system HAS to be scrapped and start from the bottom with the parents and local control of EVERYTHING-—even deciding WHO can teach—and what books to use.”
I certainly won’t argue that - I just wish that day would come.
“Not really, if it was, we wouldn’t have the reading mess - after all, they do quite well learning their languages. No, the Asian languages are visual-based.”
No, the Chinese do not, on average, do well in learning to read and write their language. You would be surprised to discover how few Chinese out of 1.3 billion have the time and the memory to master more than a very basic grasp of the written language. In fact, the Chinese schools’ emphasis on memorization (driven by the language) is a major policy concern in China for various reasons.
No, “Asian” languages are not visually (ideographically) based. Mandarin and various dialects (e.g. Cantonese) used in China are (although pinyin is phonetic system that is used in China with children to help them learn characters - an admission that phonetic systems are easier to learn).
Vietnamese (a roman alphabetic system replaced Chinese characters as a result of the influence of French missionaries), Korean (Hangul), Thai (an indic system), Lao (an indic system), Cambodian (an indic system), Malay (always phonetic, but an indic system gave way to an arabic system which gave way to a roman system), and South Asian languages are not ideographic.
Japan uses a variety of systems jumbled together. The Kanji characters, borrowed from China in the 4th Century, are now combined with two syllabaries known as “Kana” ( Hirakana and Katakana). Romanji, which are phonetic characters, are also used.
By the way, If China ever went phonetic, the value of China’s human capital would soar. Until China changes politically and culturally, let’s hope that doesn’t happen. Given the Chinese people’s cultural attachment to the ideographs, the likelihood of a switch in the near to medium term future is remote.
Cheers!
This is absolutely true. I’m so depressed. My kid is ruined by this, even though I fought it all the way. It’s too late for him now.
Please see post 43 so that you don’t repeat this sort of thing any more. In particular, you need to stop thinking of “Asians” as an undifferentiated blob.
No. I didn’t sound out words when I was three. I learned words that she’d written up as flash cards. I learned them by sight, not by sound. She would go through the deck and couldn’t believe how fast I learned them. She had to keep adding to the deck because I was outpacing what she thought a child of three could learn.
She learned to do that, when she worked with disabled children at a school as a teacher’s helper. She wasn’t a school teacher herself. But, she’d seen other teachers do it with children, and she thought I could do it too. She was right.
Re: Some of the comments to you - see comment 43.
My apologies. It's easy for someone of European lineage to do. I would imagine that Asians likewise lump us European types into one big group for similar reasons. No offense was mean. Again, I apologize.
“This reads like the la leche league nazis who drove my wife into nearly fatal post partem depression. It’s sick.”
Dang breast nazis. Can’t stand ‘em.
Don’t give it a second thought. Now, how do we keep Romney from getting the nomination? ;-)
My oldest child was completely unable to read until I taught him with phonics. My youngest was taught with phonics starting at age 4. I see phonics as a quick way to learn many words - bot, cot, dot, got, lot, etc. Children quickly master many little words and then build on their success. Some words do have to be memorized by sight because they don’t follow standard pronunciation rules but you work on that bit by bit. Phonics and sight memorization go hand in hand to completely master reading but phonics is the best place to get started and become quickly successful.
Would I be a grammar nazi if I hoped that your children wrote better as well? Good is an adjective, it modifies nouns. To read is an action, so it would require an adverb that modifies a verb. You don't read nearly as well as your kids.
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“Re: Some of the comments to you - see comment 43.”
You’re probably. But I do know one thing, for certain, here in the US. One big reason that Asians run circles around whites academically is because they have their own system of making sure their kids get taught, either through their organizations, or through after-school centers...and believe me, they don’t use Whole Language, or Calculators, for that matter AT ALL, in those places.
After all...they only make money (the after-school centers) if the kids actually learn something.
That at least I understand. We vote someone else in the primaries...anyone else in the primaries.
Not to go off on a tangent, but the Mormon thing is enough to put me off. That no non-mormon is allowed in a Mormon temple places the religion in enough of a secret-society category for me to reject a Mormon candidate outright, without any further evidence. Some might well be justified in calling it bigotry, but that is simply how I see it.
“Would I be a grammar nazi if I hoped that your children wrote better as well? Good is an adjective, it modifies nouns. To read is an action, so it would require an adverb that modifies a verb. You don’t read nearly as well as your kids.”
Well, if you don’t learn reading good, your not going to do two good later on...which is the point of this thread.
“Phonics and sight memorization go hand in hand to completely master reading but phonics is the best place to get started and become quickly successful.”
But even what you’re calling sight isn’t really - it’s more like phonics, with some deviations - since phonics can be used to to almost sound out even the tougher words in English.
If we had to rely on Whole Language, we would see a character string such as “lknpe” and remember that it means water, whereas as “lkcnpe” means waiter. That’s what Whole Language is...the letters mean nothing, just a bunch of useless symbols - it’s the shape of the word, and only the shape of the word that means anything.
The obvious conclusion when followed to its logical conclusion: remedial telephone book-reading class. Any objection is totally disingenuous.
Obviously that ultimately be only possible by an advanced sight reader-instructor who’s dissertation is based on being learned all the names in the telephone book.
Right?
I fear that sky’s the limit in that regard: there’s remedial atlas reading-class.
Right?
The ultimate destination will be remedial map-name reading class. This will be a doctoral level program where only those having the necessary qualifications in both telephone book-reading AND atlas-reading will be qualified to be learned how to sight-read map names.
I’m fairly certain this will ultimately deteriorate to all things being referenced by some arcane numeric grid-code, i.e., akin to how the various Soviet factories were named. That’s about the time when all those special ed-instructors will be shot in the head (their survivors billed for the cost of execution materiel & processing costs).
Whole Word was ardy awesome concept; whole LNGUAJ redng? Wow! Sins I’m a graduate of Heln Wud Sped Reding. I reds 186000 wrds pr secnd.
BTW: Y U wan hav sx w me?
I blame them.
By now parents ( especially conservatives) should **know** that government schools ruin a child for both literacy and numeracy. Our nation's socialist-entitlement schools push homosexuality and other sexual deviency, are biased against boys, espcially white boys, and are utterly godless in their worldview. Simply by attending the child learns to think and reason godlessly. He must just to cooperate in the classroom. How could it be otherwise?
I also blame the **TEACHERS***!
Would a moral and ethical person work in an abortion center, order the supplies, and hand the instruments to the abortionists, just to hold on to the vain hope that once in a while they could throw out a conservative or Christian anti-abortion crumb to the clients? Wel!l.. The same holds true for teachers who **willing** run these godless, socialist, pits of ignorance, misnamed “schools”.
Personally, I have recently made a decision. I will NOT have a government school teacher for a friend. They are either too stupid , too evil, too much of a Useful Idiot, or too much of a paycheck collecting and timid toady to be a friend. That's my stand.
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