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.)
Two other developments, now nearly lost in the mists of time, that led to the collapse of genuine literacy by sixty years ago was the universal adoption of the Prussian design for primary and secondary schooling and then the adoption of one flavor of but one philosophy of education with the emotive label "progressive education" as the only legal philosophy of education throughout the U.S.
Both these developments were originally thoroughly alien to American culture and even language. It isn't possible to get a teaching certificate in the U.S. today unless one is willing to sign-off on progressive education as the only possible philosophy of education.
The origins of these adaptations of experimentalism are horrible to contemplate. It was a deliberate attempt to adapt children to assembly line work, the drudgery the elites at one time believed would dominate their near future.
But if you want to deal a death blow to the unholy alliance between the chattering and meddling classes, the education establishment, the mandarin class and its orthodoxy needs to be attacked head on.
Today by comparison we do see full blown illiteracy in all three subjects.
You're making a couple false assumptions. First, that all methods other than phonics are the cause of "full blown illiteracy..." I'm assuming you're conflating writing and arithmetic with reading in referring to "three subjects". Besides "whole reading" only approaches in some schools, discipline, distractions, an inability to maintain appropriate teacher-student relations, a lack of willingness among the community to demand accountability from the public schools thanks to unions and the tenure system, and a host of other causes may have had something to do with the fact that Johnny can't read.
Additionally, the social pressures towards literacy that existed until John Dewey just aren't there any more. To mush all that into a single originating cause in the transition to other reading systems is unsupportable and unscientific. Johnny can't read because it is now perfectly possible to live and function in our society with only the most minimal literacy and numeracy.
Second, you seem to assume that because I think a Phonics-only approach is wrongheaded and insupportable that I prefer a whole word or dolch method only system. That's simply stupid. Phonics-based learning provides a truly solid core around which students can gain reading mastery but that cannot do everything.
Third, I have actually used the McGuffey reader and associated modern phonics based programs in homeschooling my two kids. It worked amazingly well for one, who reads three levels above grade and is accelerating. Phonics did not work for the other child, who only learned to read after we introduced Dolch cards into the phonics program.
It’s too late for us. We have enough imported illegal aliens now and election fraud that these types of politicians will be voted in in perpetuity!
Everyone needs to learn the lesson from California: Left-wing radicals control this state all the way up to the governor, in the last election, they beat their opponents by a good 10 points each. Sane voters don’t have a prayer in this state, that’s why there such a hemorrhage of productive citizens outta here.
I can’t leave due to job and family constraints, I’ll have to suffer being taxed to death. No hope for us, don’t let it happen in your state!!
The entire book is available on-line at the first link above. Chapter Three deals heavily with the subject to reading. The subject of phonics is specifically discussed under the heading Name Sounds, Not Things.
ML/NJ
All Western languages are phonics-based. All of them. The fact that English is a Germanic language with various accretions from Norman French, Latin, Spanish, etc. doesn’t matter. The accretions were generally modified to follow the existing sound patterns of English as they existed at the time of the linguistic acquisitions. In some cases, new letter/sound combinations were introduced. Consequently, instead of having, for example, just one “ch” sound, we have three (the common “ch” found in words like “chair”, as well as the “ch” sounds in “charade” (French) and “chiral” (Greek)). The few additional sounds resulting from interactions with other Western languages hardly make learning to read phonetically unsound, impractical, or impossible.
There is a literature that demonstrates that there are relatively few sounds that need to be mastered to cover the vast majority of English (see, e.g. M. Bishop’s “The ABCs and All Their Tricks”). Add a few more letter/sound combinations and you virtually have it all. The fact that the system sometimes involves more than one or two sounds per letter, digraph, or dipthong hardly makes phonics too complicated or hard to learn. All it means is that there are a few more things to be aware of than you would have in Spanish or Italian.
Mandarin, on the other hand, requires an enormous investment in sheer rote memorization to achieve even basic literacy. An excellent memory (in addition to vast amounts of time) is also required to be able to read Mandarin at a literary level. Most people would be surprised to discover how few ideographs the average Chinese knows (1000 characters (words) is all that is needed to understand over 90% of Chinese publications, and even the average university graduate only knows about 6,000 characters).
This shows how difficult it is to learn words using the “whole language” method. Average English speakers, at all levels, have far larger reading vocabularies than the average Chinese (http://iteslj.org/Articles/Cervatiuc-VocabularyAcquisition.html), and this is accomplished with far, far less investment of time.
Young children who have learned to read English and who also speak German, Spanish, and Mandarin can learn to read German and Spanish at the level at which they speak in two to four weeks. Mandarin, on the other hand, takes years and years and years.
Of the major languages in the world, only the Chinese predominantly rely on a writing system that requires “whole language” instruction (Japanese writing is now a jumble of ideographs and phonetic symbols and is trending in a more phonetic direction). But even the Chinese have introduced a phonetic system in the early grades to try to increase literacy. (See post 43). Why? Because whole language instruction produces semi-literacy at best for the average Chinese, and that is inadequate to participate meaningfully in the global economy.
Nobody else uses exclusively ideographic systems because they limit literacy compared to phonetic systems. This is precisely why Korea adopted a phonetic system to replace Chinese ideographs in the 15th or 16th Century.
Teaching English as if it is Mandarin makes no more sense than trying to teach Mandarin phonetically (pre-pinyin, that is).
Many bright children learn to read from being read to without explicit phonics instruction because, like little cryptologists, they figure out the simple code by themselves without even being aware of it, use it, and internalize to automaticity. Those without the requisite gift, however, will never learn to read English well without good phonics instruction. Everyone should bear in mind that in 18th Century America was very poor compared to today, spent far less on education, and employed phonics as the sole method of teaching reading. Yet, America was then the most literate country on earth.
Today, our highly trained education professionals and their apologists have turned much of this country into a semi-literate mob, in no small part on account of pedagogical absurdities such as “whole language”.
I agree, but the cultural factors that lead to achievement among “Asians” are declining. In time we will see a pronouced regression toward the mean unless Asian parents become more aware of what the schools and popular culture are doing.
I see Robert Reich is predicting a Romney-Rubio ticket. He may be right - Rubio would help the R Establishment get conservatives to vote for Romney. Unfortunately, the VP slot is symbolism rather than substance.
Possibly, but bear in mind that the ed establishment has been known to slap the “phonics” label on predominantly whole language instruction in order to deceive parents.
Great post.
Our language-—the phonics based system-—gave us Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and made the brilliance of Western Civilization dominate the world. It is an efficient method—accessible to the masses so that most everyone can be literate and knowledgeable—and which leaves much more time for complex ideas and theories, rather than memorization of symbols.
It is an easier way to pass on knowledge and record ideas—especially abstract ideas.
In the Age of Reason, Americans were buying more books than the English (18th Century). Knowledge is power. It is why the “educators”—starting with the Fabian Socialist, John Dewey, tried to destroy the literacy rate of America in the 30’s with dumping the phonics system in the first place. Their agenda is available for anyone to read about. (Cultural Marxism). Public schools have been destroying the minds and futures of many children ever since— on purpose.
Ideas and knowledge are dangerous, if you want a nation of slaves and useful idiots.
That’s a much better way to win an argument and influence people than charging them with ignorance and arrogance. I recognize and agree with many of your points. You are clearly passionate about this and I hope your practical experience matches your theory. I doubt it, based on my own experience, but I hope it works for you.
Implicit phonics is pseudo-phonics. It is the same as “Whole Language”. That is what the Cultural Marxists do. Parents catch up to their dumbing down curricula—so they rename it to fool the parents.
It is what they have done with “Goals 2000”—Race to the Top. All cultural Marxist curricula to destroy “fixed beliefs” and instill emotion and destroy true knowledge. (BK Eakman, The Cloning of the American Mind).
We need government and their Billy Ayers -type writters of curricula OUT of the text book business. They are deliberately destroying the minds of children—creating cognitive dissonance which creates ACORN workers.
We need to abolish DOE and Unions
Achievement of Asians in England is also seeing later generation declining (Theodore Dalrymple)-—the longer they are under the dumbed-down English school system and influenced by their vulgar, toxic culture, the more derelict and worthless they become—and their families self destruct.
Marx is all about destroying all relationships—creating hate and distrust between all groups. Family structure when it influences worldview and can buffer the toxic popular culture can save children. Without family structure—there is no chance. Children are destroyed.
I agree with your first point. As a practical matter, I have been to China many times and have overseen or provided language instruction in Mandarin, Spanish, German, and English.
Thanks for this scholarly comment. I want to add a more informal response to Melas, who argued that non-phonetic languages work, so what’s the big deal about phonics?
I hate to see these casual comparisons because they provide cover for the sight-word monster.
Here’s the deal. Chinese has a relatively small vocabulary. An educated person might know only 20,000 ideograms. These tend to have a pictorial basis which helps memory. They don’t change much—no upper case and lower case. Sentences are short and stripped to essentials—”No ticket, no laundry!” (That’s three ideograms.)
Now look at English. The same word has many forms (UPPER, lower, script, exotic fonts). Many words look alike. An educated person might know 200,000 words but can read a million. Sentences are often long. (”If you don’t have your ticket, you can’t have your laundry.”) To introduce Whole Word memorization into this visual chaos is not going to help anyone. Quite the opposite.
“You put it perfectly. You so clearly have an unreasoning faith in phonics that you’re willing to force it on everyone you meet. I don’t put my “faith” in any particular teaching method. That’s blind, and it’s stupid. You, on the other hand, are clearly a true believer. Good for you. Hopefully, not too many people will fall for your single minded crusade. “
You have an agenda.
Outstanding post. It’s an embarrassment that we have Whole Language apologists on this site. But then I’ve also run into a couple of people here explaining why pedophiles aren’t so bad.
“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?”
You’re being humorous, but an ENTIRE GENERATION in California was RAVAGED by Whole Language in the 1980-1990 timeframe, thanks to a state School Chief named Bill Honig.
He later apologized for it, claiming that he had been taken in by the younger people working for him, who had pushed that agenda through.
It’s just heartbreaking to see what happened there.
“I’m certain that the ease I have with language is from having been taught phonics. I can’t see how English can be taught without it.”
It isn’t. The question is whether it a good idea to teach Whole Language BEFORE the kids learn sounds...as they must and will learn sounds in order to read at even basic levels. Apparently a lot of people on this site think it’s just fine to poison kids with Whole Language first.
“By the way, I find it interesting that those, who learned to read at 3 years old, can remember every detail of the method or methods used. “
LOL. That occurred to me also.
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