Using that technique, ALL words become "sight-words." Your brain has to be fast enough to translate the images the words invoke, but that's not that difficult. Your thoughts work a lot faster than your eyes.
But if the author's point is that phonics is the root of reading and comprehension, then I agree with him.
I used to work with a guy who was a speed reader. The amount of material, and detail, he could digest was simply amazing. He read books and even technical manuals overnight. I was skeptical until I was able to confirm his level of comprehension; he really was absorbing the stuff. He also had a very fast brain and may have been reading paragraphs instead of lines.
The “mini movements” are beyond control and barely noticeable, like reflexes. Whether you train yourself to recognize sight words or not, without those movements, you can’t see. It’s a matter of neurology and how the brain works (I had a class including this type of material).
If you ever look at someone who’s daydreaming, you’ll notice their eyes are unusually still. By cessation of the movement you are left with your “mind’s eye” and only see what you “think”.
Tag. The first word I ever really read and it was thanks to my first grade teacher and phonics. We didn’t have Dick & Jane we had Tag, the dog with siblings, Dot and Jim. Once the letters T-a-g made sense, learning the letter sounds and letter combination sounds made it so easy to figure out, sight reading is based on what one knows. Kind of like my eldest about age 2yrs had learned logos, which included some words, so if we drove by a delivery truck or billboard she would surprise me by saying Sears, Ames, Stop & Shop and I would glance about wondering why she was calling out a store name when we were no where near the store, oh a billboard or truck with the name in logo form on it. Of course these had stylized lettering and color which made it easier to ID, I doubt she could have read the store names if written on a page.
Back in the 60s I took the Evelyn Wood speed reading course. It works exactly as you describe. At first, one uses a side to side motion of the hand to pace the eye across the page. As one gets better, the page can be read with just a top to bottom motion. People who see you do it assume you are just skimming, but in fact you read every single word. It s a fantastic skill that I don’t use very much any more, but when I was teaching it came in very handy.
Author and article are idiot(ic). The relationship between “phonics” and “whole word” is the same as “crawling” and “walking”.....you have to go through the first to get to the second. You CANNOT START OFF TRYING TO WALK. Moving from “whole word” to “whole paragraph” to “whole page” (speed reading) is just a matter of practice. If you read enough, you will get there....dedicated training can speed things up quite a bit.
I read that the American literacy rate - the ability to read and write well - was 98% in 1890. Exactly. When we started homeschooling I realized this, since I have a complete collection of bound Harpers magazines from number 1 on the 1840s to 1900, when the magazine began its' slide into liberal trash.
From that magazine and other books and magazines I figured Americans were the most literate in the mid to late 1800s.
Realizing that the influence for this must have come in the early to mid 1800s I began collecting more school books from that era.
The reason for the success appeared quickly.
I was taught to read in a one room school in Vermont before the state was invaded by the NY, NJ and CT trust fund hippies.
We were taught by an excellent, old rogue teacher who used the phonics she knew. This consisted of the single letter sounds, dipthongs and tripthongs (2 and three letters sounded together).
She (and I) believed there were a lot of words in English you couldn't read using phonics.
There were two sets of phonics rules that fell by the wayside and have been forgotten since the 1840s to 1850s. Those are the silent letter rules and the substitute letter rules.
By using these rules, our younger daughter, who wasn't infected by the public school system was reading at above second year college level at 3rd grade.
This isn't unusual as once you know the rules and have a 1930s or earlier dictionary, you can read anything.
I've had many discussions with so called teachers who use this ridiculous "whole word" program to "teach" reading.
Except for the few rogue teachers, this is a waste of time.
Most are so completely indoctrinated with the propaganda from the colleges that there is no way they will even consider listening to anything a lay person has to say.
There are two books, by Rudolf Flesch, "Why Johnny Can't Read - and what You Can Do About It" in 1955, and "Why Johnny STILL Can't Read" in 1981 that document and explain the sordid money trail that keeps the farce of the whole word program going.
The Whole Word system has kids memorizing 20,000 words like Chinese characters. They are taught to guess at words they don't know by the surrounding context.
Few people are going to remember 20,000 of anything they try to memorize.
When these crippled students hit math, history and science, there are many words not included in the 20,000.
The ignorant reading teachers scoff at phonics as "rote learning". They just look at you like a deer in the headlights when you ask them, well, which would you rather memorize, 20,000 of ANYTHING or 120? There are roughly 120 phonics rules which enable you to read almost ANY word in the english language.
An older dictionary allows you to comprehend it.
I have posted the complete set of rules on one of my web sites in "cheat sheet" form to print out.
Who wants to bother memorizing even 120 of anything? You begin to remember the most used rules as you use them. When you hit a word with a seldom used rule, that's why you have a cheat sheet!
Eventually you pretty much forget you are using the rules, it's just automatic.
The speedy "sight reading" just comes naturally as time goes on.
Many people learn enough phonics from different sources such as Montessori, reading the Bible (an older copy), re-incarnation from a soul that was alive in the 1800s or just figure it out on their own. The rest are out of luck. The inability to read unknown words is what causes many people to have to go to classes to learn just about anything new.
They are unable to read the information they need to figure out things for themselves.
This was particularly obvious when computers were being introduced to our school system.
Almost all the teachers were saying they needed classes on how to operate and use computers.
Several of us asked why they didn't just read the manuals and figure it out like we did?
The reponse was that they couldn't learn that way. Translation, they were unable to read an comprehend the manuals because there were many words they couldn't read.
If enough folks bypass this mess by homeschooling and properly teaching reading, our country may survive.
If not, watch the movie, "Idiocracy". Don't rent it, buy it, you're going to want to watch it several times to catch all the nuances and to show to others.
I was a senior in high school... I had almost all my credits and needed to take some blow off classes.... I have always loved to read, and when I saw a course called “Improved Reading Skills” I figured I had a real blow off course....................... I could not have been farther from the truth.... it was a speed reading class, based upon Evelin wood... I barely passed it... but, I can read 1200 words a minute with a 92% comprehension rate... speed reading is how you flourish in the corporate world...
Respectfully suggest that speed reading is a separate issue. Typically, it’s something that grown-ups do after they can already read.
This article deals entirely with how reading is taught when a child is age 4 to 7, let’s say. Elementary school. These days almost all children in the US are given lists of sight words to memorize, such as you’ll see here.
Memorizing so many sight-words with automaticity is almost impossible for most children, so they remain in a state of semi-literacy.