Fake Reading Theory is the Slave Trade of Our Era

RightSideNews.com ^ | Dec. 13, 2011 | Bruce Deitrick Price

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

Fake reading theory is the slave trade of our era. Conscience demands that it be opposed.

A hundred books, perhaps two hundred, have been written on the reading wars. Finally those millions of words come down to a few dozen. English is a phonetic language and must be learned phonetically. Whole Word, the opposing theory, is a mirage, without merit.

The great sophistry of the 20th century was to create the illusion that Whole Word could actually work or, one step lower, that there was a legitimate choice between the two approaches to reading, as there is between fahrenheit and centigrade temperatures. The sophists urge even today: let’s use both.

Please don’t. In truth, there’s no debate, no choice. Whole Word is a lie.

One architect of Whole Word casually stated that most people could memorize “fifty to a hundred thousand” sight-words. Not true. In fact, only people with photographic memories could memorize even 20,000 sight-words. Ordinary people have trouble reaching 1,000. Many children cannot reach 100 sight-words. Virtually no one actually reads with sight-words.

Fortunately, most students finally see the phonics inside the sight-words and learn to read in a normal phonetic way. Unfortunately, the students who don’t see the phonics (the sounds) usually remain illiterate. They also become damaged and deeply unhappy. Many end up on Ritalin.

It’s important to say decisively that Whole Word is a fake, a scam, a hoax, I would even say a crime. The people promoting it are too smart not to know what they’re doing. That is my reluctant conclusion....

.

[FreedomPoster]

OK, I’m good with that. The key point is that trying to teach children reading with a one-size-fits-all whole word approach is a really, really bad idea. Phonics instruction is necessary, exceptions to the rule notwithstanding.

[Windflier]

It seems like there are thousands and thousands of counterexamples to this very dogmatic statement.

Every language that uses the alphabet (or any variation thereof) is a phonetic language. The fact that nearly all phonetic languages have absorbed words from other languages doesn't negate that.

The fact that you can also somehow learn to read English through the whole word sight reading method also doesn't negate the fact that it's a phonetic language.

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

RE: “I teach a class at my church and sometimes I have the kids (teenagers) read aloud. It is brutal to listen to them struggle over the simplest words.”

Yes, that is what Whole Word has done to us for 75 years. Those kids will never read for pleasure. They are basically illiterate. The next question is: how do we help these kids?

All the phonics people I ask about this say the same thing: they have to start over and learn to read properly. No matter what the age!

Sue Dickson has taken her Sing, Spell, Read, Write program into prisons, and taught convicts to read as if they are age six. They have lots of bad habits (guessing, etc.); so it’s simpler just to say, “Forget everything you have learned about reading. Now you will do it right.” They can’t be helped in any other way.

Churches are well positioned to give remedial help. The kids are there. You are an authority figure. A class at church might be their last best hope.

There are a dozen good phonics programs out there. Find somebody who is gung-ho about one of them; and let that person loose.

Even more basic, just start at the beginning with the alphabet. I’ve tried to boil down the essentials in “54: Preemptive Reading”—meant for children but entirely valid for adults. http://www.improve-education.org/id81.html

[wideminded]

Apparently you have your own personal definition of "phonetic".

I don't have a stake in the argument over the best way to learn how to read since I have only vaguely learned what all this is about, mainly from seeing threads like this on FR. It is quite possible that you are correct that emphasis on sight words is bad when one is learning to read. Nevertheless, it is clear that English is not an entirely phonetic language. If it were, all these words would end with the same sound:

bough
cough
dough

And they wouldn't be spelled in this absurd fashion.

[aruanan]

Your post is fallacious. English is a phonetic language, and is best taught that way.

Poor, dear Windflier. If you had actually read (or understood) my post, you would not have said what you did above or misused the word "fallacious."

What you should have said is that written English is an alphabetic language. Here, I'll post it again so that you can meditate on it:

This is idiocy. The fact that English is a somewhat phonetic language makes it possible to predict what certain words that are familiar in spoken English may look like in written English such that they may be recognized if a reader is already familiar with them. It also makes it possible to produce a written form that can be recognized and understood by other English readers. It is undeniably true, though, that the number of written English words vastly outnumbers the number of spoken English words. It also does not follow that because English reading may be learned through the use of phonetic approaches that fluent English reading is done through a phonetic process. This is impossible. The speed at which it is performed in adult level fluent reading is far in excess of the time required to employ phonetic rules. Although a phonetic approach can enable a student to gain mastery over the written word in a comparatively easy fashion, compared to learning an idiogram-based language, the adult version of reading is not a phonetic process.

Do you have any clue as to why I said "somewhat phonetic"? That's because the English language is a composite of many different languages and its written form, though alphabetic, does not enable one to phonetically decode the written form as easily as a language like Spanish or Latin or Greek.

Also, because it is known how fast certain intellectual processes take place, it is known that fluent reading cannot be the result of a mental sounding out of letters and syllables. Once someone learns to read and acquires familiarity with the written language, he is able to recognize words by their shape, relative length, position in a sentence, their first few letters, their positional function in a sentence, and by the ongoing context of the sentence. If this were not true then you wouldn't be able to "read" this: "Yuo aer otu of yrou fgrgigin mndi."

[Rifleman]

“Yuo aer otu of yrou fgrgigin mndi.”

You _do_ realize that you just disproved your position?

yrou and your are not decoded to the same concept by “shape” or whole word because they are not shaped the same at all. They decode that way because your mind notes that it does not recognize yrou as a word and starts down another path to decode it. The ou pair is common, as is the you triplet. The remaining r fits nowhere but at the end of the hypothetical word which thus gets id’ed as “maybe your?” An automated process that you are only partly conscious of.

The same kind of decoding happens for text in radically atypical fonts. And it happens MUCH faster than you hypothesize.

Visual pattern recognition (whole word) and auditory pattern recognition (phonics, as the letters on the page evoke the mental models of the phonemes) are both parts of fluent reading.

If you pay close attention to your mental processes while reading at different speeds, you may experience the two kind s of pattern recognition directly. I do, just a bit, as I read slower or faster.

[Windflier]

Well, you posted ten times more words than I did, so I guess you win. Bye now.

[Windflier]

Apparently you have your own personal definition of "phonetic".

No I don't, but perhaps you read something into my post that made you think that.

Point taken on the examples you posted. I'm all too aware that our language has lots of words that are exceptions to the normal rules of phonetics.

"Ghoti" was my mom's favorite spelling of the word, 'fish'.

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

Coincidentally, just got email from Don Potter about 1967 article where all of these issues are explained by noting that the more verbal kids figure out for themselves the phonetic content no matter what the teacher claims to be doing.

Meanwhile, the less verbal kids often can’t escape from the early sight-word instructions, despite later exposure to phonetic information.

A long, somewhat technical article but here it is:
http://donpotter.net/pdf_files/errors_children_make_laurit.pdf

[cycjec]

Windflier: "English is a phonetic language" one word proof: Kurzweil* example from Rudolf Flesch's Why Johnny Still Can't Learn to Read (c. 1981)

[cycjec]

On the link between slavery and reading instruction, see this from John Patterson Green's autobiography, Fact Stranger Than Fiction concerning his father, born a slave:
When he attained his liberty, he had already learned how to read and write ... ... No school door swung upon, or even ajar for him: he learned the alphabet in some mysterious way, for it was a crime to teach a slave to read and write.... father had no instructor save a copy of the then Webster's Elementary Spelling Book, which was his inseparable companion, by night and day, and, with the help of a blind man, whom at times, he led through the street, he was gradually inducted into the mystery of reading
The method in practice between "Daddy" and the blind man was as follows: Dad would call out the letters of a word, and the blind man would tell him how to pronounce it, and "Jack-the-Weazel" like his forebears, being naturally clever, ere long was reading, in the same little book, the monosyllabic sentences, beginning -- "No man may put off the law of G-d"

[cycjec]

“ghoti” though is a Bernard Shaw contrivance. “gh”
is pronounced “f” only finally, and “ti” is “sh”
only with “on”

[Windflier]

“ghoti” though is a Bernard Shaw contrivance.

I know.

[christianhomeschoolmommaof3]

“ough” has six sounds O, oo, uff, off, aw, ow. My children learned the six sounds and can apply them when they encounter a new word. Most consonants have one sound, all the vowels have two or more sounds, and multiple letter combinations have different sounds. Example ph says f. There are about 75 basic phonograms which are easy to memorize and apply. Much easier than learning thousands of whole word lists. For more info look up Wanda sanseri’s senate speech and Spell to Write and Read curriculum.

[christianhomeschoolmommaof3]

Ping to my post 74. Ough follows the rules if you know them. It is not an exception.