Posted on 10/22/2013 12:47:19 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
What’s the big deal? My Doctor has been writing prescriptions for years in hieroglyphics.
I believe this was known a the see/say method that was (briefly) thought to be superior the phonics. It was clearly one of the most disastrous fads in education.
I went to school in the 1960s and we learned phonics. I don’t know how anyone can learn to read english without phonics. English is great, probably the greatest language of all, but spelling-wise it’s a disaster. I assume they don’t even have spelling contests in other languages.
Bruce, you are absolutely brilliant.
Now here’s the worst horror story I ever heard regarding the reading problem in this country.
In the ‘80s two recently graduated doctors were camping in a national forest in Washington State and nearly burned it down. They read in their camping handbook that their garbage was to be “burned.” What? Nope, the word was “buried.”
This is the kind of mistake resulting from the reading system taught in our schools today - they don’t teach attention to details.
How would you like these guys to operate on you?
I got myself humiliated once (in 3rd grade, I believe) while reading out loud in class - mispronounced ‘diphtheria’; (a word I had never seen before) as ‘diarrhea’. New in the school, and laughed right out of my shoes, I was.
That’s what I get for guessing at a word instead of sounding it out.
2) For argument's sake, why are we losing out the the Chinese (if we are in fact losing out to the Chinese)? Reading and writing "hieroglyphs" hasn't actually hurt them, has it?
In education, the progressive movement is the disintegration mode of thought.In progressive education, man is primarily an actor rather than a thinker and actions and the concrete have primacy over the abstract and thought. A child must learn by doing activities.In reading,the commitment to the concrete as against the abstract take the form of the whole word method rather than phonics.
The progressive program for the schools is not reform, but demolition of subjects, facts, lessons, texts, structure, intellect, teaching, and learning. Above all, the movement represents the equation of education with the perceptual level mentality. It is the anti-conceptual mentality embracing the pre-conceptual child and training him to remain in that state for life.
“2) For argument’s sake, why are we losing out the the Chinese (if we are in fact losing out to the Chinese)? Reading and writing “hieroglyphs” hasn’t actually hurt them, has it?”
First, we’re not “losing out to the Chinese” so much as allowing the deck to be heavily stacked to favor the Chinese.
Now, on to the Chinese written language...
Years ago, I worked for a Chinese family. One of the, recently “immigrated” members of that family had been a construction engineer in China. According to him, the Chinese language was a huge handicap in any technical area. The language wasn’t nearly flexible enough to function in fields that were not native to China. To become an engineer, the guy had had to learn Russian, German and English.
This was in PDRChina where he had worked. The Russian was necessary for political reasons. The German was necessary because many of the site managers were Germans. English was necessary because, according to him, anything worth knowing/learning on engineering was published in English.
I think phonics come first, then you begin to recognize the words and the inconsistencies.
I learned to speak quite a bit of Thai, then read some about 37 years ago. They don’t generally put spaces between the words, and sometimes they wrap compound vowel characters (I think it is) around a consonant. Consonants at the end of a word aren’t necessarily pronounced like they are in the beginning or middle of the word. The net result is that it is very difficult to discern any single word, or hieroglyph or whatever. But you almost have to pick it out or read back and forth. It works for them, though I don’t know if they’d win any speed reading contests.
English spelling is quite easy if your phonics education was complete, unlikely if you were educated in the 60’s. Many older teachers were still secretly teaching some phonics back then but the curriculum they were forced to use were generally the look and say pap, which was pretty much useless in developing good readers and spellers.
There are 26 letters but 70 phonograms (letter combinations with with specific and distinct sounds) and about 30 spelling rules that tell you when to use which.
Almost everyone learns “i before e except after c” which is an incomplete rule.
It is actually “i before e except after c, when we say ‘ay’ and in some exceptions. Neither foreign sovereign seized the counterfeit or forfeited leisure and either weird heifer eats protein.” The complete rule pretty much clears up most of the confusion.
A complete and systematic phonics education ensures that kids become competent at both reading and spelling. A great teacher will also teach some history of Britain so they can understand how English became a layered language with multiple roots.
Is 1930 right? I thought whole word became a fad circa 1980.
Lol!
Once when our class was reading the list of the week’s spelling words, I read ahead to myself and saw a word that I HOPED I wouldn’t get.
Thank goodness someone else was chosen to read the word “fort” aloud to the class because, had I been chosen, I would have said “fart”.
I could never have lived it down.
Phonics is essential, but not sufficient, because of the many parents and contributors to the English language. Our rich vocabulary comes at the expense of consistency, so some look-say is inevitable.
Think of the many simple words that are NOT spelled phonetically:
WAR
TWO
FOUR
MONDAY
DOG
etc.
This doesn’t include the MANY alternate phonetic pronunciations in some of our common words.
BOUGH/PLOUGH
COUGH
DOUGH
ROUGH/TOUGH
etc.
It is well worth the extra memorization, and I would not want to go to sterilizing efforts like some of the Scandinavian countries have to standardize the phonics and pronunciations. We speak, read and write in English. It has the world’s richest vocabulary, because its speakers shamelessly borrow from other countries, perhaps largely due to the centrality of international commerce and colonization during the formation of the modern language. It doesn’t hurt that England venerates her language and created the OED, which the French sneeringly call a museum. The French meant it as an insult, the English do not take it as one.
May I suggest that your phonics education is incomplete as most of the words you list are in fact phonetic. I recommend Spalding method. (spalding.org)
For all those ‘ough’ words, I would teach children that this is the ough phonogram and it has six sounds o, oo uff, off, aw, ow. While pronouncing the sounds I would mimic being struck once for each sound. Little boys quite eat this up and immediately learn to recognize and mimic this fun ninja combination. The sounds are in order of most frequent use and we would have a lesson on those formerly problematic words that are now fun and easy to remember ninja words.
Bizarre. Never heard of this.
Turning English into a Hanja-like written language is just going to fail.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.