I must reply to this, my wife had phonics instruction in school and now she is a total useless reader. She has to sound out all the words to any book she is reading. (so she doesn’t read very many books) I on the other hand had been taught to know what the word was when I saw it and know what the word meant.
I believe phonics is a (as you said) a lazy way of teaching and if my wife is any example, she just doesn’t read at all any more.
In da sickstees wenn i were in skewl, awl wee hadd wus foniks, nobuddy i can theenk uf in meye skewl faled to lurn to reed and rite.
Phonics is not intended to have people sound out words for the rest of their lives. It eventually becomes something like sight reading — I see “cat” and I just know that it’s “cat”.
But for new situations, someone may not recognize a complex character string such as “refrigerator”. If you depend wholly on sight reading, then your are lost. What the heck is the “ref...blah ..blah ... blah” thing??
But someone exposed to phonics can sound that out and once they “hear” the word, they will know that those characters mean the big appliance in the kitchen that keeps food cold — they’ve heard that word. They know the sound. Now they know the character string.
Once mastered, “refrigerator” is no more complex than “cat” — you see it and you know it. But phonics helps you the first time you see it.
My experience with both my daughter and now my granddaughter is that phonics can “morph” into sight recognition once the word becomes familiar. My daughter is an avid reader and works as a program developer in medical education which involves a lot of writing with no tolerance for spelling errors. Me, I’m admittedly a poor speller.
This is not a good example in fact it is more of a red herring argument.
Sight word learning is lazy. Phonics is learning the rules of grammar and applying them. Phonics readers advance far beyond sight word readers since they are not limited by memorizing words only. When they encounter a new word they can apply the rules and sound it out. Sight readers call the word by the first one that they have memorized that looks similar and is most times far off from the word at hand. Easy to spot in public reading settings.
It’s sad about your wife’s reading experience. According to the studies, phonics is demonstratively better than whole-word reading, but even in the data in this article, the percentage of successful readers went from “58% in 2012 to 81% in 2016”. This means that 19% of children still didn’t learn to read under the phonics regime.
Phonics has some theoretical defects. In English, the idea that a letter has a sound is a lie. Most letters, especially vowels, can participate in multiple different sounds. Furthermore, the names of letters are often oddly different than the typical sounds of the letters, confusing many potential readers. You may have been one of the 58% for whom any method works. Your wife may have been one of the 19% for whom even phonics doesn’t work.
A third form of reading — sounds-based reading — will eventually displace phonics as the best way to learn to read. In this approach, kids start with what they already know — the sounds of words — and gradually learn how to spell those sounds in letters. Once they can spell word sounds in letters, they can easily recognize the words when they go to read.
I am curious as to how much exposure to alphabet and sounds your wife received before going to school, and also whether or not books were read to her from infancy forward.
My personal feeling is that those factors, along with the phonics approach when actually in school, are big contributors to lifetime literacy.
What does that even mean? "know what the word was"
When someone learns by the phonics method, they learn the component parts that make up words and - how could it even be avoided - they learn to recognize the whole word and what the word means.
Much better to learn what makes up the whole, and then what the whole means. And that applies to most all learning, not just learning to read.
I must reply to this, my wife had phonics instruction in school and now she is a total useless reader. She has to sound out all the words to any book she is reading. (so she doesn’t read very many books) I on the other hand had been taught to know what the word was when I saw it and know what the word meant.
I believe phonics is a (as you said) a lazy way of teaching and if my wife is any example, she just doesn’t read at all any more.
We learned with phonics. Eventually everyone becomes a sight reader, who decodes new words in phonics. Your wife did not learn to memorize the words she decoded. Odd.