Focus on phonics to teach reading is ‘failing children’, says landmark study
That's just one example, I can find dozens more.
In a more common sense era, American schools used rote memorization exclusively and anyone who managed to make it past third grade was more literate than half of high school graduates today who've been "schooled" with phonics.
As for the author's claim that, "English is a vast language. Memorizing it one word at a time is purest folly....", where is it written that you need to know, less have to MEMORIZE the entire language? The majority of the most highly educated Americans only has the command of +/-5% of the more than 1 million English words anyway. And phonics is destined to fail you because English is a higgledy-piggledy conglomeration of Angle, Saxon, Jute, Frisian, Latin, Old Norse, and Norman French. The language today is a logical disaster because it was largely frozen in time in 1453 when William Caxton began operating the first movable type printing press in England.
Plus we have "loan" words that have come to us in the last couple of centuries through commerce and military intrigue from Spanish, German, French, Italian, Yiddish/Hebrew and Hindi. If phonics were ever going to work (which it wasn't) you first would have to know the linguistic origins of every word, which leads directly back to -- you guessed it -- rote memorization.
That's why the old bromide was "The Three Rs," not "the P and Two Rs."
Phonics is how I learned to read and Paal G is not to be believed.
“It’s phonics that has failed.”
Your post is deceitful and uninformed. Next time, post about something you understand...if there is anything at all that you understand.
Phonics is the only thing that’s going to save literacy in this country.
While it is true that there are many exception, there are far more words that follow the rules well enough to make phonics workable.
You can take your liberal, literacy destroying agenda over to DU where they’ll cheer you on.
The Guardian is a left-wing whatever. You don’t go there for good information about education. On the contrary.
Also, please note that the article does not say that phonics doesn’t work. It says that teachers should teach all the different approaches and let students choose. This is nonsense from the theories of learning styles and balanced literacy. What happens here is that every student is overwhelmed by a multitude of useless methods.
Our problem is that bad methods have a big lobby in the government, and in the media, as you see.
“Sight Words are a Sick Joke” — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/k12_sightwords_are_a_sick_joke.html