Reading is easy. (But you'll have to work if you want to make kids illiterate.)

YouTube ^ | July 27, 2013 | Bruce Deitrick Price

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

On a literacy forum, a somewhat hostile teacher demanded to know if I was trying to frighten people? I answered:

Yes, I am. I've studied Whole Word for almost 10 years. It doesn't work; it couldn't work. That our education establishment pushed this thing on people is a crime. If I can help frighten people away from it, that's good.

As for phonics, people should understand that this is almost an umbrella term. In fact, I'm starting to think it's not so much a program or set of rules as a concept. If a kid knows that the letters on the page represent sounds, that's phonics. Many people can run with that. I was one such person. I still don't know any phonics rules. The sad thing, it turns out, is that the slower, less verbal kids are precisely the ones that need the most phonics. Otherwise, they memorize a few hundred word-logos and remain functional illiterates for the rest of their lives.

I would love to scare the whole country away from that.

I've created another video to deal with just this issue. Seven experts explain reading. Rudolf Flesch, Sibyl Terman & Charles Walcutt; Samuel Blumenfeld; Siegfried Engelmann, Marva Collins; Don Potter; and Mona McNee. These are some of education’s real heroes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JV0tPGn-Ws

(less than 4 minutes)

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(BTW I have many other YouTube videos that deal with reading. Here are 15 main ones: http://www.rantrave.com/Rave/Bruce-Deitrick-Price-reaches-1000000-YouTube-views.aspx

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[ClearCase_guy]

Years ago I worked at a university which had, as a primary focus, the education of young women to become school teachers. The school put a lot of emphasis on whole word instruction. I had many casual discussions with the people who pushed this ideology. I would show them evidence that whole word didn't work, and that phonics had a better track record:

"But you have to realize, phonics just doesn't work for everybody."
"Maybe, but whole word doesn't work for anybody."
"But you can't push a one-size-fits-all approach. With phonics, some kids fail."
"You're pushing whole word as a one-size-fits-all-approach, and just about all the kids fail."
"Like I said: phonics doesn't work for everybody. Why don't we just drop this?"

That was when I started to realize that Liberals don't care about facts, or logic, or helping children. They push the ideology they have been told to push. Nothing else matters. Nothing at all.

[expat2]

Both approaches should be available. I taught my kids to read by reading to them as they watched the page. One of them learned through phonics, the other through word recognition. The first could handle new words better, but the second was able to read common words more quickly.

[BfloGuy]

Both approaches should be available.

No. They.should.not.

So-called "whole word" is an intellectual abomination.

When the Romans conquered Britain, our ancestors took the 26 Roman letters and attempted to assign the 44 [give or take] sounds in the English language to one or another. In short, they came up with a code.

Our job now -- when it comes to teaching young skulls full of mush -- is to reverse that code. We do that by teaching children which sounds are represented by which letter or letters.

To try and make them memorize entire words by sight is a foolish, cruel, and ultimately futile act. The originators of whole word were your typical nerdy liberals.

They observed that adults did not have to sound out words and that, therefore, we should just teach children to recognize whole words on sight.

But the wise educators didn't understand human cognition enough to realize that, though a child may have to "sound out" a word the first few times he comes across it, he will eventually automatize it in his memory and instantly recognize it later.

They thought we could skip the crucial step of analyzing the word's letters. They were wrong. There's no reason to give them any credit for anything,.

[GeronL]

The leftists took decades of extremely hard work to dumb this society down and there you are trying to undo their struggle.

[proxy_user]

Well, that’s how good readers end up. You couldn’t plow through 200 pages in 4 hours if you had to sound out each word.

[expat2]

Both approaches should be available. No. They.should.not.

You a Gestapo wannabe?

[Bob]

That's why, after sounding out the words initially, the reader then learns to recognize them and understand them without needing to sound out each one.

[agrarianlady]

Not all words in English follow the rules, so we have a separate category called “sight words.” That’s how proper phonics programs work.

Of course learning phonics is absolutely the best way to learn to read and to spell. The problem I had with my oldest daughter is that she learned to read when she was three, before she learned phonics. But she still learned the phonics later.

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

RE: a separate category called “sight words.”

Please keep in mind that this is merely the dogma created for Balanced Literacy. There is no need for the separate category. There is no need for anything called a sight-word.

You are asking a kid to use a different technique, a visual technique, so his brain becomes a little schizophrenic. To the degree the kid becomes good at this, that’s precisely the degree to which his reading will suffer.

The really interesting thing about Whole Word is that, I believe, it’s completely BS. So how do you keep BS going 75 years? You surround it with dozens of lies and sophistries. That’s the only way. And as fast as the public figures out one of these lies, the so-called experts invent new jargon. And so they are still able to keep this con in play.

(And may I just suggest that your daughter didn’t learn to read without phonics. Her brain figured out the phonics! She cracked the code. Give her credit for being clever. But a big percentage of kids learn this way. Phonics is efficient. The brain is always looking for shortcuts and cheap tricks. Now if a B, at the beginning or in the middle of a word, is always the same sound then the simple, efficient thing is to figure out what that sound is and remember it.)

[Windflier]

Thank you, Bruce.

You’d think that people who train to be teachers would quickly see that Whole Word is a fraudulent way to teach a written language that is essentially phonetic.

I mean, how droolingly stupid does one have to be, to miss the fact that the letters in our alphabet are symbols for spoken sounds, and that the words in our language are constructed of these sound symbols?

[aruanan]

Please keep in mind that this is merely the dogma created for Balanced Literacy. There is no need for the separate category. There is no need for anything called a sight-word.

All reading is done via "sight words." Though it is true that a word one knows but has never before seen in print can be identified using phonics, the speed of fluent reading is such that it is impossible to have been accomplished through phonics. One is able to read quickly because one already knows the language, is able to posit the general development of a sentence based on one's prior knowledge of that language, and is able to predict, based on this, a limited set of possibilities that a quick glance is able to verify using a very limited set of visual cues. This is why reading has been described as a psycholinguistic guessing game.

[Windflier]

You a Gestapo wannabe?

I think you're taking Bfloguy's post as a personal insult, expat. He probably could have used a bit more tact in that reply, but essentially, he's correct.

Ask yourself -- what does a person who's been taught to read in the Whole Word method do, when as an adult, they're confronted with words they never committed to memory as a child?

Do they have the ability to sound them out, when they never learned the simple rules of phonetic English word construction? I highly doubt it. Did they somehow just figure it out all on their own along the way? Perhaps - or maybe they simply struggle with new words the remainder of their lives.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks BruceDeitrickPrice.

[GOPJ]

That was when I started to realize that Liberals don't care about facts, or logic, or helping children. They push the ideology they have been told to push. Nothing else matters. Nothing at all.

It's something conservatives have in common - the moment we realize liberals don't care about anyone or anything... it's just lockstep brainlessnes...

[expat2]

Did they somehow just figure it out all on their own along the way? Perhaps - or maybe they simply struggle with new words the remainder of their lives.

I know the answer to that. One of my children learned to read as I read to them on my lap by phonics, while the other learned by word recognition (their choice). Initially, one learned to read faster, but had a little more hesitation with new words, while the other could handle new words better but hesitated more with familiar material. After about 3 months those differences completely disappeared, as one could soon see the phonic basis and the other started to recognize whole words.

My objection to Bfloguy's post was his "my way is the only way" attitude, not his lack of tact. Kids should be allowed to learn to read whichever way they find most useful, without either side taking the "my way is the only way" attitude.

[Windflier]

Initially, one learned to read faster, but had a little more hesitation with new words, while the other could handle new words better but hesitated more with familiar material. After about 3 months those differences completely disappeared, as one could soon see the phonic basis and the other started to recognize whole words.

Well, I guess it's an unexplained miracle then. This whole argument is moot because kids will just magically begin to recognize words if you just keep showing them books.

Thanks for explaining it to me.

[BfloGuy]

or maybe they simply struggle with new words the remainder of their lives.

That has been my observation [informal, of course]. I took a class at a local college several years ago. The teacher's method included a lot of reading aloud from the text by the class members in turn. One young guy [obviously intelligent from conversations I'd had with him] struggled terribly at this. When it was his turn, he'd stammer, hesitate, turn red in frustration, and eventually finish his paragraph.

The course vocabulary was unknown to him and he had few tools to decipher the words he was reading. And reading, in the end, is just that: deciphering. It's a code.

[BfloGuy]

One of my children learned to read as I read to them on my lap by phonics

My mother read to me starting at age two. My favorite book was "Tuffy the Tugboat". By the time she'd read it to me, oh, I don't know, a million times, I could recite it page by page.

But that doesn't mean I knew how to read.

Only knowing the letters and the sounds they represent can be considered reading. Memorizing the written English language without understanding the relationship between letters and sounds is impossible.

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

RE: “This is why reading has been described as a psycholinguistic guessing game.”

Yes, it has been so described by Ken Goodman, one of the great sophists of the last hundred years.

I hope everyone will look at the referenced video because these experts deserve your trust. I believe that Ken Goodman does not.

If anyone would like a long analysis of Ken Goodman, Frank Smith and all the other sophists, please see “30: The War Against Reading” on Improve-Education.org