“My issue is with the statement in the original article that claims that whole word does not work period end of line. When the author takes such an absolute stance I have to object”
At the risk of continuing an unprofitable exchange, the author actually wrote: “ I don’t believe experienced readers do what is claimed but even if this were true, it would still take many years to get there.”
His point is quite plainly that although he doubts that experienced readers of english read words (at least entirely) as units, even if it were the case, IF you were to try to teach children to read by teaching them whole words rather than phonics, it would take years.
He obviously is not saying that it is impossible to teach children this way or that they would never learn to read if this method is used.
Until recently, phonetic languages such as english, not surprisingly, have always been taught phonetically. The “whole language” approach is a creature that has relatively recently (in historical time) slithered out of the precincts of the intellectual slums of academia - the schools of education. In America, phonics was the basis of reading instruction from the earliest settlements (you can see this in, for example, the New England Primer)into the 1930s.
I don’t know where your learning regarding Chinese and other ideographic languages comes from, but I would like to suggest that you are mistaken. As I pointed out before, although children in China, for example, have to learn whole characters, it is well known that this does not produce high levels of literacy because most people simply don’t have the memory or the time to learn what comes relatively easily in a phonetic language.
This problem was recognized years ago by the Chinese government, and it is why the PRC adopted “simplified Chinese” (i.e. reducing the complexity of characters) and pinyin. In Taiwan they use a different phonetic system (pronounced “ee foo how”).
As for the claim pinyin has “little to no foothold as a tool for teaching”, are you relying on Wikipedia or some other internet source? This claim is not only false, it is preposterously false. Children learning Chinese today are started on pinyin (or “ee foo how”, in the case of Taiwan) and then transition after a while to characters (simplified in the PRC; (mainly)classical in Taiwan). Even a rudimentary acquaintance with elementary level Chinese textbooks reveals that.
The fact that China has not “collapsed” because of its reliance on ideographic systems of written language is hardly the point.
The PRC would not have moved to simplified characters and pinyin if it hadn’t recognized that the system itself is a major barrier to widespread literacy and was an impediment to economic development. Whether characters are ultimately replaced by a phonetic system like pinyin will depend on many factors, not least of which is Chinese chauvinism.
In contrast to China, Japan has multiple systems of writing - Katakana, Kanji, Hiragana, Romanji - that are often used in combination and that, with the exception of Romanje, have been around for over a millenium.
I have to go to Beijing a couple of times this summer. I’ll let you know if anything has changed.
bump
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on the underlying hypothesis of the article author. As to my knowledge on Chinese, it comes from being married to a Chinese (from Shanghai) woman for ten years, and studying Chinese in college for two years.
Thanks for trying to help out here. I’ll restate this matter:
Circa 1930 there were millions of fast, fluent readers. They had of course all learned phonetically.
The Look-say sophistry had two claims: 1) that these people were recognizing whole words. In fact, the experts are STILL debating this point. My own suspicion is that the brain dips into words as much or as little as needed (but really fast). It doesn’t make any sense for the brain to carry around a lot of memorized baggage. A much better strategy is to process the phonetic information faster and faster. So I don’t accept the whole-word claim. But I then said, even if the brain is grabbing whole words, it takes a lot of years to get to that step, like being really good at sight-reading music. So it’s a moot point instructionally.
2) But the sophistry said: hey, if they’ll be doing this years from now, let’s make them do it NOW. That’s the madness I was writing about.
The article contains a great quote form Paul Witty. You can see the whole sophistry in naked form. (He and his gang actually taught that kids should learn to read “groups of words.”
(One thing that seems to be causing a lot of confusing is that many people—like me— went to sight-word schools. But learned to read anyway. The mind breaks through to the phonetic machinery. Just because someone went to a sight-word school and now reads well does not tell us what skills are being used. A true sight-word reader is very rare. I met a woman who said she reached college reading that way. She complained about how the words slide off the page!)
Here’s another of my YouTube videos about Dolch Words that might help: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPTXWo5wZXI