Posted on 02/18/2011 1:01:50 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
Following is review on Amazon:::::
"Memo To Teachers: Come Back To Real Reading--
Starting in 1931, the Education Establishment unleashed Look-Say upon the children of the United States. The result was a rising tide of illiteracy. The number of functional illiterates now exceeds 50,000,000.
The so-called experts who engineered this decline have shown a demonic cleverness in attacking the common sense of phonics, while piling up sophistries that supposedly justify the hoax of Whole Word or Sight Words. It is against this backdrop that Denise Eide writes her book "Uncovering the Logic of English."
Eide quantifies our unnecessary crisis: "The statistics are both numbing and consistent. 32% of fourth graders read well, 34% test below proficiency, and 34% cannot read. Every time I meet an elementary school teacher, I ask if this reflects their experience. They all say it does."
Think of Denise Eide as a professor of phonics. She has laid out all the rules that govern English spelling and pronunciation in an appealing way. Probably every elementary school teacher should have this book; and I suspect there might be some Scrabble and crossword-puzzle fanatics who would enjoy learning the technical aspects of English. (For example, did you know that no English words end with the letters i, u, v and j? Words that do have been borrowed from a foreign language.)
Eide acknowledges that "it is not as easy to learn and spell English as it is most other phonetic languages. Yet a finite number of tools unlock the mystery of 98% of the words in the English language. When these 104 tools are presented, all students can succeed." (Rudolf Flesch, in his 1981 book "Why Johnny STILL Can't Read," used a similar percentage, stating that 97.4% of English spelling is phonetic.)
REVIEW CONTINUES BELOW...
(Excerpt) Read more at amazon.com ...
>...”y’all” is really singular ... “all y’all” is plural. Who knew? [RightField] True southerners are born knowing this. I came from California, so it took me awhile to catch on. [paulycy]
It makes me cringe to see that. :-) I’m a Southerner born and bred, and I’ve never used ‘y’all’ to address one person in my entire life (unless others were understood to be included, for instance, other members of the family). Also I’ve talked to many thousands of my fellow Southerners and never noticed a single one use ‘y’all’ for one person. I’d be shocked and wonder what was going on if I ever did.
Of course, being only one person, I can’t have knowledge of how every Southerner in every part of the South uses the expression. The majority view, though, is that ‘y’all’ is not used for one person. Wikipedia in this instance gives an adequate account of current opinion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%27all
[I also say ‘all y’all’, but that’s to emphasize that every person is included. Dialects without ‘y’all’ say ‘you ALL’ or ‘ALL of you’ to do that, but because we use ‘y’all’ as an ordinary plural ‘you’, we lose consciousness of the ‘all’ and need an extra ‘all’ for emphasis — ‘ALL y’all’.]
I knew some folks from PA, especially the Pittsburgh area, who use ‘yins’, in the way I use y’all.
I’ve always understood “y’all” to be an example of the English plural entity. Referring to an individual as “y’all” implicitly assumes family and neighborhood associations.
Think of “y’all” as “you and yours.” This makes “all y’all” a plural, plural entity, addressing multiple individuals with implicit associations. A well-placed “all y’all” can cover a whole county in the south with a mere two words.
It’s actually a very sophisticated term as a result.
Maybe this displaced los angelino still has it wrong! :0)
Actually, they all bitch about how low functioning the students are while refusing to embrace classical education methods.
Yes, I think ‘y’all’ and ‘all y’all’ too (as silly as ‘all y’all’ may seem when you stop to think about it) are useful and add to the expressiveness of the English language.
Thinking ‘y’all’ is singular is forgivable in those who didn’t grow up using it. :-) Then too it’s often used that way in movies, especially humorous movies, so I’m not surprised that many persons are misled. Try listening more carefully to how Southerners actually use it, though, and I think you’ll see that they almost always address more than one person (or if one person, others are understood).
Nonsense, everyone does, well at least everyone who ever learns to read:
The paomnnehil pweor of the hmuan mnid: Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?
Someone trying to "sound out" the above paragraph using phonics rules would be hopelessly lost. It's readable because most people have long since memorized thousands upon thousands of Sight words.
Now that I think about it, I think this guy was from PA. Probably the same dialect going on.
That’s a good example for showing that despite changes that would produce major differences in sound, by sight the basic meaning of the sentences is fairly easy to determine. I suspect that the originator chose those particular words to make doing that as easy as possible, though. I was curious to see if other scrambled words would be as easy to read, so I tried doing that to the first long sentence in the first post of this thread (using the same technique — keeping the first and last letters in place). The result seems a good bit harder (to me anyway, and I did the rearranging).
“The sec-load ertexeps who erenineged tihs denlice hvae swohn a dinomec cenvserels in atkacintg the cmoomn snese of pihoncs, wlihe pliing up shotpisires taht spopudsely jifsuty the haox of Wlhoe Wrod or Shigt Wdros.”
Note that I intentionally tried to change the interior shapes of the words, though, and it’s the shapes along with the context that help us when reading by sight. If the letters were rearranged at random, the words would be easier than in my example. The basic point still holds that fast readers can recognize the meaning of many words just by glancing at them and without confirming that all the letters are in the proper order. (The fact that we often don’t spot typos, even those that would change the pronunciation in a conspicuous way, is a confirmation of this.)
BruceDeitrickPrice, I don’t know if you’re still reading (after my long dry posts), but I’ll add that I sympathize with your apparent intent to improve education — I’m no friend of the educational establishment myself — and phonics may well be a good method of teaching children to read (at an elementary level or students who are having difficulty, anyway), but denying that people can read fluently by sight is not the way to go in trying to convince others of this.
Yinz is supposedly a contraction for “you ones”...
It does seem to get more difficult as the average length of the words increases. I did a quick word count of your example sentence, looking for short words. Short words being words with 1, 2, or 3 letters only so that they cannot be rearranged. Your sample sentence was 29% short words. The original piece I posted was 46% short word, which was probably a big part of what made it easier to read. The short words provide the grammatical context and make it easier to guess the meaning of the whole.
I think you’ve put your finger on some of the reasons.
From what I can tell, fluent readers are looking at each letter. What happens over the years is that the brain processes the information faster and faster. Similarly, when a person can play piano from sheet music, they can sit down in front of a totally unknown piece of music and play it. Their brain is processing each note — skipping notes would make nonsense. We know such players have not memorized notes in advance.
I have about 10 videos on YouTube explaining the case against Sight Words. Here is the shortest of them (3 minutes):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_fIXd9vp5c
And here is the one with the most views:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCNDFTBkPBQ
Or search Phonics vs. Sight Words for others.
[I see from the videos that this is a special interest of yours, so I won’t hesitate to write about it at greater length.]
In my opi...n, you can easily understand that last word (after ‘In my opi....’) without needing to focus on all the letters or vocalizing them. That’s because you’re familiar with the word ‘opinion’ — have seen it thousands of times — and are used to seeing ‘In my opinion’ in discussions like this one.
Let me emphasize again, though, that I agree with you that phonics can help with unfamiliar words, and that it may be the best foundation for teaching beginners to read (or, at least, it should be introduced at some point in the process and play a big role). Obviously it’s helpful, when you encounter unfamiliar words, to have rules for figuring out how they are pronounced — or probably pronounced — and what the various roots, prefixes, suffixes mean.
After you’ve figured out a particular word, though, and seen it hundreds or thousands of times, you should be able to take it in at a glance, without sounding out every individual letter. Fast readers do that, slowing down occasionally to “decipher” an unfamiliar one, but most of the time zipping along taking in words and phrases at a glance.
It has also wasted thousands upon thousands of lives. That is heartbreaking.
Also...Bruce, if we were to completely privatize K-12 education tomorrow, the free market would assure that the best teaching practices would emerge. That this travesty of “whole word” instruction has been allowed to continue over 70 years is **only** possible in a sclerotic, collectivist, government system that impervious to market forces.
But...I know you disagree with me. You still hold to the irrational belief that our collectivist, socialist, godless system of temples of state worship and union jobs ( misnamed “schools”) can be reformed.
Though I’m not an advanced musician, my experience at a beginning and intermediate level makes me believe that good musicians do something similar with music too. They “decipher” as beginners or when learning very difficult and unfamiliar pieces, but the notes of nearly all styles of music occur in familiar patterns, some of which can be anticipated.
When pianists play melodies and chords using seven or eight fingers at a time, with rapid successions of notes, they are helped by their ability to anticipate the chord changes (or take in the shapes of the chords at a glance), based on their familiarity with the patterns that occur in the key they’re in. Not only can they read music that way, they can create it (improvise) based on the same principles. It’s much easier to envision their doing that competently than that they’re perceiving and consciously translating into muscular movement every single symbol for every single note.
Also they have a feel for whether they’re creating tension or resolving it, and because of years of practice their fingers naturally tend to go in whichever direction is needed to do that. They focus on some individual components of the patterns, of course, but their minds supply the rest — unconsciously and with surprising accuracy — based on the practice that they’ve had in playing similar or identical patterns. I believe the same happens with fast readers of familiar words and phrases. When you see ‘Consciously or unconsc........” in its context in the paragraph above, do you really need to see the rest of the word?
I’ll just tell you as frankly as I can...
1) The brain is an extremely ingenious machine, and does whatever tricks it takes in any given instant to get the best results. No one can be sure what is going on at any given time.
2) However I am confident from studying books by Rudolf Flesch, Engelmann, Blumenfeld, and all the others that I have reviewed on Amazon, plus my own intuitive analysis, that Whole Word is mostly nonsense. And as a tactical matter, I simply decided to be wholly against it. The problem is that so many people have picked up bits and pieces of propaganda from the Education Establishment. So now it’s like cleaning up a nuclear waste site.
3) Here is a wonderfully stark summation by phonics guru Don Potter (on my site under #42):
“The situation across the nation is dramatically worse that anyone can possibly imagine. When I ask the teachers why they teach sight-words, they inevitably tell me because their students are going to be assessed on them. They are totally unaware that sight-words are positively harmful. They consider sight-words part of a good reading program that includes some phonics, not realizing that sight-words create a reflex that interferes with phonics instruction. Sight-words are an obstacle to reading, not an aid.”
4) Flesch explained the whole thing in 1955. I can’t see that he got a word wrong.
It is like working on a puzzle with many pieces. There is a great deal of satisfaction in find a piece that fits.
And...As the puzzle progresses to completion the picture becomes more recognizable and the quantity of remaining pieces is reduced and the picture is finished rapidly toward the end.
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