Note that Eide's book is not a phonics course; it is better described as a phonics manual. I believe her upcoming book "Teaching the Logic of English to All Learners" completes the set. I must mention that there are a dozen excellent phonics programs available, and all the authors disagree, as we should expect, on many details. It is important not to get bogged down in the details, because what matters is the big picture: for 70 years the United States has wasted trillions of hours, and probably trillions of dollars, on a hoax.
The Education Establishment tells many lies about reading, but more and more I'm realizing that all of these lies can be distilled down to the biggest lie of all, which is: there are two ways to teach the reading of English, phonics or Sight Words. Virtually everyone in the school system believes this lie. (Balanced Literacy states specifically that both methods are excellent and we should blend them.)
Personally, I'm persuaded that almost no one reads fluently using Sight Words. Many people learn to read with Sight Words in the sense that they use them as a stepping stone, finally seeing the phonics inside the Sight Words. But probably not even one person in 100 has such a retentive memory that they can actually memorize thousands and thousands of Sight Words, and recall them instantly. In short, virtually all the success that Sight Word experts claim is really an illusion.
I would argue that Sight Words are not only useless but as destructive to the brain as Angel Dust, and should not be considered an option. Here is the true choice: intensive phonics, as outlined in Eide's prescription, or a more literary approach that emphasizes nursery rhymes, singing, sharing stories, etc. Many people learn to read almost spontaneously, just as musical people sing or play piano with little instruction. I published almost a million words without knowing a single phonics rule. As I've learned in dozens of anecdotes, the more verbal kids "figure it out." Remember that first-graders show up at school already recognizing 20,000 spoken words; they speak English words all day. The leap to reading these words is NOT so great as the Education Establishment likes to pretend when concocting excuses for its own dismal failures. (However, having said all this, I do know I would've been better off if I had learned about long A's, silent E's, and all that stuff. As Eide notes, the more you know about the logic of English, the easier it is to learn other languages.)
Here we've come to something I'm starting to call the Phonics Paradox. Smarter, more verbal children -- the very ones you would think could easily master all the phonics rules-- are actually the ones who need them least.
Conversely, the slower, less verbal kids -- the very ones you think would have the most trouble learning the phonics rules -- are precisely those children who most desperately need the phonics rules. The Whole Word charlatans always used the slower students as their alibi. Oh, we wouldn't want to abuse these poor darlings with low verbal skills. How could they possibly memorize 100 phonics rules? The obvious answer is we must make them memorize 10,000 English word-diagrams! But those slower children -- around whom the entire scam has been constructed--never advance very far in the program. They become functional illiterates.
Whole Word, in operation, functions as a Ponzi scheme. The child learns to read 50 words or 100 words, and is soon able to "read" small books with controlled vocabularies. That apparent success keeps the parents quiet. Conversely, the phonics kids are struggling with little details for much of the first year. They can't read a book; some can barely read a sentence. Here's why I say Whole Word is a Ponzi scheme: the apparent early success is actually a lie, and is paid for many times over by years of failure. Meanwhile, the phonics kids who start slow and shaky, end up reading at extraordinary speeds in a year or two.
Another crucial part of the story is that the kids supposedly struggling with all the phonics rules actually ENJOY the process. They like gaining control over this monster that's all around them -- language.
Joan Dunn, a teacher, wrote in 1954 what I'm now taking to be the most profound truth about education: "The children...want to be taught step by step, so that they can see their progress. The duller they are, the more important and immediate is this need."
Virtually all of the scam and nonsense in the public schools is supposedly designed to appeal to the "duller" kids. Haven't you heard this pitch many times: easy school work will seduce them into being real students. The Education Establishment, as usual, has everything backward. Only by systematic, step-by-step instruction can the slower kids be brought up to speed.
Here's the weird truth: memorizing 100 phonics rules is probably the same mental work as memorizing 100 visual symbols. But the 100 graphic symbols are a slow start toward a dead end; while the 100 phonics rules are a true passport, letting children read anything. There's the evil absurdity of Whole Word.
This review is so long because Eide's book is not a world unto itself. It's part of a much bigger debate, known as the Reading Wars. My goal is to persuade all the people messing with Sight Words, Dolch Words and Balanced Literacy that they are wasting their time and hurting their students. Come back to real reading. Denise Eide can be your guide."
----end review--
For a short look at the reading mess, see "42: Reading Resources" on Improve-Education.org. Article includes list of phonics programs.
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-PJ
Best gift ever, outside of salvation.
/johnny
FWIW, my wife and I taught our daughters to read English using the Carden reading method.
The read fluently. My second grader just finished all the Harry Potter books.
We are not native English speakers (Hebrew, Yiddish, French being the language with which I am most comfortable) — my wife being more comfortable than I with English due to spending more time in the USA.
I’ve been very impressed with it.
And it comes in a Kindle edition, too, for $9.99.
My wife and I have taught our granddaughter phonics since she showed an interest in reading after being read to most every night from age of 2 or 3. Now in Kindergarten she has been tested as reading at 4th grade level and quickly zooming past that. The Sight Words method of teaching frustrates her to no end.
The books that are sent home for practice are really junk. Very limited in words. It is hard to read through these books as the sentence structure makes no sense.
Sight Words method is another example of junk science that was passed down by the great minds of the ivory towers. Then blindly accepted as gospel without question by the education establishment.
Not a wonder that half of the kids cannot read. Don't get me started on Math and Science......
This is a series I’m glad to see come back:
Well, I think I can see why Johnnie still can't read.
This isn’t new. This is how I was taught to read in the 50’s. I can assure you that in my fourth grade class only about 10-15% tested below proficiency and all could read.
> “Personally, I’m persuaded that almost no one reads fluently using Sight Words. Many people learn to read with Sight Words in the sense that they use them as a stepping stone, finally seeing the phonics inside the Sight Words. But probably not even one person in 100 has such a retentive memory that they can actually memorize thousands and thousands of Sight Words, and recall them instantly.” <
I think the opposite is true. However they started to read (and I have no problem with phonics as a method of teaching), really fluent readers don’t have time to sound out letters (or even words), not when they are reading hundreds of words a minute. They take in complete words and even phrases at a single glance.
Doing so doesn’t require great intelligence. After all, imagine how many times we have seen most of the words in a typical English sentence. I’m in my sixties now, and I’ve probably seen every word in the previous sentence at least a hundred thousand times. Regular readers of Free Republic have seen most of them a thousand times on this forum alone. Try counting how often words such as ‘we’, ‘have’, ‘seen’, ‘of’, ‘the’, and ‘a’ appear just in the posts of a single day. Even slightly less common words like ‘imagine’, ‘times’, ‘most’, ‘typical’, and ‘sentence’ are easy for fluent readers because we’ve seen them many thousands of times.
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.
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.
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.
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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If I knew how logical English is, I could of been a contendah!
I guess it must depend on what “logical” means.