> “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.
Just like learning to fluently sight-read music notes on a page.
Personally, I have never met anyone who can fluently sight-read music who has learned to do it by a “whole-music” method.
Everyone I know who can sight read music fluently learned it one note at a time. Only with years of practice they can now quickly and seamlessly read groups of notes, recognize cord patterns and transitions, and accurately predict what is likely to come next.
If we don't use “whole music” methods to teach people to read music notation on a page, why would we think that “whole word” methods would work for learn to read English?
By the way, three of my children were Suzuki violin students. Yes, they did learn to hear and reproduce music on their violin as preschoolers,...BUT...by first grade their teacher was teaching them to sight-read music notation on a page. That happened ONE NOTE AT A TIME.