So?....Who is suggesting that phonics ( letter by letter reading) should be a permanent strategy for reading?
> So?....Who is suggesting that phonics ( letter by letter reading) should be a permanent strategy for reading?
This is what I originally objected to in the review quoted in the first post of the thread: “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.”
That seems to imply that letter-by-letter reading is the best way to attain fluency. Maybe that’s true if you set the level that qualifies as fluency at a relatively slow speed. If it means very fast reading, though, I believe you have move beyond that and start doing the opposite — stop hearing the words in your mind, and instead take in wide expanses of letters and words at a single glance.
I agree that phonics may be best for teaching students to read, but once readers become competent, I think they’ll stop paying much attention to the sounds implied by the various letter combinations, and instead use minimum clues to anticipate the words (and, if they wish to attain great speeds, will stop imagining the sounds in their minds).
Note the typo in my previous post (”I believe you have move beyond that” — I left out ‘to’ before ‘move’). Even though I now read at a moderate pace, I anticipate patterns rather than read all the letters, and in that instance didn’t notice that I’d left out the ‘to’. There are drawbacks to reading that way, but on the whole it increases speed.