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Your post is fallacious. English is a phonetic language, and is best taught that way.

Poor, dear Windflier. If you had actually read (or understood) my post, you would not have said what you did above or misused the word "fallacious."

What you should have said is that written English is an alphabetic language. Here, I'll post it again so that you can meditate on it:

This is idiocy. The fact that English is a somewhat phonetic language makes it possible to predict what certain words that are familiar in spoken English may look like in written English such that they may be recognized if a reader is already familiar with them. It also makes it possible to produce a written form that can be recognized and understood by other English readers. It is undeniably true, though, that the number of written English words vastly outnumbers the number of spoken English words. It also does not follow that because English reading may be learned through the use of phonetic approaches that fluent English reading is done through a phonetic process. This is impossible. The speed at which it is performed in adult level fluent reading is far in excess of the time required to employ phonetic rules. Although a phonetic approach can enable a student to gain mastery over the written word in a comparatively easy fashion, compared to learning an idiogram-based language, the adult version of reading is not a phonetic process.

Do you have any clue as to why I said "somewhat phonetic"? That's because the English language is a composite of many different languages and its written form, though alphabetic, does not enable one to phonetically decode the written form as easily as a language like Spanish or Latin or Greek.

Also, because it is known how fast certain intellectual processes take place, it is known that fluent reading cannot be the result of a mental sounding out of letters and syllables. Once someone learns to read and acquires familiarity with the written language, he is able to recognize words by their shape, relative length, position in a sentence, their first few letters, their positional function in a sentence, and by the ongoing context of the sentence. If this were not true then you wouldn't be able to "read" this: "Yuo aer otu of yrou fgrgigin mndi."

“Yuo aer otu of yrou fgrgigin mndi.”

You _do_ realize that you just disproved your position?

yrou and your are not decoded to the same concept by “shape” or whole word because they are not shaped the same at all. They decode that way because your mind notes that it does not recognize yrou as a word and starts down another path to decode it. The ou pair is common, as is the you triplet. The remaining r fits nowhere but at the end of the hypothetical word which thus gets id’ed as “maybe your?” An automated process that you are only partly conscious of.

The same kind of decoding happens for text in radically atypical fonts. And it happens MUCH faster than you hypothesize.

Visual pattern recognition (whole word) and auditory pattern recognition (phonics, as the letters on the page evoke the mental models of the phonemes) are both parts of fluent reading.

If you pay close attention to your mental processes while reading at different speeds, you may experience the two kind s of pattern recognition directly. I do, just a bit, as I read slower or faster.