Read this to your toddler. My son is now 14 and an excellent reader.
Posted on 10/22/2013 12:47:19 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
[Summary: easy way to understand sight-words.] Hey, wait a minute, you're thinking. There's no such thing as English hieroglyphics. There are Egyptian hieroglyphics, Sumerian hieroglyphics, maybe some others. But English? No way.
Yeah, you know that. But does a six-year-old kid know that? Not hardly. You know what this means? The school system can pull a fast one. Teachers point to a word-– "house" -– and say, "This design is pronounced 'house.' Memorize it."
Presto, that English phonetic word is now English hieroglyphics, simply by saying it is. That's what American public schools did circa 1930; they changed all English phonetic words into English hieroglyphics. It was so easy. What do first graders know? They've got VICTIM written all over them.
If children learn the alphabet, they are in fact memorizing the shapes of individual letters. But a single letter is not so great a challenge; plus, there are only 26 of them.
But what about five of these easy shapes stuck together to make a much more complicated shape like "house"? Or, worse still, something like "business." What about this complex shape makes you think of business activity? Basically, that's how you learn hieroglyphics, one at a time, with as many memory aids as possible.
If you don't happen to have a photographic memory, you will have to be clever and creative with your mnemonic tricks. Let's say the word is "face." Both the "a" and the "e" have a closed shape that could very well be eyes. That's how you do it.
The problem with hieroglyphics is that each design is hard work and takes up lots of memory. Even very smart people have trouble memorizing 2000 hieroglyphics with instant recall. More ordinary memories might have trouble going past 500 hieroglyphics.
Treating English word as hieroglyphics has few benefits and many obvious limitations. The English language is huge. College graduates routinely know more than 100,000 English words. Nobody knows 100,000 hieroglyphics. Furthermore, having memorized "face," would you be able to read FACE? The eyes, where are the eyes?
Historically speaking, it was as though a strange and deadly virus struck our Education Establishment around 1930. They insisted-–absolutely, hysterically insisted--that memorizing English words as hieroglyphics was the best way to go. In fact, it's the worst way.
English hieroglyphics, that's what most little children studied and memorized across the United States for a long time. This method never made any sense. It caused huge damage. It's the reason we have 50 million functional illiterates.
Virtually all readers of English hieroglyphics are damaged readers. Their eyes tend to flit randomly over the complex designs. Instead of relentless left-to-right movements, their eyes zigzag and jump backwards. Soon these readers are diagnosed as dyslexic. They are said to have ADHD; and must be given Ritalin.
No, what they need to be given is a lesson in phonics. They memorize the letter names. They learn the sounds (i.e., the phonics) represented by the letters. They learn the blends of these sounds. When children can combine two or more sounds into one sound, they are reading!
That's how it works. That's how simple it is, in every phonetic language all around the world. Once you know the letters and the sounds, there is no limit to the number of words you can read. That's why English can have 1 million words, some of them long and bizarre like "ibuprofen" and "verisimilitude," but readers have no trouble.
Conversely, children trying to memorize English as hieroglyphics might stumble over "See Dick and Jane." They might stumble over "house." After all, when you think of it as a design, house looks a lot like louse, hoist, horse, dowse, souse, mouse, host, hoses, worse, hurts, etc. Really, that is the primary problem with English hieroglyphics. Every one of them resembles 50 others. A kid could get dyslexia, never learn to read, drop out of school, and end up stealing a car belonging to a literacy professor. Well, at least that would be poetic justice.
And the moral of the story is: if your child comes home with a list of sight-words to be memorized, send the child back with a copy of this article and a request for an Individualized Education Program that is based on phonics.
--------Related material-------------
ARTICLE: "Sight Words--The Big Stupid" http://www.improve-education.org/id66.html
ARTICLE: "America, you've been punked." http://www.rightsidenews.com/2013091333189/life-and-science/health-and-education/america-you-have-been-punked.html
VIDEO: "Reading is Easy." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JV0tPGn-Ws
////
The simplest written language I have seen is Hangul (Korean) you can learn to pronounce just about anything in a couple of hours. Of course, you won’t have a clue what those words mean. lol
Servant
I pray, sir, can you read?
ROMEO
Ay, mine own fortune in my misery.
Servant
Perhaps you have learned it without book: but, I
pray, can you read any thing you see?
ROMEO
Ay, if I know the letters and the language.
Servant
Ye say honestly: rest you merry!
ROMEO
Stay, fellow; I can read.
From “Romeo and Juliet”, William Shakespeare.
Learning to read is terribly important and the average person I talk to doesn’t seem to realize this.
The low-information voters don’t read much, if at all. They put the U.S. in our current fix.
Data-entry people who work in hospitals make deadly mistakes every day because they can’t read or spell up to the requirements of the job.
Congress people don’t read their bills. The last congressman who read all the bills he signed was H.R.Gross who retired in the 70’s.
White House pretenders aren’t really smart. They know very little about economics, finances or even recent history. A little more reading in Hayek or Arthur Laffer would benefit our country, don’t you think?
Don’t you know the eco-nuts back in the 1920s were freaking out over the possibility that the north and south poles were going to melt away?
I don’t know about Korean, but Spanish is entirely phonetic. Learn the sounds of 29 letters and you can read/sound out any word.
I often wonder if illiteracy is unknown in Spanish-speaking cultures.
Briefly??? Reading is still taught that way while they complain about having to give lip service to phonics. The rulers want the population to be barely literate, to be able to read their instructions but not to be able to read history and such useless matter.
“Burned” and “buried” have the same shape. How can people be expected to tell them apart?
Children who are not taught History and cannot read well enough to pursue it easily on their own never learn what has worked in society and nations and what doesn't work. Their minds are not cramped by reality and can be taught to believe that impossible utopias can be instituted by politicians and wise leaders.
My cousin is somewhat dyslexic. He reads with difficulty, having to sort of push the words on the page together with his eyes and tediously build them up into paragraphs and such. He did not learn to read at all until he was past 30. The look-say and whole word crap that was all the rage when he was in grammar school in the 50s and 60s (yes, 50s) made reading impossible for him then. Schools in the more progressive areas were also not really grading, some just giving everyone As and Cs, the Cs being for those who learned not much of anything so Cuz got graduated. Fortunately he had a flair for things electrical and did very well with radios and later, computers.
The rationalization for the look-say method is that adults do not sound out words. They know the words they read on sight or it would take them entirely too long to read anything. Also phonics is akin to rote memory and adults don’t do rote memory very well so we shouldn’t be forcing the less developed minds of children to do that, in reading or in anything else. Facts are a waste of space.
Not in the northeast. At least in CT and MA, see/say had a stake driven through its heart at least 30 years ago.
-PJ
Phonics teachers call that Dysteachia instead of Dyslexic. It is a problem that many suffer from and this child abuse is occurring every day still in most schools across America.
“The complete rule pretty much clears up most of the confusion.”
That would require a SEISMIC shift in thinking. ;)
Greek import, not English. That’s why you teach the history of the English language when you teach phonics, so kids know where words come from or how the pronunciation may have changed over time while the spelling maintains the history.
RE: “but don’t most schools of necessity devote time to phonics as well?” Good question. Point is, they keep as much non-phonics as they can get away with.
Here’s a second anecdote to give you a sense of how bad things can be. A man called me from West Virginia last week to get help with his fifth-grade granddaughter, who has never been taught with anything but sight-words and is now functionally illiterate. In fact the man said he lived in a house with five generations of functionally illiterate people. To sum this up, this is what the Democrats in West Virginia are doing to the poor black citizens of that state. It’s really Goddamn disgusting.
Read this to your toddler. My son is now 14 and an excellent reader.
My wife has been a principal in Massachusetts elementary schools for over twenty years. See/say has not been used in MA for at least thirty years.
Saugus.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.