Read this to your toddler. My son is now 14 and an excellent reader.
What’s the big deal? My Doctor has been writing prescriptions for years in hieroglyphics.
I believe this was known a the see/say method that was (briefly) thought to be superior the phonics. It was clearly one of the most disastrous fads in education.
I went to school in the 1960s and we learned phonics. I don’t know how anyone can learn to read english without phonics. English is great, probably the greatest language of all, but spelling-wise it’s a disaster. I assume they don’t even have spelling contests in other languages.
Bruce, you are absolutely brilliant.
Now here’s the worst horror story I ever heard regarding the reading problem in this country.
In the ‘80s two recently graduated doctors were camping in a national forest in Washington State and nearly burned it down. They read in their camping handbook that their garbage was to be “burned.” What? Nope, the word was “buried.”
This is the kind of mistake resulting from the reading system taught in our schools today - they don’t teach attention to details.
How would you like these guys to operate on you?
2) For argument's sake, why are we losing out the the Chinese (if we are in fact losing out to the Chinese)? Reading and writing "hieroglyphs" hasn't actually hurt them, has it?
In education, the progressive movement is the disintegration mode of thought.In progressive education, man is primarily an actor rather than a thinker and actions and the concrete have primacy over the abstract and thought. A child must learn by doing activities.In reading,the commitment to the concrete as against the abstract take the form of the whole word method rather than phonics.
The progressive program for the schools is not reform, but demolition of subjects, facts, lessons, texts, structure, intellect, teaching, and learning. Above all, the movement represents the equation of education with the perceptual level mentality. It is the anti-conceptual mentality embracing the pre-conceptual child and training him to remain in that state for life.
I think phonics come first, then you begin to recognize the words and the inconsistencies.
I learned to speak quite a bit of Thai, then read some about 37 years ago. They don’t generally put spaces between the words, and sometimes they wrap compound vowel characters (I think it is) around a consonant. Consonants at the end of a word aren’t necessarily pronounced like they are in the beginning or middle of the word. The net result is that it is very difficult to discern any single word, or hieroglyph or whatever. But you almost have to pick it out or read back and forth. It works for them, though I don’t know if they’d win any speed reading contests.
Phonics is essential, but not sufficient, because of the many parents and contributors to the English language. Our rich vocabulary comes at the expense of consistency, so some look-say is inevitable.
Think of the many simple words that are NOT spelled phonetically:
WAR
TWO
FOUR
MONDAY
DOG
etc.
This doesn’t include the MANY alternate phonetic pronunciations in some of our common words.
BOUGH/PLOUGH
COUGH
DOUGH
ROUGH/TOUGH
etc.
It is well worth the extra memorization, and I would not want to go to sterilizing efforts like some of the Scandinavian countries have to standardize the phonics and pronunciations. We speak, read and write in English. It has the world’s richest vocabulary, because its speakers shamelessly borrow from other countries, perhaps largely due to the centrality of international commerce and colonization during the formation of the modern language. It doesn’t hurt that England venerates her language and created the OED, which the French sneeringly call a museum. The French meant it as an insult, the English do not take it as one.
Bizarre. Never heard of this.
Turning English into a Hanja-like written language is just going to fail.
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?
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.
-PJ
Read this to your toddler. My son is now 14 and an excellent reader.