Posted on 10/08/2016 1:33:46 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
In 1955 Rudolf Flesch famously explained “Why Johnny Can't Read.” The problem was obvious. Schools made children memorize words as abstract graphic designs (i.e., sight-words), nothing else.
In fact, English words contain a lot of essential info about how words should be pronounced and why they’re spelled the way they are. The Education Establishment said, “Oh fiddlesticks, forget all that old-fashioned stuff. Memorize the word-designs as if they are currency symbols or electrical symbols.”
That, of course, is very hard work. But our Education Establishment has pushed this nonsense for 80 years. As a result, we have 50 million functional illiterates. (This refers to people, i.e., victims, who recognize several hundred words by sight but never become fluent readers.)
Alert: Schools are starting. The Education Establishment will play its usual games. The job of every parent is to maneuver around these games.
In the days ahead many parents will see their first list of sight-words. The children will be told to memorize several each week (a very slow pace but that is all that many children can do). Memorizing sight-words in this tedious painful way almost guarantees your child will HATE reading and never become good at it.
You’ll see that the lists appear random and seem to have no internal logic. All the word-designs look similar in English. Even after years, many children will still confuse the simplest words, for example, is and the.
Here’s a quick way to feel the pain of sight-words. The teacher points to a cluster such as “dpx rsjk tmzc hfgl.” (That’s how they look to your kid— weird and very unfriendly.) The teacher says these words are pronounced: “run house blue play.” But how does the child connect the pronunciations to the shapes? There is no way to make sense of it. Phonics, on the other hand, is logical and consistent. Children first learn the alphabet, then they learn the sounds represented by each of the letters, and then they learn the blends, as explained in this short article on early reading.
Most children can learn to read before the end of first grade. Meanwhile, sight-word schools will guarantee that children are still illiterate in the third and fourth grades. Many of these children will be labeled dyslexic, one of the most dishonest terms in K-12 education.
It’s not necessary to argue with the people at the school. Ignore them. Teach your children to read correctly.
Please pass this article to parents with young children. Our public schools do not show any signs of self-correction. So it's up to parents and community leaders to get involved in protecting kids from what has been labeled "academic child abuse."
(Here is a longer, more scholarly treatment of the same information. http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/11/why_kids_cant_read.html)
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Bruce Deitrick Price explains theories and methods on his education site Improve-Education.org. (For info on his four new novels, see his literary site Lit4u.com.)
I had a hard time folowing this, to many big werds.
Are we going back to the age of hieroglyphics?
The ‘progressives’ have brought us full circle it seems.
Totally agree.
I said something recently to a young person about concentric circles. He had no idea what I was talking about. Well educated college grad, but no knowledge of what concentric circles are.
I learned phonics in the Rome, Ga. Public schools. 1958 1st grade. How to sound out the words. The word Island; a land mass surrounded by water gave me problems. I thought it was pronounced is land. Oh gee guess what, the s is silent. Somehow I survived. Long live phonics! The current bosses at Rome public schools have got a saying, If you are willing to try, we have got a program for you. The key to learning is being willing to try.
So True!
Back in the mid 1940s I learned phonics by drill. I can still remember reciting in class the sounds of:
a a a a a a apple
b b b b b b ball
c c c c c c cat etc
Six years, my brother was taught “word recognition”. I can remember him confusing the words invitation and invention. also, when he asked my mother how to spell a word and she would tell him to sound it out, he couldn’t.
should be “six years later”
I was trying to show my kindergarten grandson how to sound out a and t, and then how you could sound out letters to make hat, cat, rat, bat, mat. He looked at the words and said, “those aren’t any of my sight words”.
HEY. I speak GD&T.
My two munchkins (girls) both learned to read at 4 years old. They both learned phonics and sight words. My 10 year old 6th grader (skipped 2nd grade) and reads on a 12th grade level. My 7 year old is also a great reader. She is reading Harry Potter.
I totally disagree with the article. As a Father of 5 I taught all my children to read before first grade. And I did not use phonics. It does not work for early readers. Phonics comes in around second or third grade after you know how to read at a Dr. Seuss level.
The reality is that most words you need to learn when you start reading are not phonetic. Sat Rat Cat are. But you learn with Is and Who and You and They. You just have to memorize them and learn to pick them up in context as you read.
If you want to teach most children to read at age four then first teach them their letters at age three. Make sure they know the small letters very well. Those are the common ones. But they need to know both the big letters and the small ones. And they should know the sounds. Or at least some words that start with the letter.
Then read to them books like Dr. Seuss and other like books. Take 3 of their favorite books and put the words individually on 3 by 5 cards. One word for each card. Also add a card with their name on it. And add Mom and Dad and any brothers or sisters. Add Good and Bad too. And add some colors too. And you can add some words to form small sentences if you are missing them.
Then try to teach your child 5 words everyday. Make sure you are giving them some words to form a sentence. Billy is good. Father is silly. Make sure you quiz your child on the five new words and all the past words.
You will find some words are really hard to learn. I have found that Then, That and Than are tough to differentiate. Notice there is a difference in the sound of Thin and That. The TH sound is not the same.
After you get about 20 words you should be able to make several sentences. You can make some sentences after 5 words. But your child should be able to make them after 20 words. Let your child make several sentences. After 60 words you can read a whole book, like One fish, two fish.
Know after you have developed a little confidence. You can start adding some phonetics into the process for the larger words. But phonetics does not always work. Two, Too and To can’t be helped with phonetics. And there is no way to know using phonetics that Good rhymes with Could but not Soon.
Keep feeding your kid appropriate books for their reading level and make sure they have time without a computer or TV. Computers do help with reading but they can crowd out book time. And with video, today’s computers are the same as the TVs we grew up with.
In grade school?????? We need engineers etc. but probably not 100 million of them. In fact I can think of nothing worse than having that many running around. Every discipline thinks they have the inside track on revealed knowledge.
So much for your assertions. A dedicated parent can do what lackluster teachers can't...or won't. Let parents do what they want, as you suggest, without inference of one system over another. Institutional learning/teaching isn't for everybody.
Your bias is noted. Don't bother replying back.
I was taught phonics in the mid-50s. I think it varied a lot by school and even by teacher. My mother taught in the early grades until around 1974 and she never bought into the word recognition nonsense. She always taught phonics.
The Nuns taught me to sight read, and I never learned phonetics. I remember my first lesson, the word “Look”. It was pointed out that the two “O”s were like eyes. I learned to read rapidly and have been a very good reader in several languages ever since. The only drawback is that for the next sixty years spelling has been a problem.
Or maybe you learned phonics on your own without even realizing it. And people who learn the alphabet, and then how letters form syllables and words will will learn to recognize words by sight.
When you look at a word like "recommendation", how can anyone pronounce and spell it without taking it syllable by syllable, or a phonetic approach?
I think phonics and word recognition are both steps in learning to read. I had a first grade teacher who taught phonics and my brother did not. I was a good speller and he never has been.
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