you can't, but i think the issue is they shouldn't be 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.)
Learning to read is a combination of sight words AND phonics.
There are some words that just don’t fit the phonics rules, but once the kids learn the phonics, which they ought to start as soon as they start to read, they will do WAY better than just trying to guess the words by context.
When our granddaughter was in daycare, we bought a set of “Hooked on Phonics” and gifted it to the daycare. The granddaughter graduated college last spring as a BSN, and is now a newly minted RN, happily employed delivering babies in Labor and Birthing.
NO, NO, ...the sight word “position” is wrong. Just ask Oboma and his ilk and they’ll tell you it’s “gun sight”.
My mom was a 1st thru 3rd grade reading teacher. She refused to teach sight only cuz she felt children needed both.
So I taught my kids phonic first and they did fine. I also read to them nonstop!
When my daughter was 4 she saw the movie “Matilda”. Matilda was a voracious reader and after that movie my daughter went nuts! We lived in the library.
My son’s first sentence was “Mommy read book.” (Goodnight Moon)
I think the problem is when a school systems relies on sight only. There was an article in the Wash Times years ago about how public schools in California relied on sight only and 20 years later they found graduating seniors had a huge functional illiteracy rate.
How are you going to stop children learning sight words? Impossible. I’ve raised four. My youngest can’t read yet but she knows several words by sight, like Target. Two of my children cracked the code of reading before they reached the age where they are taught phonics. They read as well as the one child who did learn phonics and learned to read in school.
Brains are more complicated that you give them credit for.
I have noticed lots of people confuse than and then.
Ex: I would rather have red then blue.
FReepers, are you listening? :)
Literacy spread much faster when alphabets came into use having symbols that represent sounds. Learning to read hieroglyphics is much to time consuming for people who have to produce to survive. Converting English to Hieroglyphics, which is what “sight “ teaching does illiteralizes the general population and restricts them from receiving true information, history, for instance. It makes the population easier to control by a master caste.
you can't, but i think the issue is they shouldn't be I agree with your argument absolutely.
Look at the Chinese literary system. It is modern day Hieroglyphics. Good insight on your part.
Japanese is worse. They have to learn a complicated syllabic system and two Chinese systems and a third if they specialize in various disciplines.
I have no memory of learning to read, my mom says she taught me before kindergarten. I assume she taught me to read phonetically. My husband learned sight words and while he loves to read, he struggles with pronunciation on occasion. Spelling is harder for him as well. Our two oldest had formal reading instruction in school, some sight words some phonics.
We homeschooled our younger kids from the beginning and I taught them letter sounds before teaching the name of the letter. Instead of singing the alphabet song, “a-b-c...x-y-z, now I know my abc’s...”, we sing “a-a-apple, b-b-butterfly...z-z-zebra, all are in my Father’s world.” Same tune so it takes forever, but they learn short vowel and consonant sounds right away. Learned the song from My Father’s world kindergarten curriculum.
I tried starting kindergarten with our now six year old son when he was five. Gave up because he absolutely wasn’t ready. He was too goofy and immature. We read books to the little kids every night, sang the song with the flash cards a couple of times a month and he figured out how to sound out words by himself before we officially started homeschool this fall. We began this year using first grade materials and he is zipping through it despite no formal kindergarten.
I’m surprised people defend the sight word method. Phonics unlock the code and make reading so much easier-especially when attempting literature that is well beyond your current level. My daughter was reading unabridged Jane Austen novels when she was eight. She would laugh and tell me the funny parts so I knew she was comprehending the book.
I learned hiragana and katakana before I went to Japan. Came in useful reading street signs in small towns.
How it evolved into the mess it seems be now is beyond me.
Having an alphabet is obviously unfair to the ChiComs. So, let's pretend we don't.
It's time to cut America down to size — the essence of the Obama foreign policy.
Working in the software field, I thank my lucky stars that English is my native language.
Your mom was wise.
Phonics first, then sight. Phonics is the fallback when sight fails (as it does frequently in the English language). Phonics is how I learned to read. First cereal boxes, then children's books, then newspapers and magazines and real books.
It is true, however, that mature readers read by sight. In particular, they tend to focus on the first and last letters of each word. Even if the intermediate letters are messed up, they can still puzzle out the text. Example:
Frsorcoue and sveen yeras ago our fatehrs bughrot ftorh, uopn this ceontnint, a new ntaion, cncoieevd in liebrty and daeceitdd to the pirotisoopn taht "all men are ceatred eaqul."Now we are eggnead in a garet cviil war, ttiseng whhteer taht noaitn, or any notain so cieconved and so dceatided, can lnog eundre. We are met on a graet bietaefltld of taht war. We hvae cmoe to deditcae a pitoorn of it, as a fnail rntseig palce for tsohe who deid hree, taht the niaotn mihgt lvie. Tihs we may, in all peptroiry do. But in a legarr ssnee, we cnoant deidatce, we cnonat cascrontee, we cnnaot hllaow, tihs gnruod. The bvare men, lvniig and daed, who srgugeltd hree, have hoalweld it, far avobe our poor peowr to add or dcatert. The wrlod will lttile note, nor long remeembr waht we say hree; wilhe it can neevr fgoert waht tehy did hree.
It is rhater for us the lnviig, we hree be dctiedead to the gerat tsak rnaienmig bfreoe us—taht form tshee horoend daed we tkae incersead deotoivn to taht casue for whcih tehy here gvae the lsat flul mausree of doeoitvn—taht we hree higlhy rlesvoe that tsehe daed shlal not hvae deid in vian, taht tihs naoitn slahl have a new brith of feeodrm, and taht gmrneneovt of the poeple, by the ppolee, for the plpeoe slahl not psreih form the etarh.
Link: https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/. Abstract:
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
I know quite a few others who had worse happen. They have degress and diplomas but they don't know how to do square routes, Algebra, read at a college level or even know about important dates and events in American history or world history for that matter.
We have kids now who are entering University but do not know what happened in the years 1066, 1095, 1215, 1415, 1519, 1558, 1587, 1619, 1812, 1863, unless it was on a movie or a series or if South Park talked about it. They don't even know arithamatic or never read a book more than 20 pages for a book report. They can't even find countries or states on a map.
These same kids usually will tell you that for the economy to work the rich have to be taxed 90% of their wealth and given away to people who are poor by choice then by disaster, they believe that America is a white supremacist dictatorship and that South Africa's constitution is superior to our own. They even think that Islam is superior to Christianity.
Is it any wonder then that Employers in big companies would rather hire people from other countries that have superior educational systems than our own?
I intend to write an article about this later date.
LOL! I realized long ago that once you learn to read, you read by sight but not to that extent. What a great example!! Thanks!
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