I read Dr Seuss to my son when he was a toddler. Now he's 20 and kicking butt in college.
Posted on 12/05/2019 4:42:33 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
Important Ed News ///
Phonics is winning, finally, at long last, after 85 stupid years, after 50 million functional illiterates, after one of the most stubborn subversive schemes against common sense ever to brutalize a country. Finally, the one correct way to teach reading is again embraced as the one correct way to teach reading.
Go ahead, shout "OMG." The fix has been in for so many dumbed down decades that many people may have given up hope. You may think this is now crazy optimism on my part. But I will show you some signs that things have suddenly and surely changed.
First, conservatives must note that the New York Times is finally on the right side of a major debate. It was on the wrong side for a long, long time. I don't know what finally woke those people up. Toward the end of 2018, a seminal article appeared: "Why Are We Still Teaching Reading the Wrong Way?" by Emily Hanford.
The subtitle tells it all: "Teacher preparation programs continue to ignore the sound science behind how people become readers."
Hanford concluded, "To become readers, kids need to learn how the words they know how to say connect to print on the page. They need explicit, systematic phonics instruction. There are hundreds of studies that back this up."
Well, you can imagine the shockwaves circling the globe. Thousands of so-called literacy experts have been sent back to school. Two things kept the hoax going all these years. 1) A mountain of dubious research that 2) an army of education professors flogged to control the debate. The professors will have to work much harder now.
Next, The Atlantic, a prestigious lefty magazine, recently announced, "Phonics, Not Whole Word, Is Best for Teaching Reading."....
Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/10/k12_phonics_is_winning.html#ixzz67HadRmcu
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
“Just in time for the educrats to screw up math instruction with Common Core methods.
I was in school in the early 60s, and they sure managed to screw up math instruction then. New Math, they called it. Tom Leherer did a song about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIKGV2cTgqA
As for phonics vs. whole word, whole word works when the words are simple, visually distinct, and especially for the ones that don’t follow “The Rules” and are difficult to sound out. Many of them are among those on Dolch word list. Get them memorized, and you can read all about Spot. Look! See Spot. See Spot Run. Run, Spot! Run! If you don’t get something more interesting to read real soon, you realize that the reason Spot is running is so he won’t get bored, and you tune out.
Fluent readers are rapid, automatic, left to right decoders. Research from Marily Jager Adams, years ago. This was common sense to me. I can’t comment on speed reading, but I can tell you that systematic, step by step, letter to sound, spelling to sound instruction has turned many illiterates into confident readers who are also good spellers.
Whole language produces illiterates, and poor spellers to boot. I tested a 3rd grade class years ago at our local school. Out of 24 children, 19 were word guessers and hated reading. Who would blame them. Teaching phonetics is SO MUCH EASIER for the kids.
I learned to read by phonics when JFK was in the White House. The name of our phonics book was “Breaking the Sound Barrier”, written by a nun.
Same here. I may not be classified as a “speed reader” but I read extremely fast compared to most.
” If whole-word really didn’t work, the Japanese and Chinese languages would have collapsed long ago ...”
That is of course very incorrect and very stupid.
Languages are not dependent on written expression.
I was learning phonics in 1st grade when JFK was assassinated.
I read Dr Seuss to my son when he was a toddler. Now he's 20 and kicking butt in college.
I was taught phonics early. I was two to three reading levels above my class throughout school. In junior high I took a speed reading course and hit 720 wpm. For many years I read at least a book a day. I usually had a stack of books so if I grew tired of one, I could switch to another.
I don’t understand the phenomenon, but no matter the reading speed, my eye always stops dead when I encounter a misspelled word.
God help me: I understood what you wrote, and I’m 70.
The entire point of an alphabet is to not use pictograms.
I would plug in the machine while using the class storage room and do all the coursework allowing me to read science fiction and war novels every day.
Alas, I was caught on the third day with two thirds of the course completed.
And as it happened, my punishment was to take a Poetry writing class.
But. I came to school early and read dictionaries and the big thesaurus in the library every morning. I wanted to write like Robert Service, or Rudyard Kipling, or William Blake. I was already writing poetry and I have been published in the years since (although it's been a while and I became a poor speller after PTSD treatment) so in a way I skated anyhow.
Any of the “glyph” scripts were intended to keep the general populace illiterate.
Bruce and I have worked on fixing my kids reading issues and his works at American Thinker were a resource for me in dealing with the school administrators who were not willing to to jettison whole word reading.
Using phonics I (with Bruce’s help) turned both of my kids into avid readers. they were both significantly behind, and are now ahead of their peers in reading. Bruce was a great help. His articles in AT gave me the ammunition I needed to force them to use phonics programs and we turned my kids around from being a full grade level and 1-1/2 grade levels behind to a full grade level ahead for both of my boys.
The apparent disagreement about how to teach reading is really cover for a disagreement about whether to teach reading.
I don’t see the word I read...just saw the Word “ammunition”...but did not see ammo in my brain...
And, maybe that’s why my recall can be lousy....hhhmmm....interesting
Yeah they taught my daughter to read using phonics and totally screwed her up on spelling! Funny how we ll had no problem learning to read when we were growing up and teachers believed their job was to educate not indoctrinate!
I recently bought a series of phonics-based readers for my 4+ year old grandson. We were looking at the labeling on the box while his mom encouraged him to read it.
He read the first word but didn't know the second word. He quickly made two or three guesses. This is exactly the behavior I wished to discourage. I believe that it is important to concentrate on phonetically easy words until the child builds confidence that phonics works. ( See Spot run.) Not until the child experiences the satisfaction of being able to read should he be challenged with more difficult words.
The hope is that when he does encounter an unfamiliar word that he uses phonics and context rather than simply guessing. My next purchase will be a dictionary and I will encourage his mom to teach him the key for pronunciation. I had a dictionary readily available when I was 4 and I highly recommend it.
Your post is funny and true for literate adults. For kids learning, they learn to speak using phonics. Their brains are wired that way. They learn to read with phonics quickly. Over time, they shift to a pattern recognition approach.
Reading phonetically slows a person’s reading ability down to their speech rate - about 100 to 150 words per min. Speed readers routinely process text at 600 words per min.
BTW, I took a speed reading course in College as a “gimmie” 3 English credits. one of the most practical courses I ever took. Cut my reading load in half.
I was taught to read with phonics. Worked well. As vocabulary advanced, whole word becomes the norm, but being taught to read phonetically works very well, and does not disadvantage you.
I was reading colledge level books in 5th grade.
I took a speed reading course in high school. It was helpful, but of limited use.
I can speed read novels and some magazine and newspaper articles.
It is useless to speed read technical manuals or legalese, where one word can drastically change the entire meaning.
Dense writing has to be studied to be understandable.
I knew one woman with a near photographic memory. She could just page through a book of regulations, and had them all in her head.
But to tell you what they meant, and how they were applied, she had to "bring them up" in her memory, then read them in her head, then consider how they were to be used.
My youngest (homeschooled by mom) started learning the phonetic alphabet at 20 months...and god forbid...with cursive sandpaper letters and is being taught cursive first.
Cannot say for certain it’s correlated but by age 3 she could use and define over 2000 words correctly and the concepts she has grasped since boggle people’s minds. We’ve incorporated tons of manual skills as well as their seems to be a ral link between physical manipulation capabilty and cognitive abilities in very young people
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