Posted on 10/27/2018 7:17:20 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Our children aren’t being taught to read in ways that line up with what scientists have discovered about how people actually learn.
It’s a problem that has been hiding in plain sight for decades. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, more than six in 10 fourth graders aren’t proficient readers. It has been this way since testing began. A third of kids can’t read at a basic level.
How do we know that a big part of the problem is how children are being taught? Because reading researchers have done studies in classrooms and clinics, and they’ve shown over and over that virtually all kids can learn to read — if they’re taught with approaches that use what scientists have discovered about how the brain does the work of reading. But many teachers don’t know this science.
What have scientists figured out? First of all, while learning to talk is a natural process that occurs when children are surrounded by spoken language, learning to read is not. 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.
But talk to teachers and many will tell you they learned something different about how children learn to read in their teacher preparation programs. Jennifer Rigney-Carroll, who completed a master’s degree in special education in 2016, told me she was taught that children “read naturally if they have access to books.” Jessica Root, an intervention specialist in Ohio, said she learned “you want to get” children “excited about what they’re reading, find books that they’re interested in, and just read, read, read.” Kathy Bast, an elementary school principal in Pennsylvania, learned the same thing.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
My problem reading as a kid was that I got so very bored with the reading books. Boring stories; my mind would wander and then when the nun called on me...all hell would break loose!
All my children were reading on a 2-3rd grade level before kindergarten....That is because from birth, they were read a story each night and slowly encouraged to both sound out and sight recognize words.....
It’s the parents responsibility to both teach and encourage reading.....
It is the basis of all learning and the ability to self teach.....
FWIW,
My Daughter was reading pre-K.
I attribute this to two things. My wife, her mother, talked non stop and was fairly articulate. Her Non-stop chatter, personally drove me mad, but it went a long way exposing our Infant/toddler to language. Second, we read together every day.
When she was three or four I spent $400 on the “Hooked on Phonics” package. I broke open the box and quickly discovered that my daughter was well beyond all their lessons.
We NEVER engaged in “Baby Talk”.
Kids and people in general learn in different ways. Some are auditory and some are more visual.
There is a need to open our young minds to being more Objective.
After all;
What are Words For; if no one listens anymore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IasCZL072fQ
Spell It Out: The Curious, Enthralling, and Extraordinary Story of English Spelling Dec 2, 2014 by David CrystalIt is an interesting fact that written English was derived by monks from the Latin alphabet. They were trying the best they could to make written English a phonetic language. But there was trouble inherent in that project, and even tho they added two letters to the latin alphabet, they couldn’t make it work and we ended up with the hash that we all know and “love.”
That being said, phonics is at least the ideal of the construction of written English. And it is sufficiently valid that everyone has some use of it when they encounter a written word that they are not familiar with. If you learn phonics reading, your written vocabulary will be initially limited to phonetically spelled words - but that has to be a bigger written vocabulary than you can start out with any other way.
It is absolutely true that every competent adult reader sight-reads; anyone who doubts that should encrypt an english text into the character set of some other language, and then attempt to read it. You would know the code - but you couldn't just read on sight, you’d have to think to extract each word from the text.
And that is the way I look at the problem of learning to read. The student has a harder job than s/he will have later, because the letters haven’t been engrained in her/his memory - and the student has to think all the time. But as learning 26 letters is transcendently less difficult than learning a 25,000 word written vocabulary, so learning phonics - which is merely the start of literacy - can get a student into the hunt quickly. You want the student to get a critical mass of reading facility as quickly as possible - and then you want to “arouse an eager want” for more reading material which will promote true literacy.
By having studied LATIN.
Latin is the foundation of the romance languages. Not only does studying Latin give you the ability to pronounce the word, but to understand exactly what it means.
SO... this issue is not whether ‘phonics’ can be a valuable asset in teaching children to read and write, but that teachers rely on phonics only as the easy way out.
Without phonetics it is no different than hieroglyphics. That will put us back a few thousand years.
Yet the human mind is pretty good at figuring new things out.
Idd uyo nkwo htta hte uhanm imnd acn aeisyl nucsarbmel htsi estnneec ?
I totally concede your point.
What about groups of people who have no ‘written’ language ?
What you said goes back to the title of this thread.
There is no WRONG or RIGHT way, there is using what works best given the child. The hardest part is motivating the child to want to learn.
LOL!!! yup, nothing gets your attention like a Nun calling your name when you mind is someplace else...
My kids are all different. And exposure to adults and reading has been different. But two cracked the code, one learned from instruction in school, and one is on her way. I see her sounding out, and I see she has memorized words and signs and such.
By the way, and this will make you smile, I have learned not to chatter in the car. When I drive my mom, who has Alzheimer’s, around, she doesn’t have much frontal lobe / executive functioning, so she chatters on and on about superficial things she sees like people’s tail lights or wheels. Or the colors of the cars around us. Endlessly. Many times I want to slam into the center divider or off a cliff. I actually called my ex and my brother and apologized to them for any and all car chattering I ever did. CURED. It is the absolute worst!
No Smile there, but to each his own.
Yes...I took one year of Latin (2 of French) in h.s....I cannot really decipher a Latin sentence anymore..but, whenever there is a word unknown to me (or others) I seem to usually be able to figure it out (I am my husband’s walking dictionary)
Oh, boy! I was there alot! My mind still wanders when I’m bored.
Practically criminal. There are 26 letters, probably barely more sounds than that. Teach one letter a week, and all kids would or should be able to read halfway through kindergarten. Somehow, a bunch of them make it to junior high and high school and still don’t know how, thus crippling them for life. Unconscionable.
I think American English has something like 44 to 48 Phonemes (sounds).
Learning to read is not hard. When phonics is taught to 6 and 7 year olds they pick it up. Some get it quicker than others - like any other concept. But it works.
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