Posted on 08/27/2022 12:09:27 PM PDT by jdege
Commentary: Why Johnny can’t read — 100 years of teaching without phonics
Minnesota reading scores will remain dismal, and the gap between African Americans and Latinos and whites will persist, until our schools adopt systematic pure phonics to teach our children to read.
The Minnesota Department of Education just released test scores for 2022. More than 50% of Minnesota third-graders didn’t pass the state reading test. Over 70% of African-American third-graders didn’t pass. Eighty-five percent of African-American third-graders in Minneapolis Public Schools didn’t pass.
How did this happen? Because a majority of our schools still do not truly embrace systematic phonics instruction.
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(Excerpt) Read more at alphanews.org ...
For words they don't know, they spell out the word, phonetically.
And for new readers, all words are words they don't know.
Doesn't seem that complicated...
I think there is a strong correlation between people who cannot read and people who vote for Democrats. I think the plan is working.
I just came across my copies of “Why Johnny Can’t Read”, and “Why Johnny Still Can’t Read” as I cleaned out a bookcase this week. I taught my kids to read with Sam Blumenthal’s “Alphaphonics”. I wish I still had it; I’d use it with my grand kids. I’m not sure if it’s still published but I highly recommend it for anyone with kids learning to read. It’s a painless, natural way to learn to read the English language.
I pay PROPERTY TAX and therefore it makes sense for me to send my kids to a bunch of teachers who can’t teach reading, in order to get my money’s worth.
I used phonics in the early 60s
It’s hard to believe but most of the founding fathers had no formal education, or were home schooled.
Washington was completely self taught.
These men who seem in hindsight to have been some of smartest ever to live. It’s hard to believe.
You have to order Hooked on Phonics and do it yourself now
There were fewer books. Much fewer, and all of higher quality than most works from the 18th and 20th centuries.
There were fewer books. Much fewer, and all of higher quality than most works from the 18th and 20th centuries.
then why dont we make copies of those books and teach kids what the founders learned from?
Basic subjects should stay relatively unchanged over the years.
From that magazine and other books and magazines I figured Americans were the most literate in the mid to late 1800s.
Realizing that the influence for this must have come in the early to mid 1800s I began collecting more school books from that era.
The reason for the success appeared quickly.
I was taught to read in a one room school in Vermont before the effects of the invasion by the NY, NJ and CT trust fund hippies detroyed the state.
We were taught by an excellent, old rogue teacher who used the phonics she knew. This consisted of the single letter sounds, dipthongs and tripthongs (2 and three letters sounded together).
She (and I) believed there were a lot of words in english you couldn't read using phonics.
There were two sets of phonics rules that fell by the wayside and have been forgotten since the 1840s to 1850s. Those are the silent letter rules and the substitute letter rules.
By using these rules, our younger daughter, who wasn't infected by the public school system was reading at above second year college level at 3rd grade.
This isn't unusual as once you know the rules and have a 1930s or earlier dictionary, you can read anything.
I've had many discussions with so called teachers who use this ridiculous "whole word" program to "teach" reading.
Except for the few rogue teachers, this is a waste of time.
Most are so completely indoctrinated with the propaganda from the colleges that there is no way they will even consider listening to anything a lay person has to say.
There are two books, by Rudolf Flesch, "Why Johnny Can't Read - and what You Can Do About It" in 1955, and "Why Johnny STILL Can't Read" in 1981 that document and explain the sordid money trail that keeps the farce of the whole word program going.
The Whole Word system has kids memorizing 20,000 words like Chinese characters. They are taught to guess at words they don't know by the surrounding context.
Few people are going to remember 20,000 of anything they try to memorize.
When these crippled students hit math, history and science, there are many words not included in the 20,000.
The ignorant reading teachers scoff at phonics as "rote learning". They just look at you like a deer in the headlights when you ask them, well, which would you rather memorize, 20,000 of ANYTHING or 120? There are roughly 120 phonics rules which enable you to read almost ANY word in the English language.
An older dictionary allows you to comprehend it.
I have the complete set of rules in "cheat sheet" form to print out.
Who wants to bother memorizing even 120 of anything?
You begin to remember the most used rules as you use them. When you hit a word with a seldom used rule, that's why you have a cheat sheet!
Eventually you pretty much forget you are using the rules, it's just automatic.
The speedy "sight reading" just comes naturally as time goes on.
Many people learn enough phonics from different sources such as Montessori, reading the Bible (an older copy), re-incarnation from a soul that was alive in the 1800s or just figure it out on their own. The rest are out of luck.
The inability to read unknown words is what causes many people to have to go to classes to learn just about anything new.
They are unable to read the information they need to figure out things for themselves.
This was particularly obvious when computers were being introduced to our school system.
Almost all the teachers were saying they needed classes on how to operate and use computers.
Several of us asked why they didn't just read the manuals and figure it out like we did?
The response was that they couldn't learn that way. Translation, they were unable to read and comprehend the manuals because there were many words they couldn't read.
If enough folks bypass this mess by homeschooling and properly teaching reading, our country may survive.
If not, watch the movie, "Idiocracy". Don't rent it, buy it, you're going to want to watch it several times to catch all the nuances and to show to others.
My older sister brought home one of those charts that show the different letters of the alphabet and how they sound in different words. She was in first grade and I was in kindergarten.
We copied those charts over and over, with drawings and crayons. One day someone gave us an old window shade, which made it possible to do a spectacular letter chart that looked just like the ones in school. Wow!
By the time I got to first grade I could read. The teacher caught me reading at the back of the book and said something like “You can’t read that yet. Go back to the page we are on.” Of course I said “Yes I can.” The result was that she she trotted me into the second-grade classroom and I could their book too, and then the third-grade book.
I’m not posting this to show off, because it was not me who did it. It was the people who gave beginning readers phonics, rather than making them memorize each word individually.
You are incorrect. “Whole word” reading is a myth unless the written language is pictographic.
Phonetic languages should be taught phonetically because that’s what the symbols represent and how the human brain will best organize them.
What people assume is “whole word” reading is actually automaticity similar to muscle memory. The well taught and practiced brain will organize itself so that the very familiar words are recognized so rapidly that it appears they are read whole.
But if you actually try to teach reading this way and skip the phonetics, the brain will not be able to organize the sound/symbol relationships as well and automaticity will be delayed and in some cases prevented leaving poor readers forever trying to haltingly de-cypher the words on the page.
Many people’s thinking skills reflect their disorganized reading (and thus writing) skills, which is a heavy contributor to the current social mess.
Lead & Lead: to guide & a soft heavy metal. Same spelling - difficult pronunciation.
Different spellings but same pronunciation:
To, too, two
Which & Witch
Whole books are written dealing with these inconsistencies.
My mother taught all six of us to read before kindergarten, using phonics. I still remember reading the entire reader on the first day of second grade and thinking, “Now what?”
That would have been great.
So,,,Dick and Jane books were not phonetic, iirc.
Generations learned how to read from them.
Poorly.
Perhaps we do. Sometimes, like when the words are on a road sign and too far away to resolve the individual letters.
Your theory does not explain that misspellings immediately jamp uot to the eyos of good reeders. Your theory also does NOT EXPLAIN OUR EASE OF READING ALL CAPITAL LETTER words, which all have the same shape.
Misspellings and all caps used deliberately, as exemplars of my point, which is that even the most experienced readers are still looking at and evaluating individual letters, not just word shapes.
Well said. My Dad taught me to read before I ever entered a classroom. I am eternally grateful to him for that.
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