What I meant by “correct and relearn” is that my understanding of phonics is the kids are supposed to figure out how to spell a word by sounding it out. As goofy as English spelling is?
Perhaps my understanding of foniks is inkoreck?
Seriously, I am happy to be wrong here. I associated this with the method from a few years ago when they said the correct answer wasn’t as important as how you arrived there, and as long as you really tried, that was all that mattered. I do tend to be a bit cynical.
I disagree with the premise of the article. I had a work study job in college helping other students with math and reading. That is when I first realized that people's minds do not all work the same. Before that I assumed that everyone’s mind worked basically the same as mine only with varying capacities.
But working with other students made me realize that especially the minds of people with learning disabilities use their brains in a way completely different from the way that I use mine. So various techniques often have widely varying results depending on the student.
Phonics are like training wheels for many of us. Those of us who read enough to recognize words as meaningful symbols and are able to give up sounding them out can typically comprehend written material several times faster when we give up the voice in our head. This has always been the key to “speed reading”. For difficult technical material of course most of us revert to low gear with the voice in our head, and of course for poetry or other material where the sound of the words are important the same is true. But once one becomes a proficient reader phonics can be a crutch that is no longer needed.
The best way to get rid of the voice in your head when you are trying to learn to read faster is to practice with machines or programs that flash lines of text on your screen at faster and faster rates and then take a quiz to see how much you have retained. When I was in school we used to have machines that did this. These days there are numerous speed reading programs that do the same thing.
Then you'll be happy! Your understanding of phonics has the cart before the horse. Phonics is not a process of teaching spelling through sounds, but of teaching sounds through spelling. It is a undisputed reality that people generally speak at a higher comprehension level than they can read (often several "grade" levels for children). Children have a natural, biological knack for absorbing language via speech. This is also undisputed fact. What phonics does is harness this knack for the purposes of teaching reading, which is NOT biologically based (though there are some pattern-recognition tricks that have been incorporated into written language that trigger certain brain functions... but that's off topic).
Simply put, by teaching children how to look at an unknown word and sound it out, phonics gives the child a chance to harness the biological mechanism that makes language learning easier. They can connect the shapes (written letters) they don't know with the sounds (spoken words) they do know. It's not foolproof, and it works best when a child has been exposed to lots of different words via regular conversation. But it does work, and has since time immemorial...
Phonics has been the way to learn English forever, but only since "whole language" and "look say" and "progressive" methods has illiteracy and grade levels behind in reading been an issue.
As a previous poster said, there's more money to be made in fixing a problem (which never gets fixed, by the way) than in doing it right the first time.
To your "correct answer not as important as how you arrived there" ... the lack of reading fluency in so many students is proving that they haven't arrived there.