Free Republic

[MORE ABOUT READING, SPECIFICALLY, THAT SO-CALLED BALANCED LITERACY IS ANOTHER CHAPTER IN THE LONG-RUNNING HOAX:] So here’s the deal. The same people who lied to us about reading for 70 years now want us to believe they are finally telling the truth. They said that English isn’t phonetic, that children don’t need the alphabet and the sounds, that children need only to look at words and memorize the shapes. All this was utter nonsense. They further said that if children didn’t recognize a word (which they typically didn’t as it’s hard work to memorize a word by its shape), they...

There are two ways to teach children to read. 1) Whole Word enthusiasts say that children must memorize the shapes of words one by one, just as the Chinese memorize their ideograms. This is the wrong way. English has far too many words for this approach ever to be considered. Even if an industrious child could memorize 2,000 word-shapes (which is extremely difficult and takes MANY years), that child would still be functionally illiterate. The vast majority of the English language remains unknown. Just as bad, words the child supposedly knows are rarely known with automaticity. Sight-word readers typically stumble,...