My father went nuts when he realized I had two brothers who weren’t learning to read.
The Look Say method–no phonics–was adopted by the Catholic grade school where my brothers were students–it was a disaster.
My Dad, physician, musician, P 51 pilot farmer at heart, had a farm cause he was a farm boy, so my brother was riding out to the farm and he was in 2nd grade and he could not read stop on a stop sign. My father was apoplectic.
Need I say more–the boys were pulled and put in a school that assured my dad they would teach phonics. English reading should be phonetic, not hieroglyphic. Asians have an extra burden to memorize all those symbols.
The teaching profession is responsible for a lot of really bad things. Shame on them.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/03/most_obvious_conspiracy.html
I absolutely agree. My only point is that when you break it down, what you’ve just described doing with your own children is the whole language method. What’s currently under debate is the phonics only curricula that have been in the public school system for the last few decades.
There’s a knee-jerk reaction to hate everything about common core, but whole language is being unfairly maligned as a result. The real source of most of the bile, though, is the publishers of the phonics only curricula that stand to lose millions of dollars if whole language catches on. As far as research goes, students trained only in phonics do better in tests that measure the students ability to use phonics, i.e. deciphering words in isolation, and pronouncing made up words. Phonics only programs give children one tool only. The fact that different children learn differently is another reason to use whole language curricula.
After having read the entire comment string, one thing I noticed is that each of the commenters, as parents, were intimately involved in the teaching of the child(ren) to read, write, spell etc. Your children (and mine) were light years ahead of others of their classes because of our involvement. True “junk education” begins with abdicating your (the parent’s) role as PRIMARY educator and allowing the public schools to be.
It was my experience as my boys were going through school that we used an all-inclusive approach using a mixture of phonics, word recognition and memorization, spelling “rules” and root definition. We also encouraged both of them to take Latin which helped more than you might imagine.
It is also important to remember that no two children learn in the same way so what works for one may not be effective for another. You should not exclude one method for another as it may be at the expense of a young mind.
Everything you said was dead-on, but I think you really hit on the biggest problem with embarrassment. When our kids hit a word they didn’t know they’d ask “What does p-r-a-c-t-i-c-e spell?” and that moment is really the crux of education. The child has just publicly admitted ignorance. What happens next is going to affect them in a profound way.
Obviously, in a caring, educational environment you simply answer the child’s question and use the opportunity to review the phonics, etymology, and definition of the word. Any good teacher would do this, but there’s the matter of the other 20 or so kids in the classroom. No matter how smart you are, slowly sounding out an unfamiliar word can make you feel like an idiot in front of all your classmates. It doesn’t take much to convince a child that they don’t want to go through that again. This can quickly lead to the simplified childhood opinion that reading sucks.
The Wikipedia entry on “whole language” also helps clear up the controversy. Whole language utilizes “embedded phonics” which is just a fancy way of saying teach phonics as you go rather than exclusively. Children need a reason to want to learn. Enjoying good books and expressing themselves through writing give them that reason. If a kid writes “I pet the kat”, they’ve successfully communicated their meaning. Simply correcting the understandable error on the spot is easy. Opponents of whole language misrepresent this process and say that children are allowed to misspell words. I believe that if you stripped out the psychological and educational jargon and gave an honest description of whole language few people would think it was new or unusual at all.
From the link you gave, GH05T: “Where there is unsystematic or no phonics instruction, children do not perform as well in such areas as reading accuracy, fluency, writing, spelling and comprehension.”
This is the classic straw-man argument: “No phonics at all is bad, so let’s ignore all other alternatives entirely.” Obviously if you hand a preschooler the task of reading “ball” without a picture, but you haven’t told them what the word is OR what the letters are, they have no prayer. Yet you & I are not suggesting that we should totally ignore that certain shapes have certain default sounds. In that respect English is certainly not a heiroglyphic language; certain letters/letter combinations are in fact spoken a certain way most of the time.
The trouble comes when phonics is the ONLY method of reading comprehension taught. After a while, it becomes clear to the average student that there are seemingly as many exceptions as there are actual rules, so they either give up entirely (cf. any random Facebook or Twitter post) or they resort to rote memorization of their vocabulary. Both result in poor comprehension and render the act of reading more difficult than it needs to be.
The type of “word shape” recognition that you & I speak of does not ignore phonics, but rather complements it. If we recognize the shape of the word, we can say it correctly every time regardless of spelling. Armed with that knowledge we can also break down which letters in the word are producing which sounds, and then translate that knowledge to words we haven’t seen yet. Thus, having read previously that “Leroy was a big tough dog,” we’ll likely be able to say “The tree’s bark was very rough” correctly on the first or second try.
On a strictly phonetic basis, we’d be lost in both places (/tugg/? /rowguhuh/?). We’d have to ask the teacher how to say them (the same person who probably just embarassed us in front of the class by having us read these words aloud incorrectly in the first place), and then we’d just have to somehow remember that those words don’t follow the rules (like much of the English language). Worse, if our first exposure to those words is through speech instead of text, our inclination will be to spell them phonetically as “tuff” and “ruff,” and learning to spell them correctly will then involve UNlearning the wrong way, and then rote memorization of the correct one, since phonics “obviously doesn’t apply.[*]”
This is what military folk might call “working harder, not smarter.”
[*] Knowing that the words with ‘-ough’ in them are typically Middle English (or older) in origin rather than borrowed from the Greek or Latin helps, but the average 5yr-old is probably just as well off seeing trough, enough, tough, slough, rough, et al. and recognizing them for what they are in the first place. Seeing them all in a row like that helps one to realize that there ARE phonics involved, just not the usual ones. My 4th-6th grade spelling books did this (i.e., grouped words by family) all the time, and I don’t remember very many people being lost at the end of any given lesson.
Interesting side note, my wife (who agrees with you) and I have an ongoing debate about whether “talk” rhymes with “walk” or “tock”. Where I was born, we pronounce the L.
Honestly I don’t believe John is talking about the same thing we are when he advocates phonics programs. It’s been a long time since he was in public school. He may not be aware of the programs that actively discourage children from memorizing “sight words”. I doubt he’s seen the bogus research that claims teaching pre-k children how to read actually causes dyslexia (thus causing panicky parents to actively discourage natural whole word recognition).
My last comment is still stuck in moderation (it had a lot of links and was very long). so I’ll just put one link here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_phonics
Note that this method discourages teaching children the real name of letters (instead calling them by their sounds), and only teaches 6 sounds per week starting with single letters, then combinations until finally getting to whole words quite some time later. As a result, children don’t even start reading until first grade. Contrast this with the whole word method which gets children enjoying reading simple books like Green Eggs and Ham before kindergarten.
The phonics programs being debated today are not your parents’ phonics. There’s millions of dollars worth of government money in play when it comes to selling text books. The typical liberal cry of “think of the children” plays its usual role of distracting people. The “science” is far from settled.
While phonics may help in teaching children to read, it does help them spell. My son is dealing with ‘phonograms’ and struggles with the zany rules of English. I can understand his writing because I understand how he writes phonetically.
Phonics works for teaching kids to read–PERIOD.
Phonics works to teach kids what individual letters are capable of on a regular basis. They do NOT teach kids to read.
All the fire and heat above is about a personal bias that doesn’t stand up to the research.
Well, that’s as may be, John, but GH05T’s way is the way I learned to read as well, and it’s how my kids’ spelling issues got resolved once phonics started messing with their heads. They thought reading was HARD until I showed them phonics was just one of several tools and nothing more.
My own public school spelling classes typically grouped words of similar sound/spelling so that we would not only learn to recognize the various spelling rules when we came across them, we would also recognize whole families of words that belonged together. For example, one word list might have flow, throw, grow, and bow (like a ribbon), while the next set looked at bow (the act), cow, how, and brow. Thus, you get exposed to the fact that words which are spelled alike are often pronounced very differently, and you hopefully learn which ones go in which group by the time the lesson is over and you move on. Once you know which group the words are from, the easier it is to remember which spelling rules apply.
Like Wikipedia in a research project, phonics in its own right is a place to start. It’s fine for giving students an idea of what letters are capable of. But unlike Spanish, Italian, or even French, phonics is not consistently useful enough in English to stand on its own once one gets past the “see Spot run” phase. By relying heavily on phonics in a language where “tot” and “taught,” and “tock” and “talk,” respectively, are homonyms, you’re not just asking for trouble, you’re saying “prittee pleez with shooger ahn tawp.”
Just ask my 5-year old self as I tried to “sound out” the word “laugh” in my book of age-appropriate nursery rhymes.
Exceptions. Something that is “excluded from a general statement or does not follow a rule.” For instance, “except after c”.
The rules for phonetic reading are highly dependent upon language of origin, dialect, and local accent. When I lived in North Carolina, I was taught that “hour” and “our” are homonyms. When I moved to Missouri, I was taught “are” and “our” are homonyms. English developed organically without any spelling or pronunciation standardization for a long time. As a result the concept of phonics is not easily applied to written English. That is why “spelling reform” organizations have existed for decades ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language_spelling_reform ).
You’re never going to read all this are you? 🙂
John, once again you claim to be backed by research, but you fail to cite any sources or answer any of my points. Here’s a bit of research I found with a quick trip to google.
A broader view of the controversy which cites many sources and shows some flaws in the research that alleges to show phonics is more effective.
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/Reading_Wars.html
The Effect of Family Literacy Interventions on Children’s Acquisition of Reading From Kindergarten to Grade 3
http://rer.sagepub.com/content/78/4/880.abstract
effectiveness of paired reading and hearing reading in a developing country context
http://ecl.sagepub.com/content/13/4/471.abstract
Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and
schooling in 27 nations
http://www.rodneytrice.com/sfbb/articles/home.pdf
I could go on, but I know you’re too busy to read all the available research. I do hope you at least read the first article, but in case you don’t have the time, here’s the last sentence. “Reading First [the nouveau, government-sponsored phonics program] did not have statistically significant impacts on student reading comprehension test scores in grades 1-3”
I just can’t seem to find any of the research you claim condemns whole-word instruction. Also, you are mischaracterizing the whole language method as though it does not teach phonics at all. Basic phonics are included, but their shortcomings are recognized. Conversely, phonics programs must incorporate whole word methodologies to teach all the words that don’t fit the rules. Beyond that, phonics is the new method that was pushed by psychologist and unions. Whole word is just a fancy title for the way parents taught their own children for generations before being told they weren’t smart enough.
If you disagree with any of my critiques then please tell me why and I’ll consider your reasoning. Otherwise, you once again have failed to refute my claims. I’ll acknowledge my personal bias, but I contend that my bias is based on empirical fact. Children learn to read naturally the same way they learn to speak, by watching and listening to their parents. There is no reason to wait until a child is 5 years old to begin reading.
English is not a phonetic language. There are at least 44 phonemes and only 26 letters. That might still be manageable if letter combinations were consistent and predictable, but they aren’t. Why do you feel that memorizing letter combinations and myriad, self-contradictory rules from several foreign or even dead languages is less complicated then learning whole words? After all, whole words is how literate people read anyway.
No competent reader is still using phonics. The fact that phonetics slow the process down is clear when you listen to someone trained in phonics reading out loud. If you can’t read out loud as fast as you speak normally, I don’t consider you competent. Phonics are useful for guessing how to pronounce an unfamiliar word, but if you don’t know what the word means, then you have to ask someone or go to a dictionary anyway. Otherwise you end up mispronouncing a word like “macabre”, “pitot”, or “calliope” and just continue being wrong until someone who knows better corrects you. The pitfalls are even worse when spelling unfamiliar words. If you can’t sight read a word, then you haven’t mastered it. Allowing children to move on without achieving mastery is part of the “dumbing down” process I expected you to be against. I suspect the ability to fake reading skills through phonics is a large reason for high school graduates with poor reading skills. As long as a student gets close with pronunciation, the teacher lets it go and never investigates whether the child actually understands what they’re reading.
As a side note, Japanese Kana, Korean, Vietnamese, and several other Asian written languages are truly phonetic. As a result, they have no spelling bees because knowing how a word is pronounced automatically means you know how it’s spelled and vice versa. That’s just not true of English so your racist assertion that they’re at a disadvantage just isn’t true. On the other hand, China does have a logosyllabic writing system. They also have a 95.1% literacy rate defined by knowing at least three thousand characters (some define it as high as five thousand). If it’s not too hard for them, why do you think it’s too hard for our children?
That being said, the USA is still doing better with a 99% literacy rate, but I suspect the difference my have a few socio/political confounding factors that are more important than anything to do with language difficulty. There has been no statistically significant decline in literacy in the past few decades, and all research I’ve found indicates that the number one indicator for future literacy and academic success is parental involvement regardless of teaching method. That’s where my problem with phonics proponents start. The myth that children have to be 5 or 6 years old to learn to read comes from progressive developmental psychologist and the educators that believe them. A large part of this misconception is how complicated phonics are to learn. On the other hand, children can begin associating an abstract symbol with a sound and associated meaning at a much younger age. There is no reason to wait for a child to enter kindergarten before they begin learning to read.
Phonetic instruction is an arduous distraction from the joy of learning to read. The unfortunate side-effects of early phonics education often include making reading less interesting and enjoyable. The effect is similar to forcing a child to practice scales and learn music theory before they are allowed to play actual songs. I feel that phonics are more useful to older students that are capable of grasping the complicated maze of etymological roots our language has. Knowing whether a word is Latin, French, or Greek derived is indispensable to recognizing an unfamiliar word, but most early phonics education doesn’t include that.
Last link, a 1939 study that honestly appraises phonics teaching.
http://archive.org/stream/effectofvariedam00agne/effectofvariedam00agne_djvu.txt
From the conclusion “Should phonetic methods be employed in the teaching of primary reading? The answer to this question can be given only when the
purposes of teaching primary reading have been agreed upon.”
I think the goal of early childhood literacy programs should be to foster a love of reading. At the end of the day, only practice actually makes you a better reader. Any curriculum that fails to make reading enjoyable will discourage out of school reading, and ultimately have a negative effect.
I might point out what the essayist said, to encourage some reconsideration.
All the studies that compare reading success show that look say doesn’t work.
What i see is a serious failure to see past a personal bias.
Phonics works for teaching kids to read–PERIOD.
All the fire and heat above is about a personal bias that doesn’t stand up to the research.
Oh good grief. What is this woman talking about? Exceptions?
“Look-say” has its issues, but phonics is so much worse. My children could read fine by the time they were three. We used the oh-so-novel approach of sitting him on our lap and reading to him. When they hit a word they didn’t know, we told them what it was and helped them use the dictionary. We sent our younger boy to a public school for 6 months of second grade before he asked us to let him homeschool again because he “missed learning”. One of the lasting side-effects was a marked decrease in his ability to read and spell thanks to the ridiculous phonics-based education. It took us months to undo the damage.
This is so important I’ll go full internet crazy and all-cap it. ENGLISH IS NOT A PHONETIC LANGUAGE! Anyone who doesn’t know that has no business teaching children anything. You cannot teach a child to read competently by forcing them to memorize thousands of conflicting “rules” that only work 30% of the time. That’s why our country is plagued by adults who sound like a breaking robot when they try to read out loud by “sounding out” the letters.
The only logical way to teach written English is through whole word recognition with an emphasis on etymological analysis and frequent trips to a good dictionary. The American Thinker article completely mischaracterizes whole word education. He also glosses over the fact that billions of children in China have gained literacy in a manner much more similar to his hyperbolic example for thousands of years. Proper whole-word education includes basic tenants of letter sounds as a starting point but recognizes the inherent shortcomings of using phonics to try to read a word the child doesn’t know.
The author not only misunderstands whole word education, but the basic concepts of written language and education. His memory must be exceptionally poor if he can’t instantly recognize or recall more than a thousand words without resorting to sounding them out. For that matter, I’m pretty sure I could tell you the names of more than a thousand works of art by looking at them. I challenge you to find an American child who can’t name a thousand cartoon characters by sight. Have you ever talked to a kid about Pokemon? The author painfully underestimates children’s ability to learn. Thinking like his is directly responsibility for the reduction of progress in American schools.
I don’t know from what data he’s deriving his love of phonics. I distinctly recall ridiculing the “huked ahn foniks” crowed decades ago when it became fashionable again. I find it particularly odd that he is suggesting the method most often used to teach very young children to read in the home is the one supported by conspiracy rather than the method which requires a professionally trained, union-approved state teacher three years to teach. The only conspiracy is the ongoing quest to convince parents that they are incapable of teaching their own children without professional aid. Literacy rates were higher than they are now in America before Rudolf Flesch decided in 1955 that parents weren’t capable of teaching their children to read the way they had been for thousands of years. I’ll point out that Mr Flesch and his associates made quite a lot of money off of this novel premise of convincing parents that something they’d done for generations was bad for their kids and that every school in the country had to buy new textbooks because of his radical new system (sound familiar?).
The author complains “Every word-design is like a phone number: you memorize it perfectly, or it’s useless.” Welcome to written English. If a word isn’t spelled correctly then it isn’t right. This sort of thinking is why so many people don’t know the difference between “there”, “their”, and “they’re”.
He goes on to claim that “Phonics, as noted, quickly allows you to read almost anything”. That may be true if your definition of “reading” is mangling the pronunciation of words you don’t understand. It seems to me that the author values an ability to fake your way through reading over the ability to actually understand the words on the paper. By my definition, if you don’t know what the word means, you haven’t read it. Just making the right sounds (assuming it’s a simple word that doesn’t conflict with standard phonics) is just pretending to read. Without the comprehension gained by learning the whole word reading is useless.
The author’s waning credibility is completely destroyed by the phrase “The entire phonetic history of English going back to Greek and Latin”. English is a Germanic language. Only a small portion of “borrowed words” are derived from Greek or Latin and those words usually have special “exceptions” to the phonetic rules. Clearly he could have benefited from a study rooted in etymology, or at least a few lessons in how to read a dictionary entry’s etymological information. Who needs a dictionary though? As long as you can sound out the word people will be fooled into thinking you can read. Understanding is for people smart enough to memorize more than a hundred images.
In closing, I’d like to quote the literary genius and neologist Theodor Geisel. “The tough coughs as he ploughs the dough.”