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"They" also need to recognize that the biggest shift that has occurred in tandem with plummeting reading proficiency is not regularly alternating teaching philosophies and approaches. It is how children are read to at an ever-decreasing rate, and how increasingly rare it is that children are encouraged outside of school to read for pleasure or have it modeled.
Reading for pleasure. My son loved to be read to, taken to the library for story hour and look at the picture books and even "read" some stories to me at home from his collection of books. And then he started school.
Along came the dreaded AR program which turned "reading for pleasure" into "reading for points" along with an online test.
In the case of my son the AR program turned reading into work and he lost his love for reading.
He's 29 now and doesn't read at all for pleasure.
When I was in K-12 we went to the school library on a weekly basis. Could take out whatever book we wanted. We had book reports to do back then and it was actually pretty fun with construction paper covers, lots of crayon pictures and less than one page of "what the story was about".
Teaching reading (to children without a learning disability) is really not that complicated. In English, the most efficient way is a combination of phonics with sight words. Phonics is necessary to sound out words, but phonics alone is a long, tedious and ultimately incomplete process because English, unlike most other alphabetic languages, has a mess of rules and exceptions to the rules and exceptions to the exceptions.
Sight words alone (the "look-see" method utilized in Dick & Jane et al.) is undesirable because there are too many words to expect children to memorize them without any phonetic decoding tools. But teaching some sight words is necessary as many common words don't follow phonetic rules ("one," "of," "said"), and it also jump-starts reading as the kids don't have to slowly sound out every single word and lose track of the meaning in the process.
The most important factor in my opinion (speaking as someone who taught her own kids to read) is reading TO children, every day. The more words they hear, and the more advanced the vocabulary and complex the sentence structure, the better. They need to hear books that are far more interesting than what they can manage on their own in first grade or second grade, and stories that can't be finished in five or ten minutes of reading. You're not going to get fluency and a love of reading out of kids if you don't first put it in.
"Phonics" is just a repackaging of teaching the sounds of letters. You know, the reason alphabets were invented in the first place. There's a damn good reason why most languages in the world use alphabets, and why it takes many times longer to learn to read fluently in Chinese or Japanese than in English or Spanish.
No, that's not what phonics is. "Phonics" as a discipline doesn't exist in European languages that are pronounced as they are spelled. It's not needed in those languages. English famously is not pronounced as it is spelled, so a system for teaching how to read and pronounce the elements that make up a word, and how to recognize patterns in those elements, is essential.
French has somewhat the same issues, having silent letters, entire silent syllables, consonants that are pronounced differently in different situations or that are silent in some situations. I don't know how the initial stage of reading (and spelling) is taught in France.
Phonics isn't a repackaging of anything; it's a separate discipline from the mere teaching of individual letters. It was first devised in the 16th Century, and has been used in the US and elsewhere since the early 20th Century.
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Since the turn of the 20th century, phonics has been widely used in primary education and in teaching literacy throughout the English-speaking world.
Teaching reading (to children without a learning disability) is really not that complicated. In English, the most efficient way is a combination of phonics with sight words. Phonics is necessary to sound out words, but phonics alone is a long, tedious and ultimately incomplete process because English, unlike most other alphabetic languages, has a mess of rules and exceptions to the rules and exceptions to the exceptions.
Sight words alone (the "look-see" method utilized in Dick & Jane et al.) is undesirable because there are too many words to expect children to memorize them without any phonetic decoding tools. But teaching some sight words is necessary as many common words don't follow phonetic rules ("one," "of," "said"), and it also jump-starts reading as the kids don't have to slowly sound out every single word and lose track of the meaning in the process.
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That's very interesting. I never thought about the Dick and Jane books as being a "see-and-say" method. We actually applied phonics to the Dick and Jane narratives, when I was in school. ("Spot" (the dog's name) as in: hot, pot, dot ) But you convinced me, that there is a place for see-and-say, in combination with phonics. Well done!
That's very interesting. I never thought about the Dick and Jane books as being a "see-and-say" method. We actually applied phonics to the Dick and Jane narratives, when I was in school. ("Spot" (the dog's name) as in: hot, pot, dot ) But you convinced me, that there is a place for see-and-say, in combination with phonics. Well done!
It sounds like your teachers very sensibly combined both systems! If this had been done across the board, there wouldn't have been as much criticism of those readers. Both phonics and look-say on their own fall short because of the peculiarities of English.
That's very interesting. I never thought about the Dick and Jane books as being a "see-and-say" method. We actually applied phonics to the Dick and Jane narratives, when I was in school. ("Spot" (the dog's name) as in: hot, pot, dot ) But you convinced me, that there is a place for see-and-say, in combination with phonics. Well done!
I remember teachers telling us to "sound it out" when reading those Dick and Jane books out loud in class.
"They" also need to recognize that the biggest shift that has occurred in tandem with plummeting reading proficiency is not regularly alternating teaching philosophies and approaches. It is how children are read to at an ever-decreasing rate, and how increasingly rare it is that children are encouraged outside of school to read for pleasure or have it modeled.
Another thing I've noticed is that the current crop of teachers, educated in the "no phonics" period, have no idea how to teach phonics or decoding and only the faintest idea themselves now the phonetic system works. Some have no idea how to teach reading at all. The hardest thing about reversing the trend is that teachers now are not equipped with the skills and materials needed to provide a structured approach to the mechanics of reading and writing.
No, that's not what phonics is. "Phonics" as a discipline doesn't exist in European languages that are pronounced as they are spelled. It's not needed in those languages. English famously is not pronounced as it is spelled, so a system for teaching how to read and pronounce the elements that make up a word, and how to recognize patterns in those elements, is essential.
French has somewhat the same issues, having silent letters, entire silent syllables, consonants that are pronounced differently in different situations or that are silent in some situations. I don't know how the initial stage of reading (and spelling) is taught in France.
Phonics isn't a repackaging of anything; it's a separate discipline from the mere teaching of individual letters. It was first devised in the 16th Century, and has been used in the US and elsewhere since the early 20th Century.
I have always thought that if we revised out spelling system to make it pronounced more like it is spelled we would eliminate a lot of learning disabilities diagnoses and greatly increase literacy and the rate at which children achieve it.
One of the elephants every single one of you has missed is that Reading is not a "school only" activity. Ideally that 5 year old gets to Kindergarten having been read to for years and can already recognize many words and knows letter sounds.
Note I said ideally. You now have hundreds of thousands of parents who themselves can't read and hundreds of thousands more who don't have one single thing in their houses to read. Not books, not newspapers, not magazines. Maybe you can count the directions on the back of a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese or the menu at McDonald's.
You have entire populations of students who get to school with a vocabulary thousands of words less than is considered optimum (2000 compared to what's considered "normal" or optimum of 5000).
Hell you have 5 year olds who don't even know their real names when they get to school.
I have always thought that if we revised out spelling system to make it pronounced more like it is spelled we would eliminate a lot of learning disabilities diagnoses and greatly increase literacy and the rate at which children achieve it.
Yup. I was waiting for someone to say this. Simplifying the spelling has been debated on and off over the generations. The historical linguists always win. They want to preserve the history of the language as its reflected in the current spelling. The Scandinavian countries revised their spelling long ago. "Daughter" is spelled "dotter" or "dottir", and so on. They don't need phonics, needless to say.
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