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My daughter recently alerted me about the "Sold a Story" podcast detailing the evolution of reading education over the last four decades. As the mother of a pre-K and first grader, she obviously has a more vested interest in the topic, yet I found the series (link below) quite informative.
I'm sure spouse and I were taught with the "Dick and Jane" books (whole word approach) and our older millennial kids had a phonics based strategy in kinder/first grade. Not exactly sure when the "whole language" or cueing based curriculum became the next best thing without any peer reviewed studies supporting the method.
Including another link from CBS morning show interview today with LeVar Burton and a documentarian (NOT the podcast creator) detailing many of the same issues. The (educational publishing) company that they decline to name is likely the same one discussed at length in the podcast
OP, Dick-and-Jane can be part of a reading curriculum that includes phonics. Students learn the phonics involved in the words they read in the books. They go hand in hand. That's how it was in my school. It's not an either-or proposition.
Reading instruction is the object lesson in the complete moral bankruptcy of the education industry.
In English there are 26 letters and something like 40 different sounds are represented by these letters. Written English is an alphabetic language. If a person knows how to speak English, all they have to do is to learn those 26 letters and the sounds they represent, and they are reading. At first, of course, it's slow, because they have to sound everything out, but normal children learn quickly and pretty soon they're recognizing words because they've seen them before. This is why normal children, taught properly how to read (that letters represent sounds), within a couple of years are able to read pretty much anything written in standard English that's not highly technical, as long as the concepts aren't too difficult for them to understand.
Well, of course, pretty much anyone who can read, can teach a normal child how to read an alphabetic language. So the education industry couldn't see any profit in THAT - and they created this "whole language" or "flash card" approach, where you don't teach the children the sounds of letters, nor how to sound out a word, but instead try to teach them to RECOGNIZE the words by what they look like, and memorize THAT instead! Basically, you take the memorization task of 26 letters and 40 sounds and convert it into a memorization task of the roughtly 10,000 or so words in the common working vocabulary of a literate reader of English! And then they're shocked! yes, shocked! to find the kids can't learn to read! It's idiotic! Have you ever heard anything about how long it takes Japanese and Chinese readers to master their ideographic texts? I worked in a Japanese company 20 years and I can tell you that 40 year old engineers with masters' degrees still have to carry around their little dictionaries to decipher kanji they haven't seen before!
OP, Dick-and-Jane can be part of a reading curriculum that includes phonics. Students learn the phonics involved in the words they read in the books. They go hand in hand. That's how it was in my school. It's not an either-or proposition.
100% correct. You gotta p-pig before you can "see Jane.". The anti phonics crowd are dumber than the anti math crowd..no small feat.
Hey, what was the name of that reading program that came out of Johns Hopkins in the mid 90s. It was kind of minimalist, but seemed to be effective in a high ESL part of Phoenix.
Reading instruction is the object lesson in the complete moral bankruptcy of the education industry.
In English there are 26 letters and something like 40 different sounds are represented by these letters. Written English is an alphabetic language. If a person knows how to speak English, all they have to do is to learn those 26 letters and the sounds they represent, and they are reading. At first, of course, it's slow, because they have to sound everything out, but normal children learn quickly and pretty soon they're recognizing words because they've seen them before. This is why normal children, taught properly how to read (that letters represent sounds), within a couple of years are able to read pretty much anything written in standard English that's not highly technical, as long as the concepts aren't too difficult for them to understand.
Well, of course, pretty much anyone who can read, can teach a normal child how to read an alphabetic language. So the education industry couldn't see any profit in THAT - and they created this "whole language" or "flash card" approach, where you don't teach the children the sounds of letters, nor how to sound out a word, but instead try to teach them to RECOGNIZE the words by what they look like, and memorize THAT instead! Basically, you take the memorization task of 26 letters and 40 sounds and convert it into a memorization task of the roughtly 10,000 or so words in the common working vocabulary of a literate reader of English! And then they're shocked! yes, shocked! to find the kids can't learn to read! It's idiotic! Have you ever heard anything about how long it takes Japanese and Chinese readers to master their ideographic texts? I worked in a Japanese company 20 years and I can tell you that 40 year old engineers with masters' degrees still have to carry around their little dictionaries to decipher kanji they haven't seen before!
Huh? Consider the words that contain -ough.
Cough...sounds like off.
Through...sounds like oo.
Thought...sounds like aw
Thorough...sounds like o
Rough..rhymes with cuff
Bough...sounds like ow
What about silent h, like herb or hour or honest vs. sounded, like horse, help, or here? Where's the h in sugar or sure?
Words that don't rhyme: lone and one, tow and how, toe and shoe...
Same sound different spelling: tow and toe, here and hear, their and there...
And there are words like ice and pace where the c sounds like s, but there are words like tic and carry where it sounds like a k. In the word scent, is the s or the c silent? Why doesn't sc make the sk sound like in scoop?
Why isn't the spelling telefone, elefant, fotografy? Because they came from Greek...lexicon, not leksikon.
Rendez-vous and hors d'oeuvre and chauffeur came from French, so they're spelled the way the French use the alphabet.
And there's no accent to show which syllable is stressed. I bought a record. I record my time.
What do herb, job, and polish have in common? They're pronounced differently when they're capitalized.
Here is a brief summary of where many borrowed words in English come from: Latin–29%, French–29%, Greek–6%, other languages–6%, and proper names–4%. That leaves only 26% of English words that are actually English!
Reading instruction is the object lesson in the complete moral bankruptcy of the education industry.
In English there are 26 letters and something like 40 different sounds are represented by these letters. Written English is an alphabetic language. If a person knows how to speak English, all they have to do is to learn those 26 letters and the sounds they represent, and they are reading. At first, of course, it's slow, because they have to sound everything out, but normal children learn quickly and pretty soon they're recognizing words because they've seen them before. This is why normal children, taught properly how to read (that letters represent sounds), within a couple of years are able to read pretty much anything written in standard English that's not highly technical, as long as the concepts aren't too difficult for them to understand.
Well, of course, pretty much anyone who can read, can teach a normal child how to read an alphabetic language. So the education industry couldn't see any profit in THAT - and they created this "whole language" or "flash card" approach, where you don't teach the children the sounds of letters, nor how to sound out a word, but instead try to teach them to RECOGNIZE the words by what they look like, and memorize THAT instead! Basically, you take the memorization task of 26 letters and 40 sounds and convert it into a memorization task of the roughtly 10,000 or so words in the common working vocabulary of a literate reader of English! And then they're shocked! yes, shocked! to find the kids can't learn to read! It's idiotic! Have you ever heard anything about how long it takes Japanese and Chinese readers to master their ideographic texts? I worked in a Japanese company 20 years and I can tell you that 40 year old engineers with masters' degrees still have to carry around their little dictionaries to decipher kanji they haven't seen before!
You do realize that we have spelling bees for a reason, right? That’s because English words come from various different languages. Some words come from German, some from Latin, and the list goes on. You also have the differences in spelling from country to country, with the US and the UK having some significant variations in how words are spelled.
Unlike English, Japanese has two phonetic alphabets, Those are typically the first alphabets kids learn as a bridge to be able to learn/look up other words. Kids’ books are typically in furigana with the phonetic spellings of the kanji above the characters. Kanji itself is distinct but based on the traditional characters. Many of the characters are not regularly used anymore. The issue is that they can still actually look stuff up- either by sound or strokes. In English, you are kind of stuck if you hear something and can’t spell it.
Phonics has its place, but English is a language where whole language and phonics are necessary to get a full feel of the language.
English is not a phonetic language. (see above.) Also, kids learn in different ways and the kids whe learn by hearing can profit from learning some phonics. Kids who learn better visually, will do better learning from flash cards or just peeking over someone's shoulder while they read out loud.
Briefly, when I was a kid we learned Dick and Jane by the look see method. When I transferred to a school in third grade where they learned by phonics the principal called me and another transfer kid into her office to see why we could read so well. She asked us about syllables and vowels and consonants but we had never heard of them. This was in a super smart and advanced school district with genius students but they could.not.read. Anyway, while those super smart genius kids struggled to decipher words by means of phonics the teacher gave the two of us out of towners some hard books to read to keep us busy.
You teach kids to read according to the way they learn best. I am visual and I like art and scenery. So I learned by looking at the words and putting them together in my mind. No need or use for phonics. I can still hear those poor kids struggling to decipher words --d,d,d,d,d,d,d,d, dog? h,h,h,h,h,h, ou, ou, ou, ou, s? e?
There is nothing new and no need to reinvent the wheel. Some kids learn one way, some kids learn another way, other kids learn by some combination of ways. Teach them according to the way each one learns and they'll be fine and with less stress and more love of reading. Don't listen to the naysayers who mistakenly think they've discovered some new method!
My older brothers and sisters read to me often. By the time I was five, I could pretty much read the newspaper. I don't think of it as being smart...I was trying to rise to the level of older sibs. But who knows? In any case, Dick and Jane was the deadly dullest thing I ever saw.
I read once that some thought dyslexia might be a genetic thing. p, d, q, b...they're all the same thing, rotated and flipped around. Is it better to notice the similarities? If you see something like a banana on the ground, isn't it best that you recognize it as a banana no matter how it's oriented?
It is true that there is no one method that works equally well for all children, but because the English writing system is only imperfectly phonetic, I found that the easiest way to teach my own children to read was with a mix of phonics and sight words.
I taught them the sounds of letters--not all the letters at once, just a few at a time--and had them sound out simple words, with those letters. AND I made flash cards with common sight words that are not phonetic (such as "the," "one," "you"), because nothing is worse than getting stuck on a word that you can't sound out no matter how hard you try.
I also asked them every few days what new word they would like to read, it might be "dinosaur" or "princess," and then I would make up little sentences with words they knew plus the word they had chosen.
We worked our way through simple beginner books, and I read to them a LOT. A couple of hours a day, at least.
You do what works and above all you do not let them get frustrated. If they were reading along in a beginner book and got stuck on a word, after a couple of seconds I would tell them it was and we would move ahead. If I could tell they were getting tired and losing interest, we stopped for the day. It has to be fun. Reading is fun! And because we read so many books out loud (much more advanced books, long books with chapters by age 4), my kids knew that reading was fun and wanted to be able to read.
My kids did not all learn to read independently at the same age, but once they got it, they got it. All of a sudden we no longer needed to do any more phonics or any more sight words, because they could read anything. My older daughter was 4 when this happened, and my older daughter was 7. Son around 6.
I homeschooled so I was one-on-one with each new reader. It was a huge advantage. I don't know how it works in a classroom with one teacher and 20 nonreading kids who all learn differently.
Of course no language is perfectly alphabetic where each letter represents one and only one sound (though written Spanish is close).
Nevertheless, even those words that have irregular spellings (though, through, bough) are easily learned by ATTEMPTING to sound them out, and then determining from context what's meant. Because people learn to speak their native language before they learn to read it, they can understand what that particular word is, from what it's doing in the sentence. This is why: 1) you don't learn words in a vacuum; you learn written vocabulary by reading sentences, paragraphs, and longer matters; 2) children's books use vocabulary that's suited to the age level of their readers, so the child can fill in the blanks because the words written are words he already knows from speaking.
Now if you have children who are delayed in the development of normal speech, or dyslexia keeps them from visually processing letters efficiently, or have some other developmental difficulty, alternate strategies should be developed. But using an alternative strategy that might be better for 1-5% of children as the default strategy for teaching the other 95-99% how to read, is just plain idiotic.
And in the end, the proof of the pudding's in the eating.
What is the functional literacy rate in the United States today amongst those subjected to the education industry's version of reading instruction, versus what it was in say 1930, when none of these fads existed? What is the functional literacy rate in the United States today amongst public school students taught by the ideographic method, versus private school students taught by the alphabetic method? What is the functional literacy rate in the United States today, compared to that of, say, France, where the language is also not perfectly alphabetic, but where (I suppose) traditional methods of teaching still prevail?
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