WHY did schools stop teaching phonics?

Anonymous
Here it is short and sweet:

Phonics should be only a very small part of the learning to read process. Incorporation of the study of phonics should be extinguished as the child moves from the reading stage to the transitional reading stage. Phonics should not be taught forever because parts of the process actually slow down fluency. Because fluency leads to better comprehension, it is best to remove barriers to fluency.

Note that there are a few ardent supporters of phonics in DCUM land and they are people who don't understand the learning to read process. I think they want phonics taught up through fifth or sixth grade, which is absolutely ridiculous.
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:Here it is short and sweet:

Phonics should be only a very small part of the learning to read process. Incorporation of the study of phonics should be extinguished as the child moves from the reading stage to the transitional reading stage. Phonics should not be taught forever because parts of the process actually slow down fluency. Because fluency leads to better comprehension, it is best to remove barriers to fluency.

Note that there are a few ardent supporters of phonics in DCUM land and they are people who don't understand the learning to read process. I think they want phonics taught up through fifth or sixth grade, which is absolutely ridiculous.


None of this is accurate.

No one has been suggesting to "teach phonics forever".

We teach decoding skills as part of the foundation of reading. We teach decoding larger units even up to 3rd and 4th grade when students need to be able to decode unfamiliar multi-syllable words words of Latin origin. (-tion, -ture, etc). We teach the meaning of prefixes and suffixes in 5th and 6th grade to help read and understand words or Greek and Latin origin. But no one is teaching kids to sound out multisyllabic words letter by letter at that stage.

We teach students to use knowledge of phonics in the early grades to make decoding unfamiliar words automatic. Once this automaticity happens, kids can read much more fluently and do not need to stop and guess an unfamiliar word by looking at the first letter and thinking what makes sense. They look at AlL the letters and use their knowledge of letter sound correspondences to decode the word. They only need to use context when there are several sounds associated with those letter combinations.
Anonymous
A relative has been in education for 65 years, most of it as an elementary principal. There is nothing new in education. Every 5-7 years she is presented with a "new" program, which is the same as the one she saw three cycles ago under a different name. Recycle, rename, and repeat.
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:They didn't. It's a urban myth propagated by companies selling programs to "fix" dyslexia. Your school teaches phonics.


Oh it is definitely true.

I was a new teacher in Fairfax County back in 1993. I remember speaking with olTder teachers there who had saved all their phonics workbooks and hidden them away in a back cupboard. When the move came to ban phonics and switch to whole language, everyone had to purge their old materials but these teachers refused to and used them on the sly.

We were not allowed to teach the students to "sound it out". Principals went livid if they heard us tell a student to use the letters to figure out what a new word was. We did a lot of choral reading of books with repetitive text so kids could memorize the words and hopefully remember the by sight.

Maybe a book would have text like this:

A cat is fast.
A dog is fast.
A rabbit is fast.
A squirrel is fast.
A turtle is slow.

We would read the book out loud first, and then have kids touch under each word while we read it together. Then kids might try to read aloud. If a kid came to the word "fast" and didn't remember what it was, the WRONG thing to do was to say -- well, look at the letters. THats /f/ /a/ /s/ /t/ now blend them together. No, that was very bad and would destroy their love on learning to read!

No, instead, we would say "What makes sense? Look at the picture. That cat is running." Or "What letter does it start with? The letter ef? OK< what words make sense that start with the letter ef? Maybe the kid would say "funny".. Good guess!! Now lets be detectives. Do you see any little words in the big word? Yes, "as" is there.

Or maybe we would look on our word wall and find the word "last" and try to help the kids guess the word that way.

It was COMPLETE NONSENSE. 70% of the kids in our schools did learn to read despite this nonsense, primarily because someone had already taught them how to decode before or during kindergarten. But the remaining 30% always remained poor readers because lacking decoding skills, they had to rely on sight memory to learn all the words in grades 1 and 2, and then had no way to move forwards when they simply had too many words to remember by sight. They would start to fall apart late 2nd grade/early third grade.


























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Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:They didn't. It's a urban myth propagated by companies selling programs to "fix" dyslexia. Your school teaches phonics.


It depends. A lot of teaching prep programs pushed whole language in the 70s and 80s. Catholic schools did not remove phonics but publics and privates did. It backfired but gave rise to a lot of phonics programs that are marketed to the LD community. Mainstream privates use them but to a lesser extant for their non-LD students. Publics instituted phonics instruction in the state curriculum standards twenty years ago.
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:They didn't. It's a urban myth propagated by companies selling programs to "fix" dyslexia. Your school teaches phonics.


It depends. A lot of teaching prep programs pushed whole language in the 70s and 80s. Catholic schools did not remove phonics but publics and privates did. It backfired but gave rise to a lot of phonics programs that are marketed to the LD community. Mainstream privates use them but to a lesser extant for their non-LD students. Publics instituted phonics instruction in the state curriculum standards twenty years ago.

Simply teaching some "phonics" here and there is going to be insufficient for many kids. It's not the same as a systematic approach to teaching decoding that methodically builds on to previously acquired skills.

For what it's worth, the preprimary Montessori curriculum does an excellent job of methodically laying the building blocks for reading and writing, beginning with phonemic awareness games for the littlest kids and proceeding through basic decoding and onward.
Anonymous
The answer to OPs question is that many public schools do teach phonics. My kids' FCPS school does/did. OPs premise is false
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:Here it is short and sweet:

Phonics should be only a very small part of the learning to read process. Incorporation of the study of phonics should be extinguished as the child moves from the reading stage to the transitional reading stage. Phonics should not be taught forever because parts of the process actually slow down fluency. Because fluency leads to better comprehension, it is best to remove barriers to fluency.

Note that there are a few ardent supporters of phonics in DCUM land and they are people who don't understand the learning to read process. I think they want phonics taught up through fifth or sixth grade, which is absolutely ridiculous.


That honestly makes no sense, and sounds very much like a "cart before the horse" way of looking at things. You have to build a foundation. It should be fine for kids to be slow when they are learning new skills, like reading.

It's like how people learn to type. It takes longer to learn how to touch-type properly than to hunt-and-peck, but once they get it, they are speedy typists. Hunt-and-peck typists are faster in the beginning, but will never achieve any real speed in their typing. Same with reading without a firm foundation in phonics. Contextual clues and sight reading may be faster at the start and look like fluency, but as the child expands into unfamiliar vocabulary later in their education, they won't be able to tackle new words easily because they will stumble due to their weak foundation in phonics.
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:The answer to OPs question is that many public schools do teach phonics. My kids' FCPS school does/did. OPs premise is false


Clearly from testimony from teachers on this thread, and also as evidenced by many articles and books on the subject, there are schools that now and in the not-too-distant past that do not teach phonics. The fact that your kids' school teaches it doesn't change that fact.
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:The answer to OPs question is that many public schools do teach phonics. My kids' FCPS school does/did. OPs premise is false


My older DC did not learn phonics in lower elementary school. My younger DC learned phonics. Same school, even same teachers. But a different curriculum.
Anonymous
This is definitely still an issue, although some schools are starting to turn around and teach more phonics again. Here is a current video about the exact issues 9:14 is talking about (still!!) https://youtu.be/Lxx7hs0qdKQ

While my kid’s school is starting to do more phonics again, it’s frustrating that the lower level readers they offer do not match the phonics curriculum. So brand new readers are supposed to read “fire engine” and somehow know it does not say “fire truck.”
Anonymous
Need to chronic the achievement gap and dumb every down again. Plus teachers are too lazy and the retired admin were hustling whole language BS to their former districts.

Follow the money....
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:This is definitely still an issue, although some schools are starting to turn around and teach more phonics again. Here is a current video about the exact issues 9:14 is talking about (still!!) https://youtu.be/Lxx7hs0qdKQ

While my kid’s school is starting to do more phonics again, it’s frustrating that the lower level readers they offer do not match the phonics curriculum. So brand new readers are supposed to read “fire engine” and somehow know it does not say “fire truck.”


There's a huge fear of decodable text, because it is seen very negatively as boring and uninteresting and fails to expose students to a rich vocabulary.
Anonymous
Phonics is the reason we have your-you're, their-there-they're, etc. Phonics in English is a basic start, but it will never make someone competent or fluent. In some other, more regular languages, phonics might work.
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:This is definitely still an issue, although some schools are starting to turn around and teach more phonics again. Here is a current video about the exact issues 9:14 is talking about (still!!) https://youtu.be/Lxx7hs0qdKQ

While my kid’s school is starting to do more phonics again, it’s frustrating that the lower level readers they offer do not match the phonics curriculum. So brand new readers are supposed to read “fire engine” and somehow know it does not say “fire truck.”


There's a huge fear of decodable text, because it is seen very negatively as boring and uninteresting and fails to expose students to a rich vocabulary.



I grew up learning how to read with decodables. Now I am a teacher. There is nothing boring about kids being successful. It's the reason I became a teacher. Adults might find these books boring because they are fluent readers. They weren't made for you. They are made for students learning how to decode. Student's eyes light up when they finally "get it." Some of them sound out words and then say "Ohhhhhhh." They finally see how reading works. None of them complain about decodables.
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