Reply to WHY did schools stop teaching phonics?

Forum Index » Schools and Education General Discussion

Reply to "WHY did schools stop teaching phonics? "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]They didn't.  It's a urban myth propagated by companies selling programs to &quot;fix&quot; dyslexia.  Your school teaches  phonics. [/quote]

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 &quot;sound it out&quot;.   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 &quot;fast&quot; 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 &quot;What makes sense?  Look at the picture.  That cat is running.&quot;   Or &quot;What letter does it start with?  The letter ef?   OK&lt; what words make sense that start with the letter ef?   Maybe the kid would say &quot;funny&quot;..   Good guess!!  Now lets be detectives.   Do you see any little words in the big word?  Yes, &quot;as&quot; is there.

Or maybe we would look on our word wall and find the word &quot;last&quot; 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.

If the sentence was   &quot;

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics