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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have a feeling that many students are taught to rely on those weak strategies PP. What is the program you are using PP?[/quote]

I use Phonographix or more recently Abecedarian.  Our school district's reading program Reading Wonders, is not bad with teaching decoding and has plenty of decodable texts, but it isn't appropriate for older students who need remedial work, and for some reason teachers really aren't encouraged to focus on the decoding aspect of reading.  Kids are tested on how many sight words they know, not how well they decode.   So if kids haven't learned to read, teachers will prep them to memorize all the grade level sight words so they will score ok on the benchmark tests.

We are told to use something called "balanced literacy".   When I went to training in this, I was explicitly told NOT to teach kids to sound out words.  We need to have them "frame" the word with their fingers (i.e. don't have them focus on the sounds each letter makes) and do what "good readers do".  Here's a link to all the strategies the kids are taught which basically boil down to "guess the word instead of decoding":

https://www.lexercise.com/blog/how-not-to-teach-reading

I think these strategies are so ineffective.  Just teach kids the most common sounds letters make; teach them the consonant digraphs and the "vowel teams" . (oi, er, ow, igh, etc) and make sure they can blend and segment.  It takes a while but it doesn't take forever.  Teach them to be flexible -- the letters "ow" can make the sound /oe/ or /ou/ so you might have to try it two ways.  Sure SOME words are irregular and can't be decoded, and just need to be memorized, but most words are decodable, especially multisyllabic ones.   Then teach kids how to decode words with Latin and Greek endings.  If they already are strong at decoding they will have no problem with the longer words.

Whereas the kids who never quite learned to decode in 1st and 2nd grade but used these stupid "Lips the Fish"  and "Skippy frog" (skip to the end of the sentence to figure out what the word could be) strategies to guess words instead of using the letters that are in the words to read the words -- these kids who can't decode the word "angry" and read it as "achey" or "anger" or "angle" are going to fall apart when they are in science class and need to read the word "erosion" or "thermometer" and no one gives them a picture or Word Wall to help them out.

And don't get me started on Word Walls.  Word Walls are not needed if kids can decode and encode.  Because if they can say the word, and they know the basic and advanced code, they can spell the word. Maybe not 100% correctly but they can write it phonetically.  They shouldn't have to have every word up on a wall somewhere.  That's a stopgap measure because too many kids never learned to spell.[/quote]

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