Reply to For Gen Alpha, learning to read is a privilege, not a right

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It really does have to do with whether a child was taught phonics systematically or not. I have 4 children and all but one were given phonics instruction. The other, poor child, was not and still struggles to decode text and spell properly[/quote]

The Reading Wars have been going on for decades, swinging back and forth between phonics and whole language (or similar) approaches.  This is probably because the answer lies somewhere in the middle.  Phonics is a piece of the puzzle, but systematic phonics instruction alone might get you 90% of the way to decoding (because English isn't phonetically regular), but decoding is only a part of reading.  Give it a few years, and you'll hear people complaining about how their phonics-instructed kids have no fluency or comprehension, and the pendulum will start swinging back again.[/quote]

Girl what the hell can they comprehend if they cannot decode? How does one "fluently" guess the meaning of a word? [/quote]

Context. Which you can’t get if you’re so busy sounding out each letter that you lose the meaning of what you’re reading.

Fluency tends to require at least some amount of memorizing sight words (what a previous poster described as “popcorn words”) because so many of the most commonly used words in English are phonetically irregular.  Also, it’s next to impossible to get any fluency or comprehension when focusing on small bits of text, which phonics instruction tends to do (mainly because it’s hard to write anything meaningful while focusing on a single phonics rule.)

I don’t know why we tend to go all or nothing on reading strategies, but the best bet is likely a mix of strategies that includes sone phonics-based instruction. [/quote]

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