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][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]

I have one kid who learned to read from 100% phonics.  I have one kid who really didn't click with phonics initially - he needed something else initially and I kept with the phonics alongside whole word reading.  After the idea of reading clicked, then he still needed the concept of sound-it-out to read new words.  Context+phonics is what children use to understand new words.  And background knowledge, aka content, is what children need in order to comprehend.

Every child uses phonics to read, even the ones who don't want to or think that they don't.  This includes dyslexic children but they will sometimes use memorization (and guessing) to compensate for poor decoding.[/quote]

I don't know if that's true. Phonics never made sense to me. I ran across "thorn" in first grade and had to ask someone what it was. Once I heard it, I could make the association. The irregularity in Enlgish makes a pure phonics approach extremely difficult, at least it does for me. I often know words and their meanings but have no idea how to pronounce them correctly or would recognize them in a spoken context. Spanish, German, and Italian seem trivial by comparison given their regular spelling and pronunciation.  [/quote]

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