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]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]

Actually, its more like one and then the other. Phonics absolutely wins hands down at the beginning. Students must learn their letter sounds, then to put those sounds together to make words before sounding out words through actual reading. Memorizing words that early teaches them the bad habit of not actual reading and only guessing through pictures and context before learning to read phonetically. Its easier to do than decoding and encoding, so kids will ONLY take guesses if they are allowed to do that. That's why the words and stories should stay simple at the beginning, with no pictures. Paired with a few sight words (10-15) just to get them reading sentences and stories. But after that point, once they have mastered phonetic reading and are learning vowel teams, etc., they can learn more irregular sight words to memorize. By this time, they will already start memorizing the words they phonetically learned to read (like "cat" and "stop") and will know how to shift to phonetic reading when they come across [u]new words[/u] they don't know ONLY. That's how they take off with reading. They should never be learning to guess at words from a picture unless they need it to remember a phonics pattern they might have forgotten (what sound does "ai" in the word "[i]rain[/i]" make again? Oh, the picture shows rain so it must be "[i]ayyy[/i]"-- the word is "[i]RAIN[/i]!"). And they certainly should never be memorizing words--there are literally too many words to memorize!

Phonics advocates are not saying that its the only way to read, they are moreso saying that its the foundation of reading before you learn other skills. The other skills like cueing must come later or you will set your kid up with a lifetime of bad habits, where they will look like they can read a book they have memorized from the pictures but will feel intimidated and confused at chapter books and just plain give up once they become a teenager required to read novels. It will be unnecessarily laborious and of course, they'll end up hating reading.

BTW, a good amount of sight words are also regular and phonetic, they are only taught as sight words to memorize because they are common (like the words [i]day[/i], [i]and[/i], or [i]not[/i]). They really shouldn't be taught this way. But kids will naturally "remember" words they read once they have read a lot. The point of phonics is to free them up to be able to advance on their own when they encounter NEW words, which they will as they get older. Sight words are extremely limiting in that way.

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