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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
[b]Reading is  multi-faceted neurological process and it takes the addressing of each pupil's issue (s), which go WAY beyond phonics to teach[/b]. Stay away from any entity  that discusses phonics instruction over  whatever they or you think balanced literacy is.  These are terms thrown around to complain about schools,  and has nothing to contribute to the instruction of reading. [/quote]

Yes, reading is multi-faceted, but being able to match letters and letter "teams" to phonemes (all 44 of them) and to blend and segment phonemes into syllables and words is a vital fundamental skill that is needed.  There are many other skills needed, but without those, reading will not be able to happen.

Surgeons need to have sterile technique in the operating room. Clean hands aren't surgery and aren't the point of the operation; but without a foundation of cleanliness, the operation will not be a success. [/quote]

However:
1. TRUE dyslexia  is a neurological issue impeding the ability to do that. Sorry, but it is true, and you can beat a kid over the head with all kinds of phoneme matching, vowel teams, digraphs, etc., and, no, it doesn't cure dyslexia. Companies, or any entities, who insist that is does are scams. Sorry. 
2. Kids need a plethora of techniques,  with phonics being one of them. Just one. Phonics is really only a small part of it. 
3. If you want to improve reading skills in children,  we must start in INFANCY and Preschool. Language development, experience with  print, experience with words and semantics is the key to successful reading, as well as continued language development well into adulthood.  It is not Orton Gillingham.  Secondly,  there's a lot of skill  and behavior in reading that has nothing to do with phonics. Nothing.

Your schools are not the problem. Kids literally do not need to read anything today,  to fake it through. Everything is digitized and filled with graphics, requiring only  small pockets of attention. We need to stop discussing simple things  in the face of complex challenges. It just isn't that easy.[/quote]

I'm really not talking about "true" Dyslexia on this thread. Yes, someone with a severe learning disability or deficit in one of several areas (Rapid Autonomic Naming, long term memory, working memory, etc.) is going to have a hard time learning all the necessary subcomponents of reading and putting it all together, and may need other strategies to compensate, but memorizing words by sight probably isn't going to get them very far - it might be the best they can do though, and they will mostly need to have text read out lous to them.

But the vast majority of students who are reading several years below grade level in middle and high school aren't actually dyslexic. They just didn't learn to decode properly when they were in elementary school. That's what we are trying to fix. The kids who can't read, but they COULD read with proper decoding instruction.

Phonics is a HUGE part of the foundational skills of reading. When kids are at the beginning of learning to read, they need to see letters on the page, and know how to translate them into speech sounds. It's inefficient to tell them not to pay attention to all the letters in the word.  It is possible to guess words, just by reading the beginning and ending consonants, sometimes.. but why do that? Every word, every syllable, has a vowel sound at the heart of it; teach kids the vowel sounds (including oi and ou and er/ir/ur and aw and so on.. they are just as important as the consonant sounds. Once kids have most of the letter-sound connections they need, they are off and running and decode TONS of words. They should be able to read most short words by end of second grade, and start working on harder multisyllabic words of Greek and Latin origin by 3rd and 4th grade, and then you can be more or less done with phonics (except for the fussy spelling rules). With competent, easy decoding abilities, students can actually read the 4th and 5th grade textbooks (instead of needing them read aloud) in Science and Social Studies and can learn content vocabulary and actually learn about the world; they can read rich literature and poetry and not have to have a teacher read everything to them.

Of course oral language development, from infancy on, is important for language comprehension and to understand the words the student is reading. You can decode a word like "trough" but you won't know if you got it right if you have never heard the word "trough" before! But if students weren't taught to decode, they will look at the word trough and guess "though".  And that is not a phonologically sensible guess.

Trough could be truff or trow, or trawf - those are sensible guesses. but though is not sensible.

Poor readers who don't decode well makes mistakes like that - mistakes that just aren't plausible.  They read "agreement" as "argument". And it isn't hard to help them improve. You just need to make sure they have the basics -- sounds for each letter or letter team, knowledge that each syllable needs a vowel heart, and ability to blend sounds together - syllable by syllable. Oh - and to "flex" the vowel between short vowel and long vowel sound.  [/quote]

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