# Were you a victim of Phonics? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [February 24, 2006, 11:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000 "2006-02-24T23:47:04Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Incubus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c68b51/32.png) [@Incubus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Incubus)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2006, 3:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000/21 "2006-02-25T03:47:19Z")
Our tutoring center’s curriculum uses phonics. Typically kids go from ‘phonics/early reading’ to ‘reading’ to ‘writing’. It is interesting to hear different prespectives on the matter in this thread. However, kids that do the phonics program also do ‘sight words’ where they have to pretty much memorize the way words are pronounced. So the best of both worlds, I guess. They’ve been using phonics in this program for about 10 years, and no major complaints, so in spite of it being a supposedly flawed system, it hasn’t stopped parents in the area from throwing down 3-5 grand a year just to help their child read better. ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2006, 4:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000/22 "2006-02-25T04:41:27Z")
> [@Shirley Ujest](#): > > With the Carden reading method, children in kindergarten start to learn the sounds associated with consonants and vowels and acquire the ability to sound out almost any word by themselves. To encourage students to develop the ability to form a mental image of the word, the pages of Carden readers do not contain pictures. Never heard of it until today. [/QUOTE] OK, now i am officially confused. I am not sure how i learned to read, I am dyslexic. I see book pages upside down and mirror image from the way everybody else sees them. I learned to interpret them shortly after I learned to read. I understand they figured out that I saw the pages that way because i held the books upside down, and i wrote backwards and upside down. I have no idea how I did the training [though I do know that if i am excessively tired, i have to hold my books upside down to read as i can’t make the switch.] but I seriously overcompensated … in 6th grade I tested out to 850 words per minute, and in high school well over a thousand, with 90% comprehension. I was reading at the college level in 8th grade. I could read before I ever went to school. I have a very clear memory of the first grade teacher teaching the word ‘look’ with some illustration of the word with eyes as the ‘o’ s and the l and k as the ears, and explaining look somehow - i was giggling too hard to really hear it. I do remember the teacher getting huffy and my parents telling me to just keep quiet and do the class work. I do also remember ‘dick and jane’ [and thinking they were really lame compared to Uncle Wiggly and the complete [but ragged] set of raggedy anne and andy books that we more or less inherited from my father and his 2 brothers childhood library.] ---
**Author:** ![devilsknew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4da419/32.png) [@devilsknew](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/devilsknew)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2006, 4:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000/23 "2006-02-25T04:51:07Z")
I’m from The Dick and Jane/Letterpeople/Boxcar Children school. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2006, 5:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000/24 "2006-02-25T05:03:21Z")
I got what seemed like years of phonics in the 1960s, and now look at how literate and articulate I grew up to be. 😃 I think it worked well. I saw my daughter become a victim of whole language :dubious: in the 1990s, and was unhappy at how long her ability to write well was delayed. She still does not write much, even though when she does she has a natural talent for it. She’s every bit as intelligent as me, and reads as much as me, but she has struggled with writing all her life. Our children’s developing brains = experimental guinea pigs. ---
**Author:** ![FlyingRamenMonster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@FlyingRamenMonster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FlyingRamenMonster)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2006, 5:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000/25 "2006-02-25T05:42:28Z")
I started school in ESL. I remember doing phonics and the whole breaking-words-into syllables thing after moving to mainstream classes. I have no memory of learning to read in ESL but I’m pretty sure it involved some sort of phonics. I’m very good at spelling and have no problem keeping track of rules and exceptions. I don’t think about them much, really. I think whole language is rather illogical - written English is phonetic, so why teach our kids to read it like a set of ideograms? Doesn’t it mean they won’t be able to read words they haven’t seen before? Phonics, I recall, doesn’t teach kids to sound out letters on by one in the order they’re written. It also teaches letter combinations, for example P and H together make the “F” sound and when a vowel is followed by a consonant followed by an E, the vowel sound becomes long. Most English words conform to these rules and the majority that don’t are foreign (and would have to be learned separately under whole language too, in any case). ---
**Author:** ![FlyingRamenMonster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@FlyingRamenMonster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FlyingRamenMonster)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2006, 5:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000/26 "2006-02-25T05:43:40Z")
_One_ by one. Gaudere strikes again. :smack: ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2006, 10:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000/27 "2006-02-25T10:20:29Z")
1 L3r||3D L337! ---
**Author:** ![Sgt.Pepper](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f04885/32.png) [@Sgt.Pepper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sgt.Pepper)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2006, 1:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000/28 "2006-02-25T13:16:45Z")
I was taught with phonics. I now keep my dictionary handy. I was amused watching my ten year old nephew do his homework the other night. Part of the answer involved him spelling ‘guessed’, he spelt it ‘gest’. ---
**Author:** ![Gala\_Matrix\_Fire](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/4da419/32.png) [@Gala\_Matrix\_Fire](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gala_Matrix_Fire)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2006, 1:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000/29 "2006-02-25T13:47:17Z")
I’m strongly in favor of phonics. If more people had learned to read that way, more of them would spell my name the way it sounds, which is exactly how it is spelled, instead of free-associating some crazy alternative that does not reflect how my name is pronounced. Drives me up a wall. ---
**Author:** ![Rick](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/9f8e36/32.png) [@Rick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rick)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2006, 2:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000/30 "2006-02-25T14:42:53Z")
I hear that there is a phoe for teaching fonics in Feenix. Polish = somebody from Poland polish = what you do to boots. So how do you pronounce the sentence: Polish my boots please. 😕 Tell me again that English is a phonetic language. Spanish is a phonetic language, English not so much. ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2006, 2:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000/31 "2006-02-25T14:48:51Z")
> [@Rick](#): > > I hear that there is a phoe for teaching fonics in Feenix. > Polish = somebody from Poland > polish = what you do to boots. > So how do you pronounce the sentence: Polish my boots please. 😕 > > Tell me again that English is a phonetic language. Spanish is a phonetic language, English not so much. Faulty premesis. Main rule always taught, first letter of a sentance is ALWAYS capitalized. Secondary rule - each sentance has to have a verb to be complete. Polish [noun] is not a verb Polish [first word in sentance, capitalized] is a verb. Hence, to make the sentance complete, the first word must be the verb form. Is there a language in the world that uses an alphabet with capital and lower case letters that does _not_ capitalize the first letters of a sentance? ---
**Author:** ![Rick](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/9f8e36/32.png) [@Rick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rick)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2006, 3:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000/32 "2006-02-25T15:53:42Z")
I agree with both of your rules, but they are rules of sentence structure, not phonics. ---
**Author:** ![carterba](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/85e7bf/32.png) [@carterba](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carterba)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2006, 4:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000/33 "2006-02-25T16:15:09Z")
> [@Rick](#): > > I hear that there is a phoe for teaching fonics in Feenix. > Polish = somebody from Poland > polish = what you do to boots. > So how do you pronounce the sentence: Polish my boots please. 😕 > > Tell me again that English is a phonetic language. Spanish is a phonetic language, English not so much. Five of the six letters in those two words are pronounced the same in both. One is pronounced differently, but both pronunciations are within its usual range. It may not be 100% phonetic, but it’s far from completely arbitrary. ---
**Author:** ![Tevildo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9bd4f/32.png) [@Tevildo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tevildo)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2006, 4:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000/34 "2006-02-25T16:20:16Z")
Someone’s going to post this sooner or later - this is a longer, albeit geographically incorrect, version. “Rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman John Gough strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough on Coughlin road near the lough (dry due to drought), he coughed and hiccoughed, then checked his horse’s houghs and washed up in a trough.” ---
**Author:** ![Askia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/96bed5/32.png) [@Askia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Askia)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2006, 4:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000/35 "2006-02-25T16:55:06Z")
I learned to read whole language and whole words first, at least a year before kindergarten from my Children’s Bible, my mother’s How and Why library and the church hymnal and programs every Sunday. I also read my uncle’s (mostly mid-70s Marvel) comic book collection; Dr. Suess; my aunt and uncle’s hand me down Dick and Jane readers. I also watched Sesame Street and Electric Company pretty religiously. Phonics came from basically a one-year exposure to phonetic rules in a Catholic school kindergarten, which I absorbed quickly. This leaped-frogged my ability to sound out unfamiliar words. This enabled me to start reading the newspaper with my grandfather (headlines mostly); I discovered the Sunday Comics section and Mini-Page. When I moved to Michigan in first grade, I remember discovering that my new readers had indexes with word glossaries. Instead of reading the actual stories, I read the indexes first to master the words, THEN I read the stories in context. By Christmas, I’d learned I’d been tested to read on the sixth grade reading level. My spelling was just completely shitty until about fifth grade. I never would have learned to read so well so quickly without phonics rules. They did have a terrible impact on my spelling for awhile. I will also say that, having not been particularly intellectually challenged in school since (roughly) seventh grade, and having suffered from a slew of horrible math teachers, I pretty much coasted on my abilities right up through college. ---
**Author:** ![Dusty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a183cd/32.png) [@Dusty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dusty)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2006, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000/36 "2006-02-25T17:51:10Z")
I confess, I don’t know very much about phonics and have never had an inclination to learn, but just from reading this thread, it seems to me like it’s heavily focused on being able to _say_ unfamiliar words rather than ability to actually read them (you known, deduce meaning from context, similarity to known words, pattern recognition, backformation, etc.), which was very much what my reading education was about. It also seems to separate reading from writing. Is that true? ---
**Author:** ![What\_Exit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/what_exit/32/10652_2.png) [@What\_Exit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_Exit)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2006, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000/37 "2006-02-25T18:46:56Z")
> [@Shagnasty](#): > > I was shocked when I grew up and found out that some places taught reading WITHOUT phonics. Shocked the shit out of me. I believe that when you learn phonics, you automatically switch over to the whole language method as words become familiar and you integrate them into your vocabulary. The reverse does not hold tue however. Whole language seems limiting and dangerous. It would be scary if someone grew up to only understand words like they are hieroglyphic symbols. I’m with you on this one. I thought it was just part of grade school learning. I am wondering if the Op was subjected to an incompetent teacher rather than a flaw with phonics. Much like I would like to see us switch to Metric system, I would like to see us switch to an expanded Phonetic alphabet. Jim ---
**Author:** ![Askia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/96bed5/32.png) [@Askia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Askia)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2006, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000/38 "2006-02-25T20:51:36Z")
> [@Shagnasty](#): > > I was shocked when I grew up and found out that some places taught reading WITHOUT phonics. Shocked the shit out of me. I believe that when you learn phonics, you automatically switch over to the whole language method as words become familiar and you integrate them into your vocabulary. The reverse does not hold tue however. Whole language seems limiting and dangerous. Whole language worked for hundreds of years before language was broken down into phonetical chunks in 20th century mass education. But whole language works best in environments with lots of different reading material around and exposure to large spoken vocabularies and neologisms. (The whole language.) I think you tend to have a greater depth, understanding of nuance and appreciation of the written word with a whole language approach; but you get a wider skill set and practice in decoding a much, much larger vocabulary of written words using phonics. But without the all-important knowledge of context and background, sounding out all those different words, neologisms and vocabularies has limits to actual comprehension. **Tevildo’s** post points to the inadequacies of phonics: the rules constantly change for all those “o-u-g-h” words. Unless you can decipher that sentence in context knowing what a horse’s h-o-u-g-h is likely supposed to be, your phonics skills aren’t gonna help you. Sadly, it also points out how culturally biased a lot of reading tests are. That said, whole language is socioeconomically biased; phonics is the great playing field leveller: a person who learns uses both has the best advantages. Try reading a passage of Gone With The Wind in the slave vernacular sometime. A person with a whole language exposure to Southern period novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Joel Chandler Harris’ Bruh Rabbit stories can understand it easier than a person whose reading skills derive mostly from 21st centuray phonics. ---
**Author:** ![yBeayf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/e274bd/32.png) [@yBeayf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yBeayf)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2006, 10:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000/39 "2006-02-25T22:14:13Z")
> [@](#): > > Whole language worked for hundreds of years before language was broken down into phonetical chunks in 20th century mass education. Most languages with an alphabetic or abugidic orthography were written for centuries, if not millenia, with no spaces between words. Many languages, such as [Thai](http://coolthaihouse.com/blog/images/imgcache/450-essay0506drought.jpg), are still written this way. When words are written together without spaces, there is no alternative but to use the phonetical meaning of the characters to determine meaning. ---
**Author:** ![Askia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/96bed5/32.png) [@Askia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Askia)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2006, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000/40 "2006-02-25T22:49:00Z")
So… there’s no such thing as a sight word when words are strung together? I’mnotsureifIbuythatargumentmyselfbutthenI’mnotanexpertinThaiandIgotnocluewhatabugidicorthographyis. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/were-you-a-victim-of-phonics/346000.md?page=3)