Were you a victim of Phonics?

In My Humble Opinion
41

My complaint is not so much that phonics lacks sense or that it fails to provide useful skills.

My complaint is that the way it was taught to me, at least, was to be told: Here are the rules for spelling in English. Do you know them? Good. Now, let’s read.

(Three days later, during a book report…)

Oh, you poor fool. You can’t spell that that way. It’s one of the exceptions.

Perhaps it was a bad teacher - or a bad school system. I still think that teaching students to read, and use whole word methods for the basic Anglo-Saxon words in modern English makes far more sense than introducing the phonetic rules to students who don’t know those words, already.

I’d also like to address Flying Ramen Monster’s comment about how most words that don’t follow English phonetic rules are borrowed from other languanges: While I grant that words like marijuana aren’t following the rules of English spelling they aren’t as confusing as all those ‘ough’ words in the earlier post. Or, for that matter, trying to spell Worcester, Liecester, or other English place names transplanted to the New World, after only hearing how they were pronounced. The gripe I have is not for the words borrowed from other languages and how they might break the rules of phonetics, but how those words that originated in our bastard* tongue don’t follow the so-called rules.
I’d love to see orthographic reform for English spelling. Unfortunately, I believe that a wholesale switch to Metric will happen long before that happens. And there’s a huge amount of resistance to that, in the US. (For that matter, there are times I long to go to Esperanto, but that’s a whole different kettle of fish.)

*Yes. English is a bastard language, born of the rape of Anglo-Saxon by Norman French. And the Norman French never did bother to marry Anglo-Saxon.

42

This makes me also think the OP had a crappy teacher.

I was taught phonics–but phonics was never the exclusive method. Sight words (such as “the” before we got to the “th” digraph) were also included in each lesson. The point we were taught was that most words followed some rather standard rules and those rules could be used to “sound out” unfamiliar words. We also learned (well before the end of first grade) about digraphs and other combinations of letters, particularly when they were frequent borrowings from other languages.

If anyone was taught phonics exclusively, I would think that that would be almost as bad as being taught sight reading. I am not personally acquainted with anyone who was taught sight reading to the exclusion of phonics who can actually read new words without asking someone else what word they are looking at.

(BTW, I keep seeing “whole language” used, here, in the way that I would typically use “sight reading.” When my kids went through the early grades, the teachers used the phrase “whole language” to indicate a comprehensive program that included phonics, some sight reading, and several other approaches to help kids master new language.)

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I was already a reader by the time I hit school, thanks to a heavy dose of Sesame Street and The Electric Company. Both taught English reading and pronunciation phonetically.

“Today’s episode was brought to you by the letter D”
“B…ill…Bill!”

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This is so very true. :cool:

You’re right we will never switch to a phonetic language and we will probably never go to metric either.

We were taught phonetics as a supplement to learning words. We spent a lot of time on the exceptions if IRC.

Jim

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Phonics and whole language learning are not mutually exclusive. The best metaphor I’ve heard of compares language learning to coaching a basketball team.

Phonics = drills. Dribbling drills, passing drills, running/cutting drills…the elements of the game

Whole language = scrimages.

To be a successful basketball player, you really need both. You need to break the game down into fundamental skills (like phonics), but you also need to see how the entire game flows…AND have the enjoyment of playing the entire game. Part of whole language learning is the affective component of reading enjoyment…reading good quality literature, even if struggling sometimes.

46

They are just that similar, tomndebb. Whole language is mostly sight reading of high frequency words (also called sight words) using actual reading material (age-appropriate literature, newspapers, reference books, magazines, etc.) instead of boring textbooks, and getting meaning from unfamiliar words based on how they’re used in context, and using phonics skills to sound out unknown words. Phonics pretty much sticks to flashcards and sound recognition and specific textbooks. I’m here to testify my best kindergarten readers had the benefit of both approaches: me teaching them phonics skills, me reading real books to them, and students having parents who could afford to take them to libraries and book fairs and made reading to their kids a priority.

47

I’ve got some really bad news for you, in case you were planning to learn Thai. Having had some experience with reading Thai myself, when I was cataloging Thai books in an Asian library, I found out it is nowhere near that simple.

Here’s the bad news: Although Thai word boundaries are unmarked in orthography, they are crucial to knowing how to pronounce words. It’s a Catch-22 of reading. Sometimes life just ain’t fair. So anyone reading Thai is paying just as close attention to the word boundaries as a reader of English, if not more so, even though they’re invisible.

The reason is because Thai phonology allows only a very limited number of consonant sounds at the end of a word: k, t, ng, n, m, p, y, w. For example, all esses become -t when word-final. If you see a Thai letter s in the middle of a line, is it pronounced s, so, or -t? The only you could know is if you already know the word. If you see the three-letter word nk[sup]h[/sup]r, you have to know it’s pronounced “nakhon.” (Originally from Sanskrit nagara ‘city’.)

Not knowing the Thai language, I cheated when cataloging. I started at the beginning of a title and took a stab at the first bunch of letters. If the first word was written with one letter, or two, or three, or any number, it was likely to affect the reading of many individual characters. So I accessed the Library of Congress bibliographic database and tried searching for what seemed likely phonetic readings. If I could get the first two or three words right, a title keyword search could find all the information I needed.

Another speed bump in learning to read Thai is that an unmarked letter can be either a bare consonant, or be followed by the inherent vowel -o. How do you know how to pronounce it? You just have to be familiar with the word already before attempting to read it. Chinese writing is like that too.

So for all that I advocate phonics in English, I have to admit Thai has an orthography that simply demands not just a whole-word approach, but even further that way, a whole-sentence approach.

I have not heard the term “abugidic” before, but it looks like a synonym of abjad.

48

Oh God, no. I value my limited sanity too much. I tried to learn the rudiments of Lao once, and I could feel my brain start to liquify. I didn’t even bother with trying to learn the alphabet. Therefore I bow before your superior knowledge of that language.

It’s merely the adjectival form of “abugida”.

49

As in the classic song “Inagad Abugida”?

50

Precisely.

51

I was a whole-language learner. By that I mean that teaching to me to read in school was somewhere between redundant and pointless, as I could already read well before I ever got to kindergarten. Writing, no clue, but reading wasn’t a problem. For that matter, I don’t think I really knew individual letters all that well, but give me a sentence I’d never seen before and I’d’ve had no trouble reading it and generally understanding it. And I absolutely hated it whenever phonics was brought up. All these pronounciations for the individual phenomes and schwas and other specialized symbols drove me nuts and I’ve never really learned them, especially since I knew all the words they were trying to teach me. Also, I never saw the point with all the exceptions (why the heck is “colonel” pronounced “kernel”?) and duplicates and everything in English. Plus, my earliest being read to (and thus later reading) that I remember was mostly C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein, so right there was a need to be able to learn to read and learn new words with context, as 30-year-old British slang (and British spelling, and so on) can’t exactly be taught by phonics to an elementary-school American in the late 80s. I was also never much of one for dictionaries and still try to learn new words by context unless they’re either so technical or so obscure that the dictionary is the only way to go.

Honestly, I’m not sure how much I really learned about English in school. I have always been a big reader, with a very large vocabulary, and thus learned spelling, grammar, and so on not by sitting there in the classroom going through exercises but by reading. In fact, I almost failed freshman English in high school because I hated grammar so much that I refused to do it. It wasn’t until I took German that I started really learning formal grammar, at which point I fit it into what I already knew intuitively about the English language from years of reading.

It’s paid off in other ways as well. I know people who absolutely hate reading on what seem to be general principles and thus have had all sorts of trouble with school, with tests, and so on. I, on the other hand, hated to be forced to read anything that I wasn’t already interested in, but the difference was I was going home and reading Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke and Bradbury and Card and Orwell and Huxley and…well, the list just goes on and in, mostly in science fiction. But I was the one who floated through the verbal section of the SAT and later the verbal and writing sections of the general GRE with no test prep but a little time learning the particular tricks of a section (analogies, say) while people I knew spent hours drilling with those vocabulary-building books trying to cram in words I already knew from years of reading.

I guess I sound like I’m bragging, but I’m trying not to. I just really never liked phonics and never needed them.

52

Does anyone else have no idea how they learned how to read? I’m amazed all of you can remember that far back. I have no memory of the process of learning to read – but whatever it was I was taught seems to have worked because I’m usually a pretty good speller.

53

To be fair, I don’t really know how I started to learn to read. I just can’t remember far back enough so that it feels like I hit the ground running by teaching myself to read. What I said about the individual letters in the alphabet is true, though. Maybe I should ask my parents sometime.

54

ignore

55

Aurora Gardens Academy. I was there for one semester of 3rd grade in 1969. Good school. Learned a lot.

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When I was in first grade, in 1957, I think the way we were supposed to read was whole language - a word at the time. My teacher, who was about to retire, liked to teach what I suppose was phonics.
I don’t know about others in my class, but I went from Dick and Jane to reading full Jules Verne books by the time I finished first grade. By third, when we had a staged reading program with small books, they gave me the hardest one, which I had no trouble with, and then they let me read what I wanted.
So phonics sure worked for me.

59

My sister has a master’s degree in teaching reading, and she was trained in a mixed style, using phonics rules and sight-word reading.

Phonics rules will allow you to suss out how many words are pronounced, and sight-reading will help you learn the exceptions, one at a time. It’s like learning “i before e, except after c” and also being shown the words that don’t adhere to that rule. The rule is a decent first approximation.

Neither system of teaching reading will work by itself as well as the two work together in an harmonious blend. They complement each other magnificently.

60

My wife taught special ed for decades, and always used a mix of phonics and word recognition. That’s the only way you can teach students to read in English. Word recognition or sight reading can’t possibly keep up with the amount of words a kid is introduced to each year.

Like many others, I was reading long before I started school. And I can recall my parents and older siblings reading with me and telling me to “sound it out.” My first elementary school taught phonics, as well.

Yes, eventually you run into words that phonics won’t help you with, but no, I wasn’t a “victim.” I was a success.