Zombie thread, but as an expectant father, I’d love to remember how I learnt to read. Maybe it’s as simple as “I read.” In fourth grade, I tested out beyond the college level for reading comprehension.
I knew the “rules” in third grade, and remember challenging the teacher on the misspelling of “clothes” (shouldn’t it be “cloths”?). Rules aren’t rules, and I learnt that fast.
What we learned wasn’t necessarily “phonics,” but from my facile understanding of what “phonics” is, that certainly paid a part. But learning the exceptions was invaluable (WTF is “ocean”?).
I don’t recall how I learned to spell but it was in the early 70’s. I’ve always had a problem with spelling even up until now. I don’t know why. English spelling is, as everyone knows, extremely irregular and I think I just get stuck where the supposed ‘rule’ and the reality conflict and I give up. My brain can handle rules that make sense or are reasonably consistent, but memorizing arbitrary forms seems to have not been a worthwhile expenditure of time to me. I was taught the “i before e except after c” rule, but that rule is nonsense. I have a feeling that this rule made me distrustful of spelling rules.
As best I recall, phonics was a prominent feature of my early reading instruction, but it was supplemented by other things like rote memorization of problem words.
As a parent with kids who were spread over 16 years I’ve seen the pendulum swing from “phonics” to “whole language” and back a few times.
The best teachers always incorporated both methods to various degrees. Learning without phonics at all is horrible for many even if it works for a few. Learning only by phonics gets in the way of developing a love for reading.
I learned by my oldest sister giving me a gold star every time I read “Green Eggs and Ham” without making a mistake. And then by reading the comic books my older brother passed on to me. In school it was the end of the Dick and Jane era.
Is that what phonics was? Its not how I remember it. Must have been something else that I got lost in. (Excuse my comment in the other thread about phonics.)
My mom is a voracious reader and got me started by age 4. I can remember lying in bed reading my kid’s books while she read her novels.
I was always several grades ahead in reading throughout school. My spelling has always frustrated me. I can usually recognize when a word is spelled wrong. I hated wasting my study time looking them up in a dictionary. Thank goodness for Google.
Where I missed out is the current system of pronounning words. We were never taught this gibberish. vrSHs have no earthly idea how to use that stuff.
*** this stupid app won’t let me paste the gibberish pronunciation stuff.
I nearly flunked my college Spanish requirement because they used that crap and expected us to understand how to pronounce words.
It cost me over $500 for a tutor to help me learn to pronounce words for my oral tests. I’d record her speaking the words and then play it over and over again.
First point, most of the time when “Johnny can’t read” it’s because his parents didn’t give a damn.
Second point, if you don’t understand phonics you’ll never be able to read a new word. You would have to somehow memorize the spelling and pronunciation of every word in the language without phonics. The reason this isn’t a problem is that most of the time people are taught some phonics or figure it out themselves. Phonics is not the entire approach though, learning to read people will stumble on some words, need some help, and almost everybody will have some problem with some word some day where the spelling and pronunciation don’t match well.
Poorly taught phonics and whole language are a problem. Learning to read, write, and communicate requires more than just the basics in just one form. But nothing will work if a person is not motivated to read. It will be easy for some people to pick up, for most people there will be a moderate level of difficulty overcome quickly, for some people it is quite a challenge, but none of them will learn to read magically, to learn to read you need to read, and for children if they aren’t naturally inclined to read they need more than just a school teacher and a phonics or whole language program.
Back in the 40s when I was learning to read, whole word had not been invented and phonics was all there was. I learned quickly and somehow absorbed most of the pronunciation rules too, so, with the exception of a few outliers like victuals and subtle, I could pretty much pronounce anything I saw. I’m a pretty good, although not excellent, speller too. Especially since I have spent more than half my life in Canada where the rules differ somewhat. I and not talking about the useless “u” which is easy to learn, but rules such as whether to double to final consonant when adding “ing”; that sort of thing.
I was once in a restaurant with a group of mathematicians, all professors somewhere. One of them tried to order a “hamburger granite”, which the waitress could not understand. I look at the place on the menu where he was pointing and it said “hamburger gratinee”. He was a victim of the whole word method.
I just want to add a word about the new math. It is basically a good idea but only if the teachers actually understand it. I could see with my own kids that they were being taught it by teachers who only dimly understood it, if at all, and that is a recipe for disaster.
In 1st grade I refused to believe my teacher when she said that clothes was not a homophone of close because it is “actually” pronounced “clothe zzz”. I hadn’t, and still haven’t, heard it pronounced as anything different from “close”. Thus presaging the descriptivism I’d learn about in college.
Bingo. Way back when, I saw my Mom and Dad enjoying the newspaper, the magazines we got in the mail, and books from the library. I wanted to enjoy them too. So my Mom taught me to read before I went to school. This caused some consternation at the school kindergarten, where apparently, I wasn’t supposed to know how to read, as was the approach back in those days.
But I could read when I got to kindergarten, because I wanted to read just like my parents did. Mom taught me using mostly phonics, but there were some common words that I just knew by repetition. So I guess I learned to read both ways.
That could have been me. But fortunately, I was not a victim of the whole word method popular in my youth, because my mom taught me to read with phonics.
Yes, the rough cough and hiccouph plough through my dough. Phonics includes multiple spellings of phonemes.
I learned a few months ago that my dad taught me to read when I was three, not four like I long thought…so I’d already been reading about three years before I was introduced to the concept of phonics in first grade. And I didn’t get it.
Or perhaps it was just badly taught because I know one of the reasons my first grade teacher didn’t like me was because she insisted I sound out words I could already read and after just reading the words and being told not to a few times, I’d finally sound out the words in an exaggerated way, much to her irritation. Given all our phonics lessons were around words I could already read, I didn’t get a damn thing out of it.
That’s okay. Learning to read via whole language worked for me: at nine I tested at a 10th grade reading comprehension level, and by age eleven at the collegiate level.
I was taught phonics. I enjoyed it as much as any subject back then. The way we did it was by taking a particular letter or combination thereof and learning a dozen or so words with that letter or letters’ pronunciation that week. This week could be -gh as in laugh or cough, and the next week could be -gh as in through or bough. As we went through the years ( I think it was first and second grade when we had phonics) any exceptions would simply be learned as such whenever they came up.
I must say phonics worked quite well for me. I always read at a much higher level than the class I was in.
I taught high school science for twenty-six years. Kids made fun of phonics, and so did some of the English teachers, but compared to the same grade kids when I was in school, my students always seemed to have lousy reading skills.
When I was shopping for elementary schools, one school administrator said to me that studies show that about 70% of kids learn to read easily when presented the whole word method, and 90% via phonics. But they don’t completely overlap, and a good school should present both approaches.
I loved phonics, have a decent ability to spell. Personally, I think spelling is sort of hardwired into you - regardless of how you learn to read. My husband is amazing at spelling - my mother can’t spell to save her life (she’s probably dyslexic, but from an era where no one tested). You can train it, but there is a natural ability to see words and remember their shape.
At my four year old grandson’s nursery school teacher’s conference they observed that he was sight reading some words, and asked my daughter to not teach him whole language as they were starting phonics after the first of the year.
She nodded and said “Sure thing”, but observed to me that about thousand times a day he asks “What’s that word?” and is she supposed to tell him that it’s none of his business?
Exactly. The big problem in education is that “experts” emerge and promote their pet method and insist on the exclusion of other methods. My sisters taught me to read, so I was reading my oldest sister’s 2nd grade “Dick and Jane” primer when I started Kindergarten at 4 years old. My K teacher (who I don’t remember at all) told my parents to make me stop reading because I hadn’t learned the “right way.” My dad was also a teacher (for adults) and knew to ignore or even protest garbage from schoolteachers. I don’t remember encounter phonics until 2nd grade, and I loved it because it was so easy I could finish the assigned page in a minute and go back to reading a real book.
I missed the years of the “Reading Wars” when “experts” were ready to duel to the death over which method must be taught: phonics or look-say. Since I majored in art education, reading instruction wasn’t something I studied.
I ended up teaching elementary school, and now I have a Master’s with a Reading focus. I am on the committee at my school doing research into what English Language Arts curriculum we are going to go with as we redesign the school (we’ve received a Mercury 7 grant).
What I’ve seen so far shows me that except for the “experts” still screaming at each other and selling books that explain why only they are right, it is well known that reading instruction must be a balance of phonics and vocabulary.
Phonics alone will help someone decode (sound out) words, but if the word you sounded out isn’t in your vocabulary, you won’t know what it means.
Look-say (aka whole language even though it isn’t) is useless until you have a very large working vocabulary. Since children in low socio-economic homes hear only 4.5 million words by age 4 (compared to working class homes: 11.2 million words, professional homes: 45 million words) vocabulary must be taught in addition to phonics.
God how incredibly stupid. I guess this is not quite as dangerous as the nurse who told my mother “put your legs together, the obstetrician isn’t here, yet”, but still…
