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So isn’t the obvious solution to change the spelling of English words so they always sound the way they are spelled? How much time would that save in teaching children to read?
Oh sorry, I forgot. TRADITION!psik
You mock tradition, but the overwhelming fact is that efforts like this have been tried for over a century, and they never get anywhere. Whether it’d be great in a different universe is immaterial: it’s a non-starter here.
It is in fact one of the sources of the complication of English spelling: attempts at reform where some of the new spellings take hold, others don’t, and some take hold but only in certain regions.
Which pronunciation is going to be used to determine the spelling?
As noted, this suggestion is really tangential to the point of this thread, but even if one wishes to follow that line, I know people who pronounce “court house” as
kort hous
korrt haous (with the a representing the sound in bad)
koht hahs
and
kurt huus.
Spread that across the multiple dialects of the U.S. and the multiple dialects of the U.K, plus Ireland, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and the several (related but differing) dialects of the Caribbean basin and you have the opening for a new Tower of Babel.
Most people who propose this think that their dialect would be the one chosen and, certainly, the efforts of broadcasters in the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s created dialect that is recognizable to most citizens of the U.S., but even that pronunciation varies within the U.S. and is not exported to other English-speaking lands.
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So isn’t the obvious solution to change the spelling of English words so they always sound the way they are spelled? How much time would that save in teaching children to read?
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It may save time in teaching children to call words, but that isn’t reading. I can “read” an entire passage written in Spanish, but if you ask me about what I’ve read, I would not be able to tell you much at all. The Whole Language philosophy did not begin because educators believed phonics instruction was “bad” or “wrong”. It began because historically reading instruction was very “phonics heavy” and words were presented almost exclusively in isolation or in stories and passages that were formatted to fit word patterns and we ended up with a lot of “See Dick run.” Phonics, spelling, writing, reading, vocabulary were all presented as different subjects in school, instead of as all parts of the larger process of “language”. Proponents of Whole Language believed (and I guess still do, although as I said before the term is rather outdated) that learning to read, write, speak, and listen should be integrated (ie “whole”, not isolated bits). So the push was for less isolation of words and sounds, more words in context, more writing in response to reading, more vocabulary development, more discussion about connections to text, more reading real books by real authors, etc. all in an effort to increase comprehension. Which is, of course, what “reading” really is.
Right. So people in the USA, Scotland, Ireland and each state of India would use different spellings. Also, to a limited extent, Georgia, New York, and LA. So the kids would easily learn to read, but only stuff written in their own suburb.
Just revisited “To Kill a Mockingbird”, and noticed, which I hadn’t remembered, that on the first day of school, new methods of learning reading (and an inexperienced teacher with recent training) are gently mocked: “I’m just trying to tell you the new way they’re teachin’ the first grade, stubborn. It’s the Dewey Decimal System.”
You surprised me here: Initially, the first sentence came across as gibberish. But by trying a trifle harder, it became surprisingly easy to read. You let the words make the sounds, and then listen to what the sounds are saying.
Despite the above, I certainly agree.
I think they mostly will. Though I’m sure examples exist, I’ve never seen evidence that those who learn by phonics commonly get stuck there.
Whereas I have definitely run across more than a few poor-to-hopeless spellers who were made that way by whole-language instruction.
The most dramatic example of this that I’ve seen was my first year of teaching. I had this second-grader who was spacy and uninterested in school. She was well below grade level in her reading, and I was worried I’d need to retain her in second grade. I worked with her using leveled readers, but she just had no interest in them at all.
One day she brought in this terrible Pokemon novel. It was well above her reading level, and also just junky, the kind of book turned out on spec with probably like a three-day turnaround, you know the sort. But that girl LOVED that book. She read it over and over and over–and she learned how to read.
Phonics instruction would never set that in front of her, since it was so far beyond what she could do, and also because I couldn’t really devise clear lessons around it. Whole language instruction believes that kids will pick up on reading skills if they have high-interest authentic texts, and so whole language instruction would be fine with it.
I’m not in any sense advocating this approach for every kid. I’ve also taught kids who struggled to read and who picked up enormous novels as a status symbol rather than as something they were actually interested in; those kids benefit more from some structured phonics instruction. But for some kids, a touch of whole language approach is helpful.
Though I’m no expert, I’d strongly concur.
Put me squarely in the camp of “Please, no dogma - let’s use a sensible mix that works.”
I suspect - but can’t prove - that starting with phonics yields best overall results. My support for this is probably no better than the fact that it worked for me and for pretty close to all of the voracious readers I know.