Goodreads Authors/Readers discussion

Here in Australia we’re again in the middle of a rather silly – but nonetheless quite heated – public debate on the subject.

It’s been a circulating argument these thirty years or more between those who adhere to the school of phonics – that is, the ability to distinguish the individual sounds of the letters D O G to form meaning – and those who insist on a whole word recognition approach, through which children learn by experience that this particular combination of letters does indeed signify a dog, with all that suggests for improved skills of comprehension.

If one can believe the newspapers, it would seem some schools have been adopting word recognition to the exclusion of phonics – and this, it is argued, accounts for a noticeable drop in reading and literacy standards over these past few decades.

Personally, I doubt it’s practicable to exclude either phonics or word recognition from any reading class … and impossible to learn to write without knowing, for example, that the letters DOG make the sounds “d-o-g”. But what about DO? DOE? And when you come to the former Venetian ruler DOGE, then of course phonics go out the window and you have to rely on recognising the word within its context and your own cultural understanding.

How else, given the vagaries of English words and conventional spelling, can one learn to distinguish between There, Their and They’re? Bear, Bear and Bare? How and Hound? Low, Hoe, Bow, Cow, Bow and Bough?

It’s not either/or. It’s BOTH. Phonics and word recognition. A synthesis between the two approaches, to use a term from classical dialectics. And if we are to look for reasons behind the apparent fall in literacy standards in some western countries, it seems to me the electronic revolution, with its increasing emphasis on a visual and abbreviated linguistic culture, is probably as good a place to start.

But what do you reckon?

Having taught ESL to kids who started out with Spanish it took a combination of phonics and pattern / placement recognition to get those kids to a level where they could learn in a school setting where saying the word bilingual would have some teachers responding: "Huh?"

There are enough oddities in English one approach or the other won't work. One example would involve the verbs lead and read.

The present and past tense of lead are lead and led.

The present and past tenses of read are read and read.

For both verbs the present tense has an eed sound while the past tense have an ed sound.

There was a time 15 years or so back that most of our local schools (suburb of Chicago) went to "sight reading" - that is recognition of whole words especially for children with special needs. Needless to say, they found that backfired when children (tried) to learn new words on their own. The kids would just skip the words or abandon their reading altogether out of frustration.

They reintroduced phonics and I think they do a combination of both now.

No question that both approaches are necessary. I taught my grandson how to read when I saw that he was getting nowhere in the second grade. This was one-on-one instruction. I wrote little stories in which he was the central character. Each story introduced new letter-combination phonetic sounds. Words he mispronounced I included in the next story. Words that did not sound the way they were spelled I called "tricky words." He had to remember the sound of each entire word to successfully pronounce it. Teaching him was a fascinating experience.

Both are necessary in order to learn to read properly; especially in English.

Anthony wrote: "Here in Australia we’re again in the middle of a rather silly – but nonetheless quite heated – public debate on the subject.

It’s been a circulating argument these thirty years or more between tho..."

Whole word method (as it's called here in the states) results in children *guessing* at what the word says. My ex-husband's son was functionally illiterate at age *7* because of this. He got a couple of phonics books from a local store and was able to teach his son to read overnight.

I've read with K-2nd students in the SMART program here in Oregon. (A wonderful, hugely successful reading program - check it out.) From 5-year-old nonreaders to ambitious chapter-book readers, kids learn to apply both methods. By reading to them and following with a finger, they figure out all by themselves what works where. http://www.getsmartoregon.org/

Read to them. All the time, as much as you can!

Davida wrote: "Read to them. All the time, as much as you can!"

Davida, has recommended the simplest and most effective method of teaching children to read in most cases.

I started to read to my five children as infants and, as soon as they were able to focus their attention on the book, I would encourage them to ask questions, make comments during the reading, and critique the story at the end. They each had their own library card as soon as they were old enough to get one, and still do; so do their children. All five could read before entering first grade and are all avid readers today.

Great questions. This is so important.

Read to them, and embellish with passion.
Read with them, books you both love.
Act out the stories with them.
See plays based on books.
Take literary vacations.
Write to them, with them.
Go to readings with them.
Read read read yourself.
Gift them books you believe will entertain, guide, and educate them.

My mother and father read to me and made certain I was allowed to read and had access to books.

Patrick wrote: "Great questions. This is so important.

Read to them, and embellish with passion.
Read with them, books you both love.
Act out the stories with them.
See plays based on books.
Take literary vacati..."

Well put.

Davida wrote: "Read to them. All the time, as much as you can!"

Exactly. My parents did so, and I was reading by age four.

At 16 months of age Her Grace has been chewing on her favorite teether (a thick pasteboard book), but listens to Wife while she reads and has been for a few months.

Her Grace won't sit still for me, as she has so many duties for me to attend there's no time until her mama gets home from work.

Soon enough it will be time for her to add Irish to the English and Spanish she's learning and whatever else she'll latch onto, just as given time her focus on reading will grow.

As long as you encourage them, small children will take to learning like a hungry cat takes to fresh meat -- it's programmed into them by nature.

R.F.G. wrote: "At 16 months of age Her Grace has been chewing on her favorite teether (a thick pasteboard book), but listens to Wife while she reads and has been for a few months.

Her Grace won't sit still for m..."

What about ASl? That is fun to learn.

Mary wrote: "What about ASl? That is fun to learn. "

She does a couple basic signs, like putting her hand to her mouth when she wants food or grabbing her diaper if she thinks she's ready for a change, but she's already talking a lot and leading us to things if she doesn't have the word for whatever she's trying to get across.

I get the feeling Her Grace thinks I'm a bit slow and not intelligent enough to understand in-depth messages in sign. Then again, I am a lowly minion.

R.F.G. wrote: "Mary wrote: "What about ASl? That is fun to learn. "

She does a couple basic signs, like putting her hand to her mouth when she wants food or grabbing her diaper if she thinks she's ready for a ch..."

I had little signs like what when I was a baby too.

Mary wrote: "I had little signs like what when I was a baby too. "

My left hand has been problematic since the sagittal band tear I experienced last October. I opened a fresh jar of pickles for Her Grace and said a word (as softly as possibly) I obviously shouldn't have said. Now when my service is underwhelming (in Her eyes), I now get called a not so nice word.

When Her Grace was still inside the mother-ship, I'd 'talk' to her uses a few particular sounds, which she still uses back at me now.

Children are programmed to learn language from their earliest, and as they grow they go in stages from responding to different primate 'dialects', from lemur and loris to gibbon and chimp to human. As they focus on human they gradually ignore the others.

It tends to underscore the importance of phonics and context in both verbal and written communications.

R.F.G. wrote: "Mary wrote: "I had little signs like what when I was a baby too. "

My left hand has been problematic since the sagittal band tear I experienced last October. I opened a fresh jar of pickles for He..."
Uh, oh. That's a problem I guess. Kids pick up words easy at that age I guess.

Mary wrote: "Uh, oh. That's a problem I guess. Kids pick up words easy at that age I guess. "

That they do, and often enough they learn the words we'd rather they didn't more quickly.

R.F.G. wrote: "Mary wrote: "Uh, oh. That's a problem I guess. Kids pick up words easy at that age I guess. "

That they do, and often enough they learn the words we'd rather they didn't more quickly."

Can be quite amusing however.
For instance, upon telling my two-year-old cousin "Good-bye, (his name)" he promptly responded "Goodbye, (his name)"

Mary wrote: "Can be quite amusing however.
For instance, upon telling my two-year-old cousin "Good-bye, (his name)" he promptly responded "Goodbye, (his name)" "

Yeah, Her Grace got angry with me for telling her no about something and promptly told her mama "dada mean me".

I didn't have the water for cleaning during a diaper chane quite warm enough and I got " bish "

It astonishes me that anyone can debate the phonics/sight approaches. Obviously, you need to understand how to break the sounds down; that will go a long way though as noted sometimes in the wrong direction. But to be truly fluent, you will have huge supplies of words that don't need to be thought about--a sight vocabulary. Some of that might be taught. Most of it will come just fine when a child reads a bunch.

Some languages (I'm thinking of Spanish) do phonics a lot better than English. But even there, a fluent reader does not sound out each word.

R.F.G. wrote: "That they do, and often enough they learn the words we'd rather they didn't more quickly."

Too true!

I read aloud to my daughter. Also she watched SESAME STREET. I swear this is all I did. (The house however is brimful of books and she was surrounded by them.) She taught herself to read before the age of four.

Rebecca wrote: "It astonishes me that anyone can debate the phonics/sight approaches. Obviously, you need to understand how to break the sounds down; that will go a long way though as noted sometimes in the wrong...But to be truly fluent, you will have huge supplies of words that don't need to be thought about--a sight vocabulary ..."

I think those caches of words comes with time (and lots of reading). I say a little competition/push goes a long way sometimes. I was *slower* than my peers in kindergarten when it came to reading, but that just ramped up my desire to "do what they were doing." My teacher was trying to hold me back from reading activities because "I was not ready." I wasn't having any of that, lol.

I was taught in school with just phonetics. It was before the sight-reading/whole word recognition "caught on." I remember the "tricky" words being a little puzzling at first. But by the time I hit third grade my reading level was post-college as recorded by tests.

I think the "tricky" words, sight words comes in time with older readers/teachers guiding the way. Isn't that what spelling tests are for?

I think you nailed it, Theresa.

I home schooled my children and began strictly with phonics - teaching letter sounds then consonant/vowel combinations and consonant blends. My kids were reading almost everything (with basic vocabulary) from a very young age (about four). Once they had the basic phonic building blocks, they were able to sound out words and figure out unknown words/letter combinations by inference. Some advanced or foreign words simply have to be learned by sight - the combination "ough" is one of the hardest. But most words they will read can be sounded out. If a child's strong enough on phonics, they will begin sight-reading on their own.

There is no one right way. Period. You need phonics. You need instant word recognition. You need rote memorization for the words phonics can't teach and foreign words that apply none of our rules. You must have environmental print surrounding them. You must have books available of all levels and impart a love.

My oldest was a phonics kid. He learned sounds and blends and used inference. My second didn't want to show he'd learned (he'd beg me for heavy science textbooks, mind you) but went to school and immediately began reading at an extremely advanced rate. My third, well we'll have to see.

But my house is jam packed with books and we never pass up a cheap book, whether at Half-Price, garage sales, or a random shop. I think reading is also something that is done together and explicitly shown (from the left-to-right finger sweep to the page turn to the inflection).

I come from both an educator and parental background. Again, no one system will ever work for every child. Especially in the highly inclusive setting and in the world where many aren't native speakers of the language.