Notes on the schools; what comes after phonics

View 766 Thursday, March 14, 2013

HABEMUS PAPEM

It is Thursday and I seem to be falling further behind. My apologies. We have more medical appointments this afternoon. Nothing terribly serious.

I am in a tearing hurry. I thought I had posted a reference to this essay by my friend Sarah Hoyt, but apparently I did not. A reader has reminded me:

What Sarah Hoyt wrote about what a school system attempted to do with her children is chilling. I am very grateful I was taught with phonics and encouraged when I demonstrated a smartass precociousness!

My sister was taught with Whole Language. She had a much harder time reading than I did, and she is an extremely well-educated and extremely smart lady. In many, many ways she has been way more successful in her career than I have been.

I asked her about her experience with Whole Language. This is her reply:

"I found myself limited most of my life until I decided to teach myself phonics. This has greatly increased both my reading skills and my desire to read!"

Regards, Charles Adams, Bellevue, NE

<http://accordingtohoyt.com/2013/03/11/malice-or-incompetence/>

"Malice or Incompetence?

Recently I came across a news article estimating that 80% of NYC graduates cannot read and write and are functionally illiterate. I’d bet those numbers are not far off across the country, and it wasn’t a surprise…

….Right here, let me tell you that if your kid is in school, chances are he or she is being taught to "guess" words, aka, "whole word." If you ask him if they use whole word, they’ll act shocked and say oh, no, they use phonics "in combination" with other methods. They told me all of this too, at the time. However, the entire lesson plan is geared towards guessing words, sometimes working from the meaning. (I.e. Terribly and Therapy are the same word at a glance because they begin and end with the same letters, so you’re supposed to "guess" one of them, and then work out which it is by the meaning of the rest of the sentence. [This was referred to, ten years ago, as the "whole language" method.])

Do I need to tell you that in a language that is largely phonetic – yes, I know all the exceptions, but it’s easier to work to the right word from a mispronounced version than it is to do it from "meaning" or "guess" – this is NOT only the way NOT to teach reading but is, ultimately the way to teach kids not to read. By turning words into ideograms, which they were never meant to be, you make reading too difficult for all but the most dedicated strivers.

I’m surprised the literacy rate is 20% I’m surprised it’s not 5%, and I wonder how many of those kids read well enough to read for pleasure…."

I intended to post a reference to this yesterday. Her essay is worth your attention. There are also comments, far too many for most to go through. One of them is mine, which I am reprinting below.

I must be off again.

For those concerned about reading: I recommend that every parent be certain their children can read before being sent to any school public or private. By read I mean be able to read essentially any English word, and I recommend you test by showing them nonsense words like deamy and cromagnanimous. Those won’t be “easy” but any five year old who can read can say them. Once children can read then their speaking vocabulary is their reading vocabulary, and they can read the rest of the words but won’t necessarily know what they mean. And they will get some wrong. I mispronounced covetousness until after I had my PhD because I never heard anyone else say it. But I knew what it meant from very early on because when I was about ten I heard about Dr. Faustus and looked him up in the encyclopedia. But that’s another story. The important point is that if kids can’t read phonetic nonsense words it is time to panic.

English middle and upper class children traditionally learned to read at age 4 in nursery, taught by nannies, and a nanny who couldn’t teach the kids to read wouldn’t keep that job very long. English protoplasm isn’t any better than American.

For those who haven’t the foggiest about how to do this, start with HOP ON POP and some of the other Seuss books which are quite phonetic, but to be sure you’d be better off with a systematic program. My wife developed a system when she was teacher of last resort in the LA county juvenile justice system, and we computerized it in early Windows days. It runs on any Windows system (alas the Mac version was for power chip Macs and won’t work on modern Macs).

You can find the program here:
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/OldReading.html

It is hokey, and not at all cool. It just works. It’s an insurance policy. Most kids if given reasonable instruction (not told to guess but told NOT to guess) will learn to read; but Mrs. Pournelle’s program is 70 lessons, about half an hour each, and when done (you have to get through each lesson to go on to the next) it is DONE. After that its just do some reading. Lots of reading. I am about to put the California 6th Grade Reader of 1914 on Kindle — about 2 weeks now — and that’s age appropriate up to about 12 or 14, all old public domain stories and poems. Kids often like poems. By the shores of Gitchee Gummi by the shining big sea waters… and so forth.

Relying on someone in a school, public or private, to teach your children to read is a bad mistake. At worst test them yourself: at the end of first grade they ought to be able to read Longfellow, and some will like him. Or Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses. If they can’t read The Pleasant Land of Counterpane at the end of first grade, PANIC.

Enough. Sarah, we’ve discussed this stuff before, but apparently it’s getting worse out there now. There’s no excuse for kids getting a bad education, but they won’t get it from most of the public schools which exist to pay union rates to teachers with tenure. Some teachers will break their hearts trying to do more, but many give up early on. Don’t chance it.

For God’s sake be sure your kids can read.

On the one hand, I remember my parents telling stories of how my first-grade teacher asked us all to bring a book from home to read in class, and I brought "Tom Swift and his Ultrasonic Cycloplane", and she told them not to let me bring in books because I was obviously just making up the words instead of actually *reading*.

On the other hand…okay, so let’s say that you’ve got enough pronunciation skill and "sound of doubt" ability to pronounce "illiterate". How do you know what the word *means*? Is there a way to know what the word means without having someone tell you, at some point, that that specific combination of letters is a word that means "unable to read"?

You can’t play sports without learning to catch a ball. But pronunciation is no more the whole of reading than catching a ball is the whole of playing sports.

— M

I include this letter not to make fun of the writer but because it illustrates a point often made by reading teachers.

The theory of “whole word” reading comes from a study by professors of education, who observed the eye motions of accomplished readers and those of slow readers.  They found that the fast readers did not stop at each word and “sound it out”, while the slow readers did.  They drew the conclusion that phonics was a drag.

What they did not do was give both groups text rich in words they had never seen before. Had they done so they would have seen that the fast readers did in fact stop at unfamiliar words and mentally “sound them out".”  If it turned out to be a word they had heard and used they did this quite rapidly and went on with reading; if it were a word they had never heard before they did pause.  Some would try to infer it from context. Some would simply go on reading without understanding. That depended on the instructions they had bee given – read as fast as possible vs. understand as well as you can – and in part because of previous instruction and habits.  But proper studies show that fast readers do learn “whole words” after a while, as you and I do, but they have the ability to pause and ‘sound out’ words when they have to.  And of course those taught to guess get some right and some not right and appear to be reading fast but there are understanding problems.

Of course reading with understanding requires efforts to expand vocabulary – which is why “reading at grade level” with censored works of limited vocabulary is so dreary. 

About 2,000 words are sufficient to read and speak the English language, but if you want to enjoy literature you need the ability to read and understand more..  At some point reading ability is in fact dependent on IQ. At lower levels this isn’t really true. All kids from “dull normal” up can learn to read and write the basic 1500 to 2000 words required for reasonable communication. Some dull normals will never go beyond that. Some will, and in fact expanding their vocabulary may be good for them and expand mental horizons.  All this seems like basic common sense, and it is, but there is very little common sense, or even uncommon sense, among the conclusions of professors of education, many of whom have never actually taught a single student to read in their lives.  I don’t say this as a canard.  When my wife was working on her reading system we met such professors. They were convinced they understood the situation and didn’t need to waste their time teaching normal children to read. They could leave that to their students.  They were working on something more important.

 

English is over 90% phonetic.  Some words, like though the rough cough plough me through, have to be memorized; but most of the words commonly used are thoroughly phonetic.  Good reading programs understand this and deal with it. Whole word instruction simply assumes that all the words have to learned as if they were Chinese ideographs, because some must be. And I better stop before I get upset and ramble on for hours, which I can.

 

The important point is that if kids can’t read – if they have to rely on guessing – they will never be good readers.  Yes you may have to be told what illiterate means if you never saw the word before. On the other hand if you know literate and you know something of the rules of English words – say by 7th grade – you will probably see the word, sound it out, and understand what it means.  Now true  that’s a guess and can lead to mistakes. I could tell stories of some of the mistakes I made because words sound alike. Also knowing how to read the word bitch can get you in trouble in some social situations. I could tell you stories. But if you cannot read a word – which is to say pronounce it – you must show it to someone to learn both how to pronounce it and to define it. That slows learning something awful.  With modern computer equipment perhaps this requirement will change, but I would not bet my child’s future on that.  Teach them to read. It will take a couple of hundred hours – fewer if you use a systematic program like my wife’s – and it’s a cheap insurance policy.  Illiterates in the US are not likely to succeed.  There are exceptions but illiteracy is a serous handicap.

 

We got back from our medical appointments and the car drove nicely to the local grocery store where it promptly died.  It is 95 out there and that may have something to do with it. I don’t know. AAA towed us to our local friendly mechanic and he got us home.  A trying day all around.  I’ll see what I can do later tonight or tomorrow.