Why Our Children Aren't Reading

 

  In his classic book on Phonics by Rudolf Flesch, "Why Johnny Can't Read and what you can do about it",  Edward Ziegler in his Forward of that book commented on many of Flesch's ideas.  He quotes him regarding changing from reading by Phonics to 'Look-Say':  "...by the 1930s, to rid their classrooms of what one education professor called "heartless drudgery", America abandoned the alphabetic code (which flies in the face of all logic and common sense) and began to teach children to guess and memorize the meanings of the tens of thousands of words they would see in print."

Flesch explains it, "With Phonics-first, you teach a child the word fish by telling him about the sounds of f--'ff'--i--short i---and sh--'sh'.  Then you tell him to blend the sounds from left to right to read the word: 'fish'." 

"In the Look-Say method, you give the child a picture of a fish printed underneath the word, and encourage him to memorize that group of letters that make up the word fish.  Then you print the word again and again in hopes that the child will memorize and remember what the word fish looks like.  You do the same thing more or less with many thousands of other English words." 

"Most such instruction," Flesch insists, "is not reading at all, but 'word-guessing'.  Real Reading isn't taught at all.  Books are put in front of the students, and they are told to guess at the words, or wait until the Teacher tells them the word that is difficult.  And the guessing goes on and on."

Ziegler goes on to say, "Flesch blames the look-say system on our alarming decline in literacy.  Some 27 million American adults are functionally illiterate.  Plus, that number is increading 2.3 million more adults per year!

As for the use of Phonics, many schools claim to use it, but in an incidental way.  The teacher may write a list of words the letter s has in common, such as in the beginning sounds of  sand, soft, and slip.  Flesch remarks that this is not phonics at all, but the memorization of how those words look long before the teacher has let the students in on the secret of the sound of s.

Ziegler continus, Flesch remarks that with phonics instruction, a child learns to read by mid term of first grade.  "There should be no such thing as reading levels", he says.  "Once a child learns to read, he reads." 

I encounterd these same issues when my son, Casey brought home his first-grade reader for me to listen to him read aloud.  Having grown up in a school system that taught Phonics, red flags began to pop up when he read big words like balloon, wagon, and bear.  So how did he know how to say them?  With those words was a picture of a bear pulling a wagon in one hand while holding balloons in the other.  I told him, "You're not reading, you've memorized these words!"  

My solution was to find a book that taught parents how to teach phonics to a child or student.  Even though I had learned to read by phonics outside the continental United States, I didn't remember how I learned it, I just knew that I knew how to read by Phonics.  We removed our son from public school and brought him home to learn to read the logical and common sense way...with Phonics.  There were other school subject and issues besides Reading that bothered me, but the Reading issue was the beginning of the end of his enrollment in public school.

Reading by Phonics is the foundation of all learning.  Without knowing how to read, one cannot learn math word problems, science, grammar, history, and all the other academic studies.  And, without knowing how to read, knowledge is stunted without ever reading the Classics or stories read just for enjoyment, or enlightenment,  the Holy Bible, or any 'how to' book. 

 If one is left to read simply by the look-say system, the danger is a lack of reading comprehension of what was read, and the reading disease of Dyslexia, that is, reading words backwards, like was and saw, stumbling over words, and slow reading, to name a few.

 Also see other articles on reading difficulties on my Blog, www.janiceportermy.blogspot.com  if you are reading this from Facebook, (Reading With Phonics) :   The Disease You Get in School, How to Reverse Dyslexia, and Why Johnny Can't Read,  Spell, or Write Short Compositions.