On 11/9/19 3:10 pm, Clare Snyder wrote:
On Wed, 11 Sep 2019 00:16:56 -0400, micky
wrote:

alt.home.repair added. Best to reply to this one.


OT How old are you and how were you taught to read?

I heard a very interesting radio show tonight, and apparently the same
fight about how to teach reading, that was going on at least since 1951
is still going on.


When I was 5, in 1952, (and of course they'd been debating it at the
board of education for months or years before that), there was a contest
between what was then called "Word recognition" and phonetics. Later
these were known as whole word and phonics, and probably other names
too.

Word recognition won, by the time I started first grade, but our first
grade teacher, Miss Maxwell was 64 and entering her last year of
teaching. She was not inclined to learn something new (which she
probably had doubts about anyhow), so we learned phonetically.
Everyone of us could read before we left for Xmas vacation, including
the 2 girls who never knew the answer to questions. (and the one who
stuttered, though I don't really think the two are related.)


Since then, a 3rd choice has reared its head, 3 cueing systems, where
the reader tries to figure out the word from context: semantic,
syntactic and graphophonic cues. I don't know what those words mean.
On the radio they talked about the rest of the text, pictures, and
something else. Did any of you get taught with a 3 cueing system?
I started school in '57 and was taught a combination of Phonics and
word recognition. Word recognition also included some level of
context. That 3 pronged method had me reading at a grade 3 level by
the end of first grade. I became a voracious reader - both fiction and
non-fiction - much of which was technical material. Without the
phonetic component, it is MUCH more difficult to become fluent. My
girls started school in 1987/88 and struggled until WE started
teaching them basic phonics. Didn't help that we had them in French
Immersion. I think they could read French better than English by grade
4. Oldest daughter does a LOT of reading (has to for her postgrad
course-work!!!) - and enjoys reading for pleasure when she has time -
She moved several hundred pounds of books in her last move, and has a
pretty fair-sized set of book shelves in the apartment

Hmm, I started in 1957 too. Learnt phonetics, learnt word roots,
breaking words into syllables, suffixes and prefixes. We learnt through
semantics and syntactics as we went though we didn't know the words used
to describe what we were doing. Graphonics is something you develop
naturally as a voracious reader, which I was. I was always way ahead of
my year level in reading - reading books for year 8 whilst in year 4,
for instance. It helped that my parents were also voracious readers and
there was always a library of books, magazines and the like in the
house. Having a mother who was a university graduate was also a benefit.

My wife learnt English as a second language with whole word recognition.
That relies on rote memory far too much and, as an adult, is not an
appropriate way to learn a new language, especially when the script you
learnt as a child was derived from Sanskrit. Try, for instance, to learn
a new alphabet as an adult and you will get what I mean. The ability to
do rote learning diminishes from the onset of the teenage years. Even
now, some 39 years after my wife first learnt English, she still has
difficulty breaking a word up into syllables and this hinders her
pronunciation immensely.

Parents are the greatest influence upon children with regard to reading.
When I took up teaching, I had a mixed bag of students, some very
literate, some bordering on bare minimum literacy. I used to ask those
students who had poor literacy levels if their parents were readers, had
books and newspapers in the house, were regular visitors to the library,
etc. In pretty much all cases, the answers were no to all the questions.

You can teach whatever you want in a school environment but that
learning environment needs appropriate reinforcement at home. Without
it, the learning withers.

--

Xeno


Nothing astonishes Noddy so much as common sense and plain dealing.
(with apologies to Ralph Waldo Emerson)