While I'm pretty sure that only a few Hatrack River members write children's books this discussion may be important for anyone who writes for adults using a full vocabulary in their work.
posted
This is a fascinating article for me. I've known at least two dyslexics, and dated another. My boyfriend and one of the friends were crippled by it; the other friend currently works as a writer and reads more books than anyone else I know. He was tought to read by his father - also a dsylexic.
I also remember doing reading tutoring in an elementary school a few years back... the two kids I tutored exhibited almost exactly the behavior this article describes. When they read the books the teacher gave me for them, books they'd clearly read many, many times, they went with speed and confidence. Faced with any new vocabulary, though, they seized up. When I tried to show them how to sound words out, as I'd been tought, they just stared blankly. Clearly, this was a skill they'd never been tought. They even had a lot of trouble recognizing old vocabulary words in a new setting... they weren't reading at all, but memorizing.
Sometimes I think public schools do more harm than good.
posted
Thanks for sharing that article. Fascinating!
Thank God my dear grammy gave me those phonic books and records back in the day. Now I'm wondering if this could be why my brother and sister don't like to read. I remember them using flashcards to memorize words.
Could good old American competitiveness be contributing to this trend?
I know a couple of families with preschoolers; the parents drill the kids on words daily. They enjoy showing off the fact that their child can read, and they are not even in school yet. Smugly they gloat about how smart their children are. Shocking!
Also, I saw a sitcom the other day, where two families where having a sort of competition over who's kid could learn to read first. Sight-reading can be learned really fast, so of course those kids will be able to read faster, sooner. Very sad.
Well, I'm going home to drill myself on the phonics of the German alphabet. I think I was recognizing the words by sight before. I'd hate to become a German dyslexic.
posted
That's a very interesting article, and the theory it propounds makes a lot of sense to me (as someone who firmly believes that the phonetic method of learning to read is more logical and easier than the alternative).
However, it is unfortunate that the author does not seem to have been able to conduct proper tests to verify this theory; the test results reported do not seem to have followed correct scientific procedure in that they are inferring the initial circumstances that has led to the outcome (i.e. which method was used to teach the child) based on the outcome and the theory to be tested -- it is, if I understand correctly, using highly circular reasoning.
I would very much like to see the results of better-conducted testing in this field.
posted
I think it would be hard to better control the tests as it seems most children are taught a combination technique and children have such widely varying interests and aptitudes. I'll let you know in 20 years the result of my personal experiment. My wife's friend whose husband and 2 older sons are dyslexic has a late life child she's just starting on phonics. If he learns to read very well its good enough for me.
I had mixed feelings about posting this as it is most relevent for the handful of writers who are trying to make a go at children's novels. But then I remembered that the major difference between me (academic success and a good day job) and my elementary school friend (dead end job after dropping out) was that at age eight I discovered Heinlein and he didn't.
[This message has been edited by keldon02 (edited May 05, 2005).]
posted
... i think i believe what this article is trying to say. i'm also afraid that i will never be able to write "childrens" material for this reason... do they even realize that technically, even the Chinese don't do it by "sight" they learn to work out those symbols as having a definitive basis in simpler ideas and sounds, called, i believe, radicals, which then get built up to being more complex.
i also now see why i used to hate Suess and still do. heh, i like to hear how he hated writing those too though
posted
Reminds me of that email with the letters all screwed up. The thing is, a method can teach you to read effectively but not equip you with the ability to spell or write.
Posts: 366 | Registered: Sep 2006
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posted
Listened to Blumenfeld in college. Could barely stay awake. Guy's smart, but could sure stand some help in the public speaking department! He's possibly right, but I'd like to see more convincing evidence before assigning blame with the certainty he does.
Posts: 491 | Registered: Oct 2004
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posted
I was homeschooled in the beginning and my parents were Blumenfeld followers with all his books. I had friends my age who went to public school from the beginning.
Now, obviously we were different people, and I don't know how much our relative personalities and intelligence levels affected things, but the end result is that I became an avid reader at age seven and have never stopped since, and am now writing as well. My friends, some of whom I still keep up with, rarely read at all, and feel that reading is 'too hard and boring'. They were taught the sight reading method, where I learned phonetics.
I don't know for a certainty that the difference is wholly in the teaching methods, but time after time people I meet who love reading are usually people who learned phonetically.
I'm curious, how many of us learned to read using which method? As I've said, hooked on phonics really worked for me but are any of you guys avid readers that learned to read using the sight method?
posted
I taught myself to read from Sesame Street, which is phonics (at least when I was a kid, don't know if that has changed). I started school already knowing how to read, so I have no memory of which method they used.
I've been thinking about this a lot since I read that article, and I think that "sight" reading is actually a more advanced form of reading than phonics. Let me explain: When I read, I rarely "hear" the words in my mind. I recognize each word, understand the meaning, and go on to the next. I can read very quickly with this method. I know that I'm not pronouncing the words in my head because there have been times where I was reading aloud and I came to a word that I knew, but had no idea how to pronounce. And I had never noticed that I didn't know how to pronounce it until I had to read it aloud.
When I hit a stretch of dialect or some other non-standard spelling, my speed goes way down and I get fairly frustrated. But I'm not dyslexic.
So I think that automatic recognition is a step up from sounding out words, but if you try to skip the phonics step then you'll run into trouble.
--Mel
Oh, I should answer the second part of the question too: I love to read. I will read any text that is put in front of me, because I can't help it. So I try to make sure that the words I see actually form a story.
[This message has been edited by MCameron (edited May 06, 2005).]
posted
I was taught using phonics. I also had a phonics kit at home that had fun games, activities and records (yes, records) with a song and story about each letter of the alphabet. And I LOVED watching Sesame Street!
I still haven't gotten through the full article, but thanks to what I have already read, I finally have an understanding of what sight reading is, and I can't understand how it could possibly work.
I mean, unless a word is memorized, a kid won't have any idea what it is. They aren't equiped to sound it out or to understand how the letters work together so that they can figure it out. And how do you make the jump from reading to writing. It appears that writing is a secondary skill taught after the child has memorized his/her 50 words.
I can understand the application of sight reading for the deaf. How can you sound a word out, if you can't hear? But for hearing children, sight reading sounds a bit like putting the cart before the horse.
As for how this relates to dyslexia, I don't know. The bit that I read frustrated me because I was trying to wrap my head around the idea of memorizing words instead of reading them.
However, how can children be expected to learn properly, if they aren't given the proper tools. I have a friend who learned using a whole word method. To this day she can memorise words and numbers with near photographic accuracy, but her reasoning and comprehension skills are below average as are her writing and language skills. Is this connected to the way she learned to read? I don't know for sure, but it is something I have wondered about.
Phonics teaches more than just the ABCs. It teaches deductive reasoning, probably even more so than mathematics (something I think I learned mostly through memorization because, Heaven forbid you count on your fingers -- you should just know it), and it teaches the principles of writing and spelling. That is a lot to learn, and it might take a bit longer to grasp all of it, but in the end the payoff seems to be higher.
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I've rambled for far too long and I really should go and read more of that article. Feel free to ignore all of that.
posted
I learned to read by sight, but I wanted to read so badly I think I would have learned to read no matter how they taught me.
Somewhere along the way I understood how to sound out words, but I don't think I was taught that in school.
Maybe it had something to do with what RH said about mathematics because I also love doing math. I learned arithmetic through memorization, too, and I still think of the way I read in terms of memorization.
I certainly wouldn't recommend teaching anyone else that way, though. Phonics is a much better way to learn.
posted
i was a tough one for the teachers to crack
they tried so many methods on me that i don't even know all of them, but i do know that they were teaching me phonics and sight together at some point.
i have never been a good memorizer, never. the sight reading drove me nuts, and was probably what hindered me in learning to read. when i finally progressed to the point intellectually that i knew how to ignore the teachers when they were trying sight reading, and pay attention only to phonics and the other deductive reasoning methods, that is when i started to perform. eventually i learned how to reason out not only how to sound the words out, but how to sound the sentence out. i learned flow and rythm, entirely on my own. i also figured out how to reason out the meanings of words, on my own (teachers kept trying to teach me it, but they were doing so by memorization rather than reasoning.)
i didn't start to love reading until like 4th grade. that was the first year in which i was allowed to go to the school library and choose my own reading material. i chose "The Boxcar Children" and have been loving reading since in fact, by about 7th grade i was reading college level material with ease. it was still in fourth or fifth grade that my mom found me in our basement reading the medical encyclopedias, i probably didn't understand a whole lot of it, though my mom assures me that i understood a surprising amount.
i generally like to try to choose material that is above my own reading level and comprehension level, although that is becoming very difficult to find these days.
posted
I don't remember what method I learned by. I'm reasonably sure that I learned how to read before I went to school, but it's all fuzzy. Maybe I'll ask my mom.
All I know is that reading in my house was highly encouraged, and sometimes even used as reward/punishment when we were really little. My favorite time of day (my brothers', too) was when we'd all sit in the living room right before bed while my mom or dad read us a chapter of Tom Sawyer. I remember one time (I forget what I did) when my mom sent me to bed without Tom Sawyer after I did something wrong, and I sat at the top of the stairs while she read to my brothers, trying to catch what was happening.
posted
I've no real idea what they used on me at school; the bits of learning to read I remember were with my parents or some early computer programs ("Reader Rabbit", anyone?) Both were using phonics.
I love to read. I read Tolkien when I was seven, Homer's Oddyssey when I was eleven. Very confusing to the librarians, who used to catch me in the adult section and try to convince me that no, really, I wanted to be reading these *little* books about alligators, not Arthur C. Clarke....
Bah. But anyway, yup, an avid reader here. My bro learned a similar way: he's far less of an academic type than me and I remember him having trouble in school before the parents pulled us both out and started homeschooling us. He's an avid reader too, if slower, and was reading Steinbeck and Shakespeare by choice in his early teens.
posted
As far as developing a love of reading and writing, I have a lot of people to thank for that.
The principal at the elementary school I attended had instituted a mandatory reading time for all students in all grades. It lasted for 20-40 minutes every day and was called U.S.S.R. -- Undisturbed, Sustained, Silent, Reading. We could read anything we wanted as long as it was book. As I recall, comic books did not count. We also had scheduled library time at least once a week, sometimes twice a week.
The school also had an annual writing competition. You could write a short story or poetry and each class would have one winner whose writing would go into an anthology. This was my favourite time of year. I never won, which was very disappointing, but I was a class finalist for two or three years.
I also remember that in grade one, we had a variety of readers that we had to work through. Not everyone progressed at the same rate and that was all right. We were given some leeway in how fast we learned. However there were incentives to work hard. As we completed each reader, we would get to go on a special outing with our teacher. I remember going for lunch at McDonald's (a real treat when you're 5 ), and going for ice cream cones once at the local ice cream parlour.
I also owe a lot to parents who encouraged us to read. We would read together after supper and on holiday trips, mom would always read aloud as dad drove.
When I was a teen, my dad introduced The Reading Program for my sisters and me. For every novel ("novel" length varied a bit for my youngest sister who was only 8 or so at the time, but for me and my middle sister, books had to be at least 100 pages, extra long books - about 400-500 pages were worth double) we read, we would recieve $1. For every two books we read, he would buy us another book.
posted
I passed that article on to a writing friend of mine who has dyslexia and she was more dubious of the author's theory. She reminded me that true dyslexia is not the same thing as being a slow reader or having difficulty interpreting words. Dyslexics reverse letters, like "p/q" and "b/d", or flip things upside down. Truly, her brain thinks in a different way than mine does, and I have noted that translates into the way she thinks words should be sounded out. She struggles with spelling at times, but has improved 1000% over the past few years that we've been writing together. Her learning method may have had an affect on her struggle to read, but there is a bigger problem going on than not being able to sound out words.
Posts: 2026 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
I heard once (I don't remember where, I'm afraid, but it was from a source that at least seemed reliable at the time) that dyslexia is usually represented as mixing up similar letter shapes like b/d, but that there is really more of an auditory element than a visual element to it, and that, in fact, p/q were NOT confused because they didn't sound sufficiently similar. b/p would be a much more likely source of confusion, as would m/n and of course b/d. According to this source, the emphasis on the visual was really slowing down effective treatment and workaround schemes for dyslexics.
If true, this would fit with a lack of phonics being related to dyslexia. It would also, Elan, account for
quote:her brain thinks in a different way than mine does, and I have noted that translates into the way she thinks words should be sounded out.
Has anyone else heard this, or heard it refuted?
When I tutor kids for reading, I usually find that they can sight read a set of words well but are very weak on the phonics area. However, to date I have rather a small sample size.
I learned to read from Dick, Jane and Sally--but my teachers always included phonics in the instruction. One thing to remember is that there are LOTS of words that do not follow phonetic pronunciation, and they tend to be the really common, basic words: things like "was," "the," "once," "two," "said," etc. These words have to be memorized. But that's no reason not to learn the phonetic code, so that you can read most words you've never seen and at least make a good stab at the rest. (And even the non-phonetic examples I listed aren't totally non-phonetic.) However, phonics as it's often taught has it's own problems, with rules like "When two vowels go walking..." that are false more often than they are true. If anyone is interested in home-schooling their kids, or has a child who is having trouble reading at school, I'd recommend Reading Reflex by Carmen and Geoffrey MacGuiness.
Ooo... you must be really old, like me. Actually, I learned to read with Jack, Janet and Spot. Same sort of thing. I remember having our teacher read stories to us about the little monkeys A, E, I, O, and U, and their little cousin Y. But when they gave us a BOOK and let us take it HOME and read it, I remember I must have read it ten times that night. I was greedy for reading. It was liberating. No more would I have to wait for my mom to grab some time to read to me, I could now read for myself. And I gobbled up books as fast as I could. The happiest day of reading I remember is when the librarian told me I had graduated beyond the "first grade" books and could read anything else I wanted to in the library. Anything. I too, remember the Boxcar Children, the Oz stories, the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, the Shy Stegosaurus from Cricket Creek, Paddington, and... eventually... A Wrinkle In Time, which led me to a lifetime love of sci-fi and fantasy.
I feel sorry for kids who will have no memories of their childhood beyond the dreck that television provides.
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