Arizona Republic has a good article about the use of phonics in teaching kids how to read.
A 2000 report by the National Reading Panel virtually put an end to “The Reading Wars.” It deemed phonics as critically important combined with whole-word strategies to enhance comprehension.
Basic phonetic rules help children sound out words, but other common words still need to be memorized – words such as “the,” “have,” “were” – because they don’t follow any but the most complicated rules.
Established by Congress in 1997, the panel was charged with a comprehensive review of research on how best to teach children to read. The answer, it said, lies in a balanced approach between methods, combining the best of phonics and whole language with good literature.
“You need all of those pieces to put together a strong reader,” Tankersley said.
For the most part, that is what is happening in Arizona. In a 2003 review of reading programs by a panel appointed by the state Education Department, the ones that ranked best had strong phonics instruction.
The DHM is pleased and amused. The DHM comes from a long line of teachers and school administrators, not all of whom have been equally jubilant about the decision of the HM and the DHM to homeschool our brood of seven.
Some fifteen years ago the DHM had a discussion about this with a dear, elderly relative, a retired schoolteacher. She taught school in the Chicago area during the ’20s and 30′s- during a great wave of immigration from Eastern Europe. She had many interesting stories to tell, and she dearly loved her students and was passionate about education.
So she naturally expressed some concern about this strange thing called homeschooling to the DHM.
“Are you sure you’re qualified, my dear?” She asked the DHM.
The DHM said she was.
“But it’s very important that they learn to read, ” said the Elderly Relation, “And phonics is the best way to do that. Have you had the proper training in teaching phonics?”
The DHM had read a book or two, so she said that yes, she knew how teach phonics, and she certainly agreed that phonics was the way to go. The DHM also asked if the Elderly RElation was sure that phonics was still taught in school, because it hadn’t been taught when the DHM was in school, nor was it taught in most public schools that she knew of.
The Elderly Relation was shocked, and somewhat disbelieving. She was sure that public schools still taught phonics, because otherwise, how were the children learning to read?
Apparently, they weren’t:
California embraced whole language, with a statewide adoption of whole-language textbooks in 1987. Five years later, the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed California had the fifth-lowest reading scores in the country. By 1995, the state’s scores had dropped to the lowest in the nation, and whole language was blamed.
Consider this news story, that reads like something from Saturday Night Live:
A new study reveals that the four counties of the Rio Grande Valley are all above the national average for illiteracy.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 19% of American adults cannot read a newspaper.
But the numbers are higher here in the Valley where 40 percent of Willacy County residents are considered illiterate.
Ad it gets worse from there. Illiteracy stands at about 43 percent for Cameron County residents.
The study show 50 percent in Hidalgo County and 60 percent in Starr County.
Harlingen Consolidated Independent School District is releasing a summer reading list to help its students:
In other news, 60 % of the students are blind, so the school is issuing sunglasses to help them, and 40% are deaf, so the school is giving them iPods.
Is it any wonder we are in so much trouble?
Updated to add this story, which actually happened to our son-in-law Shasta this week. The timing is perfect.
Shasta went to the blood center to sell some plasma. He was a first-time donor, so he had to fill out all kinds of paperwork, check forms, prove his identity, etc, etc. You can’t sell plasma if you’re not an American citizen, and they have to document things like tattoos and piercings- it’s a long, tedious process.
It’s made more tedious when the person running that side of the clinic is like the person Shasta dealt with. Let me clarify up front that this person is an American citizen born and bred here in the USA, white as white bread and pasta- the point being, there are no allowances to be made here.
One of the questions was the seemingly simple “What language do you speak?”
“English,” said Shasta.
The woman at the computer looked confused and stared blankly at him, “What? Don’t you mean American?”
“No.” Said Shasta. “I speak English.”
“No,” she said, “you must mean American. You weren’t born in England, were you?”
“No,” Said Shasta, who is stubborn and implacable in the face of ignorance. “I am an American, and Americans speak English.”
“No, they don’t,” she said. “We speak American. People born in England speak English.”
They went round and round for a while, and finally he relented and let her put ‘American’ down as language on her computer, although he refused to do the same thing on his own forms. She claimed that the computer would not accept English for the native language of a person born in America, but would automatically recategorize the ‘English speaker’ as foreign born. Shasta ignored her and the computer he used for his processing, of course, did not do that. He was so annoyed that he made her leave her desk and come look at his computer to see that ‘English’ is indeed what Americans speak.
Yes, yes, I know that the British born are snickering and agreeing that Americans certainly do not speak English, but even Churchill acknowledged that it’s a common language (two peoples divided by a common language). Humour aside, there is no official language called ‘American.’ Somebody who works at a blood bank and presumably has at least a high school diploma and probably a two year college degree ought to know that. An eighth grade drop out really should not have been baffled by Shasta’s claim that he speaks English.
It’s just one of about a thousand daily symptoms of something much bigger.
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>>> “Basic phonetic rules help children sound out words, but other common words still need to be memorized – words such as “the,” “have,” “were”
Now I’m trying to figure out why ‘the’ is hard to sound out.
Can you think of another CV word where the V is a schwa and orthographically represented by “e?”
Here are other CV’s where the final V is orthographically represented by “e:”
be, me
Here are CV’s where the final V is a schwa:
duh…. I can’t think of any others except the way we represent the sound of a letter, and we don’t usually write that
The rule is that vowels that fall at the end of a syllable [usually] say their second sound (that’s from Romalda Spaulding’s Writing Road to Reading and others based on her method) — the second sound being the sames as the vowel’s name. So “the” is really pronounced /thee/, not /thuh/, even though it degenerates into a schwa in some cases during normal speech.
I say “in some cases” because when “the” comes before a word starting with a vowel you do say /thee/ — the angel, the elephant, the apple, the earth, even though we usually say thuh man, thuh dog, thuh pear, thuh world…
When I’m teaching my kids to read I always have them say /thee/ when they’re sounding out the word, even if they’re going to say /thuh/ when they read the sentence “the fast way.” Being Southern, I do that sort of thing a LOT, for example, having my child sound out /pehn/ even though we say /pin/ in normal speech, and I’m not about to correct their pronunciation away from our family’s regional accent.
In short, for phonics lessons, the schwa does not exist.
HTH.
You really don’t just teach “the” as a sight word? “Thee” for the is hypercorrection and it sounds REALLY bad when reading aloud.
I don’t consider it a hypercorrection — see the rule I mentioned above, plus the examples where you really do (or at least, everyone I know really does) say /thee/ in normal speech. I think it sounds better when reading aloud, too. To say /thuh/ before a vowel you have to have a glottal stop in there, which isn’t as pretty as the way /thee/ flows into a vowel.
And just to be clear, I’m not saying /theeeee/. It’s not a long, drawn-out sound and it doesn’t get emphasized in speech or reading aloud.
And Dictionary.com agrees with me.
If you could see things from a six year old’s pov, I think you wouldn’t find it so difficult to see why it’s easier to memorize ‘the’ then to sound it out. Is it a harder ‘th’ as is ‘this’ or a softer version, as in thistle? Is the e here pronounced like the e in ‘be’ or the schwa? It’s a schwa- and as mercybemoaned is about to point out, the may be the only consonant vowel short word combination where this is the case.
And to our ears, we don’t see much of a difference between pronouncing the to rhyme with bee or to rhyme with ‘buh,’ but to a six year old, this is a complex issue.
I would say ‘to’ is a case, though this is presumably irrelevant, as we could then just say, “Okay, ‘to’ should also be memorized.” Again, I don’t see how sounding out ‘the’ is any harder than any other word that could have a soft or hard TH, or that has a vowel with more than one possible pronunciation.
To usually is one of the words that we tell children to memorize, as is do.
I realize you don’t see why. Shrug.
How many kids have you taught to read?
That was supposed to be a reply to Timotheus.
You have a couple of connection points in this entry that made me want to comment. The adaption of whole-language by the state of California two years before the birth of our eldest was one of the initial things that led us into homeschooling. A teacher friend was forbidden to teach her students to read using any other method.
Around 1990 or so, in Arizona, we had our second child tested for learning disabilities…not to have a label but to garner some strategies to help him. The woman who tested him, highly recommended to us by other homeschooling families, was a professor in the special ed. department at ASU. She told us the very interesting information that only those training to be special ed. teachers were taught how to teach phonics. Every other education major was learning the whole language method of reading instruction.
I started school in the early nineties, and my grade school had phonics. They were at odds with the state because they disagreed with whole-language methods, so had to develop an entire system on their own, as it was not provided. We had photo-copied hand-written and type-written worksheets! Out of the three elementary schools in our district, you could tell where each student began (the schools combined when I was in 5th grade) by the reading skills.
Interestingly, my grandmother retired from teaching when I was still in school. She was born in 1920. My mom told her we were planning to homeschool (mind you, she taught, my aunt had taught & worked for the state DOE where she lived, my uncle just retired a couple of years ago from being a teacher, then guidance counselor, my mom taught for a while as did my father – albiet, he taught people to work on cars at a tech school in the 70′s). My grandmother’s reply to this revelation? “Good. Tell her to make sure she teaches those great-grandchildren of mine phonics. The schools stopped and the children are not learning to read properly now.” I love my Grandma!
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