A discussion in Australia, about how to teach children to read, seems to link into poetry.
Phonics and reading
Janet
It doesn't seem to link so I'll post extracts below:
Phonics has a phoney role in the literacy wars
Sydney Morning Herald
August 16, 2005
"Children do not need to sound out words to read them, writes Mem Fox.
Phonics is the ability to break up the words on a page into sounds - for example, seeing the word "cat" and being able to say its individual sounds: kuh-a-tuh. Making the right sounds is phonics, but phonics is not reading. Reading is making sense from the page, not sounds...
...Parents often make the understandable mistake of believing that phonically sounding out words is reading. But we do most of our reading in silence: the meaning is on the page, not in the sound. That's why we can read and understand the following, whereas sounding it out would be chaotic and meaningless:
Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is that the frist and lsat ltteers are in the rghit pclae: you can raed it wouthit a porbelm bcuseae we don't raed ervey lteter but the word as a wlohe.
So, hey, waht does this say abuot the improtnace of phnoics in raeidng? Prorbalby that phonics ins't very imoptrnat at all. How apcoltapyic is that, in the cuerrnt licetary wars?
Only 50 per cent of English is phonically simple. In the following sentences, "ough" is pronounced in eight ways: "I thought I'd thoroughly worked through the expenses for the furlough I'd been granted by the borough office (in a tough drought year), but actually it wrought havoc with my budget. I had to cough up so much more that I nearly choked on a doughnut and hiccoughed for ages afterwards."
Is it necessary to have a grasp of phonics in order to be able to read? Broadly speaking, the astonishing and contentious answer is no, otherwise we wouldn't be able to read silently; neither would it be possible for the billions of people in China and Japan to learn to read when no phonics exists in their written language - it's displayed instead in pictographs. Children in China are told what a word is, then they learn to recognise and memorise it.
... Teaching children to read through a phonics-only program is asking them to break reading into tiny pieces and then put it together again. It's difficult, confusing and unnecessary...
...Phonics comes into its own as soon as children begin to learn to write. Josie (who read at three years) is now courageously struggling to write. She has to match the sounds of language to the letters she scrawls across a page. During the complex battle between her brain and her hand she's now coming to grips with phonics and spelling...
Mem Fox was an academic in literacy studies for 24 years. She is the author of Reading Magic: how your child can learn to read before school - and other read-aloud miracles."
[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited August 15, 2005).]