[Janet Kenny]

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).]

[David Rosenthal]

Thanks Janet. I would love the correct link, or a citation to the research study if you have it. I am a teacher and early literacy is one of my areas. I love Mem Fox, and the study sounds facinating and important. Please post whatever other information is in the article. Meanwhile, I'll hope it is in the next issue of Reading Research Quarterly.

David R.

[Janet Kenny]

David,
I'll PM the complete text to you. There are fierce copyright laws in Australia.

Janet

[Patricia A. Marsh]

Janet & David--

Click on Janet's link and, after scrolling down to the website's search box, type in "phonics" . . . voila! . . . the article is one of several on the subject.

Our daughter learned to read before she was four years old, thanks to roadsigns, headlines, Dr. Seuss and her very own bookclub membership. Before starting to grade school, she had outgrown the good Dr. and was more interested in reading 2nd grade level storybooks. So, when her first-grade teacher raised hell with me because phonics was the <u>only</u> way to teach a child how to read and reading comprehension was, for all intents and purposes, immaterial to learning--??!!--well, let's just say that I'm glad our daughter never lost her love for books <u>despite</u> learning phonics as an afterthought.

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

Honestly, I think phonics is useful as one more trick in the bag.

I remember when I was learning to read, since I had a much larger verbal vocabulary than I did a written one. Phonics allows a child with such to parse a word they've never read before but have heard, though there are still some problems. In particular, I remembered having to read a story about "busy chick" to my 1st grade teacher and saying "bussy" only to be corrected and told it was pronounced "bizzy." Suddenly the story about the hyperactive chick made much more sense, though my teacher was not able to offer any explanation of why "bus" was pronounced "biz" in "busy" and "business."

I was also mispronouncing "automaton" for years because I'd read it many times before I heard anyone actually say it.

Kids learn phonics as a way to make sense of written words, but also quickly learn that it's not universal tool, and you realize that "busy" and such are not pronounced as they should be.

I was also pronouncing the "h" in "herbal" for years until corrected to the illogical American pronunciation, which now annoys me when I hear Brits get to pronounce the h. Unless they're Cockney, which is I think where the American's got the h-dropping from.

[Janet Kenny]

Patricia,
Thanks for that. Also you can click on "Commentary" and the article is linked there.
Janet

[Mark Allinson]

Kevin, the Australian accent is supposed to be a descendent of the cockney, and yet we have no truck with 'erbs.

It's hhhhherbs all the way down here.

It sounds weird to us when we hear 'erbs on tv or the movies.

------------------
Mark Allinson

[David Rosenthal]

Patricia's daughter's first grade teacher was a hack if she truly thought comprehension was immaterial. But it probably was not entirely her fault -- she was most likely trained by true hacks who actually thought such things.

Of course phonics (or more broadly grapho-phonemic cueing -- the process of correlating graphic symbols to speech sounds) has a role in reading development. But what this research shows is precisely that it doesn't hold a primary role, and specifically that phonics -- the ability to isolate and recognize individual phonemes in a text -- is of relatively minor importance in learning to read. This is directly contrary to the current politically favored view that mastery of phonemic awareness is a necessary pre-requisite to reading, and that phonics is the primary skill in reading development.

The wider professional view is, and always has been that the most effective curricula take a balanced approach incorporating skill and strategy development in all three of the key cueing systems: grapho-phonemic, syntactic, and semantic. When we read, all of these things are working together. If you are just using "phonics," you aren't reading, you're decoding. I can decode a submarine technical manual, but my understanding of it would be very limited. The recent phonics craze here in the USA is producing fourth and fifth graders who may be proficient decoders, but don't know what they're "reading." In the biz, we call it "word calling." Very sad and maddening. I could rant a long time about the National Reading Panel report and No Child Left Behind and how they are destroying public education, but I am too tired right now.

But I will recall the thread of an argument by literacy researcher James Cunningham (not the poet). One thing he points out is that the "pendulum" in the reading wars is unlike a real pendulum in that it spends all of its time at one or another of the extremes and never passes through the middle (aide -- there is similar pendulum in literary and cultural criticism, IMO). He also points out that as long as we let legislators and the political process control curriculum we are doomed. We need to take teaching seriously as a profession and let that profession establish its best practices. He asks, "why don't we hold an election to vote on what is the best treatment for, say, lung cancer?"

I thought said I was too tired to rant. Better stop now.

David R.



[This message has been edited by David Rosenthal (edited August 16, 2005).]

[H Roland Angus R]

Originally posted by Kevin Andrew Murphy:
Unless they're Cockney, which is I think where the American's got the h-dropping from.

Presumably it's an attempt to use the 'correct', i.e. French pronunciation. Like the American tendency to say 'fillay' for fillet.

[Marcia Karp]

Originally posted by Janet Kenny:
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

I have to disagree with the logic of this -- that silent reading precludes sounds -- and since Robert Graves says it better than I can, I'll let him to the talking. From The Common Asphodel

THE OUTWARD AND INWARD EARS

Though the poet ought to write as if his work were intended to be read aloud, in practice the reading aloud of a poem distracts attention from its subtler properties by emphasizing the more obvious ones. The outward ear is easily deceived. A beautiful voice can make magic even with bad or fraudulent poetry which the eye, as the most sophisticated organ of sense, would reject at once; for the eye is in close communication with the undeceivable inward ear.

Best,
Marcia