3 important reasons to stick with phonics

Change is not always better. If it isn't broken, don’t fix it. Stick with phonics!

Most Americans are very concerned about our educational decline. Reader’s Digest® took a poll about what issues are most important to our country. The vote was overwhelmingly for better education and literacy. In fact, RD sponsored a “Make It Matter Day” on Saturday, Oct. 3, 2010, as a national volunteer day of reading, writing, and learning. Liz Kennedy wrote a wonderful RD article called, 5 Ways You Can Promote Reading, (Find out how you can foster a love of reading at home, in school and in your own community), which begins, 

“We asked you to choose the cause that matters most to you. Your votes are in and the winner is literacy and education. On October 3rd, 2010, Reader’s Digest will rally behind this cause on Make It Matter Day. In the meantime, here are 5 simple ways you can promote reading and literacy.” See back issues on www.rd.com 

RD supported events across the country on Saturday, Oct. 3, 2010, participating in educational and literacy activities at libraries, schools, YMCAs, and Boys & Girls Clubs of America. They gave several ideas for people to get involved. 

So, what’s the point, here? All change is not an improvement, as our educational decline shows. PFT was supposed to create a Great Society with educational excellence in the 1960s-70s, yet in 2010 we were more backwards than ever! Still are. The changes made were NOT an improvement, as time has shown, yet as a country we persist with faulty reading methods. 

Even those with good intentions, such as RD and its readers, know there’s a huge problem, but don’t know what’s wrong with the current system or where to look for help. Too often we follow the propaganda for “change” without understanding the cost of bad change. All change that glitters is not golden. Truth is eternal and unchanging. 

As discussed in Vol. 3 of "It's Not Rocket Surgery!", did you know that there is a world-wide gender gap in reading, especially with whole language or sight-reading methods? Science has shown that boys are very different from girls in fetal development, emotional response, brain differentiation, and such. The multi-focus teaching methods above favor girls in academic achievement. However, when the single-focus approach of systematic phonics is used, the sex differences are eliminated, with the boys even outperforming the girls sometimes.

One of my Examiner.com articles discussed the Visual Attention Span (VAS) Theory, which explains why sight-reading doesn't work well. VAS is the number of letters (not sounds) that can be held in short-term [visual] memory and, as children mature, their VAS increases. The more letters a student can hold in his or her short term memory, the better he or she will fare with whole language/[sight-word] methods (which involve a lot of memorization). 

Out of the VAS clinical practice has come the results that since boys mature more slowly than girls, boys tend to have lower VAS scores and do worse at reading in whole language/balanced literacy classrooms. But in systematic phonics classrooms, where children are required to process sounds as opposed to memorizing letters, VAS is not a factor and there is no gender gap. The creators of VAS Theory use systematic phonics, succeeding in teaching 100% of their students to read, with data based on their study of more than 3000 children. http://www.vasresearch.com/index.html 

Did you know that many speed-readers are usually sight-readers? Speed-reading is easier when you have a limited vocabulary because you only have to pick up a small percentage of the words on a page and contextually fill in the blanks in your mind. Speed-reading is a terrible way to read (unless you’re scanning a large legal document). 

My father, a very gifted genius who taught me to read phonetically when I was 3, hated speed-reading because a person misses the flavor of the language, the nuances and style of the writer that way. In fact, when I didn't get an “A” in a high school speed-reading class, my father praised me for NOT excelling at speed-reading! 

And consider that when Japanese is translated into its phonetic sounds and written with the alphabet, it’s easier and faster to read than the traditional pictograms. It becomes more universally understood as well. One example is when Japanese names are translated phonetically and written on a TV screen during the Olympics. Everyone can sound them out reasonably.

Again, knowing that boys fall behind with whole language or sight-reading methods, a wise parent will make sure that her son or daughter has systematic, synthetic phonics taught as his/her method of reading! Since reading is the foundation of everything else, s/he will have a much better chance to be his/her brightest self. 

(Note: I can’t stand it when people mix singular nouns with plural pronouns, such as, ‘your child will be their best self’. “Their” (more than one) does not describe “child” (only one). Hence, my use of the "his/her".)

http://thegodfreymethod.com/content/SeeingtheEmperorsNewClothes3importantreasonstostickwithphonics