In 1955, Rudolf Flesch wrote a book that revolutionized the teaching of reading in American schools Why Johnny Can't Read; And What You Can Do About It. His solution was phonics, a system of sounding out words. Although, I still grew up with Dick and Jane, I was also taught reading using this new system, with its classroom charts: at, b-at, c-at, f-at, m-at, s-at, th-at. Sesame Street still uses this approach.
However, in the 1970s, when I was studying to become a reading teacher, phonics was no longer seen as the cure-all for Johnny's problems. For one thing, English letters are notoriously unsystematic in their pronunciations. Vowels are horrrible, but even some consonants shift from hard to soft. How did we come up with the spelling Cholmondeley for a word that sounds like "chumly"?
The biggest problem is that to read fluently, you cannot read a letter at a time. You read in chunks of letters, not just in words, but in whole phrases. When you read fluently, you are recognizing the shapes of words. (This is why reading a paragraph typed in all uppercase is so difficult; the shapes all look alike.) And if you are reading only a sound at a time, then you are reading so slowly that you're in danger of not comprehending anything you read. Phonics was a fine supplemental strategy, but students need to be weaned quickly from sounding out words to sight-reading, recognizing words on sight.
Another breakthrough in teaching was the recognition of different learning styles. I'm a visual learner; so when information is presented so that I can see it (either in text or pictures), I learn much more easily than when it is presented aurally, (like a lecture, or spoken commands).
I'm reminded of this old debate between the two camps of reading teachers, the phonics camp and the sight-reading camp, because I'm once again trying to scale the wall of katakana. I'm like the little first grader, sounding out my words one syllable at a time. But katakana frustrates me, because half the time, even after I recognize all the kana, I still can't figure what foreign word it is meant to represent. wain risuto (wine list), kaaten (curtain), esukareetaa (escalator).
So yesterday, I decided to give up sounding out katakana words. I'm just going to memorize them. I'm not going to learn katakana to figure out words, I'm going to memorize entire words so that I will learn katakana in context. Eureka! I think I've got it. Suddenly I was over the barrier.
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens
September 24, 2002
Comments
I've been reading a fascinating book on the fate of human societies and have just reached the discussion on the development of language. Your comments bring to mind the difference between languages such as ours that use an alphabet and languages like Japanese, and its native phonetic writing system, which is a syllabary. For languages that are constructed with vowel/consonant pairings, it's a beautifully simple solution to representing sounds. But for languages like English it's impossible. I had the same problem with Katakana but for some reason Hiragana always seemed much easier. I suppose it's because it didn't require the jump from interpreting the signs into Japanese sounds and then subsequently translating those sounds into the correct English word.
Comment by: jbl. Posted October 1, 2002 10:41 AM.
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Phonics vs. sightreading.