> if you just teach phonics you aren't actually helping kids to read (they've tried) because reading is more than just sounds
Of course, decoding isn't sufficient on its own (I can 'read' Portuguese without understanding it). But for a child who has oral fluency in a phonetic language, decoding is the main thing they need to learn, to allow them to bootstrap additional reading skills.
I have heard many teachers make this same criticism and it's so odd to me. Little children learn to read first by literally reading out loud. It's only later that 'silent' reading develops, and for most of us (I'd venture), we silently read by internally 'hearing' the audio version. At least I do (I'm listening to myself narrate this comment as I type it out silently). How else can you learn to read if not sounding out? I clearly remember myself learning to read, sounding out words and then being like 'oh that word is X'. And I see the same wheels turning with my daughter.
> Little children learn to read first by literally reading out loud.
IME, little children learn to read first by recognizing whole words that other people read out loud, and the best learn-to-read curricula recognize and leverage that heavily, and use it to progress to add in phonics skills via using words that vary in one phoneme to reinforce what the common part sounds like. Phonics is useful as one of the skills used to identify unfamiliar words when children progress to reading independently, but even there its not the only thing going on (context is important).
> How else can you learn to read if not sounding out?
Whole word recognition. That written languages have existed that are logographic rather than phonetic makes it clear that it is possible to read, and learn to read, by means other than phonics, which is only potentially useful as part of the process in phonetic languages. But even where it can be part of the process, its not the whole story.
Young kids don't start with logographic languages or whole world recognition. Just look at languages that use logographic scripts: Japanese has two phonetic "alphabets" (kana), and kids learn those first. Content for kids is written in kana. Kids start learning basic Kanji later on, but the phonetic script comes first.
The logographic languages (Chinese really) all start with phonetic systems before the children then start memorizing the ideograms. There are dozens of chinese phonetic systems in use for teaching. The HTML standard has a whole element reserved just for asian pronunciation systems.
This is one of those topics that people debate endlessly because what works "for most" does not work "for all".
I learned full word reading, it works great for me. I was well into middle school before I learned I didn't know how to pronounce a lot of words, but by 5th grade I was reading at a college level. Pretty sure I didn't internalize "e at the end makes vowels long" until nearly high school.
I read really fast, I can glance at a word and read it long before any sort of inner voice could catch up and mentally pronounce it.
I've met plenty of other people who are the same, but I will also acknowledge that this doesn't work for everyone.
But you know what? I bet a lot of chemists "read" chemical names the same way.
> I learned I didn't know how to pronounce a lot of words
Taking words on a page and reading them out loud is a fundamental aspect of reading. The way you've written it here, you were not fully able to read until the fifth grade. That is ... problematic.
From my perspective, the problem is this. Phonetic reading naturally encompasses whole word reading, because a child who starts reading with phonics, eventually reads 'the whole word' (I don't think any adult spends any amount of time examining the minutiae of letter ordering in everyday life). However, the opposite does not work. As you pointed out, despite your high reading level, you weren't able to figure out basic phonetic rules until high school. This would be problematic if you were learning any new language for example. Even ones not based on latin alphabet. The practice of blending sounds together is a fundamental part of reading.
A child who is using phonics is able to (1) understand, (2) sound out, (3) and speak the written word (which means they will be able to do things like read poetry). A child who is using the whole word approach may be able to understand, but if they cannot enunciate properly the words on the page, then they cannot do either 2 or 3, which means the reading is not complete. I don't see how we can consider this an acceptable replacement.
> I read really fast, I can glance at a word and read it long before any sort of inner voice could catch up and mentally pronounce it.
>> I was well into middle school before I learned I didn't know how to pronounce a lot of words, but by 5th grade I was reading at a college level.
> The way you've written it here, you were not fully able to read until the fifth grade. That is ... problematic.
I don't really think that's what they're saying here. They wrote "by 5th grade I was reading at a college level". They have the classic "I read a lot so I read words I don't know how to pronounce" issue. That's different than "not fully able to read".
>> I read really fast, I can glance at a word and read it long before any sort of inner voice could catch up and mentally pronounce it.
> This is not exceptional for an adult.
Sadly, I think that it is. I looked up US literacy rates for this thread to validate my memory that they were something like 98%. I learned that not only are they 92% at "level 1", but only "[f]our in five U.S. adults (79 percent) have English literacy skills sufficient to complete tasks that require comparing and contrasting information, paraphrasing, or making low-level inferences" [0]. I know this isn't exactly directly responsive to reading speed or whatever, but this is just to say I had a much rosier picture of US literacy in my head and maybe you do too.
> They have the classic "I read a lot so I read words I don't know how to pronounce" issue.
I read a lot of fantasy literature as a kid, and I'll argue that not needing to bother with pronunciation is a huge boon when trying to go through a particular style of fantasy novel!
This is not the gotcha you think it is. Once a child masters reading to themselves silently, phonics or not, the ability to read fantasy novels is immediate. I'm curious how you see a teacher even evaluating a whole word based approach. If the child is unable to enunciate the word they're reading, all you can say is that the child claims to read the word and understand it.
> This would be problematic if you were learning any new language for example.
But it is a benefit when it comes to technical papers, chemical names, and foreign loan words.
> This is not exceptional for an adult.
Really? I've met plenty of functioning adults who say they sound out words in their head when reading. Go to any one of the many online threads about reading methods and you'll come across plenty of people describing that they have a voice in their head pronouncing each word that they read.
> But it is a benefit when it comes to technical papers, chemical names, and foreign loan words.
Realistically, if I read technical papers and see a word I don't need to pronounce, I just refer to it in my mind as whatever it's written as. I learned phonics as a kid, yet have no trouble simply ignoring the pronunciation. Yet... since I do know phonics, I could pronounce the word, which is a strict superset of abilities compared to the whole word method. Which is my point... Phonics is strictly superior. There is nothing a whole word approach can do that a phonics student cannot, but there are things a phonics user can do a whole worder cannot.
It's strictly superior from a "can you pronounce words" standpoint, but not necessarily in terms of a "long-term reader" standpoint. As another "whole words" person who pronounced the 'b' in 'subtle' until he was in like 5th/6th grade, I can tell you I was reading and comprehending things that my peers in the "gifted" program were not and could not, and that continued... probably to the present day but definitely through my school age years.
And there's evidence that the focus on phonics essentially kills a love of reading and has a deleterious effect on long-term reading skills [0].
Full word reading works fine for a subset of kids, but it leaves a sizeable amount behind. Phonics is fundamental for teaching those kids how to read.
This is how the podcast explains what reading research has found about how people learn to read:
- First learn to associate letters with sounds
- By sounding out words, reinforce those associations
- And associate combinations of letters with known words from their spoken language
Our brains aren't wired for written language like they are for spoken language. We have to actively learn. And by associating letters with sounds, our brains are able to loop in the existing language areas of the brain into written language.
Even in phonics, kids learn common words like "the" by sight. But that doesn't scale. People don't learn to recognize every word as an individual token.
Of course, decoding isn't sufficient on its own (I can 'read' Portuguese without understanding it). But for a child who has oral fluency in a phonetic language, decoding is the main thing they need to learn, to allow them to bootstrap additional reading skills.