CZ:Cold Storage/Teaching reading and writing

A variety of different methods of teaching reading have been advocated in English-speaking countries.

The debate is often more political than objective. Parties often divide into two camps which refuse to accept each others terminology or frame of reference. Despite this both camps often incorporate aspects of the other's methods. Both camps accuse the other of causing failure to learn to read and write.

Currently (2007) the preferred names of the two camps are Whole Language and Phonics. Phonics has been the traditional method for many years going back to the start of the public education system in America. Whole language, a later variant method of reading education, incorporates associative techniques with visual imagery and other non traditional methods including allowing "invented spelling". It has a swarm of controversy around it as it has been considered to be potentially confusing and not rigorously structured.

Reading by "Whole Word" or "Sight Word"

The "Sight Word" method is not synonymous with "Whole Language" approach, but is often considered to be part of it.

The "Sight Word" method also appears prominently in avowedly "Phonic" teaching such as the National Curriculum for England & Wales, where words that do not fit the rules of phonics are placed on a list of sight words for rote memorization.

Some advocates claim that it is the same method used to acquire literacy in languages such as Chinese, assumed by the advocates to be based on ideograms. This claim would appear to be ignorant of the structure and semantic relationships of Chinese characters.

Students learning English using this method memorize the appearance of words, or learn to recognize words by looking at the first and last letter from rigidly selected vocabularies in progressive texts (such as The Cat in the Hat). Often this method is taught by slides or cards with a picture next to a word, teaching children to associate the whole word with its meaning. Often preliminary results show children taught with this method have higher reading levels than children learning phonics, because they learn to automatically recognize a small selection of words. However later tests demonstrate that literacy development becomes stunted when hit with longer and more complex words later. However, some whole language advocates claim that, using only whole language teaching methods, students can learn the 5,000 most common words in roughly three years. They also claim that a 5,000 word vocabulary is sufficient for basic literacy.Template:Fact Both these claims are disputed.

Following almost a decade of hands-on research by Dr. Diane McGuinness’ and three associates and a study of the last 25 years of reported research on teaching methods, she reports (three times for her emphasis), “The average number of words in daily conversations on the streets of any town in the world today is about 50,000. . . . But when people are asked to memorize what word goes with which abstract visual symbol scribbled on clay, or papyrus, or paper, the upper limit is around 1,500 to 2,000, not enough for any language. Not even close. . . . There is a natural limit on human memory for memorizing codes with too many confusing symbols. This limit, from the evidence so far, is around 2,000 symbols. . . . What turns out to be “natural” is that ordinary people (including children) can only remember about 1,500 to 2,000 abstract visual symbols.”

Dr. Rudolph Flesch reported in his 1981 book Why Johnny Still Can’t Read, “And how does look-and-say [now called whole word or whole language] work? It works on the principle that children learn to read by reading. It starts with little ‘stories’ containing the most-often-used words in English and gradually builds up a ‘sight vocabulary.’ The children learn to read by seeing those words over and over again. By the end of first grade they can recognize 349 words, by the end of second grade 1,094, by the end of third grade 1,216, and by the end of fourth grade 1,554. (I got those numbers from the Scott, Foresman series, but all look-and-say series teach about the same number of words.) . . . Now consider the look-and-say trained reader. The word rectitude is of course not among the 1,500 or 3,000 words he learns to recognize during his first three or four school years.”

Although the number of words taught by the whole word method may be different today, Dr. McGuinness’ studies shows that unless the students learn phonics (on their own or from help outside the classroom) in addition to their whole word training, they cannot learn more than about 2,000 words by sight alone. In any case, if the students know only 3,000 to 5,000 common words, they read so poorly that they do not like to read, seldom do so, and--in most cases--cannot hold an above-poverty-level wage job. For proof of this statement see the data on functional illiteracy in the “Success rate of reading education in English vs. alphabetic languages” section later in this article.

The classic implementation of the whole word or whole language approach was the McGill reading curriculum used to teach most baby boomers to read in the U.S. The method was invented by Rev. Thomas H. Gallaudet, the director of the American Asylum at Hartford in the 1830s. It was designed for the education of the deaf by juxtaposing a word, with a picture. In 1830, Gallaudet provided a description of his method to the American Annals of Education which included teaching children to recognize a total of 50 sight words written on cards and by 1837 the method was adopted by the Boston Primary School Committee. Horace Mann the then Secretary of the Board of Education of Massachusetts, USA favored the method and it soon became the dominant method state wide. By 1844 the defects of the new method became so apparent to Boston schoolmasters that they issued an attack against it urging a return to an intensive, systematic phonics. Again Dr. Samuel Orton, a neuropathologist in Iowa in 1929 sought the cause of children's reading problems and concluded that their problems were being caused by the new sight method of teaching reading. (His results were published in the February 1929 issue of the Journal of Educational Psychology, “The Sight Reading Method of Teaching Reading as a Source of Reading Disability.”)

Reading by Initial teaching alphabet

This method was designed to overcome the fact that English orthography has a many-to-many relationship between graphemes (the letter or letters used to represent a phoneme) and phonemes (the smallest sound used to distinguish syllables or words in a language or dialect). It involved the use of the present English alphabet (the Latin alphabet) and a few new symbols, each of which represented only one phoneme. The method fell into disuse because children still had to learn the Latin alphabet and the conventional English spellings in order to integrate with society outside of school.

Reading by Phonics

"Phonics" is distinct from the linguistics terms "phonetics" and "phonetic", although there have been deliberate attempts to obfuscate the terms within debates on primary education.

Phonics refers to an instructional design for teaching children to read. The method teaches sounds to be associated with letters and combinations of letters. The applicability of the alphabetic principle to English is disputed by opponents of phonics, as shown later in this article.

There are several different varieties of phonics. "Embedded phonics" is often seen within teaching schemes belonging to the "Whole Language" camp, whereas "synthetic phonics" and "Analytic Phonics" are most commonly seen as rivals for dominance within the "Phonics" camp. The differences are principally between ways of presenting information, rather than the information itself. Embedded phonics advocates mini-lessons embedded within other subjects, whereas the Synthetic and Analytic varieties advocate exercises and standardized tests.

Generally, phonics instructs students to memorize sound-letter associations. They learn to sound out and then blend sound combinations to produce words. This method requires direct teaching of "sounding out" methods, and memorization of pronunciation rules.

Phonics does not use the term "blend" in the linguistic sense of the term. There are many instances where phonics uses terms that are homophones of linguistic terminology, but with very different meanings.

One method used by some teachers to develop students' ability to sound out words and blend sounds is Elkonin boxes.

Samuel Orton produced what he claimed to be "the most perfect phonetic system", the Orton phonography, originally developed to teach brain-damaged adults to read. Orton described 73 "phonograms", or letter combinations, and 23 rules for spelling and pronunciation. By following these rules one can correctly pronounce and spell all but 123 of the 13,000 most common English words.

Advocates of phonics cite the large reading and spelling vocabulary that phonetic students can theoretically obtain. However, critics of phonetic methods talk of students that fail at each one of the method's many mandatory skills. Almost all students learn letter-sounds. Some students find it difficult to "blend" the letter sounds to produce sensible speech. Some students also fail to apply rules to select letter sounds. Also, critics charge that in phonetic programs, students can learn to pronounce a sentence without ever learning to understand it. The same holds true for "whole word" teaching.

Comparing reading education in English and in languages such as Chinese

Those who do not understand the Chinese written language might believe that learning to read Chinese is much more difficult than learning to read English. This is because they may believe that there is a different Chinese character for each word in the reading vocabulary. This is not the case. This quote from Why Our Children Can’t Read by Dr. Diane McGuiness explains why. “In 221 B.C., Emperor Qin unified China and initiated a writing reform. He appointed the scholar Li Su to develop what is called the ‘small seal script,’ which he finished in 200 B.C. Li Su’s basic job was to standardize the symbols into one uniform system. He assigned one character each to several hundred words (logographs), to CV [consonant-vowel] and CVC syllables, and to ‘classifier’ signs which stood for categories (determiners). . . . The modern Chinese dictionary contains about 12,000 entries.

“The Chinese writing system is largely based on the syllable. Misconceptions about Chinese writing are due to the syllabic structure of the Chinese language. Just under half of all Chinese words are only one syllable long: ‘li,’ ‘chu,’ ‘kao,’ ‘chang,’ a word and a syllable at the same time. Most Chinese syllables consist of only two basic sound sequences: CV and CVC, and most CVC sequences end in one of only two sounds: /n/ (tan) and /ng/ (tang). The Chinese language has very few consonant clusters or ‘blends’ (kwan), and a grand total of around 1,277 ‘tonal’ syllables. In tonal languages, meaning can change by altering the tone or pitch of the vowel. This open, simple syllable structure means that the Chinese language is riddled with homophones, those words that sound alike with different meanings, which makes it necessary to use about 200 classifiers [later stated as 214 classifiers]. Ninety percent of all Chinese words are written as compound signs, with the syllable sign and classifier sign fused together.”

David Crystal’s The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language states, “In the modern language [of Chinese], basic literacy requires a knowledge of some 2,000 characters. Thus the “several hundred words (logographs)” represented by a single character, the “1,277 syllables,” and the “214 classifiers” mentioned above total about 2,000 symbols or a little more. Dr. McGuinness makes numerous mentions of the approximate 2,000 symbol limit of memorization ability in her book Why Our Children Can’t Read. Three mentions of this limit are referenced in the section on “Whole Word” or “Sight Word” above.

In comparison to learning English, consider the findings of a researcher named Rozin: “The most unusual effort of this medium centered approach was probably, ‘American children with reading problems can easily learn to read English represented by Chinese characters.’ (Rozin, 1971)” This study does not, in itself, prove that learning to read English is more difficult than learning to read Chinese. It does not, in fact, say anything about learning to read Chinese. In reporting on this study, Kenneth Ives does not say how many words Rozin was able to teach the students using Chinese characters. There were undoubtedly less than 2,000 words taught. What it does say, however, is that English spelling is so inconsistent, illogical, and confusing that students can more easily memorize the Chinese characters representing the English words than they can learn all of the confusing many-to-one and one-to-many grapheme-phoneme correspondences of the words and all the words that do not conform to any grapheme-phoneme correspondences--which must be learned as sight words. Every time the students saw a certain Chinese character, it unfailingly represented the same word. But when they saw a certain letter or combination of letters in English, they did not always represent the same sound or sounds. See the next section, “Comparing reading education in English vs. alphabetic languages,” for a more complete explanation of the confusing grapheme-phoneme correspondences in English.

Comparing reading education in English and in alphabetic languages

English is not a strictly alphabetic language. Many will claim that failure to learn to read in English is due to a failure of the students to apply themselves properly to the task, or to various societal problems, or to inadequate teaching. The lack of alphabetic nature in English is the real culprit, however, in this sense: (1) although most students can learn to read English, it requires significantly longer to learn to read than in alphabetic languages (See the “Time required to learn to read English vs. alphabetic languages” section later in this article.) and (2) an unknown but substantial number of students are so resistant to the lack of logic and inconsistency of English spelling that they cannot learn to read without the extensive help of a one-to-one tutor for a year or more. Different students have different abilities. Some people--particularly young girls--are very good at memorizing. Young boys and most adults prefer to learn new things by comparison to what they already know--i.e. they like to learn by logic. Unfortunately, the lack of logic is a complete “turn off” to some of the most intelligent students who are looking for logic in what they learn.

Ever since alphabets were first invented, alphabetic languages have used a letter or letter combination to represent the sounds in the words. The easiest alphabetic languages to learn are those that use one specific grapheme (a single letter or a specific letter combination) for each specific phoneme (the smallest sound in a language or dialect used to distinguish syllables or words). Unlike strictly alphabetic languages, English uses at least 1,768 graphemes to represent the 40 English phonemes. Although these 40 English phonemes could be spelled with 26 single letters and 14 digraphs (two letter combinations), they are spelled with all 26 single letters in the alphabet and at least 153 two-letter graphemes, 98 three-letter graphemes, 14 four-letter grapheme, and 3 five-letter graphemes, for a total of at least 294 different graphemes. This is less that the 1,768 mentioned above because every English phoneme is spelled with more than one grapheme. The number of spellings of the phonemes varies from at least four (for the TH phoneme in words such at this) to at least 60 spellings of the U phoneme in words such as nutty--which is exactly what English spelling really is.

Some phonics spelling advocates will claim that English is more than 80 percent phonetic. This is only possible, however, if you allow more than one grapheme for a phoneme. If you allow only one grapheme for every phoneme as logic and ease-of-learning demands, English is only a little more than 20 percent phonetic. The problem is that there is absolutely no way of knowing which word is spelled phonemically and which is not. There are absolutely NO invariable spelling rules in English--every “rule” has exceptions and some of the exceptions have exceptions!

In addition, Dr. Diane McGuinness’ book Why Our Children Can’t Read explains the complex logic that is required to learn to read English. Unlike many alphabetic languages, there are tens of thousands of different syllables in English, with sixteen different syllable patterns in English: (C=consonant, V=vowel) CV, CCV, CCCV, CVC, CCVC, CCCVC, CVCC, CVCCC, CCVCC, CCVCCC, CCCVCCC, CCCVCC, VCCC, VCC, VC, and V. There are two or more syllables in most English words. Each syllable can have one of the sixteen syllable patterns. If each vowel and each consonant in each of these patterns consistently represented the same phoneme (one-to-one mapping), there would be nothing in the logic of these syllables that would be beyond the abilities of most four- or five-year-olds. But they do not. English spelling also has one-to-many and many-to-one mapping. This requires a type of logic that most children do not develop until they are eleven or twelve years old.

The types of logic required for one-to-many and many-to-one mapping are: (1) the logic of “classes” (categories where objects or events that are similar are grouped) and “relations” (where objects share some features but not all features, e.g. all poodles are dogs, but not all dogs are poodles) and (2) “propositional logic,” which involves combining both the classes and relations types of logic. This requires the ability to think of the same item in more than one ways at the same time. These combinations require the use of relational terms such as “and,” “or,” “not,” “if--then,” and “if and only if” in formal statements of propositional logic, e.g. if an H follows the T, then say /TH/ as in thin or then; but if any other letter or no letter follows the T, then say /T/ as in top or ant.

The eyes of the fluent reader skip easily over a multitude of traps for the beginner. Most fluent readers who learned to read as a child have long since forgotten the difficulty they had in learning. Due to the difficulty of English spelling there are basically three ways of learning to read (a more precise explanation of the time required for learning is in the section “Time required to learn to read English vs. alphabetic languages” below):

• Young children can learn (a) the very limited number of common English words that are phonemically regular (one-to-one mapping) either by phonics teaching, by whole word, or by whole language teaching, (b) learn a few hundred sight words (most of which are almost totally unphonemic) by the whole word or whole language method, and (c) if being taught by the phonics method, memorize--without understanding the logic involved--the hundreds of many-to-one and one-to-many phoneme-to-grapheme mappings. Then--with constant practice in reading that extends past the age when they can understand the logic required--using their knowledge of phonics, they learn one-at-a-time all 20,000 or more of the words in their reading vocabulary required to be a fluent reader. This process requires at least two-and-one-half years to give young children the foundational knowledge and confidence to continue reading long enough to become fluent readers and--for most students--extends past their eleventh birthday.
• Begin learning to read after age eleven or twelve--when they can understand the logic involved--and spend at least one to one-and-one-half years learning strictly by phonics. Then with additional reading experience, learn one-at-a-time all 20,000 or more of the words in their reading vocabulary required to be fluent readers. This method, of course, is totally impractical. Children should begin learning to read at the age of four to six years of age when they are best able to learn to read. Furthermore, students of almost all other school subjects need the ability to read to be able to do the class-work, homework, and testing required to learn each subject. Delaying this instruction would place students at a serious competitive advantage with students of almost every other nation.
• IF taught only by the whole word or whole language method AND IF they do not learn phonics--on their own or with help outside the classroom--they can learn 2,000 or so words (or perhaps as many as 5,000 or a little more if they have a superb memory) and join the ranks of the functionally illiterate. Those who can only read 2,000 to about 5,000 simple words they learned in the first four grades in school cannot “get by” in our increasingly complex and competitive world as well as they should. They cannot read very well and therefore seldom attempt to read, and they cannot hold an above-poverty-level-wage job. They become a drain upon society at best or a criminal at worst (see statistics on functional illiteracy in the “Success rate of reading education in English vs. alphabetic languages” section later in this article).

This is why many teachers--and almost all whole word teaching advocates--will tell you that phonics teaching “does not work.”

As stated in the Whole Word method section above, the human mind cannot remember more than about 2,000 symbols, so the whole word method does not work either. Students of whole-word-only or whole-language-only teaching cannot become fluent readers unless they also learn phonics--either on their own or with help outside the classroom--as a tool to help them “decode” new words. When phonics knowledge or contextual clues do not reveal the word they must consult a dictionary or ask someone.

The problem is that learning the words one-at-a-time until a person knows enough words to be able to “get by” in life as well as they should--as well as is required in our increasingly complex society--takes much longer than is required in alphabetic languages. Although some phonics advocates have recently designed much-improved methods of teaching phonics, learning to read in these programs still requires a year or more longer than a perfect one-grapheme-for-one-phoneme spelling system.

Why English spelling is so bad

English is a conglomeration of words mainly from eight different languages--from every conquering nation that occupied the British Isles. Prior to 1755 writers spelled the words the way they sounded, but a specific spelling of the phonemes had not been settled upon. As a result, for example, Shakespeare often spelled a phoneme two different ways in the same paragraph in his original writings. To further complicate the matter, the early publishers hired many foreign typographers because originally there were very few British typographers. These foreign typographers often knew little or nothing about English words. In order to avoid the difficulty of adding small lead pieces between each word in a line of type to justify the right margin, they would often add a “silent E” or double the letters in some of the words.

In 1755 the publishers hired Dr. Samuel Johnson to prepare an English dictionary to standardize the spelling. In a misguided and often erroneous attempt to show the origin of the words, Dr. Johnson made a very serious linguistic error: he included the foreign words with the spelling of the original language. Instead of freezing the spelling of the phonemes in the words, as linguistic logic demands, he froze the spelling of entire words. In effect he divorced the graphemes from the phonemes and turned each word into a Chinese picture-writing type of logogram using a specific group of letters in a specific order. There were dictionaries prior to Johnson’s, but they were not as authoritative or as well-received as Johnson’s.

As you may know, the pronunciation of words changes with time, so what was bad in 1755 is even worse today. As Edward Rondthaler and Edward Lias state, “[S]pelling is the only branch of learning that has undergone no serious update or repair since before the 16th century. Other disciplines receive continuous updating. But not spelling.

Time required to learn to read English vs. alphabetic languages

Following Frank C. Laubach’s thirty years of experience in teaching adult illiterates around the world in 300 or more different languages, he stated, “Over 90 percent of the world’s languages have one sound for a letter and one letter for a sound. In such languages learning to read is swift and easy, requiring from one to twenty days.” Furthermore, he found that in 295 of these languages (98 percent of them) students could master reading and writing in less than three MONTHS.

In comparison, most U.S. students require two and one-half YEARS or more to learn to read well enough to succeed in school. As Rudolph Flesch explains, “Generally speaking, students in our schools are about two years behind students of the same age in other countries. This is not a wild accusation of the American educational system; it is an established, generally known fact. . . . What accounts for these two years? Usually the assumption seems to be that in other countries children and adolescents are forced to study harder. Now that I have looked into this matter of reading, I think the explanation is much simpler and more reasonable: Americans take two years longer to learn how to read--and reading, of course, is the basis for achievement in all other subjects.

Frank C. Laubach believes even more time is lost: “It is estimated that two and one-half years are lost in the student’s studies because of our chaotic spelling.”

Perhaps most convincing of all is this quote: “In November 1974 Professor Durr reported on a study trip to Russia in the pages of The Reading Teacher. . . . He found that first-graders are taught to read 46 of the 130 national languages of Russia. . . . All children in the USSR are given an ABC book and start to learn from it the day school begins. They learn at first about a letter a day and what it stands for, and gradually proceed to syllables and words. By December 15 of their first year all Russian children are through with their ABC books and start reading simple stories and poems. There is no further instruction in reading as such after the end of first grade.”

Success rate of reading education in English vs. alphabetic languages

National literacy rates range from about 10 percent to 99+ percent. Frank C. Laubach’s books Teaching the World to Read and Forty Years With the Silent Billion detail much of his experience in teaching in 300 or more languages around the world. In teaching adults to read in languages other than English, his books never once mentions being unable to teach some of his students to become fluent readers. When he makes the statement that “Over 90 percent of the worlds languages have one sound for a letter and one letter for a sound. In such languages learning to read is swift and easy, requiring from one to twenty days.” it implies that they all learned to read. It follows that the literacy rates in non-English speaking countries is--more than anything else--a measure of the percentage of the population that has had reading training.

Unlike other nations, many of which do not enforce universal education for all their citizens, U.S. children are required to be in school until their mid-teens. It is in the short-term best interests of politicians and educators to believe the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the U.S. literacy rate is 90 percent or more. There is not necessarily any conscious deception, but a brief study of how the Census Bureau made this determination will reveal why the reported figure can be so much higher than the true literacy rate.

The Census Bureau included questions about literacy in each census from 1840 to 1930. Many of those most knowledgeable about U.S. literacy believe that literacy began to drop in the early 1960s and has been declining ever since. The Census Bureau reintroduced questions about literacy in 1970 at the insistence of the military.

In the 1970 census the only question asked about literacy was on grade completion. The Census Bureau considered those with fifth-grade completion or higher to be literate. A little more than 5 percent reported less than a fifth-grade education. For some reason, the Census Bureau decided that 80 percent of these could read, so they reported 99 percent literacy.

In 1980 the Census Bureau mailed out forms and based most of their calculations upon written responses to questions about grade completion. In addition they used a small sample of home visits and telephone interviews. They asked people what grade they had completed. If the answer was “Less than fifth grade,” they asked if the person could read and write. As explained in Jonathan Kozol’s book Illiterate America, this technique of determining literacy is almost certain to underestimate illiteracy.

Because U.S. schools since the 1930s have mostly taught by the whole word method (or the whole language method) and due to new time-consuming pleasurable activities and negative influences explained below, a shocking 46 to 51 percent of U.S. adults are now functionally illiterate. Although there are several ways of determining functional illiteracy, due to the fact that very few U.S. adults can afford to accept a job that pays less than they are capable of earning, the average yearly earnings is the best method--or certainly one of the best methods--of determining functional illiteracy.

The most comprehensive study of U.S. functional illiteracy ever commissioned by the U.S. government, the Adult Literacy in America study proves these functional illiteracy figures. Reporting the problem in this manner, however, in effect minimizes the problem. The Adult Literacy in America study reported the percentage of U.S. adults who were employed full-time, employed part-time, unemployed, and who had given up searching for a job and were out of the work force, and it reported the average hourly wages of those who were working. All of these data were grouped according to the literacy level of the study participants; there were five literacy levels in the study. Taken together, these data prove that Level 1 adults (the least literate) earned an average yearly income of $2105 and Level 2 adults earned an average yearly income of $5225, at a time when the U.S. Census Bureau stated that the threshold poverty level for an individual U.S. adult was $7363. Shockingly, 40 to 44 million of the 191 million U.S. adults at the time (21 to 23 percent of them) were Level 1 and 50 million U.S. adults (25 to 28 percent of them) were Level 2 literacy. This means that a minimum of 46 percent (21 plus 25 percent) and a maximum of 51 percent (23 plus 28 percent) not only earned less than poverty level wages, the earned significantly less than poverty level wages. This percentage of families is not in poverty only because most families have more than one employed adult and most low-income families receive financial assistance from the government (from our taxes) and charitable assistance from family, friends, and charitable organizations.

Few if any non-English speaking nations use the whole word teaching method. They do not have to; phonics works for their language because it follows the alphabetic principle: the words are almost entirely spelled as they sound.

The problem for adults who are illiterate in English is that, due to the time required to work for a living and care for any children they have, there is very little time left for learning to read. Even if they learn to read in only a little more than a year of one-to-one study with a tutor (some do not), it may take another two or three years of study to learn all of the things that they should have learned in school that are necessary to earn a high school equivalency degree. A high school equivalency degree is usually the minimum required to get and hold a good job.

This points out the importance of making a perfect one-grapheme-for-one-phoneme spelling system such as the newly devised NuEnglish available for schoolchildren. Not only will all but the most mentally disabled be able to learn to read (instead of only about half as at present), they will do so in only three or four months (instead of requiring two and one-half years or more, as at present). As a result most of their school curriculum can be moved down about two years, making them competitive with students in other alphabetic language nations.

There are hundreds of profit and non-profit organizations in the U.S. concerned with improving the success rate in learning to read, most of them not realizing that the main reason for lack of success is the illogical, inconsistent spelling of the words. Even those organizations that realize the main reason for their lack of success assume that there is nothing they can do about it other than to continue looking for improved ways of dealing with our illogical, inconsistent written language. What they do not realize is that

• dozens of scholars for the last 250 years have recommended solving the problem of English spelling by making the spelling phonemic--rather than merely fighting the symptoms of the problem. No reputable medical doctor would merely fight the symptoms of pneumonia by prescribing pain-killers, decongestants, and cough suppressants rather than prescribing the antibiotics to cure the pneumonia.
• Several nations both smaller and larger than the U.S. and both advanced and backward nations have simplified their spelling systems.
• A simple, logical phonemic spelling system has been proven effective for teaching students to read in less that three months in 300 or more alphabetic languages by Frank Laubach, working with adults, and by elementary school teachers in almost all alphabetic languages.
• Almost every branch of learning undergoes frequent updates as new discoveries are made--but not spelling. With the exception of a few dozen words in American English spelling successfully simplified by Noah Webster, the spelling of English words has been frozen since the publication of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary in 1755.
• Numerous linguistic and educational scholars have thoroughly disproven all reasonable objections to spelling reform.

But it has never been tried in English.

And people do not realize that due to drastically changed conditions, an ability to learn to read quickly is more desperately needed than ever before. The drastically changed conditions include a multitude of time-consuming pleasurable pastimes that did not exist in simpler times prior to the 1960s (TV, DVD movies, CDs, iPods, music concerts, skateboards, roller-blades, new extracurricular school activities, cell-phones, video games, the internet, etc.) and an increasing number of negative influences (drugs, gangs, school bullying, parents working two jobs, etc.) that distract students by stealing their time or their desire to learn. Under such conditions, a confusing, illogical, inconsistent written language requiring two or more years to learn--for the approximately 50 percent who do learn--is a severe handicap in our increasingly complex and competitive world where almost every student of a non-English alphabetic languages can learn to read in less than three months.

Learning to Read by Print exposure

Print exposure is simply the amount of time a child or person spends being visually aware of the written word (reading)--whether that be through newspapers, magazines, books, journals, scientific papers, or more. Research has shown that the amount of print material that a child accesses has deep cognitive consequences. In addition, the act of reading itself, for the most part irrespective of what is being read, increases the achievement difference among children.

Children who are exposed to large amounts of print often have more success in reading and have a larger vocabulary to draw from than children who see less print. The average conversations among college graduates, spouses or adult friends contain less rare (advanced) words than the average preschool reading book. Other print sources have increasingly higher amounts of rare words, from children's books, to adult books, to popular magazines, newspapers, and scientific articles (listed in increasing level of difficulty). Television, even adult news shows, do not have the same level of rare words that children's books do.

The issue is that oral language is very repetitive. To learn to read effectively a child needs to have a large vocabulary. Without this, when the child does read they stumble over words that they do not know, and have trouble following the idea of the sentence. This leads to frustration and a dislike of reading. When a child is faced with this difficulty he or she is less likely to read, thus further inhibiting the growth of their vocabulary. This cycle leads to the "rich get richer, poor get poorer" phenomena known as the Matthew Effect.

Children who enjoy reading do it more frequently and improve their vocabulary. A study of out-of-school reading of fifth graders, found that a student in the 50th percentile read books about 5 minutes a day, while a student in the 20th percentile read books for less than a minute a day. This same study found that the amount of time a child in the 90th percentile spent reading in two days, was the amount of time a child in the 10th percentile spent reading all year.

Print exposure can also be a big factor in learning English as a second language. Book flood experiments are an example of this. The book flood program brought books in English to the classroom. Through focusing their English language learning on reading books instead of endless worksheets the teachers were able to improve the rate at which their students learned English.

See Reading Can Make You Smarter by Anne Cunningham and Keith Stanovich; National Academy of Elementary School Principles

Other Linguistic Models of English Spelling

Attempts to make English spelling behave phonetically have given rise to various campaigns for spelling reform; none, to date, have been generally accepted. Opponents of simplified spellings point to the impossibility of phonetic spelling for a language with many diverse accents and dialects. Several distinguished scholars, however, have thoroughly disproven all reasonable objections to spelling reform, including this objection. See, for example, Dictionary of Simplified American Spelling. Thomas Lounsbury, LL.D., L.H.D., emeritus professor of English, Yale University, presented a devastating rebuttal to all reasonable objections to spelling reform in his book English Spelling and Spelling Reform as far back as 1909, particularly the last chapter, pages 331 to 341. A shorter rebuttal of all the reasonable objections to spelling reform is available on pages 166 to 170 of Let's End Our Literacy Crisis published in 2005, ISBN 1-58982-230-7, available for a discounted price at [Publishers' Direct Bookstore].

Linguists documenting the sounds of speech use various special symbols, of which the International phonetic alphabet is the most widely known. Linguistics makes a distinction between a phone and phoneme, and between phonology and phonetics. The study of words and their structure is morphology, and the smallest units of meaning are morphemes. The study of the relationship between words present in the language at one time is synchronic etymology, part of descriptive linguistics, and the study of word origins and evolution is diachronic etymology, part of historical linguistics.

English orthography gives priority first to morphology, then to etymology, and lastly to phonetics. Thus the spelling of a word is dependent principally upon its structure, and its relationship to other words. It is usually necessary to know the meaning of a word in order to spell it correctly, and its meaning will be indicated by the similarity to words of the same meaning and family.

English uses a 26 letter Latin alphabet, but the number of graphemes is expanded by several digraphs, trigraphs, tetragraphs, and even three pentagraphs (these refer to two, three, four, or five specific letter combinations, respectively, used to represent a single phoneme, which is the smallest sound used in a language or dialect to distinguish between syllables or words) while the letter "q" is not used as a grapheme by itself, only in the digraph "qu".

Each grapheme may represent a limited number of phonemes depending on etymology and location in the word. Likewise each phoneme may be represented by a limited number of graphemes. This is disputed. See the “Comparing reading education in English and in alphabetic languages” section of this article (above) and see if you think that 1760 ways of spelling 40 English phonemes with as many as 60 ways of spelling one phoneme and at least 294 different graphemes--as many as 11 different graphemes to represent one English phoneme--can really be called “limited numbers.” Some letters are not part of any grapheme, but function as etymological markers. Graphemes do not cross morpheme boundaries.

Morphemes are spelt consistently, following rules of inflection and word-formation, and allow readers and writers to understand and produce words they have not previously encountered.

The above portion of this section is describing how present English spelling IS. It ‘’definitely’’ does not define how English spelling MUST be. In fact, for the benefit of beginning learners in English, spelling ‘’’should not’’’ be as described in the previous portion of this section. Anything other than a phonemic spelling--as used in almost every alphabetic spelling system on earth--places our students at a serious competitive disadvantage with students in all these languages.

Although most of this article refers to the present characteristics of English spelling, Frank Laubach points out in his book ‘’Teaching the World to Read’’ that “[i]t is a linguistic axiom that what is understandable as speech is also understandable when written with a suitable phonetics.” This proves that, although in present spelling, priority may be given first to morphology, second to etymology, and lastly to phonetics, such spelling is not ‘’necessary.’’ This is true because the meaning of a word is primarily determined by its context. Furthermore, words written in English can be understood even more easily than words spoken in English--regardless of how strange the accent of the speaker or the writer ‘’who is spelling phonemically’’--for three important reasons: (1) when listening, if a word is misunderstood in the split-second it is pronounced, it is gone forever unless there is an audible recording or unless you can ask the speaker about the misunderstood word, whereas the written words can be examined as long as necessary for understanding, (2) in written words, you can see the context before ‘’and after’’ the misunderstood word, but with spoken words you only know the context before the misunderstood word--the context afterward hasn’t been spoken yet. If you spend more than a second or two pondering the misunderstood word, you will miss the following context, and (3) ‘’most importantly,’’ written words are separated by spaces and punctuation, whereas spoken words are all run together and the punctuation is often questionable--unless the speaker is speaking unnaturally slowly. The listener often does not know if a certain syllable is at the end of one word or at the start of the following word.

Practical applications of reading education

In practice, many many children are exposed to both "Phonic" and "Whole Language" methods, coupled with reading programs that combine both elements. For example, the extremely popular book, Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, by Siegfried Engelman, et al. (ISBN 0-671-63198-5), teaches pronunciation and simple phonics, then supplements it with progressive texts and practice in directed reading. The end result of a mixed method is a casually phonetic student, a much better first-time pronouncer and speller, who still also has look-say acquisition, quick fluency and comprehension. Using an eclectic method, students can select their preferred learning style. This lets all students make progress, yet permits a motivated student to use and recognize the best traits of each method.

The data on the distressingly high functional illiteracy in U.S. adults (see the “Success rate of reading education in English vs. alphabetic languages” section earlier in this article) show that neither the phonics, the whole word or whole language, nor any combination of them is completely successful for every student. Although some English-speaking nations may have superior teaching methods to the U.S., by extension, all nations whose native language is English have problems that more-strictly alphabetic nations do not have. Also as shown in the “Success rate of reading education in English vs. alphabetic languages” section above, Frank Laubach’s experience in easily teaching adults to read in 300 or more languages that are phonemically regular provides indisputable evidence that regularizing English spelling should be given a careful, honest evaluation.

Although spelling reform has been successfully implemented in several nations, both large and small nations, both advanced and backward nations, it has never been attempted in English. The only partial improvement in spelling was accomplished in the early 1800s by Noah Webster. He proposed simplifying the spelling of a few dozen words. Some of the changes he recommended took place; some did not. Most of the differences between U.S. and U.K. spelling are a result of Noah Webster’s changes.

Although there have been numerous proposals for English spelling reform since Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, in effect, froze the spelling of entire words (instead of following the alphabetic principle of freezing the spelling of phonemes), none of them have been successful. See the American Literacy Council website and the U.K.s Simplified Spelling Society website for examples of proposed spelling systems and information on the need for spelling reform. The only known recent proposal for spelling reform which uses a strict one-grapheme-for-one-phoneme spelling system is NuEnglish which was developed by Literacy Research Associates, Inc. and NuEnglish, Inc., two nonprofit educational corporations.

Speed reading continues where basic education stops. Usually after some practice, many students' reading speed can be significantly increased. There are various speed-reading techniques. Hopify is a tool to practice speed-reading.

However, speed reading does not guarantee comprehension or retention of what was read.

Readability indicates the ease of understanding or comprehension due to the style of writing. Reading recovery is a method for helping students learn to read.

Teaching writing

Writing is a physical or mechanical skill which, like any other physical skill, is improved with practice. Teachers have long known that the more different types of teaching methods employed at the same time or in close succession--auditory, visual, feeling, mechanical tasks, and other sensory methods--the more likely the student is to retain what was learned. For this reason, teachers normally combine learning to read and learning to write. The student says the word or the letter (employing the hearing of the word or letter and the mechanical skill of saying it), writes the word or the letter (employing “muscle-memory” skills), and sees what was written (employing visual skills).

Writing ordinarily begins with learning to print the letters and simple words. Practice with workbooks where the students trace the letters over a dashed form of the letter is helpful in develop the hand movements necessary for writing. After learning the form of printed letters, the students are taught cursive writing (handwriting).

Teachers will sometimes ask the students to write a short story about an interesting experience and then ask the student to read the story to the class. Students must learn writing skills for any tests they must take using an essay type of answer.

See also

Dolch Word List on Wikipedia

Notes

• National Right To Read Foundation - Many articles on comparison between Phonics and Whole language techniques and effects