Posted in Articles

In the online version of the British newspaper  "The Weekly Telegraph"  there is an article (posted 8-9-06) decrying the flawed teaching methods in government schools that have failed five million students and touting the positive changes now taking place.

Here are some pertinent quotes from the article:

"Four- and five-year-olds will be taught to read quickly using the tried and tested 'phonics' method that will replace the 'searchlights' of the present curriculum under which pupils learn by a mixture of strategies."

"There will be no more lists of 'whole words' that children must learn at the age of four or five and no more books to teach them to recognise 'by sight' a single word such as 'big'."

"Instead they will learn to decode simple words by sounding out and recognising the 44 main letter-sound relationships..."

"Other studies have shown that boys no longer lag behind girls in reading when taught in a systematic way rather than being forced to recognise and remember whole words."

Unfortunately, our country's government school system is moving in the opposite direction and removing the sound/symbol relationship from teaching reading while teaching children to employ a mixture of word attack strategies, such as word families, blends, whole word "picture" memorizing, etc., leaving it up to the pupil to decide by himself which strategy to use (all which detract from phonetic learning), and thereby causing conflict and confusion in his decision-making.

What's even more disconcerting is that most Christian schools and many homeschoolers are employing these very same methodologies, to the detriment of their children. Whether to teach the above strategies with or without teaching the sound/symbol relationship should not be the issue. The issue is why do they feel the need to teach reading with anything other than the sound/symbol relationship?

Mixing other strategies, such as word families, blends, whole word memorizing of supposedly "un-phonetic" words, etc., creates obstacles to learning to read for your children because they attempt to circumvent the sound/symbol relationship inherent in the alphabetic nature of the English language.