WHY READING IS PHONICS
Read Bruce Price's book “Saving K-12 – What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?” Explains the problems in your local schools: www.Lit4u.com/saving-k-12/
FOR READING ENGLISH, you don’t need anything but phonics. All the problems we’re having in our public schools are because the so-called experts insist on using methods that don't work. (Video by Improve-Education.org / Bruce Deitrick Price)
------ READING PHONETICALLY: you first learn the letters of the alphabet; the sounds the letters stand for; then the two-letter blends and the three-letter blends. At this point you’re reading small words and syllables. You sound things out audibly to lock these sounds into your memory, or so the teacher knows that you’re processing the words correctly.
Soon enough, the process becomes internal. The sounding out is silent, so to speak. In a few years, the process becomes very fast and more and more automatic. When you're running, your left leg moves forward, otherwise you fall down. You don’t tell the legs what to do, but they get the commands. It's the same way with the processing of all the syllables and words.
Now suppose an expert reader runs into an unfamiliar word. You immediately slow down to baby-speed. You sound out, “Pla-ti-tude? What is this?” You go to the dictionary and find out the meaning. “Oh, platitude. I get it.” Now you have acquired a new vocabulary word. But it's not a sight-word! You can break this word down into its component sounds. That’s the important fact.
The point of all this copy is to make a contrast with sight-words. They are designs that children are told to memorize as graphic units. Someone must tell the children how to pronounce each word. There is no way to deduce the pronunciation by looking at the word. Everything is arbitrary. That’s why learning to read with sight-words is a vast memory project, and for the average person a hopeless task.