Food for thought

I received my final book today, finally, after more than two weeks!! I picked up “Alpha Phonics: A Primer for Beginning Readers” from eBay in a really sweet deal and I will be using it as a remedial reading course for Super-boy and a beginning course for Diva. I am a firm believer that my own reading success stems from a fantastic phonics program that my first school used. I am also convinced that phonics is not taught properly in schools and that the huge amount of sight words the kids are required to learn hurts them in the long run. At the back of this book, I was delighted to find that my own thoughts on this were eloquently mirrored by the author:

No one denies that the English alphabetic system is somewhat complex. But its complexity is hardly an excuse for not teaching it.

For far too long, teachers of reading have avoided the difficulties of our alphabetic system by teaching sight vocabularies, whole-word configurations, context clue, and incidental phonetic clues. While such methods may produce some initial success on the primary level, they are, in the long run, injurious because they violate the basic nature of our writing system and are not in harmony with its principles. They do not provide the student with a fundamental understanding of the symbolic system we use in reading and writing, an understanding which he or she much have in order to become truly literate.

…

To some teachers this will seem like an overly academic way to teach reading. And it is, on purpose, because we want the pupil to learn to enjoy using his or her mind.

In teaching someone to read English, we must decide what should come first: learning the alphabetic system or enjoying inane stories with lots of irregular sight words. The latter may seem to be much more fun for teacher and pupil; but does it accomplish what we want to accomplish? If our goal is high literacy, it does not.

- Samuel L. Blumenfeld