Saturday, August 31, 2013

Reading is easy. (Illiteracy is hard.)

This country, for the last 80 years, has been living through what future historians might call the Great American Reading con. The experts claimed to accept as true in a procedure that didn't work. In order to protect it, and to shield themselves from charges of informative malpractice, they developed endless shock swell of intellectual disorientation. 
Here is jargon concocted by our elite professionals during this long nationwide nightmare: psycholinguistics, miscue analysis, reading schemes, comprehension schemes, whole phrase, estimating, picture reading, whole dialect, view phrases, balanced literacy, reading readiness, word walls, active learning practices, shut instructional activities, high-frequency words, conceiving and learning about publish, created spelling, reading recovery, emergent literacy, creative curriculum approach, purposeful systemic linguistic theory, wealthy literacy undertakings, authoring cycle, capability convictions, post-reading, lifelong book book book reader, cognitive flexibility idea, unaligned reading, child watching, to name a couple of.
The wander of all this malarkey is that reading is a very difficult thing to do. The Education Establishment required to hold this self-serving idea in play because they couldn't appear to educate children to read. After all, the professionals would insist, it's so hard to do! Don't accuse us!
In fact, reading is easy to do, and to teach.Consider what these well known reading professionals have to state: 
Grace Fernald (Remedial methods in rudimentary School Subjects, 1943): "Since no adeptness are needed for the mastery of reading, composing, and arithmetic which are not currently owned by the commonplace, usual individual, it appears conspicuous that there is no such thing as a individual of usual understanding who will not discover these rudimentary skills." 
Rudolf Flesch (Why Johnny Can't Read, 1955): "We could have perfect readers in all schools in the second degree if we educated our children [correctly]... It's very easy. Reading means getting significance from certain combinations of notes. educate a progeny what each note stands for and he can read. I understand, you state, it can't be that easy. But it is."
Sibyl Terman and Charles Walcutt (Reading: disorder and therapy, 1958): "It is absurdly easy to educate a progeny to read with the correct procedure. Most of the children in America could be taught in a few weeks or months at the age of five. We will notify you about diverse schools, now functioning, where a problem reader is effectively unheard of."
Samuel Blumenfeld (ca. 1990): "All young kids, except the very gravely weakened, evolve their innate language faculty exceedingly quickly from ages 2 to 6. In fact, by the time they are six they have evolved speaking vocabularies in the thousands of phrases, and can speak with clarity and grammatical correctness without having had a single day of prescribed education. In other phrases, young kids are dynamos of dialect discovering and can easily be educated to read between ages 5 and 7, provided they are educated in the correct alphabetic-phonics way."
Sigfried Engelmann (War against the schools' learned child abuse, 1992): "I have not ever glimpsed a kid with an IQ of over 80 that could not be taught to read in a timely manner (one school year), and I've worked exactly or obscurely (as a trainer) with thousands of them. I've not ever glimpsed a child that could not be taught arithmetic and dialect skills." 
Marva Collins (on her site, ca. 2000): "Children as juvenile as 3-1/2 and 4 years of age are accepted to my school, at the beginning of every school year in September. I assurance that they will ALL be reading by Christmas, three months subsequent. That has been the outcomes since I started my school in 1975."
Don Potter (2012): "The mystery of making learning to read easy for children is not to bewilder them at the very starting. young kids who discover the letters letter titles and are taught to read from the noise comprised by the notes will have a very very simple time discovering to read. (To mention just a couple of of the very fine programs that are available, I would put Blumenfeld's Alpha-Phonics near the head of register, Dolores Hiskes' Phonics Pathways is an exemplar phonics program, Rudolf Flesch's activities in his Johnny work for me every time, and Hazel Loring's Reading Made Easy with combine Phonics for First degree makes educating reading a snap for any age student.)" 
In order to make reading difficult, our learning Establishment adopted every wrongheaded idea they could find. They dwelled obsessively on difficulties, and on conceiving roadblocks. They concocted an array of alibis and sophistries to apologise their malfunction. rather than of emphasizing that English is at smallest 97% phonetic, they certainly deceived that English is barely phonetic at all.
Basically, phonetic reading is a vast mnemonic device, that is, there are numerous easy-to-remember directions to help you read. When you glimpse a b-word (beach, baked baked baked bread, etc), you know for sure it starts buh-. That eradicates about 98% of the possibilities. Each subsequent note eradicates more options, until you know the phrase precisely.
Conversely, suppose you're memorizing sight-phrases; and the next day you see a sight-word you're not certain you know. routinely, you concern that you misremembered in some way. How can you be certain? Your only sure recourse is to find a famous person who can read! 
entire phrase is quite a misdeed and a antic. All those design drawings can gaze more or less alike. Here's an very simple way to know-how what kids endure. contain a publication upside down in front of a reflector and try to read, in a usual left-to-right way, what you glimpse in the reflector. aim on smaller concepts. Try to memorize one of them; then try to find that same conceive again. You'll likely glimpse this process as annoyingly difficult.You'll probably feel dyslexia creep into your brain.

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