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In short, associating pictures with the words which describe them in various comprehension exercises, increasing in difficulty based on progress, has shown to help students in their reading comprehension.
Perhaps this can help some parents out there.
I have taught all my children to read using McGuffey. I helped many of my siblings learn to read. Much of the discussion around phonics is missing the point.
It is a caricature to say that "phonetic" reading is completely phonetic to the exclusion of sight reading. This is binary thinking. Nobody teaches it that way.
The goal is not and never was to read phonetically ever after. In fact, from very early on, the concept of "sight words" is introduced. The phonetic method is a bridge and a tool to internalize words. The goal is to recognize words effortlessly, without thought.
So what is the difference between the old phonetic methods, the later sight methods, and the modern (debunked) contextual methods?
It's all about where you start. The phonetic method uses phonics as its foundational concept. You begin with the sounds, and you learn the exceptions as you go. But even the exceptions are aided by phonetics. Most "sight" words still have enough of a phonetic component to clue the reader into what's going on.
Sight reading, on the other hand, assumes the reader will pick up enough phonics as they go along, contextually. But with this method, everything must be learned by rote. The "bridge" of having phonetic tools at your disposal is not taught.
Now some children are simply sight readers, and do poorly with phonics. Not all minds are alike. But even sight readers benefit from having a foundation in phonics.
The reason for this debate is that different IQ levels require different techniques. Higher IQ students will be more able to apply patterns and systems from phonics to words seen for the first time. Lower IQ students tend to struggle with mapping systems onto new material. So the more brute force systems, like memorizing whole words, tends to have more success. We see similar things in learning mathematics.
"IQ levels" are almost impossible to measure objectively, excluding medically identified learning disabilities. Reading comprehension difficulties are less a function of fluid intelligence (commonly called "IQ"), and more so environmentally induced. Examples of this are, but not limited to:
- Instability at home
- Lack of parental involvement
- Prejudice, explicit or subliminal, by school staff.
- Hunger and/or fatigue
- Dejection resulting from some combination of the above.
So, it all makes sense, but by this theory, it seems like the english words "through" and "tough" and "benign" should be really hard to learn, compared to "true" and "stuff" and wine". Also, English ought to be harder to learn to read than, say, German or Spanish. But I don't know of any evidence that English-speaking countries have lower literacy than Spanish- or German-speaking countries. I don't mean that phonics…
It seems to me that MSV is precisely the method that illiterate people use to fake literacy. Likewise for people who've developed a very minimal foreign language proficiency--they can get by in certain contexts but they're not in a position to constructively build fluency. If MSV were sufficient alone such people (and I include myself when it comes to foreign language proficiency) wouldn't be stuck at a dead-end.
MSV is obviously an essential skill, just not for acquiring foundational literacy. For one thing, early readers already understand the vocabulary. At that age they wouldn't be reading words like "benign" or even "tough"--some children might not fully understand them, but in any event learning to identify and distinguish such words is unnecessary at that stage. The primary task is to teach them how to identify enough of their existing vocabulary on the page that they can read sentences, paragraphs, pages, books, etc--enough to support basic narratives and concepts, especially unfamiliar ones. Only once they can read proficiently can reading become an independent channel for language acquisition and comprehension, where higher-order reasoning skills like MSV can be constructively applied, including toward furthering their literacy.
Phonetic spelling is probably the greatest invention in written languages since paper. I am constantly amazed that teachers on the front lines fail to recognize this. I'm saddened that UI designers keep replacing phonetically spelled words with icons and emojis.
> I am constantly amazed that teachers on the front lines fail to recognize this.
Some have. One system which embodies what you desire in interactive multimedia form is:
> memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don't know
Personally I think the phonics vs. sight words debate in English pedagogy misses the point entirely. The problem is that English divides words sentences into "words" and not morphemes. This way words like 'disambiguation' or 'boustrophedon' appear as a hard to parse blob regardless of which strategy you use. In my experience, schools have already started teaching "word roots" and the strategies needed to break words down into those roots. This to me seems like the key strategy.
TLDR: Phonics works, Current strategies don’t.
What actually works is the shortest part of the article. It’s infatuation with what doesn’t work puts what does work more than halfway into the article.
I would have appreciated the article to be structured as “Phonics works, MSV Doesn’t and here’s why they’re different”
Is there similar data for other countries available? It'd be interesting to know if this is an issue unique to America (among developed nations), shared among English-speaking countries, or if it's a problem equally distributed across the world.