CHAT: learning to read

The "learn the bits and then put them together" method of learning to
read is called the "Phonics System" in America and was a staple in the
seventies when I was in elementary school.  It was kind of irrelevant
to me because I could already read when I got there, having learned by
following along while my mom read me stories.

A major alternative system is the "Whole Language Method," in which
language use is made as relevant and important to the child as
possible, but there is very little explicit instruction as to how to
read: the children are supposed to just pick it up for themselves, but
the teacher's job is to create a system where they are extremely
motivated to do so: for example, the children will spend a lot of time
telling stories to the teacher which the teacher will write down and
have them copy for themselves -- so they are exposed to words that
they care a lot about; their own words.

There are other methods besides these and they go through phases of
popularity.  Different methods seem to work well overall for different
students.

Ed Heil ------ edheil@postmark.net
--- http://purl.org/net/edheil ---

Irina Rempt-Drijfhout wrote:

> Our eldest daughter is learning to read - as exciting for us,
> interested parents, as the kids' early language acquisition. The
> method she's using expects learners to pronounce single letters as
> distinct phonemes: /p/ /e/ /n/, and only then construct the whole
> word: /pen/ ("pen", obviously).
>
> This causes as much confusion as it prevents - we think it might be
> better to learn whole word patterns first (as I did when I learned to
> read about 25 years ago) and only then analyze them into phonemes and
> letters. The theory seems to be that you get to know "the bits that
> words are made of" before you have to know the words and that makes
> it easier to read unknown words. There may be something in it, but in
> the first six months or so they're not supposed to see any unknown
> words anyway (she has a book that she can read even now, using about
> ten different words, and it still manages to make an interesting
> story) and after that the analytic phase is well underway.
>
> She does have some talent - when Boudewijn and I were talking about
> centro-palatal stops last night, she followed Boudewijn's
> instructions to me how to pronounce it and came up with the same
> that I did - a centro-palatal affricate /c/.