Re: OT-ish: txt - Could it replace Standard Written English?

En réponse à John Cowan <jcowan@...>:

>
> Two comments:  English is not French, and the U.S. is not France.
True, but that's irrelevant here.

> French is merely etabnannimous, not maggelitous;
It doesn't change anything about the best way to teach spelling. I was taught
English spelling with a bottom-up method. And although we began when I was
already 12 years old and I didn't learn French spelling this way, it seems to
have been pretty efficient. And for a top-down method, whatever the orthography
looks like is irrelevant anyway, since the point of such a method is *not* to
worry about it.

 the U.S. is radically
> decentralized in education, France is radically centralized.
Irrelevant when we're talking about learning methods. Whether a single school
adopts some method or more is irrelevant on whether the method will be
successful or not. In fact, the fact that despite all the budget that the
French education put into the "méthode globale", this one fails, should be a
warning against trying it on a decentralized basis.

> Therefore
> we must be wary of importing conclusions from one to the other.
>
You are the one who claimed top-down methods were the best to teach everyone
spelling. I just pointed out it's not the case everywhere, and that the French
experience *is* meaningful for everyone. The difference between the English
spelling and the French spelling are not that big, not enough to justify that a
method which strongly fails in France should work in America, especially when
there are quite a few hints that it doesn't work there either.

Your only argument in favour of the top-down method, that it works with adults,
is already weakened by the fact that it's proven that children and adults have
completely different approaches to learning, and the French example, which *is*
relevant, shows you how dangerous the method is when applied to children. Why
keeping on defending a method that has been proven useless when applied to
children? Do you have any interest in raising the level of illiteracy among
American children?

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

It takes a straight mind to create a twisted conlang.

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