Why can’t
Johnny read? He had not been taught to read. He had been taught to
look at words and say what the word says. He had been taught to recognize
forms and shapes in the same way that you call an elephant, elephant and a dog,
a dog by simply recognizing how it looks. Unless someone identifies that
word to you, you have no way of decoding what those letters say.
It is a word
guessing game. To add to this methodology, one is taught to match the
picture with the words on the page as a strategy. So, a child reads, “Mother
buys a ……”
Teacher says,
"Look at the picture, what is Mother holding?"
Child says, ”Bread."
Teacher says,
"Yes. Mother buys a loaf of bread."
To promote this
style of word recognition, books or readers specially made for this purpose are
presented to the child with a select number of words repeated in awkward sentences
to facilitate word recognition through repeated encounters with the words.
So the child can read a number of words in the first grade, another two hundred
added to that in the second grade and so on.
Let me share a
secret with you. Each publisher makes up its own category of words of
first, second, third, etc grade. It is possible that a child who can read at
third grade level in Florida using their adopted text can barely read first
grade books in Illinois with Scott Foresman’s selections.
Furthermore, the
child has been memorizing what each word stands and saving a memory slot for
that word in the brain. Our short-term memory can only retain so much. After
a while some things previously learned will be kicked off. Reading
in this manner obviously has produced non-readers in so many generations. There
are high schoolers who are still struggling with reading at a time when
reading is the mainstay at school. Failure to read leads to failure in
understanding content areas and failing in school.
Let me present to
you how reading can be taught in a systematic way which guarantees mastery of
the reading process after 72 lessons. Rudolph Flesch wrote a book, Why
Johnny Can’t Read and what you can do about it.
Here are some important points in the
method:
1.
Reading
is decoding what the letters say, blending them together to sound something
familiar and finally recognizing what one has just said to be a word one has
known in daily conversations. M-a-n
blended together says “man.” The word card saying man can be matched to the
picture card of a man.
2.
Reading
instruction begins with preparatory activities prior to formal reading
instruction. Matching and sorting according to color, size and shape
develop hand-eye coordination and visual discrimination. Working with puzzles
develop or expand vocabulary. Activities with art, washing activities and
building activities develop manual dexterity necessary for writing. Games
on sequencing pictures, (what happened first, what next, what happens
next), prepares one for comprehension.
Even before
a child can read independently, one can follow a story, answer questions
about the story and even suggest possible answers to critical thinking
questions. Singing, reciting poems sharpens articulation. Being read to leads
to love of reading and therefore invites them to learn how to read.
3.
Developing
phonemic awareness comes next.
These are activities encouraging the play
of sounds that make up our words. At this level, we do not use letters.
We simply listen and participate verbally or with a motor response without
using letters. Some of these activities include --
Rhyming,
Segmenting
Blending
Counting the number of syllables,
Adding a sound at the beginning of a word
Adding a sound at the end of a word
Substituting a vowel in the middle of a word
4.
Phonics---
there are 44 sounds of the English language. Since we only have 26
letters of the alphabet, we combine two letters together to make a new sound.
So if we know the letter sound or letter- combination sound and blend all the
sounds of the letter-symbols from left to right, we can read any word.
5.
The
systematic method is arranged into five big steps and these organized into 72
lessons. There are 40 weeks in a school year. Let’s suppose a child
can only learn one lesson a week, 72 lessons can be accommodated in two years.
After two years, a child can read anything.
Would you like your
child to be guessing what this word says all through his/her life or would you
give him/her the key so one can decipher what each word says independently?
What are you waiting for? Get hold of this book, read the argument for
teaching the phonics method and follow the systematic lessons laid out.
After 72 lessons, your child can read anything and would like to read.
