Jeffrey Bowers and Sam Bommarito on Phonics

 

On September 22^nd, Jeffrey Bowers twitted the following:

@jeffrey_bowers Replying to @annephillipswa @dmounty14 and 19 others

What do you make if the fact that reading outcomes in England have not improved in over a decade of legally mandated phonics?  No one seems to address the Elephant in the room.

Dr. Sam Bommarito @DoctorSam7 Sep 22

Yes this! By the way if England 10+ years of mandated phonics it hasn’t had an impact why on earth are we in the process of trying to mandate it United States. Time to look at all the data before making decisions.

 

 

Who is Jeffrey trying to kid? I have addressed this question since 2010. AND with Jeffrey, I had tagged him on Twitter several times including in my blog posts as follows:

 

https://www.dyslexiafriend.com/2020/05/jeffrey-bowers-flawed-thoughts-on.html

On Twitter Jeffrey Bowers has tweeted the following:

 

    The consistent misrepresentation of science in support of phonics is really quite extraordinary.  And when challenged (see: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10648-019-09515-y), almost complete silence.  Researchers just keep saying the same thing and ignore serious questions and challenges.

My comment:

 

The first sentence above “first focus on teaching letter (grapheme) to sound (phoneme) correspondences”.

 

 

Do any of the educators understand exactly what that means? It means that sounds represented by letters should be taught correctly.

 

 

When the phonemes are taught wrongly most children learn to read after wasting a lot of time figuring out the connections.

 

Jeffrey does not understand that for phonics to work as it ought to we need to teach the pronunciation of phonemes correctly.

 

Here is another post which I posted on Twitter and tagged both Jeffrey and Buckingham.

 

https://www.dyslexiafriend.com/2020/05/learning-to-read-via-analyses.html#more

I repeat that neither Jennifer Buckingham not Jeffrey Bowers know what they are debating on.

 

Jennifer Buckingham states that phonics should be taught but is unable to explain why phonics is not working the way the phonics proponents claim it should.

 

Jeffrey Bowers did not understand that the problem is not phonics but the way the pronunciation of phonemes is being taught in countries around the world.

 

For phonics to work properly and the Reading Wars to end we need to teach the correct sounds of symbols and to teach children the blending of the phonemes.

 

I believe it is the ego of Jennifer and Jeffrey which is preventing them from accepting my findings and ending the reading wars or...

Here is another post where I tagged Jeffrey on Twitter.

 

https://www.dyslexiafriend.com/2020/05/the-endless-war-jennifer-buckingham-vs.html

This debate between the two and the Reading War can be ended if the pronunciation of phonemes of consonants is taught correctly.

 

 

            Sound symbol skills + Blending ability = Basic phonics

 

Educators talk about phonics without understanding that sound symbol skills are paramount for phonics to work effectively.

 

 

Stop teaching kuh-ah-tuh for cat and instead teach it correctly as /c/ /a/ /t/ and there will be no kids left behind.

 

AND Jeffrey has the audacity to claim that no one had addressed the elephant in the room. What a blatant misrepresentation.

 

As for Dr. Sam Bommarito, I am rather disappointed that he would agree with Jeffrey. I understand that Dr. Sam has been teaching for more than 50 years but it would appear that he had taught the first year and repeated it for the next 50 years without understanding why kids fail to read. He has no idea as to what is required for phonics to work effectively. This reminds me of a saying about the bad workman who blames his tools. A similar Malay proverb is a guy with two left foot blaming that the floor is uneven when he could not dance.