Disinformation by Marion Blank.

                                     

The following are extracts from a YouTube video by Karen Quinn, Co-Founder - www.TestingMom.com interviewing Marion Blank from Columbia University New York City, United States. LINK

 

Kindergartens today are asking parents to teach phonics lessons at home with their children to help them label the sounds and so that is generally very destructive and not constructive and it puts a lot of pressure on the children those who can do it don’t need it and those who can’t do it just fail. It is a lose-lose situation as opposed to a win-win. (Marion Blank)

This is the kind of disinformation that misleads many parents and teachers who accept such nonsense from so-called educators.  

What’s one of the most common difficulties with kids is what is called the naming problem that’s difficulty in labelling nouns

If you give multiple trials on the same word so you are naming the same thing over and over again without it being boring, you are going to prevent the naming problem from ever interfering with reading and that’s one of the main principles behind reading kingdom where every word is taught with at least 45 to 50 trials.

I have addressed this in my previous post. LINK

The criminal fact is that in the US 60% of the children are failing in reading and these are normal healthy vibrant children who are failing in reading. The reason they are failing is because they are being taught phonics.

This is another sweeping statement made by Marion Blank and many balance literature advocates. They say it only because they have spent time and money on the wares they are marketing.

You have a sound of the letter p as per and ph as per and huh. If you take the consonant sounds you can’t say them without the schwa at the end. If I hold up a letter C and I say why don’t you say cook but a C isn’t cuh it is /c/. Even when a child learns to blend it does not sound like the word it is supposed to come out. If you sound out cat it comes out cuhahtuh which is not cat.

This has been my mantra for more than a decade. Teach consonant sounds with no extraneous sounds. Who or what is Marion Blank to say that consonant sounds cannot be said with the schwa at the end. (Even the word schwa is used wrongly by Marion. The ending vowel sounds at the end of consonants are extraneous sounds added to consonants.) This is what many balance literacy advocates have been duping the world with. I have video clips of a 6-year-old kid in Lagos who pronounces the consonants the way they should be. (LINK) If this 6 year-old kid can say it, who or what is Marion Blank to say it cannot.

Here is a post on the importance of enunciating the correct sounds of consonants that includes another video enunciating the consonants without extraneous sounds (without vowel sounds at the end). LINK

Phonics has no way of getting a child to automatic reading and all these can be overcome with the right methods and that’s what we do on the Reading Kingdoms that we just came out with is the thing called Spelling Ninja because if you develop solid long term memory you never lose it. It takes a few weeks to build it in but a child who can spell it and write it quickly and automatically he is going to be reading ok. So the Spelling Ninja programme does that.

Her spelling Ninja programme is what I have been doing for more than a decade. I teach kids to rote memorise all the 220 Dolch Words. They do that by spelling out the word and saying the word after spelling it. Writing out the word as they spell it will further reinforce it in their minds but is not necessary.

You don’t need the letter names.

I am noting the above here only for record purposes. This is the kind of misleading statement made by so-called educators for the sake of getting people to buy their programmes. I have dealt with this in my post here. LINK

A vast majority of words are content words and there is a very small group of words about 200 altogether but only about a hundred that matter to children are what are called non-content words. They are called non-content words because they don’t seem to refer to anything, words like the, was, is if, and, etc. They are not taught to any degree in phonics as they do not follow any phonic rules. The children are taught they are bandit words and told to learn them by sight. But how someone learn by sight without being taught anything. No one knows but the other thing is these are absolutely critical to meaning and – 60 % or more of every page of print is a non-content word.

If only 200 words do not follow phonics rules to any degree why not get kids to rote memorise them. 

No! Not learn by sight (visual memory) but get kids to memorise them by rote memory - by frequent exposure until automaticity. 

If kids memorise those words and are thereby able to spell them, then 60% of words in a book can be read leaving only about 40% to be read using phonics.