The importance of combining phonics and whole language.

                          

Phillip Chipping and I have been discussing on LinkedIn for a few days. He asked me to send him 2 posts which I think are the top.

All my posts are worth reading but I thought I’d make a new post as there was another teacher, I discussed with who teaches phonics but does not understand why memorising Dolch words is important.

This is one of the problems with kids shutting down. The phonics proponents are adamant that kids should not rote memorise HFWs because it is based on Whole Language and the WL proponents think phonics is useless as many kids who have learned phonics can’t read.

Neither the phonics or the whole word advocates know why many kids shut down from learning to read. 

4th Lesson with Jack and the naysayers

 

Yesterday, 8.5.2022 was my 4^th lesson with Jack.

He still guesses instead of reading what he already knows. This is a habit which will take a little time to unlearn.

Today, I gave him the following Dolch words to memorise by rote memory:

her, all, good, some, my, this, here, soon, 

My way or the highway - SSP proponents

 

There are many Science of Reading (SoR) and Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) proponents who claim it is their way or the high-way. They keep Twitting not to teach kids to memorise the High Frequency words (Dolch Words).

They keep lying that words can be memorised only by shape.  

They say that teaching letter names before letter sounds will confuse kids.

No wonder the illiteracy rate in the UK is still high as it was decades ago.

Kathy Rastle's Logical Fallacy

 

@Kathy_Rastle’s Twitter profile says:

Professor of Psychology, Language & Reading Research, Editor J. Memory & Language, President, Experimental Psychology Society

And she has 4,615 Followers

Kathy Rastle and londonjohn tweeted the following:

Londonjohn @londonjohn9 Apr 23 @Kathy_Rastle

 From my experience of teaching hundreds of struggling pupils to read, I've seen they can deal with whole words in sentences as, or even before they receive phonics. Why do you say phonics is the starter motor for reading?

My first one hour with my first student for 2022

 

This is a continuation of my post found here. 

27.4.2022

Today was the first 1 hour session with Jack.

I asked him to read out the sounds represented by the consonants and recorded it as shown below.

Students with Reading Difficulties (OHRC)

Recently there has been many tweets on ‘Ontario Human Rights Commission Executive Summary’.

What is new in that summary? NOTHING!

Is there anything in the summary that has not been said before? NOTHING!

The term used by them is ‘Students with reading difficulties’.

Elsewhere they have terms such as:

i.                     At risk children

ii.                   Unskilled readers

iii.                 Child with special education needs

iv.                 Etc.

Lyn Stone and orthographic mapping

 

Lyn Stone had blocked me for commenting on her tweet. Only recently have I seen her tweets again. Here is one such tweet I read yesterday and believe she does not know what she is talking about other than quoting what someone had said about 20 years ago.

Here is the URL to Lyn’s video clip and my comments.

https://youtu.be/KIuwKnZqJEQ

Visual memory revisited

I am writing on visual memory again as there is a discussion on it on Twitter. 

 

Most teachers assume that words are stored by visual memory. This is not an accurate assumption. Some of the phonics proponents say it repeatedly. So much so, that they have begun to believe their own lies.

SSP proponents and their tale of the three legged rabbit

On 5.4.2020 I saw a tweet that had my name tagged along with a few others. I copied some extracts from the article linked to the tweet and when I wanted to respond the tweet disappeared together with the linked article.

You may find the thread here.

Emily Hanford of APM Connecting the dots

This post will make no sense to those who have not followed my tweets on Rote memory of Dolch words and the irresponsible responses by several SSP proponents. I was talking about rote memorisation and they attacked me and said there is no place for visual memory of words.

Why the obsession with Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP)?

The following was posted by a teacher from OZ on Twitter.

This SSP mania has been hugely harmful to learners. I am yet to find ten year old struggling learners who don’t know their letter sounds! Aa apple, Bb ball, Cc cat – it is this letter sound teaching that they continue to employ that causes many to struggle.