I posted a Substack note on Paul Thomas’s post and he referred me to another post of his.
I think Paul has finally framed the issue in a way that allows for a more productive discussion. Rather than arguing over whether there is a "reading crisis," he is asking deeper historical questions.
Here is my response:
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.
Yesterday, 8.5.2022 was my 4th 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,
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 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?
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.
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 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.
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.
