November 25th, 2009
Dolch = Dyslexia. Why Sight Words do not work. Why we have 50000000 functional illiterates. (The intense sound track suggests what it must be like to be made illiterate by your own school.) (Bruce Deitrick Price / Improve-Education.org) look-say phonics Rudolph Flesch sight words Dolch Words balanced literacy John Dewey functional illiteracy, Frank smith, kindergarten, pre-k, k-12, reading,
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I have to also say though, while I don’t approve of the dolch method for mainstream teaching, there are some students with certain learning disabilities who might benefit from this method, such as those with certain forms of dyslexia.
Also see new video called “The Strange Truth About Dyslexia.” Marva Collins, Siegfried Engelmann, Mona McNee, Don Potter–all the experts I trust–teach children to read in first grade. If cowgal is also achieving the same results, fine.
20 000 words? Before they start school?Are you talking about expressive / responsive spoken language or reading? Sounding out does not instantly connect to meaning! What about does and does, read and read, bow and bow? Context is vital! Look up the word? In a dictionary? Pretty complex skill for a 5 year old that can’t manage to sound out ‘who’ and then have to try and retain, search for it using complex skills and then get their head around interrogative and relative or pronoun.
The w sound in ONCE comes from the O sound which is the name of the letter O.
The transition between that sound and the N is achieved by modern english speakers by adding an “uh” sound. The silent E probably used to not be silent and make an “eh” sounce but now just facilitates the S sounding C.
I started kindergarten at a private school and there was a strong emphasis on phonics and spelling. When I transferred to a public school in 1st grade, I was at the same reading level as 3rd graders there, and by 3rd grade I was at a 9th grade reading level.
To Cowgal: Children arrive in first grade recognizing as many as 20,000 words and names. When children sound out a word (e.g., A-ma-zon), they instantly connect to meaning. If they do not, they look up the word. The notion that they–or we–routinely decode words but do not comprehend meaning is fanciful. (This sophistry was devised decades ago by the Look-say gang, so they could claim that successful reading is, in fact, only word-calling. Flesch analyzed this gimmick in his 1981 book.)
My favourite words break all the rules:
ONCE – wuns(no ‘w’ but I hear it)
YOU – isn’t this ‘u’ – if a and I are words why not u?
Teaching reading can only be achieved through a thorough blended approach – indlucing phonics, phonological awareness (rhyme, syllables), and by actually reading with a purpose. It is SO much more than just decoding – what’s the point of reading if you don’t understand what you have read. Learning to read must include learning to comprehend or it’s pointless.
Hey hold that!! don’t throw baby out with bath water!
such lists are good COMPANION for reading books. and good TO HAVE to monitor children’s spelling of common words they need to write right.
Its very handy for parents & young learner to focus to get start fast! I get tremendous success with young learners using Fry s
DON’T BLAME THE TOOL!
Brilliant! My new motto is ‘free the sounds!” We could ‘free’ a lot of children from the heartache of reading disability by teaching them to ‘free the sounds’
If you would take a small child and ask her to read a word that she learned with sight words, say ‘mouse’, she would recgonise it in seconds. But say we gave her the word ’stewarsesses’ She would go ‘what’s that?’, when a child properly taught how to read (sound-letter recognition) would, within a minute or so, say the proper word.
With this argument in mind I say that English is a wide and comlex language and sight word could not possibly cover all of it
By the way, I am able to reach this type of learner all over the globe because of the internet, and when I have parents writing me to say that their children are making sense out of reading for the first time in their lives, I am proud and grateful. I have been in the school system with the role of “mopping up” after all the testing, sorting and labeling and have been there with the kids who have no confidence left because of the label they have been given. I am glad to have a solution to offer!
Our students don’t see words as shapes. This is vastly different from that. Did you go see? Are you by any chance a teacher of students who struggle? Have you worked specifically with students who are visual learners, dyslexic children? and found solutions for them that worked for the first time in their lives? I have and there is absolutely nothing like it. We teach with the stylized word first and for kids who also learn from whole to part, the approach is vital. THEN we teach phonics.
You’re making money selling Dolch words? I’ll continue to trust Samuel Blumenfeld’s analysis that once children start seeing words as shapes rather than sounds, they won’t become fluent readers. I’ve seen arguments that a few sight words can’t hurt, but I’d rather err on the side of caution and warn parents against any sight words.
Although you make valid points, I think you still have not hit the target. Dolch is not dyslexia. Whole language was an incredibly bad idea. Phonics alone does not work either, although it works better than the former. The key lies in the fact that reading is a left brain function and only about 1/3 of children function primarily out of left brain. So, teach reading in a way that simultaneously engages mutliple areas in the brain, esp. visual cortex & cerebellum. Go to child-1st(dot)com for info
Probably the “decline” is a matter of parallax. I suspect the other kids are sprinting ahead (i.e., grasping phonics, really reading). Some kids in Whole Word remain stuck at the age 6, 7, or 8 with regard to reading. You observed this phenomenon in the video where a father pushes more Sight Words at his own son. A mother here in Norfolk told me about a 9-year-old who sees “the” and says “it.” (Both being short Dolch words.) Age 9 but frozen at age 6 by a derelict elementary school.
I wonder if this helps to explain what I have heard as “the fourth grade slump”, where children experience a sharp decline in their reading and writing abilities in school. Often, educational techniques have no practical application in a child’s life, which makes the content confusing and irrelevant. No wonder children learn how to hate reading and writing.
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