Reading

The NY Times has a piece on the reintroduction of phonics. They note:

“Bit!” Ayana Smith called out as she paced the alphabet rug in front of her kindergarten students at Garrison Elementary School.

“Buh! Ih! Tuh!” the class responded in unison, making karate chop motions as they enunciated the sound of each letter. In a 10-minute lesson, the students chopped up and correctly spelled a string of words:

Top. “Tuh! Ah! Puh!”

Wig. “Wuh! Ih! Guh!”

Ship. “Shuh! Ih! Puh!”

Ms. Smith’s sounding-out exercises might seem like a common-sense way to teach reading. But for decades, many teachers have embraced a different approach, convinced that exposing students to the likes of Dr. Seuss and Maya Angelou is more important than drilling them on phonics.

Now in my experience wandering about Europe for about ten years and having to get some semblance of the six languages I played with  I think I learned at least how I learned. Pronouncing Greek, Russian, French, was a challenge which was eased by actually doing it. Reading however was an interesting exercise. Take Greek. I know the letters, had studied classic Homeric Greek, but yes things have changed a bit in 2500 years, but not that much once you got the hang of it.

At first you walk about pronouncing word after word, not necessarily as a Greek, inflection comes with use, but you can get close. Then after a while you recognize the word qua word. Then finally the word has meaning as a sign or symbol, and you forget the letters. You learn to read by sensing the symbols, not the words. You learn exit, men's room, food names, here and there, how much is it, numbers, they all come to you as symbols. 

It was one night in Moscow when I looked out at the street and show and saw the signs, the Cyrillic was blending into the symbols for store, pharmacy, taxi, and so forth. I no longer read, I understood. It was like a stop sign. if you have to phonic your way through it you most likely have had a crash already.

The challenge is English. It is an impossible language to pronounce, phonics works sometime, it also uses different words in different places. An auto rotary versus circle, and in the UK one might just as well be on Mars.

So what is the best way to read, I guess just do what works, for the student.