this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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I have a son that's learning to read right now so I've got some first hand experience on this. This article is making a lot out of the contextual clues part of the method but consistently downplays or ignores that phonics is still part of what the kids are taught. It's a bit of a fallback, sure, but my son isn't being taught to skip words when he can't figure it out.
He's bringing home the kinds of books mentioned in the article. The sentence structure is pretty repetitive and when he comes across a word he doesn't know he tries to look at the picture to figure out what it is. Sometimes that works and he says the right word. Other times, like there's a picture of a bear and the word is "cub" (but I don't think my son knew what a bear cub was), he still falls back on "cuh uh buh" to figure it out.
So he still knows the relationship between letters and sounds. He just has some other tools in his belt as well. I can't say I find that especially concerning.
So I'll preface this by saying I'm a late 20s Canadian who attended elementary school from 2001-2009, but we weren't taught phonics (the actual system), we were taught about word sounds.
A lot of my classmates were on their own if they didn't immediately "get it." Also, it was encouraged to skip words if you didn't know them and then try to guess what they were based on the context of the sentence. Lots of wrong guesses happened and those kids got laughed at.
I found it incredibly concerning as a kid because there were a ton of weaker readers who could barely get through a single sentence. This is still happening, even if it's not in your child's school, and that should concern you. These kids will grow up thinking they're stupid when they just needed different tools like your son has.
I think also one thing to remember is that phonics and word sounds are not reading either due to the fact that English is a Frankenstein language where any letter or combination of letters often has a myriad of ways of being pronounced. You cannot learn to read without a healthy dose of memorization and contextual cluing. Letters are, at best, just another clue as to what the word could be.