Being a grandmother, I did the Dick & Jane books (trying not to say how old I am
).
I went to a private school and had saved copies of these old books. My daughter was being taught by phonics in kindergarten by a very good teacher. She was having difficulty but it was working for some kids in the class. I took an afternoon off work and we read the old Dick & Jane books. She started reading immediately!
A friend of mine at work had same problem but her son was in first grade and still struggling. I took her my Dick & Jane books. Guess what he stated reading immediately!
I think the new methods of teaching reading are the problem. I think they should return to the Dick & Jane books that worked so well for years. I was taught phonics also in second grade after I had the confidence to read sight words in the Dick & Jane books. Children need to be taught sight words because sounding out every little word is extremely frustrating to a new reader. I think the scientific studies return the answer that the researchers want it to return. Just like the government studies return the answer that either side would prefer.
These are two personal examples I have that your method alone does not work Daddude for all children.
Well, first of all, it isn't
my method; phonics was the only method of teaching reading to kids in English and other European languages until the late 19th century/early 20th century. What you think is "the good old-fashioned way" was in fact an innovation in your own grandparents' time.
As to how your granddaughter learned to read, you don't really say enough. I doubt that it is possible for Dick and Jane to teach any child to learn to read in one afternoon -- surely that's not what you're saying. If you had a role to play I'm sure it was as much the fact that you are her grandma as anything else. I'm not denying that whole language can work, especially with an enthusiastic teacher. Probably, when you sat down to read with your granddaughter, it did help to work with a text that wasn't too hard, and probably what happened is that your granddaughter's classwork prepared her to read Dick and Jane, and then she applied what she had learned. Right? But that doesn't show that phonics failed your granddaughter. Actually I don't know what kind of phonics your granddaughter was learning. It might not have deserved the name, you know. Not every program calling itself "phonics," or every lame, half-hearted attempt to introduce phonics into an otherwise whole language program (what is often called a "hybrid" approach), will produce results. The only sort of phonics that deserves the name is systematic, intensive, or synthetic phonics (many names have been given to distinguish it from "mixed" programs).
No disrespect to you, but I think the whole word, Dick-and-Jane method did
not work so well for so many years. It failed a lot of kids who would not have been failed by a proper, intensive phonics program. You might have fond memories of those books, but for many other children they represented nothing but boredom and frustration. Don't tell me you don't remember
that, too, even if you didn't share the opinion -- the whole Dr. Seuss and easy-reader phenomenon came about in reaction to the boring Dick-and-Jane readers. Dick and Jane was a little before my time, but my mom had me go through a phonics workbook (I remember it) when I was 5 or 6, I guess, and I went on in school to use lame whole word Holt readers--incredibly boring.
Just look at the California experiment with whole language. They mandated use of whole language as a state law back in 1987, and subsequently California dropped to last place (in one year's rankings). I gather that the scores subsequently rose after the law was repealed. Later--to quote Wikipedia (and this coheres with what I've read elsewhere): "The National Reading Panel examined quantitative research studies on many areas of reading instruction, including phonics and whole language. The resulting report
Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and its Implications for Reading Instruction was published in 2000 and provides a comprehensive review of what is known about best practices in reading instruction in the U.S. The panel reported that several reading skills are critical to becoming good readers: phonics for word identification, fluency, vocabulary and text comprehension. With regard to phonics, their meta-analysis of hundreds of studies confirmed the findings of the National Research Council: teaching phonics (and related phonics skills, such as phonemic awareness) is a more effective way to teach children early reading skills than is embedded phonics or no phonics instruction."
For all but the education establishment, the scientific debate is essentially over -- even if the policy debate rages on.
My advocacy of explicit phonics is not out of some blind prejudice. I go where scientific studies lead. Studies
that follow the scientific method properly uniformly demonstrate the significant superior effectiveness of explicit phonics, versus programs that don't use explicit phonics. For me, it's not a question of phonics vs. whole word--it's a question of explicit phonics versus anything else (regardless of whether it is
called "phonics" or not). Again, over a period of many decades, the proper scientific studies have actually proven the superiority of explicit phonics versus the other ("see-and-say," whole word, whole language, "implicit" phonics, and "mixed") methods.
Many kids
can learn to read from a whole language method, and maybe matters are different for little babies. But that's probably because they manage to figure out the code. (It's also plausible to me that it's easier and more natural for very little kids to be able to figure it out. But as far as I know, nobody has done studies on that.) But, especially for older kids, if you really want a kid to know the code, you teach the code, period. Otherwise, you're taking your chances.
There's one other thing, while I'm still on my soapbox (again)...sometimes educationist ideologues try to portray a debate between intensive phonics, on the one hand, and people who want to "introduce literature" to children. This is an insulting false alternative. I am as big an advocate of the use of literature for children as you'll ever encounter.
And I've been teaching my boy using phonics. There's no reason you can't do both, and I doubt there's a single phonics advocate who says you shouldn't.
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