I enjoy looking through news articles online that deal with homeschooling or an educational subject and choosing one to write on each week. It keeps me up to speed on everything. This week, I wanted to find something on the current topic, sight-words. Most informative works I read speak very highly upon teaching young children to recognize sight-words. This article, however, did not. The article, written by Bruce Deitrick Price is entitled Education Has Been Battered by Bad Faith. It is very well written and I do agree with the main point of the article. Price says that Teachers often begin teaching in good faith. They believe in the teaching methods that they have been taught and therefor use those methods to teach their students. Later on, however, many teachers continue to use the same methods after finding out that they are not productive. I agree with this, I do. I think that there are teachers who adapt their lessons appropriately to truly speak to the heart of a child so that they can properly retain the information. However, I do not think that is every teacher and Price does bring up a good point. Where I disagree with him, is in his one and only example, teaching sight-words.
Price says "These professors know that their methods hurt children. They know that slowly memorizing hundreds of sight-words is a horribly difficult task, which typically leads nowhere." Now, children sitting with a stack of flashcards sounds like an absolutely awful idea! If that is how sight words are being taught, yes, there is a huge problem. The problem there is in teaching styles, not with teaching sight words alone. Learning sight words does not have to be difficult. And this just happens to be a great day for my daughter to prove my point. Today was Word Chain Wednesday. We put together a puzzle to get her brain working first thing in the morning and also as a quick refresher. The princess paid extra attention to the word that she has trouble with. I was very impressed by this. She chose the word before we even started, asked me what it was, and put it back in the pile with the other pieces. It was very obvious she was storing that information into that little head of hers. After completing the puzzle, we got out the links with words on them. Within a few minutes, all ten words were added to her chain. She received these words last week and within one week she could recognize them anywhere. Once she decides she's going to remember something, it takes seconds. You can see it in her eyes when she's processing information. The brain of a four year old is simply amazing!
I obviously did not choose to write about this article simply because Price thinks sight words are difficult. It was something else he said. He was talking about the book "Why Johnny can't read," written in 1955 by Rudolf Flesch. Price says "It explains why we had an illiteracy problem (sight-words) and what to do about it (bring back phonics)," Now, I can't write on "Why Johnny Can't Read" because I have not read it. I will add it to my reading list. As for Price, his views are very clear. Do you remember when I said that the Princess took a closer look at the word she had difficulty with. The word she struggled with was "one." Yes, phonics is important. We can not ban phonics from reading education. I can not think of a possible way to memorize the entire English dictionary. It is not happening! Every once in a while, I'll read a book and come across a word I do not know, with phonics and reasoning I can usually come up with both how to say it (or a relative guess) along with the definition. However, that word "one." The princess had a hard time with this word because when she could not remember it, she begin to rely on phonics. That is perfectly fine. I never discourage her from sounding out a word. In fact, I am very proud of her when she successfully sounds a word out phonetically. But with the word "one" I have to stop her because she gets further and further away from being able to determine what that little three letter word is. She would not be able to read the word one without memorizing it.
The fact that not every word can be phonetically sounded out is not even the greatest problem with removing sight-words from the process of teaching a child to read. Children need to be able to retain information. Fluency is the most important factor when reading. What is the point in reading for pleasure or education if the reader does not know what he is reading! I am going to travel back about six years. When I was helping my nephew learn to read, every day was a struggle. He would come home from kindergarten with books to read and we would phonetically sound out every word! This was too much! Fluency was out of the question.. There was no way he was retaining anything he was reading. In fact, the way we were reading, I am not sure I retained any of the reading. It was all about reading the individual words, not the story being told.
We do not need to get rid of phonics, nor should we. However, I believe the same goes for sight- words. Besides.. the most fun we currently have in our lessons is when the princess is practicing sight words. I would miss all our games if we took it out of our homeschooling lesson plans! Playing with the princess is a very justifiable excuse to put off folding clothes or washing dishes to play with toy cars and puzzles; We all know the importance of bonding and playing with your child. But, playing and bonding while teaching the princess to read is an even better excuse to wait a few more minutes before getting back to those pesky chores! With all seriousness, though, I truly believe that sight words are an important part of the learning to read process.
Everybody has their opinion, now you know mine. What do you think?
Thanks for commenting on my article. I've never taught anyone to read. I've merely absorbed the collective wisdom of all the phonics people. They don't like sight-words because, even though you may have some gains at the start, you ultimately end up giving a child a kind of schizophrenia. When the kids look toward the next word to the right, there's a tension about how to attack that word: phonetically or graphically. And there is the problem.
ReplyDeleteI have another article up now called "Reading is easy. Illiteracy is hard." It's on rightsidenews and has a lot of great quotes from the experts.
Bruce, thank you for your response. I can understand that concern. If only every word could be sounded out phonetically, then we could prevent this problem. I can still see why somebody would want to limit the amount of words that get taught by memorization. However, for the reasons I discussed, the mixture of phonics and sight words works well for us. I look forward to reading this next article.
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