Tag: phonics
Phonics confuse slow readers
I love the English language and all its strange little ways – how it is perfectly unsuited to learning to read using an exclusive phonetic system. Take a simple word like Slow. Slow can be pronounced phonetically as Slough, like the town, or Sloe, as in the name of the fruit. If you come from…
What is reading for?
Currently, there is a lively debate about how children should learn to read. It seems to me that both sides of the debate share the same concern – they all agree that children should become fluent readers, able to both read and understand the written word. To me, the debate has come about through the…
Why Phonics are useless on their own
The older I get, the more I realise that there is never one simple easy answer. Duality or multiplicity is built into the fabric of life. Yin/Yang, Left/Right, Relativity/Quantum theory. All systems work happily enough, but each needs the other to make sense of the whole. So it is with learning to read. The mechanistic…
