Has My Child Been
Mistaught?
Look at the eager-beaver
kindergartner. There's not a child alive who has ever started school not
wanting to learn to read.
Look at the parents. There are no
parents anywhere on Earth who don't want their child to have the basic skill of
opportunity - the ability to read.
Yet look how many children in our
schools today who can't read very well. In most states, it's around 15% who are
deemed functionally illiterate. And many, many more read below grade level. Yet
all of them have normal eyesight and intelligence, with nothing medical
standing between them and literacy.
How can this be? It's very possible
that a child who can't read very well is dealing with some inborn traits such
as attention deficits that are hard to manage, and got away from the child
before the orderly process of decoding text could get going.
But it's also possible that the
child has been mistaught. Millions of children haven't been taught the precise
and orderly code of our alphabetic language, because most schools don't believe
in teaching reading with phonics-only methods. Instead, they mix a lot of
methods, including sight-reading, memorization, guessing, and using context
cues, which wind up creating more disability than it solves.
How can you tell if your child has
been mistaught?
• Ask your child to name the short
vowel sounds. No go? No phonics.
• Ask an older child to read the
first few paragraphs of the lead story on Page 1 of your newspaper. Does it
sound confident and flowing to you, even if some of the words are unfamiliar?
Or does it sound choppy, hesitant, intermittent and frustrated?
• Read a page of a book with your
child that's just a little above your child's abilities. See if your child
skips words or entire lines, substitutes words, adds words that aren't there,
guesses, backtracks, or otherwise reads wrong.
• Does your child hate reading?
That's a Whole Language side effect, often caused by frustration when smart
kids can't read as fast as their brains want to.
• Does your child get eyestrain
after short periods of reading? Another problem compliments of W.L. Because of
the looping and skipping around the words . . . what letter does it start with?
what letter does it end with? does it match the picture? . . . a child's eyes
literally get tired a whole lot faster doing sight-reading, than with the
smooth, straight, rhythmic eye movements of phonics. W.L. kids can almost never
read books with relatively small print. That's most everything worth reading,
after about age 12.
• Look at your child's assigned
reading from school. Ask your child to point out the words on a page that are
unfamiliar. Does your child routinely look up those words in the dictionary? Or
is your child in the habit of skipping them? Find a book your child has just
read and quiz him or her about some of the more complex words in it. Could
problems with reading comprehension date back to the W.L. habits of guessing
and acceptance of incorrect reading, 'way back in kindergarten and first grade?
• Ask your child to "sound out"
words. If he or she cannot, there's been no phonics tucked into that wee brain.
What
can you do? Find a tutor who knows a good, systematic, intensive, explicit
phonics method, such as Spalding (www.spalding.org),
preferably before your child finishes third grade. The brain is in maximum
teaching mode for language through approximately that age. After that, it gets
harder and harder to teach reading right.
By Susan Darst Williams • www.GoBigEd.com • Read to Me 006 • © 2006
