2 Comments

1. 

   Marnie on May 5, 2019 at 3:34 pm

   Keep jumping in this debate, Erica! We need so many more persuasive voices sounding the alarm.

   I was a middle school English teacher who found it harder to teach writing and mechanics because my students couldn’t even distinguish a noun from a verb. That was needlessly difficult, but what really set me on edge was that my typically-developing classes were reading, on average, 2 years behind grade level because of whole language instruction.

   As a result of that frustration, I now teach how to teach reading for beginning or struggling readers. High frequency words DO get confusing to discuss. Even if a word is easily decodable, such as an highly frequent word like “had,” it still needs to become automatically recognized. A “sight word.” Thus, there are times when it’s good to provide repetition so that the word (phonetically regular or not) becomes instantly recognized (i.e., a “sight word”).

   In other words, games and worksheets for extra practice of high frequency words may be useful. What bugs me about the Insta worksheet example is that the emphasis seems to be on the shape of the word—rather than on the individual sounds in the word—/h/ /a/ /d/.

   Additionally, there are only a handful of words that are truly non-decodable, such as “eye.” The word “is” follows the expected pattern of a short vowel “i” and the /z/ sound for “s” is not uncommon at the ends of words. I encourage teachers to point out to students how each sound (phoneme) relates to a given letter or letters (grapheme). Words like “said” are odd, but only the “ai” is not playing fair. The other consonants are 100% regular phonics patterns.

   This nit-picking about decodability matters because those students that learn to rapidly connect individual phonemes to graphemes in words, most quickly pick up reading and more likely enjoy a lifetime of reading achievement (for instance, see Stanovich, 1988). Almost every word is decodable or mostly decodable and doesn’t have to be treated as a word to be learned only by sight.

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     Erica Meltzer on May 7, 2019 at 3:28 pm

     Thanks for the input/clarification. I can totally understand treating “had” as a sight word for the sake of practicality while also spending class time going over the individual sounds and relating them to other, similar words. I used to do something comparable with a lot of my ACT students: I’d drill them on the rote version of a rule just to ensure they could consistently answer questions testing it, and then also go over the logic behind it on relevant questions so that they could learn to apply the concept more effectively across the board. That kind of two-pronged approach is extremely effective when managed well. The issue (and based on what you wrote, I’m sure you know this) is that that kind of juggling act doesn’t usually work well unless the teacher really knows what they’re doing and is very deliberate about making the various parts work together. Otherwise, it’s easy for kids to just end up confused. My concern is that inexperienced teachers without any real training in phonics are going on TpT and pulling off random worksheets that treat phonetic words like sight words without realizing that they ALSO need to be taught phonetically. The sheets I saw on TpT might be fine in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing, but they could easily be a disaster in the wrong ones.

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