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Phonics is considered a "bottom up" approach where students "decode" the meaning of a text. The advantage of phonics, especially for students who come to schools with large vocabularies, is that once students get the basics down, they can go to the library and read a wide variety of children's literature.
The Reading Wars: Phonics vs Whole Language: Phonicsby Jon Reyhner, a phonics skeptic
That certainly explains why my district, heavily populated by small children possessing large vocabularies, would be dumping Open Court for Fountas and Pinnell.
4 comments:
It's always funny when I hear my DD use a word that she obviously learned from reading because she's mispronouncing it in a way that phonetically makes sense. For example, she thought that the word "faux" rhymed with "box" rather than with "bow". She doesn't speak French, so she wouldn't know that the "x" is silent and the "au" diphthong often is pronounced like "ah" (as in the word "fault").
I know - I love that!
once students get the basics down, they can go to the library and read a wide variety of children's literature.
The question is, why is considered an 'advantage' rather than the actual objective.
ya got me
You'd think, seeing as how disadvantaged kids enter school with 'word poverty,' you'd want to get them decoding as fast as you possibly could so you devote (nearly) all of your ELA time to teaching vocabulary & background knowledge.
(I say nearly all because teachers still have to teach what Dianne McGuinness calls "the advanced code" after kids master the "basic code.")
Basic code is what people think of as "irregular" words although in fact many (most?) of them are not irregular.
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