10 Resons Fonics Herts My Brane

10 Reasons Phonics Hurts My Brain

1. Weak readers also have weak auditory, speech and language skills. You should teach spoken words first.
2. Phonemic awareness must be developed before phonics makes sense.
3. English has a huge number of words that look and sound alike.
4. Phonics teaches letter sound knowledge that many students are unfamiliar with.
5. Most English words have the hardest sound buried in the middle of the word.
6. Auditory vs. Visual Memory - Reading is about 98% auditory, it is more about listening than about letters or printed words.
7. There is no standard for letter to phoneme translation - br and ch, for example, both have two letters but one has one sound while the other is two. Going from letter to phoneme instead of phoneme to letter is a struggle for many students.
8. Cognitive capacity - there is only so much space in a student’s head. Instead of learning rules and exceptions, students should learn patterns.
9. Phonics teaches students to learn accurately but slowly. Many students struggle with reading comprehension because words fall out of memory too easily.
10. Transitioning from phonics practice to authentic reading is very difficult.

Reading Best Practices

Why do so many teachers and tutors claim to use best practices for reading instruction when they neglect the most important methods?
The National Reading Panel reviewed decades of research on reading and determined that struggling readers need a solid foundation, a foundation that extends far deeper than phonics.

Reading comprehension practices that ensure success for struggling readers must include auditory processing (making sense of spoken words) activities so students can connect printed words and meaningful spoken words. Virtually all students who struggle with reading have subtle problems with auditory processing, the leading cause of comprehension difficulties in secondary students.

Many who believe that they are following best practices in reading still neglect phonemic awareness instruction. This is sad, as a few hours working on phonemic awareness is often the fastest route to reading success. Early research showed that phonemic awareness was important for kindergarten and first grade students. Recent research, including the research Sound Reading is based on, shows that it critical for older students. The reason is simple; as words get more complex students require greater phonemic awareness to make sense of them.

Reading comprehension practice doesn’t have to be a protracted battle. There are many strategies that are useful, but only a few that stick. The first is "Stop and Think." The teacher places post-its at critical places in a story. When a student comes to a post-it he stops and thinks. Then he employs the second strategy, he "Turns and Talks" to his reading partner and they have a minute talk about the passage.