I learned phonics and became an excellent reader without hesitation. Later, some morons in the education system created "better" reading techniques, f*cking up my younger brothers and sisters.
Glad to see a return to phonics.
Glad to see a return to phonics.
I personally do not think I am all the special, but I from what I remember, I believe many of my issues with phonics were:
1. The inconsistency of the English language makes it so phonics is limited after a certain number of words, and then memorization and context must be used. For example, take words like cough, rough, through, though, etc. or words like read, lead, wound, etc. Not to mention all the silent letters we have too. If I am not mistaken, most languages do not have Spelling Bee contests because how clearly the language phonics map to spelling, e.g., German.
2. This is purely a hypothesis on my part, but I wonder if certain accents of English are better suited for phonics than other English accents? I grew up in the Southeast, USA. People slur words, drop off endings, contract words n >= 2 words, and even mispronounce words all. For example, the words "ten" and "tin" or "pen" and "pin" are not typically pronounced differently where I am from.
3. If you are like me and had speech problems, then phonics are substantially harder. It's hard to sound out the words when one's mouth cannot produce the proper sounds.
I do not doubt the other alternative methods are worse than phonics, and perhaps I am ignorant, but this debate also seems to be predominately an English only issue. Mandarin Chinese does not have phonics instruction to my knowledge, and they can read just fine. So, perhaps English is just a difficult language to read and pronounce correctly -- even for native speakers?
In grade school English class, our teacher raised as examples "cough", "rough", "through", "though", etc.(i.e., all the "ough" words). She pointed out that sometimes words are inconsistent with phonics.
I became annoyed and complained about the inconsistency. Her response (to me and the class) was straightforward: phonics wasn't exact and some parts of speaking and reading must be memorized. But she also pointed out that everybody else had learned it as a child and that we would too, which was a pretty convincing argument. Within a few days the desire for a foolish consistency evaporated as we advanced through our reading assignments, slaughtering armies of text before us.
English words are composed of characters from a phonetic alphabetic. In Chinese each word is a unique character. So there is no phonics system for Chinese.
This is not true in contemporary Chinese. There are plenty of Chinese words that consist of multiple characters. There are also Chinese characters that have no meaning outside of a multicharacter word (e.g. the 葡 in 葡萄 ).
But there are other characters like "行" that have multiple pronunciations that vary depending on the word they appear in.
This is some next-level teaching skills. Thank you for sharing it in particular :)
I doubt that reading English can be taught without a dose of rote learning.
"At least it's not as hard as learning Chinese" doesn't sound like a convincing argument against language reform to me.
We know. Their point is that the fact that Chinese children succeed in learning to read (non-phonetic) Chinese well contradicts the core argument of TFA, which is that phonics is necessary to learn to read well.
I'm very pro-phonics, but this is nevertheless a compelling argument against it being necessary. If you know of another explanation for why Chinese reading education seems to work well despite the lack of phonics, please give it. (Or is it that learning to read Chinese actually is a big problem in China?)
Historically it was. Reforming the writing system (potentially even ditching it entirely in favor of a Latin/etc derived script) to improve literacy rates was a major topic among Chinese intellectuals during the 20th century.
Some combination of character simplification, reading and writing the vernacular instead of "Classical Chinese", brute force, and modern technology has made this less acute. But it still is not unusual for even educated native Chinese speakers to simply not remember how to write some uncommon character. (You will see this in English occasionally too, of course. I have to think twice when I write rendezvous.)
Korean fixed that by revamping the writing system…
Most characters have a sound part and a semantic part. The sound part is not very precise, but it helps. The semantic part can be quite abstract, such as the sign for mouth (a square or a squarish rectangle) for parts of speech (和 = and).
Like the others wrote, a phonetic system is used in the beginning to provide the pronunciation to the kids. The same system is usually used later for text input on computers or cell phones, possibly supplemented with support for drawing characters.
They have the additional problem that they might not speak Mandarin and the pronunciation support they are using is based on Mandarin.
It works much better than it has any right to, but it requires much more training to reach basic literacy than even an imperfect sound-based system like English. Weeks versus years. To reach proper literacy takes years and mountains of text in both cases.
Since English dictionaries are arranged in "alphabetical order" to make finding the word one wishes to know the definition easier, I'm not curious if the Chinese writing system has anything approaching an "alphabetical order", or any kind of canonical way to order strings of Chinese text. And relatedly, how do they find words in their dictionaries?
(this is normally something I would google but it doesn't sound like something I'd get a high signal to noise ratio on given the ambiguous terms at hand)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radicals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_Dictionary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zihui
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Shuowen_Jiezi_radicals
The alphabet is a marvelous invention. I seem to remember that Europeans in China (and places with a large Chinese diaspora) used alphabetical sorting of whatever romanization they favoured (different between English, French, Dutch). Much easier than radicals and stroke counting.
From what I remember from taking Mandarin in college, Chinese students learn to read much slower than speakers of languages with phonetic alphabets.
I did a quick Google search for the exact numbers and it looks like Chinese students are expected to recognize 3k characters by the end of 6th grade. While US students are expected to be able to read 20k words by that time and some sources I found said up to 40k.
Some more googling looking for something similar to compare is that Chinese students know enough characters to read simple newspaper articles at age 11 or so. While a 6 or 7 year old American student can read simple newspaper articles.
Either way there seems to be a pretty strong consensus that one of the advantages of a phonetic alphabet is ease and time to learn.
Obviously a phonetic language has other disadvantages compared to a logographic language.
But ok, Chinese is semi-logographic/semi-phonetic (many words are made just by characters with the right sound) at this point, which is a confusing hot mess and requires more effort to be completely literate, but only a year or two of more effort compensated for by a more accelerated math in elementary school (well, at least for city kids).
>requires more effort to be completely literate, but only a year or two of more effort compensated for by a more accelerated math in elementary school
I’m not sure what you meant by compensated for. I’m discussing the differences between writing systems. Not which country has a better education system.
I see this almost every time I meet with Chinese friends: they have forgotten one or more particular ideograms that have a particular meaning and simply cannot recover them w/o extensive discussion with their educated Chinese peers. They chalk it up to their faulty memory: I chalk it up to a faulty language.
Apparently not enough to be mentioned on this thread!8-))
Here's an interesting Reddit thread that discusses modern languages on a scale ranging from purely phonetic to purely logographic:
https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/bv7r1p/wh...
While I must admit I would give a rat's ass (but not much more) to know any common logographic language today, I would never go to the trouble to learn one. The effort is simply too great, the payoff too limited, and there are other better ways to use the rest of my life.
Characters in Chinese can be combined to make more words, and you need around 9k words in English to read a novel and 2k characters in Chinese to read a novel.
And I think you're off by an order of magnitude about vocabulary size. Chinese vocabulary size around 6th grade is more like 2K - 4k words tops, not 20K. See
https://www.guavarama.com/2015/02/06/chinese-characters-by-g...
In this case specifically though there seems to be a pretty strong consensus that one of the advantages of a phonetic alphabet is ease and time to learn.
In a completely phonetic language (which English is obviously not) once a kid learns the alphabet and around 50 phonemes you can represent with it, their auditory and reading vocabulary is roughly the same. So you can have 6 year olds with a reading vocabulary of 20k words.
It’s not that simple, but clearly the more phonetic a language is the easier it is to learn for someone who can already understand the spoken words.
Many Chinese characters include "phonic" components, and Chinese characters were historically learned using "rhyming" dictionaries. The systems are not totally equivalent but they're similar - the approach is not a pure "whole language" one.
I think your conclusion is right but that example is a bad one (though interesting). Chinese is not a phonetic language. Each symbol is a 'word', roughly. This means you can quite possibly read without knowing how it sounds. This is how the many Chinese languages co-exist - the written forms are roughly the same, it's just spoken with different sounds.
It's an interesting tangent on this topic because Chinese are starting to see a comparable literacy problem - inability to recall the written characters when hand-writing. This is because most writing these days is done by IMEs on computers and phones, where you actually DO input a phonetic latin 'word', and the IME turns it into the Chinese character you want.
I still read that as somewhat supporting your opinion - that purely phonetic languages are easier to learn, and that languages that are less phonetic (English) or completely unphonetic (Chinese) are harder. Whether that supports phonics or not? I'm not sure, personally i think it does, but your experience that it's still a difficult system is not wrong.
When I was in elementary school, every kid who didn't form sounds like "normal" went to speech therapy until they did. By 6th grade none of my friends lisped or stuttered or spoke with excessive sibilance. S-backing was not a thing then (it seems half cultural/regional now and half unconscious/untrained/lazy but I have nothing but my experiences to base that on; it is not a conscious choice for anyone I've asked) but today, I hear all of those things so I have to assume that there is not very much speech therapy any more.
But good on her! My son is similarly talented with language and it’s a beautiful thing to watch.
She has traveled a lot starting at about 6 months, and has been exposed to lots of languages and cultures. She has some Mandarin now, a little German and a lot of Japanese. So I definitely agree that her environment has supported her language acquisition.
When she was 8, she often read the same books that I read, mostly science fiction, some but not all YA. When she was 10 her class read The Oddysey in French. She was always at least a couple years ahead of her peers in reading level.
The parenting/environmental effects fade a lot (but are still present) by adolescence.
While the effects fade, the advantages gained thereby can last. Being ahead of age norm for reading allowed access to more books, and both learning opportunities. More for my kids who were home educated up to 16[1] so had more time to read stuff they chose, than for me. It also formed a liking for reading.
Parental influence can have a lasting impact. My older daughter is now an electronic engineer, which is the result of an interest that started with making circuits with me as a child.
[1] This makes sense in the British system where the usual age for finishing one set of exams (GCSEs) is 16 (which is the end of compulsory school age) and you then do more specialist exams (A levels in my kids case, there are qualifications too) after that.
As far as reading goes she sounds broadly similar to us - including the taste for SF. Did you have problems deciding on whether books were sufficiently age appropriate or not? There were quite a few where I had to balance a book being good with whether it was suitable (mostly because of violence).
We also talked about the books and I tried to give her a summary in advance, including the parts that I thought she might not handle well. She did skip some books based on my summaries.
True, but it's not actually a problem. Just sound out the words, and you'll infer from the context which word it actually is and "fix" it in your mind. People listening to you read aloud will also know what what the correct pronunciation is and will help you correct it.
My first experience of the idea was in US films and TV programs. I never came across it at school in England.
FWIW, my reading lessons (both at school in the early '70s), and at home at the same time used a form of phonics.
Although I never knew that term until over 30 years later. We simply knew it as breaking the word apart in to pronounceable pieces.
As mentioned in the article, I still occasionally use the technique if and when I come across an unknown word.
For what it is worth, I also think British English is more consistent than American English in pronunciation.
For example, you all pronounce "Zebra" like "Zeh-bra" and "Zeppelin" like "Zehp-pellin" if I am not mistaken.
American English, where I live, would say "Zee-bra" and 'Zehp-uh-lin." for no good reason. Fundamentally, I think that was also my issue with phonics. So many spoken words have more complex sounds replaced with shorter sounds like "uh", "un", "in", "an", "oh", etc..
Simple words like:
Definitely => "Def-in-ut-ly"
Interesting => "In-tra-sting"
etc..
> As mentioned in the article, I still occasionally use the technique if and when I come across an unknown word.
Don't get me wrong, I do too, but even as an adult, it's usually the words with French etymologies that burn me.
Trivial example would be "resume" (like applying for a job -- yes, Americans often drop the accent on the 'e'). No way sounding out the word would have mapped to "Rez-oo-may" without previous knowledge. Somehow 'Receipt' => "Re-seat", "Debt" => "Deht", "Motion" => "Mo-shun", and so on.
I think phonetics of germanic words: hunger, anger, hack, ball, etc. are far more consistent.
The French "dictée" is similar, but has you write down a spoken (coherent text). One that usually gets weekly practiced (and graded...) in primary school, but there's also spelling-bee-like events, e.g., https://dicteepourtous.fr/
French pronunciation is mostly consistent (more so than English at least), but there's several complications:
- multiple ways to spell the same sound (so you just need to know for that word)
- often silent terminal consonants (but they must be present, because they are pronounced in some contexts)
- the pronounced syllables don't always match word boundaries ("liaison")
The last two points also explain why a coherent text is a more useful test than just single complex words.
Most of English's inconsistencies stem from words absorbed from other languages, and far and away the largest helping of that was the French that British nobility picked up during the Norman invasion.
My understanding of French pronunciation primarily revolves around the idea that 80% of words end in three randomly selected vowels followed by 1-3 randomly selected maximally hard consonants such as j, x, z, k.. and that the sum total of those randomly selected letters always sound identical to the vowel portion of the word "œuf" which means "egg". Which is also basically like trying to say "eww" while you have an egg in your mouth.
Pork, Beef, Poultry, Venison, etc. are thought to have French etymologies.
Pig, Cow, Chicken, etc. are thought to have Germanic etymologies.
It's because the French speaking nobility ate the meat, and the lower-class old English speakers raised the animals.
The word for "Knight" in German is "Ritter" if I am not mistaken? Though, I have no idea where the word Knight comes from. (Which I intend to look up after posting this).
Learning Chinese with a phonetic alphabet (bopomofo) is pretty common as far as I know, maybe just in Taiwan though. I suppose China mostly uses pinyin for this now.
I have also seen this in learning materials:
1. Putting the phonetic spelling (e.g. pinyin or bopomofo) in small print above the characters; a similar approach (furigana) is used for kanji in Japanese (in language textbooks and apps as well as books for beginning readers); there are special fonts as well as browser extensions, etc.; for Chinese/hanzi a font with phonetic superscripts would probably work well.
2. Phonetic sets; in addition to semantic elements/radicals, many characters also contain a phonetic element, which may not be exact (perhaps a bit like phonics in English) but studying groups of characters that share the same phonetic element can help with figuring out pronunciation or recognizing less familiar characters.
I, my siblings, and my kids all learned to read using whole words and we are all excellent readers.
Neither your family nor mine are statistically significant samples.
My experience of teaching my kids words before letters was that it was pretty easy.
On the other hand we all learned to read young, and at home, and with the assumption it was a fun thing to do, all of which makes it a very different experience to learning at school in classes.
This has two important implications:
- There were fewer people that were actually instructed in whole language and they skewed younger (and less practiced)
- The teaching profession had fewer years of as practitioners so methods resources were likely unrefined. Fewer books, instructional materials.
Also, there is always a bias to publish a scoop in acadamia, so unless there were multiple corroborating studies we should take it with a grain of salt.
Most importantly, I think that different kids learn differently. My son has been working on phonics for a long time and still struggles connecting sounds to words. In contrast, whole language approaches have been working better for him.