The Reading Wars, astonishingly enough, continue to rage. Rudolf Flesch explained the problem in 1955, in his famous book titled “Why Johnny Can’t Read.” Many other smart people have explained the problem again and again. But still our schools persist in using precisely the bad methods that Flesch discredited.

In particular, the schools make children memorize words as shapes (a.k.a. sight-words). This practice is the single main reason why we have 50 million functional illiterates. Bottom line: get rid of sight-words, use some version of phonics, and children usually learn to read by the age of seven or eight. Instead, many public schools hang on to ideas that cause reading failure. It’s important to understand WHY these ideas don’t work.

There are two ways for a child to “read” a word: sound it out (that is, say it or pronounce it). Or, name it as a visual object, just as a child might name a make of car. For decades, public schools insisted on the naming of shapes, which virtually precludes literacy. Now, as part of the strategic retreat known as Balanced Literacy, many schools dogmatically insist that the two methods be taught simultaneously. This is better but still only half-way back from hell. The student’s brain will continually flip-flop from one mode to the other. So the student will be a tense, confused reader.

Here is the sort of bizarre comments you see ad infinitum on the Internet: “One of the most precarious dangers in this realm is the assumption that there is one way to teach reading….I teach a strong phonics based curriculum, but we also teach 20 new sight-words every 2 weeks.” Unbelievable. That means her students are supposed to memorize 300 sight-words for the year. Virtually no child can achieve mastery of that many sight-words. Even if they do, they’ll be hopelessly schizophrenic for the rest of their reading careers. What a mess. Let’s zoom in on the actual process and try to see the sins as they occur.

Imagine a child reading this sentence: “The bird saw a….” When the child\’s eyes move toward the next word, what happens?? If the word is processed LEFT TO RIGHT AS SOUNDS, that is real reading. If the eyes scan BACK AND FORTH over the whole shape (which is how we look at a car), as the brain struggles to recall its name, that\’s sight-word reading and a guarantee of low literacy.

Freeze the frame. Note that the instant the eyes start backward (that is, leftward) is the instant you have inefficient reading. Clearly, the eyes are covering the same ground two or three times. Isn’t this obvious, even to professors of education? Reading should be a steady left-to-right, 1-2-3-4 process. Much like playing the piano, where you don’t go back and play previous notes; much like walking along a sidewalk, where you don’t suddenly walk backward; much like talking to a friend, where you don’t start speaking the unfolding sentence in reverse.

Reading, for most people, means you are covering a few hundred words a minute. Even a slow reader is reading two words a second! To keep this pace, there can be no hesitation, no going back, no retracing one’s steps. You just bound along, sort of like a kid running across a stream from one stone to the next. Sometimes you might go back and make sure that the words said what you think they said. But ordinary reading, of a novel or a magazine, is a very fast–let us say, relentless– activity, always moving forward.

Sight-word reading, precisely because it trains the eyes to scan UP and DOWN, RIGHT to LEFT, and LEFT to RIGHT, is the death of reading. The loons pushing this thing claim that kids can identify a word at a glance. Yes, this can happen if we’re talking about the Nike swoosh, the American flag, or a STOP sign, anything very familiar that you’ve seen dozens of times. But for every sight-word the child knows with automaticity, there are 5 more the child knows with only partial-automaticity and then there are 10 other words that have not yet been dealt with. It’s basically like a child trying to run across the stream on a series of rocks, half of which are under water or covered with slime. The kid won’t make it.

Now, let’s move ahead one-half second and freeze the frame again. “The bird saw a xzgk.” Uh-oh, the child doesn’t know the word xzgk. With a nervous twitch, his eyes jump ahead looking for a familiar word. This is the essential act in a method called “context clues.” The child, not able to read properly, is supposed to examine surrounding words (or pictures) to figure out an unknown word. Now he goes back and starts the sentence again and reads up to the unfamiliar word, still doesn’t know it, and lurches ahead to the next sentence, then to a sentence after that, and then comes back. On the simplest mechanical level, you can see how many extra tracks and arabesque the eyes will execute.

As a practical matter, an educated adult can sometimes use context to deduce an unknown word. But this works only if you know virtually all the other words on the page, and you have a lot of background knowledge. To tell a child to use this technique is the height of quackery. But that’s precisely what our Education Establishment has been doing for almost 75 years.

The young reader, far from knowing most of the words on the page, may only know half of them. Can you imagine the panic and confusion as this child searches ahead for a known entity? The child’s eyes may move backward as often as forward. So you have a huge amount of wasted energy and wasted time, all because the child cannot actually read.

To reinforce the total insanity of this gimmick called context clues, let’s consider this sentence: “The man walked into a xwygq”

Even if we confine ourselves to five letter words (a sight-word reader would no doubt include four- and six-letter words among his guesses), you have dozens of possibilities. There may be many pages of text where you would never be able to determine the missing word; or you may be able to determine it approximately but only after minutes of wasted effort.

By the way, what is xwygq? Did the man walk into a motel or a hotel? Did he walk into a field? Or a ditch, drain or sewer? Perhaps he walked into a truck, train, or wagon. No? What about a house or a store? He could walk into a fight, couldn’t he? A storm? Ah, I got it! He walked into a fence. What a fool. But not as big a fool as someone who teaches little children to use context clues to guess at mystery words. As opposed to teaching the child to read those words.

I think you can devastate the case for sight-word in many separate ways: 1) by pointing out that English has far too many words for someone to remember even ONE-TENTH of the important ones; 2) far too many similar word-shapes for the brain to quickly distinguish, for example, right, fright, bright, blight, light, tights, mighty, flighty; nightly, etc.; 3) far too many different cases and typefaces, which means that any given word-shape is never fixed but likely to appear in a chaos of alternative forms. All of these variables place tremendous (indeed, impossible) demands on memory. Sight-words, at the start, may have been someone’s sincere theory; but it quickly degenerated into a vicious hoax. Even if a child wanted to memorize a large number of sight-words, there would have to be relentless drawing of these word-designs and endless flash card drills, the most brutally repetitive work you can imagine. All of which our Education Establishment forbids!

So we hardly need, you might think, still another reason to dismiss Whole Word. But public schools keep pushing this flop, shamefully enough. Kids are being damaged. So this article is intended to be the clincher. Simply imagine for yourself what a child’s eyes are actually doing. If they move steadily to the right across the page, that’s reading. If they’re roaming around, searching ahead, or backtracking, that’s not reading. That’s a dog looking frantically for a buried bone. Case closed.

Certainly if a person could memorize tens of thousands of English word-shapes and name them with perfect automaticity, well, that’s successful sight-reading. That’s what some disingenuous educators claim can happen routinely. But all the evidence says this happy picture rarely occurs. Most kids top out below 500 and become functional illiterates. Mastering even 2000 sight-words is a huge accomplishment. (There are super-brains that reach 5,000 and actually go through college reading that way, but they always report how nervous, tense, and miserable they are.)

Meanwhile, the average kids have been chewed up and spat on the ground. To them, a typical newspaper story looks like this: “Senator John xxxxx joked that he never xxxx that he could xxxx so much. His wife xxxxx, ‘John’s like a xxxx.’ They xxxx loudly and xxxxxx their xxxxx.” To guess one of those mystery words would be quite an achievement. To guess all of them is improbable.

Here’s another sick part. You could construct a test, with multiple choice answers, to measure comprehension. With some lucky guesses, a kid might pass. The school might actually state that the boy reads at “near grade-level” or some such. In this way the schools cover up the magnitude of the tragedy. And so it continues.

Can a child actually read? It’s so easy to find out. Hand the kid a newspaper and say, “Read this.” If the kid leaves out words, replaces words, guesses wildly, or reverses words, you know the child can’t read. Blame the school.

(For more on the reading crisis, and a list of phonics programs, see “42: Reading Resources” on Improve-Education.org.)

Bruce Deitrick Price is the founder of Improve-Education.org, an education and intellectual site.

One focus is reading; see \”42: Reading Resources.\”

Price is an author, artist and poet. His fifth book is \”THE EDUCATION ENIGMA–What Happened to American Education.\”

Bruce Deitrick Price is the founder of http://www.Improve-Education.org, an education and intellectual site.
One focus is problems in the schools; see \”56: Top 10 Worst Ideas in Education.\”
Price is an author, artist and poet. His fifth book is \”THE EDUCATION ENIGMA.\”

Author Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is the founder of Improve-Education.org, an education and intellectual site.

One focus is reading; see \”42: Reading Resources.\”

Price is an author, artist and poet. His fifth book is \”THE EDUCATION ENIGMA–What Happened to American Education.\”

Category: Education
Keywords: reading, phonics, whole word, sight-words, illiteracy, Flesch, alphabet, dumbing down, comprehension