HI. I am an English teacher and I am teaching phonics to someone who is used to the whole word approach, like most in Spain. What are your thoughts? Thanks.
In the United States, the whole word method burps up once every 20 to 40 years under a different name until it’s discovered once again that it doesn’t work.
I was teaching linguistics at college the last time the whole word approach had taken over the schools, and my students who were school teachers said that resulted in the outrageous popularity of a program called “Hooked on Phonics”, as parents tried to ensure that their kids learned to read well in spite of the school curriculum.
Then those kids who’d been taught phonics at home or by tutors would be tested at school, and score well because of the phonics instruction at home, and their scores were bogusly taken as proof that the whole word approach was working.
If most people in Spain are used to the whole word approach, then the world really has gone crazy, because there is no reason speakers of a phonemically spelled language should be taught with the whole word approach. What’s the point of phonemic spelling if the teachers ignore it?
Exactly. I have proven phonics to be really a success. Not only hace my students learnt to speak better but they have thanked me to teach them a logical way of breaking down words into sounds and make it more logical all together. The problem is that most of the spanish have learnt English words wirh the wrong pronunciation and I have to prove all the time that or in word has the same sound as ir in sir etc, etc. So now you can picture how catastrophic the whole thing is.
Exactly. I have proven phonics to be really a success. Not only hace my students learnt to speak better but they have thanked me to teach them a logical way of breaking down words into sounds and make it more logical all together. The problem is that most of the spanish have learnt English words wirh the wrong pronunciation and I have to prove all the time that or in word has the same sound as ir in sir etc, etc. So now you can picture how catastrophic the whole thing is.
You just need to post it once, man.
Anyway, if you can work it, I would recommend you use Judy Gilbert’s textbook “Clear Speech” from Cambridge University Press. This will explain to them how vowels are pronounced at various points in words, etc.