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The

Phonics

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Why Johnny Doesn’t Like to Read.

According to dictionary.com, an aliterate is “a person who is able to read but rarely chooses to do so.” Aliteracy in America is increasing, as documented in the a series of articles over the years:

May 2001 Washington Post article, “The No-Book Report: Skim it and Weep”

August 2007 AP article “Americans Reading Fewer Books Than in Past“

November 2024 Atlantic article, “The Elite College Students who Can’t Read books”

While online media may also contribute to this decline,

Picture of Brain with wires and circuits

Tutor Don Potter:

“Should we be surprised that one in four Americans did not read a single book last year when we know that a majority of the American public is suffering from at least some degree of artificially induced whole-word dyslexia?

The cognitive conflict caused by reading using the silent, right side of the brain makes reading a very unpleasant, tiring activity. No doubt the exquisite joy of reading poetry has been especially vulnerable since sound is of the essence in poetry.”

This is likely caused by whole word teaching, which makes reading unpleasant by introducing “cognitive dissonance” in the brain. Even many programs with "phonics" in their name or programs that do teach some phonics often teach a minimum of 220 sight words and also often have many features of whole language programs such as guided reading or vocabulary controlled texts. In 40L volunteers' experience with remedial students, these 220 sight words are enough to cause reading difficulties and a dislike of reading in a significant number of children. Emily Hanford’s explains in At A Loss for Words: How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers.” Her recent podcast series Sold A Story digs deeper into the problem.

Geraldine Rodgers explains how she has experienced this type of unpleasantness when reading shorthand, which forced her into the same method of reading that sight word teaching produces:

Short vowels, present in Gregg shorthand manuals before 1918, were not present in shorthand manuals after that date but only unmarked vowels which could be either long or short. As a stenographer of Gregg shorthand who learned it at the age of sixteen without the use of the critically important short vowels, I can assure anyone that transcribing such Gregg shorthand, with its additional reliance on “brief forms” (a kind of sight word) can only be done with heavy, conscious, context guessing.

Although I have taken shorthand rapidly and quite accurately for over fifty years, I find transcribing it requires conscious judgments (“psycholinguistic guessing”) and is therefore unpleasant.

I much prefer to use longhand to take notes because I can read it automatically and avoid unpleasant conscious decoding. I pity those who must read all printed matter “psycholinguistically.”

It is no wonder they prefer to watch television.¹

shorthand class

Shorthand

shorthand writing example

Geraldine E. Rodgers describes how her research led her to discover two radically different types of readers, with an emphasis on either sound or meaning.

“The “meaning” type reads with the conscious help of context, and so can never read automatically, while the “sound” type reads by the sound of print, not with the conscious use of context, and so can read automatically.”²

The Hidden Nature of the Reading Problem and its Impact on Vocabulary Development

From 1826 to 1876 and again from 1930 to the present day, whole word methods of many types and names have pervaded American schools. In Retarding America: The Imprisonment of Potential, Michael Brunner states,

“Ever since the late 1920's, the professors of reading have been supportive of one form or another or whole word instruction, many believing this instruction makes learning easier and more rewarding. The tragic side effect of this deleterious instruction has been countless millions of illiterates and functional illiterates.” ³

These marginal literacy rates are a hidden problem: people can read text that is written at a low vocabulary level because of the high proportion of sight words in such text and can guess many of the rest from context.

Author & Researcher Geraldine Rodgers:

“Only about 3,000 of the highest frequency words compose about 98 per cent of almost any discourse. Words from the remaining half-million or so words in English normally compose the remaining two percent of any untreated, natural discourse.

However, when written material is artificially simplified in the deliberate attempt to remove that two percent of low-frequency words,

the harm that is being done to vocabulary development is hidden.

It is usually not even suspected. Such vocabulary control is the real reason for the drop in test scores at the high school and college levels.”⁴

It is only when reading difficult material that their reading problems become apparent. Therefore, many people with reading difficulties or who dislike reading don't even realize they have a problem. According to the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey,

“Perhaps the most salient finding of this survey is that such large percentages of adults performed in the lowest levels (Levels 1 and 2) of prose, document, and quantitative literacy. In and of itself, this may not indicate a serious problem. After all, the majority of adults who demonstrated limited skills described themselves as reading or writing English well, and relatively few said they get a lot of assistance from others in performing everyday literacy tasks.”⁵

Many children with poor vision think everyone sees the world as blurry as they do. It is only after they get glasses that they realize how poor their vision was. Because they can read material written with controlled vocabulary, which includes more and more books and newspaper articles, and even modern Bibles in a continued dumbing down process, many people with reading difficulties do not even realize they have a problem. They don't realize that they are reading with blurred vision, and that it is possible to enjoy reading even complex material.

book and mountains

Geraldine Rodgers: “Yet most third grade teachers do not even know there is a real problem. If a child stumbles over a lower frequency word which has not already been taught, the teachers pronounce it and think the problem is solved….

Once children know those 1,000 highest-frequency words (which account for about 90 per cent of almost any material), they are automatically reading above the frustration level on most reading comprehension test materials. They are therefore able to guess the meaning of most of the unknown words in the remaining 10 per cent from the context of the selection, particularly if those words are already in their spoken vocabularies, and they can therefore guess the answers to the questions.”

Geraldine Rodgers contines:

“The sounds of words are really only labels for the ideas being named. If the sound of a word cannot be resurrected from memory when it is needed, then the idea behind that word is rendered useless. When reading-disabled children encounter unknown low-frequency words, they may be able to guess their meanings, but the low-frequency words will lack a “sound” hook with which the children could have filed the word in their memories for future use, and with which hook they could have retrieved the word in the future. As a result, instead of accumulating their vocabulary through their reading, as healthy readers can do, reading disabled children cannot increase their vocabulary in a normal fashion, any more than badly taught deaf-mutes can. The stunted vocabularies of reading-disabled children are the real reason for the low so-called ‘reading comprehension’ scores that show up so consistently today at the high school and college levels.”⁶

This leads to troubles with vocabulary development.

If you cannot sound out the words, you either skip the word or guess.

“These sight-word readers lack enough phonic ability to sound out truly unknown words so that they can add them to their spoken vocabularies. For such readers, vocabulary knowledge therefore cannot be increased by reading, but only by listening to oral speech. By contrast, phonic readers can sound out an unknown word from all of its letters and figure out its meaning from the context. Phonic readers therefore add both the spelling and the meaning of a previously unknown printed word to their vocabularies. The effect, of course, is cumulative.”⁷

This cumulative effect of vocabulary development was termed “The Matthew Effect” by Dr. Keith Stanovich.

girl on rising graph

Dr. Keith Stanovich,

Matthew Effects in Reading:

“The very children who are reading well and who have good vocabularies will read more, learn more word meanings, and hence read even better.

Children with inadequate vocabularies--who read slowly and without enjoyment--read less, and as a result have slower development of vocabulary knowledge, which inhibits further growth in reading ability.”8

Dr. Kerry Hempenstall:

“Struggling readers may read around 100,000 words per year while for keen mid-primary students the figure may be closer to 10,000,000, that is, a 100 fold difference.

For out of school reading, Fielding, Wilson and Anderson (1986) suggested a similar ratio in indicating that children at the 10th percentile of reading ability in their Year 5 sample read about 50,000 words per year out of school, while those at the 90th percentile read about 4,500,000 words per year.”⁹

girl on pile of books

A comparison of the King James Version (KJV) of Romans 12 to the New International Version (NIV) version of Romans 12 to shows both the nature of vocabulary restrictions caused by whole word teaching and also how uncomfortable it is to be a reader taught with whole word methods. The KJV is on the first page, the NIV is on the second page. If you were taught with whole word methods, you would have to guess at several of the words (those words not in the most common 10,000 words in the English language) based on their first and last letters. Depending on your memorization abilities, several of the red words would be difficult and would require study, and the purple words would be slightly more difficult to remember. The KJV has 10% of its words that are not the most common 10,000 words in the English language; the vocabulary impoverished NIV has only 2%. If reading everything was this uncomfortable for you, you might avoid reading, too.

In his article, “The Gift of Language,” Psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple eloquently describes his experiences in England with people who were unable to fully express themselves because of their lack of vocabulary development:

pile of words

“With a very limited vocabulary, it is impossible to make, or at least to express, important distinctions and to examine any question with conceptual care.

My patients often had no words to describe what they were feeling, except in the crudest possible way, with expostulations, exclamations, and physical displays of emotion.

Often, by guesswork and my experience of other patients, I could put things into words for them, words that they grasped at eagerly…”¹⁰

My uncle, by contrast, remained trapped in the language of the slums. He was a highly intelligent man and what is more a very good one: he was one of those rare men, much less common than their opposite, from whom goodness radiated almost as a physical quality…..

But he was deeply inarticulate.

His thoughts were too complex for the words and the syntax available to him.

All through my childhood and beyond, I saw him struggle, like a man wrestling with an invisible boa constrictor, to express his far from foolish thoughts-thoughts of a complexity that my father expressed effortlessly.¹¹

man on mountain

Psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple sums up the article with this thought:

“Everyone, save the handicapped, learns to run without being taught; but no child runs 100 yards in nine seconds, or even 15 seconds, without training. It is fatuous to expect that the most complex of human faculties, language, requires no special training to develop it to its highest possible power.”¹²

This training begins with the proper phonetic training in reading and spelling. Even most phonics programs in the schools today use a fair number of sight words, and most schools do not teach spelling based on phonetic patterns. 40L recommends our easy to use online spelling lessons and phonics lessons, or the reading and spelling resources listed on our website.

40L volunteers have remediated many students taught with whole word methods, and the change is amazing. They learn to enjoy reading instead of dreading reading, and their whole outlook on life changes as their self confidence improves.

References:

1. Rodgers, Geraldine E. "The History of Beginning Reading," 2001, p. 1075

2. Rodgers, Geraldine E. "The History of Beginning Reading," 2001, p. 1737

3. Brunner, Michael S. Retarding America, the Imprisonment of Potential, 1993. p. 37

4. Rodgers, Geraldine E. "The History of Beginning Reading," 2001, p. 1759

5. Adult Literacy in America: A First Look at the Findings of the National Adult Literacy Survey, August 1993

6. Rodgers, Geraldine E. "The History of Beginning Reading," 2001, p. 1052 - 1053

7. Rodgers, Geraldine E. "The History of Beginning Reading," 2001, p. 14

8. Stanovich, K.E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, p. 381. More reading research from Dr. Stanovich.

9. Hempenstall, Dr. Kerry. "The Matthew Effects," ReadbyGrade3 Reading and Reading Disabilities, 1996.

10. Dalrymple, Theodore. “The Gift of Language,” City Journal, Autumn 2006.

11. Dalrymple, Theodore. “The Gift of Language,” City Journal, Autumn 2006.

12. Dalrymple, Theodore. “The Gift of Language,” City Journal, Autumn 2006.

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