• TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works
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    10 days ago

    Phonics would make sense in a language that’s phonetic. But English is not phonetic, so teaching them it as if it is, and then teaching them “tricky” words and that all words are fake, and making them read nonsense words to test their phonics, is stupid

    • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
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      10 days ago

      English is not phonetic

      Like hell it’s not. Just because gh has more than one pronunciation doesn’t mean it’s not phonetic.

    • Jtotheb@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      From a semantic perspective that argument is badly framed but I can intuit your point using my foundational skills of reasoning. In the same fashion, the reason I can guess what words like phantasmagoria and phosphaturia sound like and tell them apart is because the written English language is still representational enough that you can develop common sense abilities and learn additional rules and exceptions from there. Every single word in your comment follows a rule pattern that another common word follows.

      Cueing is poorly taught; the whole language approach makes no sense on its own. Why would you remove the tools for assembling the pronunciation of a multisyllabic word and instead suggest guessing at it? You wouldn’t. Nobody studying this is suggesting you throw phonics out in entirety, even the cueing advocates that don’t believe in dyslexia who sound suspiciously like they have dyslexia.

    • antonim@lemmy.world
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      9 days ago

      Except that the alternative method, the “whole word” approach, seems to have way worse outcomes.