Looking At Reading In Our Schools Today

Taupo Times, Volume XIV, Issue 61, 5 August 1965, Page 6

Looking At Reading In Our Schools Today

! What is the basic of reading in New Zealand schools, asks Mr P. H. Jones, ! of Taupo, in a series of articles in he | a ttempts to answer just this prohlem. This is the fourth of the series: —

But the Sputnik — not the professors — forced a reappraisal of American educational philosophy. Teachers found that Raglan children nsed 10,000 basal words instead of their 1800 which Trace called "a middle class idealisation of cardboard mommies and daddies in trifling stories." Our Director of Education thinks it "wasteful to teach children some things before they have reached a certain level of maturity." How that applies to the American theory that 61 years is their average for "reading readiness" was not stated but Mr Gordon Troup considered it as "waiting in dreary suspended animation until the educationists decided they had reached the deadline of maturity and readiness for serious work." American books — very luerative for writers and publishers — were so geared to memorisation of words like "aeroplane" that four-year-old John, who knew the letters and liked their sounds couldn't read them. His mother wrote a new kind of reader based on "new sounds in place of new words." Even in its home state Look-say is now "so descredited after 30 years that produced bad spellers" that the author of Cuisenair rods invented "reading by rainbow" a 47-colour-code now used in 100 schools in seven states. Effect On Spelling Look-and-say teaches reading faster but "casts reason aside, invites chaotic spel-

ling and produces fumbling reading." Lord Cobham, for the second time, had no doubt that it "enablep children to to learn to read more quickly, "But it is lethal to spelling and, I believe, responsible for much of the appalling English one hears spoken and sees written today." The English educationist, Fleming, protested against "the one-sided emphasis on too much looking and guessing" and proposed that reading books should directly link sounds with spelling by using phonics because hearing makes just as important a contribution as seeing. Faulty Without a good knowledge of sound - values the transfer of speech to writing dictation) must be faulty. It is unfortunate that much of the difficulty of our language lies in it being only 85 per cent phonetic. With

look-and-say no matter how well you look you cannot say if you do not know the sound of what you see. Phonics has a definite beginning and end and works both ways — pound to sight and sight to sound. In some Canadian schools promotion depends on memorisation. Unknown, though easy, words were skipped with "We haven't had that one yet." Substitution was rlfe because this was the method in use. Seventy per cent did not attempt "lent" though they knew "went"; others called it "let, lend, left." One parent remarked: "Surely it takes more than an initial letter to form a word." (To Be Continued)