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CyberNews article: THE NEW PHONICS methodology and its history



 
 
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  #1  
Old September 1st 03, 12:11 AM
Tracy Sherwood
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default CyberNews article: THE NEW PHONICS methodology and its history

The New Phonics

The Story Behind It


Phonics isn't new; it's how our country learned to read when it was
young - until the late 40s and early 50s when psychiatry got it taken
out of our schools and established the new Teacher's College. That's
when our national SAT scores started it's plummet from which it's
never recovered. Phonics was lost to the great majority of children
even in most private schools until Hooked on Phonics brought it back
in the 80s with overnight success.

But our country had changed so much by that time that learning to read
even with phonics was no longer a simple primary task for children
being taught by teachers who were not taught themselves with phonics.
This was true for most parents as well. So even with phonics
reintroduced to the world, we had the blind teaching the blind,
totally dependent on a home phonics program. Hooked on Phonics is a
good program and does well with kids and adults whose light bulb
easily comes on, or for parents and educators who have previous
expertise in teaching phonics. But there were and still are far too
many for whom the light bulb does not easily come on or will not come
on at all. To this end, the home programs coming out were limited.

And why did our country change so that our kids couldn't compare with
kids of the old days? They are the reasons we already know about: TV,
working moms, the decline of education resulting in less trained
teachers burdened with larger classrooms, a drug and alcohol society -
including the masses on pharmaceuticals, divorce, family dinner with
sane discussion being a thing of the past... and the list goes on. We
all know of these. All of these changes have deprived our kids of a
good education to whatever degree. But the main damage is in the over
all dummying down of our kids. Learning aptitude is just nothing near
what it use to be because of all of the above and more.

And the traditional phonics programs brought back the idea of learning
the alphabet sounds and phonics rules such as the 'silent e making the
vowel long or pronounce it's own name (Sam becomes same) etc. A lot of
rules to learn and sounds to memorize. But phonics was back and that's
what they used when more than 99% of our kids could learn to read when
they were in the first-grade and move up smoothly. It was finally
back.

But our children were already victim to the above American changes and
many couldn't learn to read so easily with the return of traditional
phonics. It was working, but not well enough for far too many. And
most teachers and parents were uncertain in application of the
traditional phonics; not being certain they were saying the sounds
correctly themselves. And when the sounds were finally memorized, it
was a new arduous chore to use those sounds to read words.

The commercial programs were able to get the student to know the first
sound of the first letter of a beginning level word such as the 'c' in
'cat'. But it was just counted on that the student would be able to
figure out the rest of the word. There was no method to teach sounding
the word out. Those who were able to sound out words still didn't know
how they did it or how to teach it as a generality. So they would just
have the student say the first sound and then try to read the word.
The child - or adult - was still learning to read the word by
repetition (memorization), with the acceptance of the first letter.
Following this, the phonics rules would be drilled and grilled, often
even before the student could read the words. Still thousands of kids
could not 'sound out each letter of the word'. Why not? Well, they
would say each sound sort of chopped up, and then forget what they had
said and they would not have an ear for what sounds they had said and
so still didn't get the word, blending it into a whole. It was big
problem with the return of traditional phonics.

Then came a change in the method and philosophy of teaching phonics
itself. It came after the big commercial phonics programs had their
day in the bright lights but were still the shinier stars. It was
developing quietly behind the scenes by a private small town tutor,
until her first article was printed in the Washington Post and picked
up here, by Cybertown's CyberNews in 1996. The article hit home to
parent and educator nationwide and spread at first slowly and then
began to snowball as new programs integrated this new phonics into its
curricula one after another until nearly every phonics program being
promoted, on the Internet today touts its innovative discovery or
solutions to struggling phonics students. But history takes it back to
this one article entitled, 'Phonics the Right Way and the Wrong Way'
by Tracy Sherwood.

Since its appearance on Cybertown in 1996, this article has weathered
massive new competition and still managed to stay in the top 10
placement of many major search engines, until web site positioning
experts were able to force new competition ahead with paid positioning
and keyword strategy. Although this article has had no editing in
keywords or content in the entire eight years of its existence on the
Internet, it still remains one of the most widely read and with no
doubt the most influential article on the subject of teaching phonics
today.

What was it about this tutor's discoveries that changed the face of
phonics forever? It was the author's twenty-four years of tutoring
experience with the most difficult students and adults that by
necessity, the tutor had to find the cause for the barriers to this
problem plaguing traditional phonics. The tutor, Tracy Sherwood, began
an experiment which consisted of nothing more than pure observation in
her tutoring sessions. Rather than push the student to read the word,
she simply observed the mistakes of both children and adults, learning
disabled and dyslexic, preschooler and practicing teacher. Before she
could determine the solutions, she had to spot the thought process of
each student with each mistake made and make notations. This was a
year long process and at end, the solutions to various difficulties
were in plain sight and in every case, universal.

Sherwood was the first to discover, or at least to make known, that
traditional phonics was being taught backwards and made no sense to
the student. She saw that teachers and parents would never see this as
they would too quickly resort to telling the student the word when he
failed to sound it out. And frustration depleted patience. Following
that came disability labels, remedial reading programs with absolutely
no challenge nor remedy and accompanying all this, special interests
such as psych-based experts and drug companies inciting the forwarding
of the controversy of whether phonics is or is not as effective as
it's supporters do tout.

Yet with the sweeping popularity of this Cybertown article, the entire
approach to teaching beginning and remedial phonics began to win the
day with its superior results and made its way into millions of homes,
private schools and even public schools - however limited in quality
of delivery. Prior to the release of this article, phonics was simply
learning the sounds, reading the words in groups of similar sounds,
and learning the phonics and spelling rules. There was no additional
help or mention of observing one's own speech as a separate practical
from reading the letters. There was no talk of sound-blending
techniques and games, or teaching babies and toddlers to put attention
to how the mouth forms individual sounds to make words. There were no
electronics, card, or other games in which the correct sound must be
found when heard and spelling was not decoded by saying the word one
sound at a time. Dyslexic adults were not coached on reading a word
backwards when attempting to guess rather than sound out, or when
omitting or randomly adding a sound that wasn't there. The Phonics
Game was the first to tout these missing basics and came on the
television scene some four months after the publication of the
Superphonics article and eight months after the release of
Superphonics for Babies & Toddlers. History traces the discoveries of
the exact difficulties and developments of techniques for their
remedy, to this Superphonics article and its Babies & Toddlers Guide.
When Sherwood promoted her discoveries and solutions to the world,
literacy began it's upward climb out of the dark downward spiral of
illiteracy. The face of phonics has greatly changed for the better.
And it all started right here at Cybertown.

Read Phonics the Right Way and the Wrong Way
at http://www.cybertown.com/mag2.html

By Tracy Sherwood Copyright Tracy Sherwood

August 26, 2003 Cybertown's CyberNews. Go to Cybertown Homepage
visit superphonics.com
  #2  
Old September 1st 03, 03:07 AM
toto
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default CyberNews article: THE NEW PHONICS methodology and its history

On 31 Aug 2003 16:11:58 -0700, (Tracy Sherwood)
wrote:

The New Phonics

Advertisement... Spame, but..

The Story Behind It


Phonics isn't new; it's how our country learned to read when it was
young - until the late 40s and early 50s when psychiatry got it taken
out of our schools and established the new Teacher's College. That's
when our national SAT scores started it's plummet from which it's
never recovered.

I would like to know how the SAT scores could start plummeting in
the 1940s since the very first time the SATs were ever taken was
in 1941

In 1941 -- the first year of the SAT -- approximately 1% of all high
school students took the SAT. Accurate demographic data don't
exist, but the test was taken, for the most part, by the kids from
wealthy families.

Today, the percentage of kids taking the test is much greater. And
thus the demographics are vastly different. Yet we draw mistaken
conclusions from test results then, and now, that are simply
statistically impossible to make.

http://members.tripod.com/~candst/tnppage/vouch2b.htm

Since the early 1960s the composition of people taking the SAT
has changed dramatically. In particular, many more poor students,
minority students, and students from the bottom three-fifths of their
class are taking the SAT than in the past. Historically, students in
these categories have scored much less well on the SAT than white
middle-class or white upper-class children. Accordingly, aggregate
SAT scores declined between 1960 and 1980. This fact is neither
disturbing or surprising; that's exactly what's supposed to happen
when the pool of students taking the SAT contains an increasingly
large number of less-adept students (See David Berliner and Bruce
Biddle, _The Manufactured Crisis_, pp. 14-23 for a good treatment
of SAT data).

The aggregate decline in SAT scores stopped in the early 1980s
and has changed very little since that time


--
Dorothy

There is no sound, no cry in all the world
that can be heard unless someone listens ..
Outer Limits
  #3  
Old September 4th 03, 03:39 AM
Byron Canfield
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default CyberNews article: THE NEW PHONICS methodology and its history

"Tracy Sherwood" wrote in message
m...
The New Phonics

The Story Behind It


Phonics isn't new; it's how our country learned to read when it was
young - until the late 40s and early 50s when psychiatry got it taken
out of our schools and established the new Teacher's College. That's
when our national SAT scores started it's plummet from which it's
never recovered. Phonics was lost to the great majority of children
even in most private schools until Hooked on Phonics brought it back
in the 80s with overnight success.

But our country had changed so much by that time that learning to read
even with phonics was no longer a simple primary task for children
being taught by teachers who were not taught themselves with phonics.
This was true for most parents as well. So even with phonics
reintroduced to the world, we had the blind teaching the blind,
totally dependent on a home phonics program. Hooked on Phonics is a
good program and does well with kids and adults whose light bulb
easily comes on, or for parents and educators who have previous
expertise in teaching phonics. But there were and still are far too
many for whom the light bulb does not easily come on or will not come
on at all. To this end, the home programs coming out were limited.

And why did our country change so that our kids couldn't compare with
kids of the old days? They are the reasons we already know about: TV,
working moms, the decline of education resulting in less trained
teachers burdened with larger classrooms, a drug and alcohol society -
including the masses on pharmaceuticals, divorce, family dinner with
sane discussion being a thing of the past... and the list goes on. We
all know of these. All of these changes have deprived our kids of a
good education to whatever degree. But the main damage is in the over
all dummying down of our kids. Learning aptitude is just nothing near
what it use to be because of all of the above and more.

And the traditional phonics programs brought back the idea of learning
the alphabet sounds and phonics rules such as the 'silent e making the
vowel long or pronounce it's own name (Sam becomes same) etc. A lot of
rules to learn and sounds to memorize. But phonics was back and that's
what they used when more than 99% of our kids could learn to read when
they were in the first-grade and move up smoothly. It was finally
back.

But our children were already victim to the above American changes and
many couldn't learn to read so easily with the return of traditional
phonics. It was working, but not well enough for far too many. And
most teachers and parents were uncertain in application of the
traditional phonics; not being certain they were saying the sounds
correctly themselves. And when the sounds were finally memorized, it
was a new arduous chore to use those sounds to read words.

The commercial programs were able to get the student to know the first
sound of the first letter of a beginning level word such as the 'c' in
'cat'. But it was just counted on that the student would be able to
figure out the rest of the word. There was no method to teach sounding
the word out. Those who were able to sound out words still didn't know
how they did it or how to teach it as a generality. So they would just
have the student say the first sound and then try to read the word.
The child - or adult - was still learning to read the word by
repetition (memorization), with the acceptance of the first letter.
Following this, the phonics rules would be drilled and grilled, often
even before the student could read the words. Still thousands of kids
could not 'sound out each letter of the word'. Why not? Well, they
would say each sound sort of chopped up, and then forget what they had
said and they would not have an ear for what sounds they had said and
so still didn't get the word, blending it into a whole. It was big
problem with the return of traditional phonics.

Then came a change in the method and philosophy of teaching phonics
itself. It came after the big commercial phonics programs had their
day in the bright lights but were still the shinier stars. It was
developing quietly behind the scenes by a private small town tutor,
until her first article was printed in the Washington Post and picked
up here, by Cybertown's CyberNews in 1996. The article hit home to
parent and educator nationwide and spread at first slowly and then
began to snowball as new programs integrated this new phonics into its
curricula one after another until nearly every phonics program being
promoted, on the Internet today touts its innovative discovery or
solutions to struggling phonics students. But history takes it back to
this one article entitled, 'Phonics the Right Way and the Wrong Way'
by Tracy Sherwood.

Since its appearance on Cybertown in 1996, this article has weathered
massive new competition and still managed to stay in the top 10
placement of many major search engines, until web site positioning
experts were able to force new competition ahead with paid positioning
and keyword strategy. Although this article has had no editing in
keywords or content in the entire eight years of its existence on the
Internet, it still remains one of the most widely read and with no
doubt the most influential article on the subject of teaching phonics
today.

What was it about this tutor's discoveries that changed the face of
phonics forever? It was the author's twenty-four years of tutoring
experience with the most difficult students and adults that by
necessity, the tutor had to find the cause for the barriers to this
problem plaguing traditional phonics. The tutor, Tracy Sherwood, began
an experiment which consisted of nothing more than pure observation in
her tutoring sessions. Rather than push the student to read the word,
she simply observed the mistakes of both children and adults, learning
disabled and dyslexic, preschooler and practicing teacher. Before she
could determine the solutions, she had to spot the thought process of
each student with each mistake made and make notations. This was a
year long process and at end, the solutions to various difficulties
were in plain sight and in every case, universal.

Sherwood was the first to discover, or at least to make known, that
traditional phonics was being taught backwards and made no sense to
the student. She saw that teachers and parents would never see this as
they would too quickly resort to telling the student the word when he
failed to sound it out. And frustration depleted patience. Following
that came disability labels, remedial reading programs with absolutely
no challenge nor remedy and accompanying all this, special interests
such as psych-based experts and drug companies inciting the forwarding
of the controversy of whether phonics is or is not as effective as
it's supporters do tout.

Yet with the sweeping popularity of this Cybertown article, the entire
approach to teaching beginning and remedial phonics began to win the
day with its superior results and made its way into millions of homes,
private schools and even public schools - however limited in quality
of delivery. Prior to the release of this article, phonics was simply
learning the sounds, reading the words in groups of similar sounds,
and learning the phonics and spelling rules. There was no additional
help or mention of observing one's own speech as a separate practical
from reading the letters. There was no talk of sound-blending
techniques and games, or teaching babies and toddlers to put attention
to how the mouth forms individual sounds to make words. There were no
electronics, card, or other games in which the correct sound must be
found when heard and spelling was not decoded by saying the word one
sound at a time. Dyslexic adults were not coached on reading a word
backwards when attempting to guess rather than sound out, or when
omitting or randomly adding a sound that wasn't there. The Phonics
Game was the first to tout these missing basics and came on the
television scene some four months after the publication of the
Superphonics article and eight months after the release of
Superphonics for Babies & Toddlers. History traces the discoveries of
the exact difficulties and developments of techniques for their
remedy, to this Superphonics article and its Babies & Toddlers Guide.
When Sherwood promoted her discoveries and solutions to the world,
literacy began it's upward climb out of the dark downward spiral of
illiteracy. The face of phonics has greatly changed for the better.
And it all started right here at Cybertown.

Read Phonics the Right Way and the Wrong Way
at http://www.cybertown.com/mag2.html

By Tracy Sherwood Copyright Tracy Sherwood

August 26, 2003 Cybertown's CyberNews. Go to Cybertown Homepage
visit superphonics.com


For those interested in teaching via phonics, a less expensive, and more
provably effective program, is a project I've been working on for the past
three years: http://www.headsprout.com

Considerably less cost than superphonics, and no shipping costs either.
Nothing to return if you decide you don't like it; if you're not truly
amazed by your child's progress, you can have the full amount refunded. AND,
your child can do the first three lessons free to see if it even works for
your child


--
"There are 10 kinds of people in the world:
those who understand binary numbers and those who don't."
-----------------------------
Byron "Barn" Canfield
Lead Flash Programmer, Headsprout, Inc.
http://www.headsprout.com




 




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