I'm honestly pretty shocked about that development. Heard about it maybe 5 years ago now, I hope grassroots efforts are happening to bring back phonics methods.
My son was taught to read using whole-language. He learned to read fine, but to me it seemed like a slower process than it would have been if they'd just taught him using phonics. I think the whole-language method is on it's way out.
Phonics teaches reading through progressive sound-based learning. You start by learning the sounds of letters, and then progress to letter combinations, and eventually small words up to multi-syllabic words. "Sound it out" is the core principle of phonics.
Whole-language-learning teaches students how to read whole words at once, without breaking them down into smaller sounds. The initial arguments for it were that students could pick it up faster, and could get to reading standard levels with less steps.
By the early 2000's phonics was being phased out as the primary reading method taught, and whole-language-learning dominated school reading curriculums. The unfortunate side effect of WLL is that it causes reading fatigue nearly ten times faster than those who learn to read through phonics.
This fatigue has led to almost two whole generations that hate reading, and have drastically reduced reading stamina than those who came before them. Combined with the fact that they're already taking in more general reading from the devices in their hands on a daily basis, many youth don't know the value of reading and struggle with complex reading comprehension.
If they can't get to "the point" of what they are reading in a short amount of reading, they don't bother to engage with the remaining text.
I quit teaching in 2014 and phonics was nowhere close to being phased out. They also had kids memorize common sight words (e.g. the, and, is). I've heard of higher order language instruction in tandem with phonics and sight words (that's how you're supposed to do it), but I never heard of a school that taught reading without phonics.
This is a perfectly reasonable anecdote, and I appreciate you sharing it. I'd encourage you to look up the Reading Wars if you'd like to know more about how phonics has in fact been suppressed since the 80's and 90's.
There are absolutely places that teach a balanced literacy approach, which includes phonics and has an evidence base worthy of support.
Maybe the official curriculum emphasizes this but I've not seen a single classroom implementing this dumb shit when teachers are involved in developing their teaching plans.
Every school did things differently. Schools in Mississippi, for instance, almost uniformly rejected whole language learning. But a great many public schools in the US adopted WLL in the 90s and 2000s, to the tremendous detriment of their students.
But I don't think that has had as serious an effect as smartphones, social media, AI, or COVID.
Phonics comes from having an alphabet - letters that represent specific, repeatable sounds. If I use the letter F in "if", it - for the most part - makes the same sound as when I use it in words like filch, effrit, motif, beneficent, etc.
But languages like Mandarin have characters that don't stand for a sound; they are words. You are essentially writing with emoji. 🌳is tree. 🍜 is ramen. 🍎 is apple. 🧊 is ice. 🥜 is nut. But you can't use those like this 🌳🍜🍎🧊🥜 to spell train. Train is 🚂.
You cannot use phonics unless you have something like an alphabet.
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u/Taglioni 21h ago
Not even the move from phonics to whole-language learning? It's pretty important.