Getting tired of this...

[rabidsamfan]

I'd like to debunk the following rumor... You may have seen it floating around LJ.



I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg!

The Phaonmneal Pweor of the Hmuan Mnid

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas toguhht slpeling was ipmorantt.





As I pointed out to another soul who put this up, spelling is important. There are three things going on here which are being neglected by the facile conclusion that letter order doesn't matter. The first is that you are a literate person already, and a fairly good reader, who is unjumbling words rather than understanding them with the ease which you read properly constructed English. The second is that you are reading words within the context of a sentence, where every unjumbled word eases the way for unjumbling the next word. If you took all the words in the paragraph above and made a list of them, altered the order of the list, and then had someone try to read the words, they'd be slowed down considerably. The third consideration is that none of these words have letters omitted or added. If they did, you'd be far more bollixed than you are.

We don't read words as a whole -- that fallacy has been the basis of several disastrous attempts to teach children to read without learning phonetics -- but we are very fast unscramblers of scrambled words when the first and last letters are in their correct places, particularly when the word is within the context of a sentence or paragraph. At least, we are once we've had a great deal of practice at reading!

Comments

[elendiari22.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Thanks for posting this info.

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. And you'll notice that when a word begins with a two-letter combination -- like "phenomenal" -- they've been very careful not to send the second letter of the combo off into the center of the word. Now that would foul things up a bit!

[cpsings4him.livejournal.com]

We don't read words as a whole -- that fallacy has been the basis of several disastrous attempts to teach children to read without learning phonetics -- but we are very fast unscramblers of scrambled words when the first and last letters are in their correct places, particularly when the word is within the context of a sentence or paragraph. At least, we are once we've had a great deal of practice at reading!



Thank you so much for pointing that out! A few years back (well, probably more than a few now!) I remember trying to help a child (and I can't even recall clearly who it was now) with their reading home work and encouraging them to "sound it out" when she came to a word she didn't know (as I had been taught to do). But she had NO CLUE what I was talking about. That was not how she had been taught to read! Her mother said that instead of using phonics based teaching methods they were using word memorization! I was about ten shades of appalled! I could not believe that they were not giving children the tools to be able to figure out an unfamiliar word on their own! What happens when they come to a word they have not seen before and have therefore not memorized? Well, they just don't have a clue what it is. They're stumped and have no way of figuring it out on their own. They have not been taught to understand that letters have individual sounds and when you put them in conjunction with other letters, those letters together make certain sounds that form words. They don't know WHY C-A-T spells cat - only that it does. It was very scary to think about, actually. To the best of my knowledge, due to poor performance by students in studies, this teaching method is no longer in practice in the state of Georgia.

Sorry to rant about this in your journal, but that is something that has bothered me for a long time.

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

Oh, go ahead and rant. As you can see, it's one of my soapboxes too! And I know the history behind it, which only makes it worse.

[cpsings4him.livejournal.com]

I'd love to hear the history behind it sometime...when you have time to tell me. :)

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

Well, here's a website which has some of it:

http://www.riggsinst.org/artp25.htm

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

This is a better article. http://www.theriver.com/Public/tucson_parents_edu_forum/whole_language.html It's got the info on Mann and the school for the deaf, which is the root of the method.

http://www.nrrf.org/article_anderson6-18-00.htm comes from a group which is probably the one which best represents my views. It's also good on the political slanting which has overlain the issue to our detriment. I happen to like the McGuinness book, but the silly women doesn't think that /Y/ is a phoneme, so I can't take her whole hog.

[mariole.livejournal.com]

Go get 'em, Tiger! ;)

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

Grrr!

[dreamflower]

Way to go, RSF!
Word recognition can work to a certain extent, but phonics have to come first, and a basis built. Then word recognition can work for words that do not follow the normal standards of spelling. For example, the word "do" which if spelled as it sounds would be "doo" or "du".
But many words that seemingly don't follow the usual rules do follow other, lesser known rules.
And you are right, spelling does matter. Even incorrect spellings should follow some kind of phonetic clues, unless they are merely typos. c

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

The Dolch list of sight words is about 20 times larger than it needs to be. Yes, there are some words which are exceptional, and a lot of them are core words (which is why they evolved, actually) but teaching all words as if they were exceptions is silly. (Incidentally, when it's a musical note "do" does rhyme with "go", so context, again, becomes important.)

[unhobbityhobbit.livejournal.com]

It took me far too long to work out what "Pweor" was. Also, isn't it just easier to right words as they're meant to be anyway?

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

LOL! Yes, much easier!

[unhobbityhobbit.livejournal.com]

Ack! It's a pity I can't 'right' words as they're meant to be.

As if I just did that. How very annoying.

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

THANK YOU.

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

*grin* You're most welcome!

[katakanadian.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear! I hate it whan people put down phonics. It may not work all the time but it provides an essential basis that frees up brain power for all the exceptions.

Japanese proficiency tests often try to trip people up for these kinds of errors. One has to choose the correct kanji from a list of several very similar choices. eg. 待つ (matsu - wait) 持つ (motsu - carry) or 四季 (shiki - 4 seasons)　指揮 (shiki - instructions).

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

There are phonics methods which aren't as good as they could be, but straight whole word stuff (and the pseudo-research which supports it) is absolutely poison.

http://www.nrrf.org/article_anderson6-18-00.htm is a good article on the subject.

[slipperieslope.livejournal.com]

It makes my head ache : (

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

Mine too!

[danachan.livejournal.com]

Gah. THANK YOU.

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

*snicker* You're the second person to thank me in all caps, and I'm darned if I can figure out why!

But you're welcome!

[danachan.livejournal.com]

Because this thing has irked me for a long time. And I'm glad you said something about it. And, well, it was either that or a very large WORD!

So. I made my choice.

[rabidsamfan.livejournal.com]

*snort* Feel free to refer offenders to this entry, then. It's such an annoying piece of twaddle...