Thursday, December 25, 2008

teach english dyslexics exclusively by the sight word method?

maybe if phonics is just not working with a student, they should be taught exclusively by the sight word method the way chinese children learn chinese characters:  strictly by repetition:  writing the word over and over. 
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2 comments:

  1. v/vmaryDecember 25, 2008 at 6:43 PM

    this comment mirrors something i have been thinking: Another scientist, Elise Temple of Dartmouth, UK, suggests that the findings about dyslexia in speakers of different languages might have implications for treating dyslexic children:

    If a child is likely to have severe dyslexia in English, maybe he or she could be taught to recognize whole words as units in the Chinese manner.

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  2. v/vmaryDecember 25, 2008 at 6:56 PM

    this girl was first taught to read using the sight word method and later could not use the phonics method: When I was in first grade, they tried to teach us phonics. I didn’t understand a bit of it. If that was the way I had had to learn to read, I wouldn’t have. Before I started school, I started learning smaller words and my own name by my dad writing it down for me and I studied the patterns. I learned words by their shapes, not by their sounds.

    i on the other hand was taught to read in russian at a young age by my russian grandmother. russian is highly regular with each letter corresponding to one sound. later when my first grade american teacher tried to teach me using the sight word method and the dick and jane books where the words or reinforced through repetition, i was at a loss. later when i was taught using phonics my reading took off. so maybe our very earliest experiences with reading have a profound influence on how we learn to read as we get older. sally shaywitz writes that dyslexic children's brain scans actually change when they are taught to read with quality phonics programs. i know in kindergarten a lot of words are taught by having the students try to memorize the whole word as a picture. that may mess students up in first grade when sending out words becomes more important. when i teach the so-called sight words to my kindergarteners, i teach them to sound them out. even a word like 'of' i teach them can be read using regular phonics rules as 'ah-f' and then switched to 'uh-v', especially if 'of' is read in the context of a sentence. reading 'of' as 'ah-f' helped me more than trying to remember the squiggles o-f meant the word 'uh-v'

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