The absurdity of phonics in English language teaching...

Question

My son recently began primary school at the age of five years. Accordingly, my wife and I have to do homework with him, which includes learning to read. Apparently the current methodology of teaching reading in Scottish schools involves 'phonics', i.e. learning to associate letters with sounds.

I have concerns about this method for English.

When I first went to school aged four I could already ready pretty well because my mother had taught me with flashcards, but she didn't teach me phonics, simply word recognition.

English is not a phonetic language. Even the word 'phonics' isn't phonetic, for goodness' sake !! And I'm really looking forward to using phonics to teach my son how to pronounce '-ough'...

However, it has made me wonder:

• Is is easier to teach Spanish to Spanish-speaking children ?
• Is it easier for Spanish-speaking children to learn Spanish ?
• Do Spanish-speaking children learn to read earlier than English-speaking children ?
• Does the phonetic nature of Spanish help maintain a certain level of uniformity in pronunciation across the Spanish-speaking world ?

Answer 1

Rather than address your questions per se, I will quote from one source, and put up a slide from another.

http://languagemagazine.com/?page_id=43721

But before we can begin the conversation about how dyslexia affects those students who are English language learners, we have to agree that dyslexia is real and that it really affects up to 20% of the population of those who read English; that’s one in five people (Shaywitz, 2005). However, Snowling (2000) suggested that when the language is more transparent than English, such as Spanish, Finnish, and German, that number decreases to about 5%.

Interesting. - rac1, Sep 17, 2015

Chinese also has dyslexia, but it's in a different area of the brain. Chinese Dyslexics who learn English can read it fine... ;-) - Faldaesque, Sep 17, 2015

I think from what I have seen, the 5% who have dyslexia in Spanish or Italian would be the severe dyslexics in English. :) - bosquederoble, Sep 17, 2015