[kvmet]

Phonics certainly doesn't _feel_ like the best way to teach English, but hopefully we now have enough data to show that it is at least acceptable. A big factor too is "can it be taught at scale". You don't only have to teach the students, you have to teach the teachers how to teach the new methods. Much like NCLB, these changes are well-meaning but we really need to stop rolling things out nationally only to find out they harm outcomes.

[zozbot234]

> Phonics certainly doesn't _feel_ like the best way to teach English

Phonics is not about "teaching English" in some fuzzy generic sense, it's specifically aimed towards teaching English written orthography, starting from its phonetics. I.e. teaching fluent speakers of English to read.

[anon291]

Why doesn't phonics _feel_ like the best way to teach English? This is a minority opinion I would think.

[lkbm]

Probably because English is so very non-phonetic. To repeat an ancient joke, "Hookt awn fonix werkt fer mee".

I could also see it resulting in more subvocalization, but my assumption is that subvocalization is actually a very important short-term strategy that almost always goes away quickly.

[Clamchop]

It'd be super cool if English orthography were allowed to keep up with the times, but we've never been more anal about spelling than we are right now, lol.

[anon291]

I mean, that was easily read.

If you go read old documents, you'll note they spelled English much more phonetically .

It's a fairly modern thing to use these standardized spellings

English is fairly phonetic. There's a few options for each phoneme and a few common words, but the vast majority follow obvious phonetic structures.

[lkbm]

Yes, of course it was easy to read. It was spelled phonetically. That's the point.

Calling English "fairly phonetic" is laughable. In most languages, they don't have spelling bees because they don't understand the concept. How would you not know how to spell the word after someone speaks it?

[ajuc]

I'd like to see how much time kids waste learning reading/writing in countries with non-phonetic languages compared to sane languages.

[lkbm]

My understanding (mostly from my speech pathologist brother ranting about this) is that we end up with reading/writing tending to lag about two years behind due to it.

[liontwist]

Those are the non-English words mixed in.

Individual letters don’t have sounds, but trigrams do.

[lkbm]

Given that that's something like half of our lexicon, you're going to have a heck of a time reading if you can't process any of them, but okay, let's look just at words that come from Old English:

food, good

rough, dough

two, to, too