Phonics Expert Robyn Dalby-Stockwell Shows The Way To Teenage Literacy
[UKPRwire, Mon Aug 18 2008] So according to the London Daily Mail one third of fourteen year old boys in the UK have a reading age of eleven or below. If this were news it would make banner headlines!
“Sadly,” says phonics expert Robyn Dalby-Stockwell, “it is simply a statement demonstrating cause and effect. The cause of our dearth of good readers is their early exposure to the Look and Guess system of reading. The effect, a nation of children who find the printed word unintelligible and so avoid books.
Boys are traditionally slower off the academic starting blocks than girls. They also have a greater tendency to suffer from dyslexia, from its very mildest to most severe forms. The fourteen year old boys the newspaper refers to have been taught via the whole word (Look and Learn, Look and Guess) method of reading. Although this method is nightmare time for dyslexics - exacerbating their word blindness problems - it is, believe it or not, still championed by many teachers and head teachers. Once taught this way, damaged children will obviously avoid reading. Wouldn’t you if Charles Dickens’ immortal opening line. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’
Appeared to you as. ‘It was the bust of tim it was the was of tim.’
Don’t encourage these teenagers to read more - simply take them back to basics, teach them to read via Synthetic Phonics - THEN bring on the books.”
