by ryao | 2025-08-03 12:19:53+00:00
I found this article painful to read, not because reading it was difficult, but because of how deeply flawed it is. It correctly identifies one system of teaching reading as flawed (to put it mildly), but then is an advertisement for another slightly less flawed system by advocating for phonetics. The problem with phonetics is that it is unreliable when applied to the English language. The following video shows the problem:

https://youtu.be/uZV40f0cXF4

English does not follow the alphabetic principle, so any ability to sound out words is vestigial. It might work for a number of words, but then you will hit one where it does not work. I remember as a child, trying to sound out words as I was told to do, and getting them wrong. I eventually realized that the word pronunciations had to be memorized. I did not understand why until I was an adult. The reason is that English writing does not follow the alphabetic principle unlike many other languages which do. This is why schools in English speaking countries have spelling bees, while countries where languages that follow the alphabetic principle do not. Just about all of the students in the latter countries will always get the spelling of words in their local language correct, 100% of the time, such that there will be no winner and thus there is no point to a spelling bee.

Look at the actual sounds used in American English:

https://americanipachart.com/

There are 39. Just for fun, British Received Pronunciation has 44:

https://englishwithlucy.com/phonemic-chart/

Let’s not forget foreign loanwords, which might or might not be pronounced using the native foreign pronunciation. With only 26 letters, how are people supposed to ever be able to sound out words correctly? The only way is to memorize what is right in advance, which is the only way poor Ricky Ricardo ever learned how to pronounce the -ough words in English. It is also how my younger self learned to read. The article suggests this is called the “whole word” approach, and despite what the article claims, that is the only sane way to learn to read.

As someone who learned a number of words by “sounding them out”, prior to realizing sounding them out does not work, I can recall humiliation after evoking laughter when adults heard me pronounce words such as rendezvous and polygamy, which I pronounced as /rɛndɛzəvus/ and /poligami/. You can hear just how wrong these pronunciations are by copy and pasting the IPA into this site:

https://ipa-reader.com/

In a number of cases, I learned words twice. Once via “sounding out” and another via hearing it said. I had no idea that the two were the same word and thought that they were distinct words. I only ever realized they were not after hearing someone read the word, expecting to hear the former and instead hearing the latter, which in a number of cases, took several years to happen.

The phonetics approach relies on children doing recitations of cherrypicked texts to give the illusion of reading, but reading involves not just recitation but comprehension. In a language that follows the alphabetic principle, a child could trivially recite a graduate level text, but would not understand any of it. That is easily determined by asking questions about the text. However, since cherrypicked children‘s texts are used by phonetics based learning, people assume they recitation equals understanding, when that is not necessarily true. The children will only understand it when the words are words that they learned orally a priori.

That said, the phonetic approach could be less flawed if they taught children to anticipate every possible variation of pronunciation, which would at least help them identify words that they have previously heard. However, that would require admitting that children cannot know the words if they had not previously learned them. That would be a fantastic admission as it would avoid making life difficult for children (and it would have prevented my embarrassment over mispronouncing words such as rendezvous and polygamy), but it would not allow for the smoke and mirrors demonstrations that proponents of the phonetics approach use to advocate for it, which is to get children that could not read well previously to recite cherry-picked children’s texts, under the false premise that recitation equals understanding.