"it radically rewrote the rules of literacy for tens of thousands of children seemingly overnight."
There are always stories about how miraculous various programs and phonics in particular are in teaching reading. But surely such programs would have been adopted by now and thus must have been producing undeniable results somewhere. Wouldn't phonics have been adopted in red states (there is an obvious partisan divide on this) and shouldn't those states now be much better in reading performance?
Spanish is almost perfectly phonetic so why do international comparisons put reading performance in Spain below that in the US? Can Japanese and Chinese (who do well on the international comparisons) only learn to read after seeing the romanized versions? Surely people in China were able to read before it was exposed to the West.
"Whole language" may have been a wrong turn if it really resulted in ignoring phonetics (I doubt that it really did in practice), but the fact is that proficient reading requires recognition of whole words. Most children can learn new words both audibly and in symbols very fast, but some may require more help from phonetics.
By the way the Roman alphabet is very poor for most languages (including English), which typically have more sounds. Few languages have only five vowels sounds, like Spanish and Italian (and presumably Latin). Phonetics is presumably helpful in deciphering foreign words, but the simple Roman alphabet will never describe them (except Spanish, etc) accurately even with code books. However some alphabets, such as Arabic, may be even simpler, omitting vowels altogether at times.
"it radically rewrote the rules of literacy for tens of thousands of children seemingly overnight."
There are always stories about how miraculous various programs and phonics in particular are in teaching reading. But surely such programs would have been adopted by now and thus must have been producing undeniable results somewhere. Wouldn't phonics have been adopted in red states (there is an obvious partisan divide on this) and shouldn't those states now be much better in reading performance?
Spanish is almost perfectly phonetic so why do international comparisons put reading performance in Spain below that in the US? Can Japanese and Chinese (who do well on the international comparisons) only learn to read after seeing the romanized versions? Surely people in China were able to read before it was exposed to the West.
"Whole language" may have been a wrong turn if it really resulted in ignoring phonetics (I doubt that it really did in practice), but the fact is that proficient reading requires recognition of whole words. Most children can learn new words both audibly and in symbols very fast, but some may require more help from phonetics.
By the way the Roman alphabet is very poor for most languages (including English), which typically have more sounds. Few languages have only five vowels sounds, like Spanish and Italian (and presumably Latin). Phonetics is presumably helpful in deciphering foreign words, but the simple Roman alphabet will never describe them (except Spanish, etc) accurately even with code books. However some alphabets, such as Arabic, may be even simpler, omitting vowels altogether at times.