From: utzoo!henry
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Title: Re: non-phonetic reading 
Article-I.D.: utzoo.2321
Posted: Fri Jul 30 17:41:28 1982
Received: Fri Jul 30 17:41:28 1982

Non-phonetic reading is definitely faster, and it is probably true that
many people find the transition from phonetic to non-phonetic to be a
substantial hurdle.  This would seem to imply that reading should be
taught non-phonetically from the beginning.  There is just one problem.
Non-phonetic reading is *the* major cause of the wave of illiteracy in
school graduates in the last decade or so.  It is much harder to learn
to read via the non-phonetic approach.  One must learn to walk before
one can learn to run;  non-phonetic teaching of reading is a failure.

I had the good fortune to have taught myself to read before school, so
I was largely exempt from this problem.  There are (or at least, were)
cultures where it is taken for granted that children will know how to
read before entering school.  This seems a much better approach.  Does
anybody know of any studies that have been done on how children in such
cultures teach themselves to read?  Given that they are expected to
absorb it the same way they absorb spoken language, it would seem pretty
much inevitable that such kids would learn to read phonetically.