How we read

[titchy]

Having read (and mostly agreed with) all the convos about how wonderful phonics is as a methods of teaching reading, rather than 'look and say' - doesn't the following kind of entirely dispute how we read?

Don't think about it too much - just read:

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg.

The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at

Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a

wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be

in the rghit pclae.

The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a

pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by

istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas

tghuuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

What do you reckon?

seen this lots of times before but it is amazing.

We've been trained to read this by deciphering the codster's messages. Catguts (is that the name of the phonics lover? something like that) isn't going to like this post!

I cnat raed a wrod of it mslyef

but I assume all those words are already deeply familiar to you from reading. Try, fmrregtoaisnem. Not so easy?

It's ferromagnetism (I think!). You only recognise words IMO when they are already familiar because you have learned to read and practised. Ds (4) definitely reads new words by spelling them out phonetically, eventually they become familar. I've had 36 years of reading to learn to decode all that. He's had a few months. It would mean nothing to him. Also, in the above sentence the muddling is actually quite careful and lots of words are kept to their regular spelling, presumably because this makes it easier.

Also, nobody would ever be able to read a book printed like that. Even that shortish paragraph too longer to read than normal.

ohhh, aloha...I actually got the magnetism bit of that!!

I'm obviously a genius as I've never even heard of the ferromagnetism

looks like coddy's handiwork! yes i could read it.

But, as Aloha said, we can only read that because we work out all the anagrams in the words and make assumptions about which words are likely to come next. And we can only read it because we can read fluently in the first place. I'm a very fast reader and I find puzzling my way through that slow and tedious. As Aloha says, the letters have been switched very carefully (eg 'huamn' is only one letter out) and most of the short words (eg can, but, the) haven't been changed at all, thereby simplifying the guessing for meaning for us. There is actually an analysis of this passage (and what it really tells us) elsewhere on the web. Will try to find it.

I was taught to read by how the word sounds and not how it looks/is spelt.

For example the word read would look something like this - r€€d. The two ee's would be joined together to show the sound. Couldnt really show this on pc, closest way was euro signs!

When I had grasped how words sounded I was then taught to spell and write the word both ways - how it sounds and how it looks on paper.

You HAVE to know the word first to guess it - which is totally different to 'learning' to read, which phonetics is about. Nobody says that as 40 year old fluent readers we puzzle out a word letter by letter (though we often do when confronted with a totally unfamiliar word). this is because phonics is about teaching to read. Not reading once you are fluent.

iunsast? Mtumtiis? Ntelapehnhe? Olactlsie?

I am not going to get involved in this argument because Aloha is fighting the good fight very eloquently, mastitis notwithstanding. She is right. Much of the guff written on learning to read comes from people who don't understand how language works, and the nature of the connection between phoneme and grapheme, particularly in English.

Read Diane McGuinness's book 'Why Children Can't Read' for the full story. Should be compulsory reading for all parents of Reception-age children IMO.

[large handbag emotion]

It's not an argument against Syn phonics for the teaching of reading.
What it shows is that after initially learning to read via an sp approach, you then need to build on this by learning higher order decoding skills which include reading around the word etc.