McNee & Coleman 'Great Reading Disaster': was look/say introduced to damage children's reading?

[Rerevisionist]

2007 detailed book which says (my summaries):---
[1] Before 1945, almost everyone learned to read, by the age of 7.
[2] They learned by being taught letters, and then words where the sounds blended (e.g. CAT, DOG, ... HOSPITAL). Oddities (foreign words, adopted words, proper names, remnants of other languages - opaque, pyjama, Edinburgh, children...) were left till later
[3] After about 1945 the look-say method 'was introduced'; they have a list of 'guru' names and books, but don't know about the promotional methods
[4] Look-say in their view used just the SHAPE of words, i.e. the outline, to try to teach reading - ignoring differences in lower-case, capitals etc
[5] There's another version in which the whole word was shown, but it was deliberately withheld that the letters had some meaning, and even that words are read left-to-right
[6] As a result there was a vast increase in illiteracy. Large numbers of pupils spent years learning nothing of reading (and the parents seemed to not comment, or be bewildered). And a vast increase (or invention) of dyslexia, since of course the kids had no idea about reading.
[7] This continued at least up to the time of their book, 2007.

Their book is interesting and convincing, but (for example) omits some names of Education Secretaries, omits actual evidence of what happened in classrooms, is somewhat anecdotal about McNee's success with dyslexics, and also makes some claims which seem hardly credible, such as teaching words purely by shape.

I wonder if anyone has informed comment, preferably being familiar with the book? I'm exploring the idea that the whole process was deliberate, part of the 'Labour'/ Frankfurt School etc 'critique' attack on Europe/USA. (Alice Coleman was resonsible for the attack against tower blocks - 'Utopia on Trial')

Thank you very much Feenie [curtsy]

Carry on making a monumental dickhead out of yourself by all means, but please don't insult other posters whilst doing it.

That was aimed at the OP, obv.

Any time, mrz

Feenie, you may not think that ruining the education of millions of children is important. Maybe you're right; or maybe you're just biased. But if you haven't anything useful to say, please don't add to the spam. Thanks.

Rerevisionist have you got any evidence that contradicts what you have been told by posters on this thread other than MM & AC who offer no evidence
(because there isn't any as it is untrue)

Spam, my foot. You opened a debate, and several posters who are actually directly involved with the successful teaching of reading have contributed to it.

Spam doesn't mean posting opinions which you disagree with. Look it up.

It stands to reason look and say is going to work for a lot of people. Most people, if they look at the same word repeated enough times and hear how it is pronounced, are going to work out how to read it without any prompting after a while - their own brain will work out the connections between the sounds and the symbols and the combinations of symbols. Some people need those connections made obvious to them - eg need to be taught phonics rather than being left to work the hidden rules out for themselves through a combination of memorising particular words, practice and experience, maybe because some people have difficulties integrating information from several senses at once (ie taking information from both vision and hearing and combining it in order to make sense of it). I doubt there are many fluent readers out there who, regardless of how they were taught, don't recognise that particular letter combinations almost always make particular sounds, regardless of the words they are found in. If most people recognise these connections even if they weren't actively taught them, then they didn't all need to be taught them and not all of them would have learnt to read more quickly if they were actively taught to them. That doesn't mean the process of decoding words phonically isn't going on in peoples' brains behind the scenes without them being aware of it (nor does it mean that people haven't also memorised a lot of words that in no way sound the way they are spelt). Just as when we catch a ball, we aren't aware of the process of calculating where our hands should be in order to catch it....

Feenie educates children which is far more important than your ill informed tantrums Rerevisionist

Rerevisionist, I have just read through this thread and do you realise just how rude you come across? Thought I'd mention it because your tone amongst other things is hindering your ability to debate effectively.

Those people are not spammers but legitimate posters on a public forum.

I instensly dislike conspiracy theories and they tend to ignore small details like a need for rigorous, valid evidence. Very unscientific.

mrz and feenie - there's a problem here, rather like the problem of patients' testimonials, namely how reliable are they? Large numbers of 'adults' in Britain can barely read, apart from the 'Sun', and otherwise show little for their long period of education. For all I know, mrz's output may be entirely like that. But, if so, is she likely to admit it? This is why I'm doing my best to collect informed comments. McN and AC's book is stuffed with authors, titles, information on government reports, summaries of tests (or, more often, tests which have been not carried out deliberately), and comments on laws, mostly in Britain. But there are holes in the information structure, and, life being short, some of their material is e.g. TV programme titles on so many million 'illiterates' or other categories which inevitably are a bit woolly. They do make a very good case, contrary to what the people here who haven't read the book claim. But it would be interesting to find if any of it is genuinely wrong, which I'm trying to do.

Large numbers of 'adults' in Britain can barely read, apart from the 'Sun', and otherwise show little for their long period of education. For all I know, mrz's output may be entirely like that. But, if so, is she likely to admit it?

The Sun functions at around a level 3 - average reading level of a nine year old. As an experienced Literacy coordinator, mrz would of course know whether or not the children in her school surpass those levels, rerevisionist.

No Rerevisionist you only appear to want comments that support your own very misinformed opinion.

No one is disputing that MM & AC make a good case what people are trying to tell you is that case isn't based on fact but on emotion. People have posted links which demonstrate that things you are quoting are incorrect but you stubbornly refuse to accept.

Most of us would agree with MM that high quality phonics is good for all children. Those of us who have posted here and actually teach children to read, teach using phonics not Look & Say or Searchlights or Whole Language and have always done so long before Letters & Sounds. Some of us work in schools that have never followed the Literacy Strategy or Framework choosing to use what we know works best for our children. Some posters are committed to phonics and are outspoken supporters for good phonics instruction for all children yet we are telling you the "facts" you are posting are incorrect. We are not supporters of Look & Say supporting it we are phonics teachers telling you that the book is wrong!

I also believe a number of people who have replied to you are members/regular contributors to the RRF (which Mona McNee founded) so perhaps you would like to consider why they are telling you the book is inaccurate.

Anyone interested in history of teaching reading
might like to read Geraldine Rodger's erudite and definitive account. USA rather than UK however.

all links to be found on Don Potter's excellent website.
donpotter.net/ed.htm

History of Reading: Anyone interested in the history of beginning reading in the United States should be sure to read The History of Beginning Reading by Geraldine Rodgers. It is available as an inexpensive e-book at AuthorHouse.com. Miss. Rodgers has a shorter book bearing the intriguing title: The Hidden Story: How America's Present-day Reading Disabilities Grew Out of the Underhanded Meddling of America's First Experimental Psychologist.

www.tactyc.org.uk/pdfs/Reflection-vermes.pdf

www.ciera.org/library/archive/2001-08/0108pdp.pdf

mrz, I'm not sure what enlightenment the tactyc paper is supposed to offer.

I will add some anecdotal personal experience to a post by Rabbitstew above.

MY DS, age c. 3-4, memorised and recited long picture books (e.g. the Little Red Train series) 100% word perfect. At the age of 4.5, before he started school, I discovered that he could also read unseen texts fluently - basically, he was showing huge curiousity in letters and words, I got Jolly Phonics materials to 'do it properly in a way he would also encounter in school'...and then dicovered that he could read the text intended for the teacher in the 'teacher's' book.

He APPEARED to learn to read through 'look and say', as in he had had no explicit Phonics instruction before reading fluently.

HOWEVER, when he was being taught phonics for encoding (spelling) at school, it becaume clear that he did in fact have an excellent 'self worked out' understanding of the link between specific phonemes and graphemes - he could read not because he was recognising whole words, but because of the link he made for himself between how each part of an individual word sounded and how they looked on the page. So he taught himself to read through working out how phonics worked.

On the other hand, there were certain common words that he did recognise 'by shape' and I found it interesting as he encountered a very wide range of books in Reception that a change to an extreme or unusual font in a book woud affect his ability to read those 'little' words (like 'the' or 'and') but made no difference to his ability to read words like 'extraordinarily' or 'catastrophe'.

I just mention it as an example where what 'appears' to be going on (a child learning by 'look and say') and what is 'actually' going on (a child working out the basics of the phonic code by themselves from repeated looking and saying) may be two different things.

I am a huge supporter of high quality phonics teaching, supported by phonically decodeable reading schemes....sadly not a combination that is universally found...

It was actually only for this part

Pearson goes on to describe innovations in the first third of the 20th century (1900-1935). These can broadly be divided into three categories (different only in ?dominant materials?). The first, ?analytic phonics? is an approach (sometimes called ?words to letters?) in which the child encounters a whole word, and is asked to ?analyse? the sounds within it. The second innovation came to be known as ?look and say?: a number of words were learnt as sight vocabulary before any analysis of their letter sounds took place: Pearson strongly argues that, ?contrary to popular opinion?..some form of analytic phonics usually kicked in after ..a hundred or so sight words had been memorized.? (2000: 2). The third approach used an invented alphabet as temporary measure, as in the ?Initial Teaching Alphabet?, popular in the 1960s (see www.itafoundation.org).

Which suggests to me Look & Say was around before 1945 as the OP believes

Isnt that the problem with "Look and Say" teacherwith2kids

There are the children that somehow automatically pick up from phonics from it, my dd picked up reading just like your dh

There are the children who only learn to recognise words- then don't move on - think its called functionally illiterate.

Then there are the children who don't get it at all like my DH.

Can't remember a thing about the Frankfurt school now but during my degree I remember being profoundly irritated by them.

ITA was an extremely stupid idea that I'd be prepared to bet left most children struggling to read and spell. Certainly everyone I ever knew who had suffered from it.

Teaching the shape of words is arse about tit - people who CAN read recognise the shape of words, but that isn't how you learn to read in the first place. It's like saying 'ooh, an experienced cook can taste food and know whether to add more salt, therefore you don't need to give someone new to cooking any instructions, they will just work it out for themselves'. Madness.

mrz,
It was actually only for this part

Phew! Vermes is amazingly ignorant about SP!

I think that Look & Say has been around for far longer than that! It looks as though it was being advocated by Pestalozzi & Mann in the late 18th, early 19th cent.!

Google books found me this. I don't think the whole book is available, I just seaerched on Pestalozzi, but if you read on there is a 'history' of 19th cent. reading instruction.

books.google.co.uk/books?id=yMUo9F1A6KwC&pg=PA75&lpg=PA75&dq=pestalozzi%2Breading+instruction&source=bl&ots=lap0eZVtjR&sig=slQv3KmaLg7BIHyzK1Ea60CuXhY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=0gj_ToCwIcrO-Qb398zNAQ&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=pestalozzi%2Breading%20instruction&f=false

"SEARCHED"

edam,

I don't think it was the learning to read and spell which was the problem with ITA, in fact, it was dead easy because the 'code' was so simple. It was the conversion to conventional orthography which was the problem.

The ITA was never intended as a tool for reading instruction; it was a radical alternative to the 'conventional' alphabetic code.

My point was that it was quite common pre 1945 which contradicts points 1& 4 of the OP

but it seems the OP is only interested in government conspiracies where I believe the problem is often government ignorance when it comes to education