Thank you Jennifer for your insightful article. As a person who has helped hundreds of children who have been victims of the ideographic or "look and guess" method of learning to read the English language, I am encouraged to see your article get good national coverage.

In particular I appreciated your comment that "pointing out letter sounds ... is not phonics instruction". Many teachers seek to appease parents who are worried that their children are not literate after several years in school, by telling them that they are now introducing a phonics approach, when, as you point out, they in their ignorance, are using what some would call incidental phonics, which is not phonics at all.

Further, it is important for children who have been incorrectly taught, to undo the ideographic reflex, which is learned in the ideographic method, during the remedial process.

During the 90s, I realised that university lecturers, who were promoting the look and guess method in teacher training institutions, were creating lucrative text book deals with text book publishers, which entrenched incorrect methods of teaching reading in our teacher training institutions. It became a self-perpetuating promotion of ignorance on the trainee teachers' part and of growing literacy problems among school students.

Please keep up the good work.

Have to agree with Tosca:
It seems to me, the loss of literacy in the general population, has a general correlation with the withdrawal of the phonetic method of learning to read.
This method for those that don't actually know it or confuse it with learning our alphabet by rote, simply breaks up a word into easy to understand syllables!
When a kid gets it and can suddenly read really big words like fan-tas-tic, won-der-ful, e-lim-in-ate the neg-a-tive ac-cent-tu-ate the pos-i-tive, by breaking them up into more easily rec-og-nis-ed sound bites, the world becomes their oyster, and self learning can quite literally replace the current raft of intellectual in-tel-lec-tual concepts con-cepts, con seps, that have quite literally turned some of our poorer performing schools into laboratories. Lab-or-it-or-ies that study untried, untested teaching concepts, like the clearly failed whole word recognition rec-og-nit-ion/rec cog nit shun concept, that has turned some of our kids into little more than lab rats?
If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
Rhrosty.

Yep, nothing like a big stick applied to the backside of those who refuse to get it.

Worked for thousands of years, so why not now.

The main problem is the smart asses who think they know better.

Have to disagree Hasbeen - the problem now is that many primary school teachers have absolutely no idea how poorly educated and ignorant they actually are.

Yes Candide; interesting isn't it, that virtually all remedial reading is founded on phonetics.
I think the problem is people who can't actually remember their own childhood and the learning difficulties some of them experienced.
As for the cane?
Violence simply begets more violence, and there are better ways; including entrusting the worst bullies, with protecting the bullied or most vulnerable from the would be if they could be bullies!
The best teachers always seem to make the lessons interesting and inspire a passion for learning in their little charges. A passion that can then serve them well for the rest of their lives!
Not a lot of use however, if they miss out on the essential foundation and the learning tools/skills, we all of us need!
Cheers, Rhrosty.

Rhosty, phonics/phonetics will not fix the problem in isolation - many words do not lend themselves to phonetic pronunciation, which is why primary reading includes lists of so-called sight words such as night, through, though, laugh, which all sound 'gh' differently. That said, there is a huge gap in understanding and teaching phonics. Effective teaching of reading needs a combination of phonics and whole word/sight word recognition.