by Sherrill Fulghum

Created on: August 30, 2008

Phonics may be a wonderful way to teach a child the correct sounds for letters and letter combinations; however, with American English as we know it today this method of teaching a child to read is grossly lacking in providing a child with a complete reading education. From the time they are born children are inundated with words spoken improperly because the user is speaking phonetically or not saying the whole word. Broken English (American) spoken on the street is the norm in today's society.

For starters the language spoken; as well as written and read, by the population of the United States is not truly English; it is in a sense a language all its own - American. From the time the first non Natives began to set foot on North American soil the language began to change. With each successive culture new words were added until today a great many of the words used originated from other languages. The old expression that citizens of the United States do not speak the King's (or Queen's) English is never more accurate than it is today.

Now with all of these foreign words not to mention the ones that have silent letters and words that have more than one pronunciation teaching a child to read phonetically is nearly an impossible task. For instance - read; is it read as in the present tense of the verb to read or is it past tense as in I read that book already. Words that came from the French language frequently have letters that are not pronounced except in the plural. In American English sch has an sk sound but if the word came from a Germanic language then the sch has the sound of sh. If a child is taught to read using phonetics he or she cannot make this distinction unless told.

While some foreign languages (foreign to Americans) can easily be learned via phonetics because the letter sounds rarely if ever change (German, Russian, and Hebrew are a few examples) but American English is not one of them.

It has been many years since I learned how to read but I distinctly remember the large paper bound book filled with letters and the teacher telling us how each of them sounded. But once we learned those wounds we still had to be told how many words sounded because the words did not follow the same rules for pronunciation as the letters. American English has very few actual rules. It does; however, have a lot of exceptions and an even larger set of exceptions to the exceptions. Combine this fact with the multitude of words of foreign origin and the only way a child can really grasp reading is by learning the whole word from the beginning.

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