Read by Grade Three?  Say What?

by Don McCabe

Expecting students to be able to read by grade three is an impossible dream.  And so it shall remain as long as the way reading is taught throughout our nation remains unchanged.  The No Child Left Behind Act is only a small start, not the answer.

What is either taught systematically or encountered through a literature approach from kindergarten through the end of 2nd grade are the phonics or words containing just the phonics of our story telling words.  My explanation follows.  I know it is simplistic and not historically accurate, so please don't write me to tell me what I already know.  I use the following because it makes sense and is easy for a non-academic to understand even though it isn't literally  true.

A long time ago there was a land that had no name of its own.  It was filled with men and women who could do a lot of things.  They could hunt deer.  They could stand still.  They could hide.  They might kick a stone or pet a dog or a cat.  Some could run fast.  Others would walk slow.  They liked to play games but they knew how to work hard.  They cut down trees to build their own homes.  They had no bats to swing or balls to hit.  Yet they knew how to have fun.  They could dance and sing or jump with joy.  They could shout, scream, laugh, or cry.  To get food, they would grow plants, spear fish, or hunt and kill deer.  They got milk from cows.  They grew grapes to make wine.  At night they could look up at the sky and see the moon and the stars before they went to sleep.  Then came some more men in big boats from across the sea.  These men would change life and the way they would speak.

The first part of the story contains just the "simple" words of our BASIC English language.  The second part continues to use the basic words but adds many other words that came into our language from other languages.  These POWER words generally are not encountered in the first two grades nor are the phonic patterns within them taught.  These words are put in color.  How many of these words in red can be read by the best of third graders?

This place is what we today call England.  When the Roman legions conquered this island, they considered the indigenous people savages. To the Romans the natives had neither culture nor legal traditions comparable to theirs.  Naturally, they felt it incumbent upon themselves to educate these indigent ignoramuses.  Since these barbarians had only basic story telling words in their vocabulary, the Romans added the necessary terminology from their own language which was Latin.  Eventually from Ireland and Italy came missionaries who brought Christianity to these pagans.  They taught the local savages that if they converted from their  polytheistic Druidic tree worshipping religion to Catholicism by being baptized and accepting Jesus Christ as their savior, salvation would be theirs.  Because the ignorant pagans had no biblical or religious or medical vocabulary beyond roots and herbs, the missionaries created appropriate neologisms by the thousands from their two favorite languages, Latin and Greek.  Then came the Normans.  They conquered the somewhat civilized barbarians and added thousands more words dealing with the more sophisticated aspects of cuisine and military matters.  So now words such as victuals, merlot, cabaret, depot, lieutenant, colonel, rendezvous, bivouac, boudoir, and unique were added to our language.  As these and other words were added into the English language from other languages such as the Spanish hacienda, the Italian spaghetti, the Arabic zero, the German auf wiedersehen, the Hebrew amen, the Sanskrit sandhi, the Russian sputnik, the Chinese Qin, and the Japanese bonsai, etc., they kept their phonic patterns rather than the phonic patterns of the basic English language.  

E-Mail Note:  from Donald Potter

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