https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/taking-o ... david-ayer
...Virtually all kids need to go through the stage of sounding words out. As long as you don’t skip this step, the vast majority of kids will learn. (Some will start seeing sound-sight patterns immediately and go from strength to strength, others will need more time, and kids who struggle greatly trying to sound words out can be identified and screened much earlier for signs of dyslexia.) Yet teachers in 2017 act like English’s relatively inconsistent spelling is some kind of sadistic impediment that can only slow learners down. This is preposterous for two reasons: all words have some predictable sound-spelling correlation (even a weirdly spelled word like ‘enough’ isn’t spelled ‘dzerchlevrg’). But even more crucially, a school-aged child’s emerging fluency and already-considerable spoken vocabulary in their mother tongue is a massive resource that simply must be put to use when learning to read and spell. Experts shudder at the thought of not making full use a child’s emerging mastery of spoken English to assist as much as possible in starting to decode written words. Yet our teachers are taught that simply creating an Enriched Environment is going to induce their poor charges to shimmy their way up a rock wall with no, ahem, scaffolding to grab a hold of...