HEARING BEFORE THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON ELEMENTARY, SECONDARY,
AND VOCATIONAL EDUCATION OF THE COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND LABOR HOUSE OF
REPRESENTATIVES
NINTY-NINTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
HEARING HELD IN WASHINGTON, DC, MARCH 20, 1986
Geraldine E Rodgers
"It is, therefore almost UNBELIEVABLE that the method for teaching reading in most American first grades forces children to focus PERMANENT, CONSCIOUS attention on decoding itself. Such reading mimics the activity of a partly deaf person when straining to catch a conversation, he CONSCIOUSLY GUESSES at missing words. THAT is what basal reader phonics REALLY is: teaching children to use only a FEW letter sounds consciously to GUESS at a missing word from the context of the memorized sight-words they can already read. By contrast, true phonics programs teach most children by January of first grade to form reliable conditioned reflexes between all 44 phonemes in English as they occur in syllables. More practice is needed after January to develop those skills to automaticity, but eventually their brain’s computers operate just like the Kurzweil machine. If their conscious minds choose to listen (remember: their minds attention is free) they will have MAXIMUM comprehension, with NO guessing."
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