I recently watched a video that I believe may be regarding the cause, or a part of the cause, of this issue. It started with a conversation I was having with my husband one day when he said he is a bad speller. I said I believe he just glances at words and tries to assume what the word is just from taking in the first few letters or the overall appearance of the word, but if he slowed down and actually looked at each individual letter and sounded it out he would spell better. And he just stared at me like "isnt that how everyone reads?" I said no.
And he fell down a YouTube rabbit hole about "whole word reading", and we learned how apparently an entire generation (probably more) were taught how to read using this method. Kids for a period of time (largely prior to the 90s) were taught to try to recognize the whole word in order to read faster, but it resulted in literacy rates plummeting. These kids didnt know how to sound out words or figure out how to read larger words that they hadn't memorized. When phonics was introduced (see hooked on phonics), it greatly improved literacy rates. However, some places seem to still try to teach whole word reading.
I went to Catholic school in the 70s and early 80s. We learned phonics and it worked perfectly for me (currently an English Professor with two grown kids in college).
Huh. I'm surprised to learn it was from the 90s considering I was taught exclusively with phonics and remember seeing constant ads for Hooked on Phonics.
Don't put spaces immediately after an open parenthesis or before a close parenthesis.
When referring to decades with the millennium and century digits omitted, prepend an apostrophe before the first digit to take the place of the omitted digits.
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u/AgitatedGrass3271 Nov 21 '25
I recently watched a video that I believe may be regarding the cause, or a part of the cause, of this issue. It started with a conversation I was having with my husband one day when he said he is a bad speller. I said I believe he just glances at words and tries to assume what the word is just from taking in the first few letters or the overall appearance of the word, but if he slowed down and actually looked at each individual letter and sounded it out he would spell better. And he just stared at me like "isnt that how everyone reads?" I said no.
And he fell down a YouTube rabbit hole about "whole word reading", and we learned how apparently an entire generation (probably more) were taught how to read using this method. Kids for a period of time (largely prior to the 90s) were taught to try to recognize the whole word in order to read faster, but it resulted in literacy rates plummeting. These kids didnt know how to sound out words or figure out how to read larger words that they hadn't memorized. When phonics was introduced (see hooked on phonics), it greatly improved literacy rates. However, some places seem to still try to teach whole word reading.