When you teach to read, you should often hear yourself saying "Read! Don't make stuff up!".
It's completely natural for a child (a person) to try to wing it as they go. But that's exactly the wrong thing when you are trying to learn to read. If you miss you learn nothing. If you hit, you still learn nothing. But when the mistake is caught and you are forced to undergo the technical process of reading, letter by letter, then you actually learn what this word is.
I have no idea what's so unique about English language that the strategy of winging it started to be encouraged. I haven't heard of any other language that was taught this way.
Maybe it's the bizarre spelling? But many languages have their fair share of that. You just teach children on regularly spelled words first.
I think its not about the English language, its about the American school system. The way curriculum decisions are spread out and the existence of so many petty fiefdoms means that there are many examples where someone is in a position to try to 'make their mark' by changing curriculum and picks a direction based mostly on their personal gut feelings. The 'make your mark' aspect leads away from picking tried-and-true approaches in favor of something more trendy.
I recently started learning Spanish via Language Transfer’s Complete Spanish program. The instructor always says something similar. Stop, think, then go. Don’t rush it. I have not yet seen a situation where the student in the course didn’t know how to do what he asked of them, but I have seen her translate incorrectly initially because she made guesswork of it.
It's a particular "method" developed by people like Marie Clay and Lucy Calkins.
Like many great lies, it has a kernel of truth. If you read the word "horse" and have the vocabulary, then related concepts like "saddle" or "pony" might be activated in your brain so you can "autocomplete" them if they come up later without sounding the word out.
Similarly, if you are reading a text about a horse called Bucephalus, then after decoding it the the first couple of times you will have it "cached" and can skim-read it the next few times it appears.
(If you didn't notice that the word "the" was repeated in the sentence above, then you're also not sounding out every word individually as you go along.)
The problem with the method is that it completely fails as a way for new readers to decode text their "autocomplete" is not already trained on. So you get students reading "horse" when the word is "pony" - and teachers arguing that it doesn't matter because they're getting the meaning out of the text which is what really matters, after all.
It's completely natural for a child (a person) to try to wing it as they go. But that's exactly the wrong thing when you are trying to learn to read. If you miss you learn nothing. If you hit, you still learn nothing. But when the mistake is caught and you are forced to undergo the technical process of reading, letter by letter, then you actually learn what this word is.
I have no idea what's so unique about English language that the strategy of winging it started to be encouraged. I haven't heard of any other language that was taught this way.
Maybe it's the bizarre spelling? But many languages have their fair share of that. You just teach children on regularly spelled words first.