Talking Points Memorandum for Teachers' professional decelopment Parents and Radio/T.V. interviews with Attorney Ned Jacobs Director, The Phonics Institute How is reading generally taught in Virgin Islands public schools and in schools throughout the United States? What are the major problems with the way reading and writing is usually taught in our schools? Is your program going to "run roughshod" over the special linguistic traditions of the Virgin Islands? Aren’t you going to be pushing standard American English over Crucian and St. Thomian and St. Johnian speech? Is it not true that all reading programs use phonics? What are you proposing that is so different? You say that the best way to classify reading programs is to ask the question: Is this reading program based upon the alphabetic principle? Why is this the best way to classify reading programs? Isn’t it true that the English language is not very phonetic? Isn’t it true that there are too many irregular words in written English for a phonics-based reading program to work well? Isn’t it true that the learning style of one child may be different from that of another child and that what you are proposing does not respect the individuality of learning styles? Isn’t it true that what you are proposing may not work that well in the Virgin Islands because many of our students speak nonstandard English, a Carribean dialect or patois, or another language altogether, on the street, and often in their homes? Isn’t phonics boring - don’t we need to teach the children by other methods in order to get them excited about reading? Does educational research support your claims that we should have extensive explicit phonics instruction in our schools? What is phonemic awareness? Why is it important to teaching to read? What is a phoneme? What is a grapheme? How are they related? How important is it for children to learn classifications of the knowledge they are taking in? For instance, how important is it for a student to know what a noun is, or what a verb is, or what an adjective or an adverb, or a conjunction, or a preposition or an ejaculation is? What is a reading strategy? Why do you disagree with many reading experts in the United States on what reading techniques should be classified as reading strategies? Why is it important for a reader to figure out what a word is by looking at the word itself and its letters, rather than looking at the context in which the word is found in order to determine what word it is? You claim that most college professors who teach college students how to become teachers say that the definition of reading is "deriving meaning from print." You criticize this definition and say that reading is really something else altogether. What is your definition of reading? Are you advocating the adoption in Virgin Islands public schools of a specific reading program that is published by a specific publisher? Or are you saying that we have more than one option as to what programs would work best? Phonics reading programs are for the preschool and primary grades, such as kindergarten through third grade or so - aren’t they? Is that what your proposal deals with only? What about the rest of elementary school through sixth grade? What about junior high - seventh and eighth grade? What about senior high school - ninth through twelfth grade? What about at the university level? How important is professional development for our teachers in your program? Are you pro-teacher or anti-teacher? You have any specific simple techniques to recommend to all teachers to help them become powerful reading and writing teachers? What is the purpose of schooling? You say that reading programs should be subjected to habit development analysis. What do you mean by habit development analysis? We hear so much about "literacy" nowadays. Why do we never hear you talking about literacy - and why instead do we always hear you talking about "reading" and "reading with understanding"? You claim there are five elements of reading with understanding. What are they? Does your proposal for Virgin Islands schools ignore understanding and comprehension? What is the Virgin Islands Language Compendium and why are you pushing this idea so much? What is ebonics - is it good or bad? Are teacher education programs in United States colleges and universities doing a good job of teaching our teachers? Why do you keep talking about the philosophy of education? Why is the philosophy underlying a reading and writing program so important? Do you want to impose your program on all the public school teachers even if they do not want to participate? How well do the public schools of the Virgin Islands stand up to other jurisdictions in the United States in reading and writing? Why do you claim that your proposal should be made the keystone of the economic revival of the Virgin Islands? Who is Rudolph Flesch and why do you frequently refer to him? The program currently in place in most of our public school classrooms - Literature Works - is described as a "whole language" program - what is whole language? How is it now regarded in the United States? What is the history of teaching to read? What does it teach us about the importance of your proposal? Tell us about the video "Reading, Writing and Ripped-Off" by Susan Robertson. Why does she subtitle this video "The Incredible Tragedy of whole language and the progressive philosophy in public education today"? The Phonics Institute stationery uses the expression "established to promote the phonics habit." What do you mean by this motto? Can we find your proposal to the Virgin Islands Department of Education on the world wide web? Where? What is your attitude toward the big push toward increased standardized testing in the United States? Our schools have so many problems, can your proposal, in your judgment, really do that much to help us? What does it mean to say that reading is the process of decoding and writing is the process of encoding? What do they say is the greatest invention ever devised by man? Why do you say there are only three word recognition techniques - whole word memorization without the analysis of phonics; visual guessing of the identity of words; and the use of the principles and the rules of phonics to sound out and figure out words? Do most reading experts agree that there are only three word recognition techniques? What is meant by "child centered" education, and what is wrong with it? Why do you put so much emphasis on word recognition teaching methodologies? Why do you talk so much about habits, habits, habits? \\Sandee\WPDOCS\Ned's Assistant\Phonics Institute,The\Talking Points Memorandum.wpd Click here for a printer friendly version

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