By Eva van Loon -Cognition Therapist

R U hooked on phonics? Then don’t expect miracles.

R U hooked on phonemics? You’re on the right road, the shorter, more natural one. Trouble is, it’s still a narrow track-not much phonemics around.

Remember that program that took the concerned-parent world by storm about two decades ago, Hooked on Phonics? If it worked for you or your kids, the chances are that your visual-processing function in the brain was working well.

It didn’t work? Chances are the brain you were working with suffers from today’s most common learning problem, auditory-processing deficit. Any kind of phonics is a waste of time for that brain. Stop torturing yourselves. As an article in the Wikipedia says about the most popular phonics program ever, “The program is better for some groups than for others. Among the criticisms, adult native English-speaking illiterates would recognize most of the words because they have large vocabularies. But children or non-native speakers, who know the meanings of fewer words, could be left clueless.” Duh!

Clueless is a good word for the phonics approach to reading. Why? Because phonics teaches students to relate letters to the sounds of English. Seems okay, doesn’t it? But reflect a moment: how did you learn to speak English? From the way it sounds, naturally! Your brain learned to recognise the sounds of English so as reproduce them.

Enter phonemics. Instead of teaching your brain to relate letters to sounds, phonemics teaches your brain to relate sounds to letters, or combinations of letters.

This is a good thing, because English is maddeningly illogical. Take this example: phonics sets the letters ea in front of the brain and says, “These letters make the sound ee.”

This is an idiotic statement. Letters don’t make sounds-sounds make letters. So phonemics turns that silliness upside down: “Hear this sound, ee? When you hear ee, most often it is spelled ea. Usually, you’re safe to spell it ea. Remember there are other ways to spell the sound ee.”

There are, in fact, nine ways to spell the sound ee in English. No wonder students go mad, trying to apply logic to the “rules” of English spelling. Logic doesn’t work, no matter how many rules you memorise.

English, bless its historically wayward heart, is not a WYSIWYG language like Spanish or French or Hawaiian. What You See Is not What You Get in English. A word could be spelled in the Latin fashion, after English’s Daddy, or in the Anglo-Saxon fashion, after English’s Mommy, or in the Hindi, Dutch, Malay, or a host of other fashions, after English’s children. You just don’t know, unless you already know because your visual processor told you so.

This is why teaching English, which despite its bumps and warts has become the chief language of the planet, is the ubiquitously useful job in the world today. For some reason, probably the ex-British Empire, the world has decided to speak and write English, in one form or another, preferably Standard English, which, in spite of its reputation, is-let’s admit it-an unholy mess. ESL (English as a Second Language) programs have made some progress with teaching English from sounds to letters, by combining phonemics with visual memorization skills.

I love English. I write novels and poetry, glorying in its richesse of vocabulary (that I shall never fully know if I live a hundred years) and delighting in its multicoloured history, its unparalleled variety, and its still youthful vigor. English may be a mess, but it’s wonderful-worth speaking, writing and reading well.

What tears me apart is our breathtaking loss in literacy in just the past quarter century. For whatever reason-TV, fast food, harried lifestyles, electro-magnetic radiation, computer screens, video games, poisoned environment-today’s youth are dangerously illiterate. Should the power go off, their toolbox of survival skills is next to empty. I am far from the first educator to say this, but this must be repeated to sound the urgent alarm: if we fail to save this rising generation from illiteracy, there is little hope for the survival not only of our crazy but beloved English, but of our entire culture.

Hooked on phonics? We’re out of time. Take the phonemic short cut-now!