I have always been interested in how people learn how to read. I learned using phonics, "a" says ah et cetera. I no longer read by sounding out the words unless I am really stuck by a new word and that happens infrequently. The last one I remember was Xenophobia and that was thirty years ago now, incidentally, it is hatred of foreigners. I have been analysing how I read by looking at the mistakes which I make. Now I glance at the beginning, the length and the end of a word and guess it in context. I know that I do that because I occasionally have to go back and re-read a sentence because I guessed a word wrong and have to go back over it.

                There we are, that's how I read now. I read using the method taught as whole language or the recognition of whole words, but that is not to say that that is how I learned to read or how I got where I am now from "a" says ah. The question which I am trying to answer in this essay is how I got from where I started to where I am now.

                When a child learns language, he tries out sounds until the grown ups around show signs of recognition and make apparently approving noises. My first word was "fly" pointing at a housefly. My grandmother was death on houseflies so saying "fie" and pointing gained approval. After that, I figured it out and managed to build a vocabulary.

                I think reading is learned in the same manner. The kid needs the means to build the vocabulary of words. Word recognition is the end result, not the means. Phonetics enabled me to create my vocabulary, just like the approval of the grown up's enabled me to get the sounds which I made into words.

                Learning reading is like learning language. You get a few words of the code by random sounds like ma-ma pa-pa and people respond by pointing and repeating the word. The kid understands that certain sounds have certain meanings and after that looking for more is a no brainer. Once the kid gets the connection between sounds and real objects the game is basically over and the kid will learn language. It is all just a matter of copying sounds the grown up's make and checking the results.

                Kids learn to read like they learn language. First they get the formula. Some random sounds really are words and the kid figures out how to make them, then, suddenly BINGO I can talk and the grown up's understand.

                Reading is the same. Give the kids the way to figure it out and they will get it. Once you figure out that C-A-T is cat  with phonetics then learning reading is like learning to talk. First a word or two, then a simple sentence, and then a new, wonderful and powerful new way to communicate.

                Reading is just another language and kids need to learn to do it just like they learn how to talk. I suspect, in fact, that teaching a kid to speak and read at the same time would not only be possible but easy. The pictures in the kid's book show the kid familiar objects. They also show the spelling and using phonetics on the words shows how the whole thing is connected together. We already know that some bright kids learn to read at the same time as learning to talk because they can read at two and a half years old, or at least one $250,000 winner on "Do you want to be a millionaire" was reading at that age according to his grandmother who taught him.

                Trying to teach kids how to read by whole language is trying to teach reading by whole word recognition. True that is how I read now. The problem is that a kid cannot get started because nobody tried to show the kid how to build a word. The problem of teaching a kid how to read is teaching the kid how to crack the code. If you try to teach a kid to learn to read by word recognition then you are not telling the kid how to crack the code. If you teach phonetics, then you give the kid the tool to translate written words into sounds and sounds into objects. Learning to speak is working out how to string sounds together into meaningful sentences. It seems likely that learning to read at the same time would be quite easy.