The Most Ridiculous Thing you can Say to a Student

Sound it out is the most ridiculous thing anyone can say to a student because letters and sounds don’t go together in English. I learned this the hard way like everyone else.

After I finished my TESL (Teacher of English as a Second Language) program I volunteered at the local LINC (Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada) Centre to gain experience. They let me assist the teacher in the lowest level class. Sometimes she let me teach. For obvious reasons I dubbed the class Kindergarten. The kindergartens were wonderful. They ranged in age from 19 to 85. The 19 year-olds were new immigrants, too old to integrate into high school and the seniors were citizens who had lived in Canada for a long time but had never learned the language. They had to learn it now because their grandchildren spoke only English and the old soldiers couldn’t communicate with their children's children.

The heart and soul of basic English is the verb to be:  I am, you are, he is… it is a little tricky explaining the verb to be without using the verb to be – in fact it is impossible. The verb to be is… If you pointed to yourself and said I and pointed to the class and said you they pointed to you and said I and pointed to themselves and said you like a two-bit vaudeville act but they weren’t trying to be funny, they were trying to learn. You cannot make this stuff up.

Anyways, the verb to be is quite critical and as a new teacher I was all fired up, full of good intentions and committed to making this class be the group was going to get the verb to be like it had never been gotten before. In big tidy letters I printed on the blackboard I am, you are, he is… I thought it would be a good idea to pronounce the words as I printed them. I couldn’t do it. I could not pronounce I am exactly as it was printed. The way I normally say these words did not match the letters I was putting on the board. I heard myself say I yam, you ware, he yiz…Holy mackerel this language is trickier than I thought. How does anyone learn it? How did I learn it? Then I remembered.

I remembered learning how to read. I was six years old, in Grade One at Clarkson Public School, my teacher was Miss Speck and I loved her. There is nothing in this world I wanted more than to please Miss Speck. There was sentence in front of me on the special Grade One three-lined paper and it was something like this:

The boy and the girl go into the house.

Miss Speck ran her finger under the words and as I read them out loud. For the first word I said /te he/and Miss Speck corrected me, the word is the Judy, carry on. It wasn’t very long before that word came up again and I read /te he/. Ever patient, Miss Speck reminded me it’s the Judy, sound it out she said to me. Well I was sounding it out and the letters said /tehe/ I had to read that word six times before I could over-ride Miss Speck’s instructions and get that t h e was pronounced /thu/  for one reason only – because Miss Speck said so. And that was good enough for me.

Reading is a game. You look at random groups of letters and try to guess what they might represent from the thousands of words you had already heard growing up in an English–speaking household. r e d was /red/, h e a d sounded like /hed/, s a i d sounded like /sed /– because Miss Speck said so. There is no sounding anything out – that is a pile of crap. How words look and how they sound are completely unrelated. Reading and Speaking are separate languages and suddenly it didn’t matter to me that sew and snow rhymed with go and blue rhymed with do and few and so on. 

Reading is a guessing game and I liked games so I was reading Walter Farley before Christmas (I also liked horses). Hundreds of thousands of trusting little English speaking children in North America today can’t read because people say sound it out to them and they try and try to do that. It is time someone told them letters don’t make any make any sense at all. Reading is based on guessing from listening. Students have been smacking their little hedz against the wall trying to sound it out which duzn’t actually werk. I was lucky to figure out quickly that Miss Speck was wrong, I still loved her but she was wrong. Now all I had to figure out was how to explain reading to the ESL students, who have never heard the English language in their lives.