Word: flesch
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...reading with a system based on pure phonics, and now, far from repenting, they wanted permission to buy a phonic text. As the debate raged back and forth, one supervisor finally blurted out: "But if we approve this book, other people will think we are giving in to Rudolf Flesch...
...phrase in all this Flesch-pother is his statement: "... teaching of reading never was a problem anywhere in the world until the United States switched to the present method around 1925." Surely learning to read has always been a problem. I was taught with the aid of a famous English primer called Reading Without Tears, which was first published in England in 1857, and used by at least three generations of English children. But that it did not live up to its title is confirmed by Winston Churchill, who refers feelingly in his memoirs [A Roving Commission] to his early...
...Examiner get as many irate letters on a single subject. Other papers across the U.S. have had the same experience. "People jumped into this thing with both feet," says Managing Editor Frank Angelo of the Detroit Free Press Reason for all the fuss was a syndicated version of Rudolf Flesch's best-selling (over 60,000 copies since March) Why Johnny Can't Read. Said one school official in St. Louis after the Globe-Democrat started its series: "I've never seen a book more discussed than this one. My phone practically rang itself off the wall...
...sweeping condemnation, Flesch had accused the schools of an almost total failure to teach children to read because they had abandoned phonics (the letter-by-letter, syllable-by-syllable method) in favor of sight recognition (recognizing whole words by their appearance). "Do you know," wrote Flesch, "that the teaching of reading never was a problem anywhere in the world until the United States switched to the present method around about 1925?" Bald and exaggerated as his statements were, Flesch had in a sense done the nation a favor. He had brought the extremists out into the open...
Educators agree that phonics alone can be the most effective instruction in some cases. But Rudolf Flesch to the contrary, most children seem to need a combination of methods. Whether the modern school has hit upon the best possible combination is probably a question that could probably be answered only by entering today's pupils into a wholesale competition with their phonics-trained parents. In the Birmingham News, Managing Editor Charles 11 reported that there was some indication that the adults might not come off too well. Among the letters rallying to the Flesch banner, he noted that...