English

[oscar]

But the experts in the field do insist phonics is, overall, better. It isn't perfect by any means though. The alternative is just doing what a lot native English speakers do, and that's to accept the oddities of English spelling without really understanding why they're there. Take the nightmarish -ough sequence of letters which can be pronounced at least six different ways! My generation simply learned that particular words were pronounced particular ways, and "enough" was different to "through" which was different to "nought" and so on.

Cheers, NeMo

Who made them "experts'? I think few are....

So "cat" is a k-sound, an ah-sound, and a tah-sound.

Put like that, it sounds like catarrh, which I sometimes suffer from - or even Quatar, which is somewhere out east. As I have said before - I love the English language 

[joe cassidy]

Cattahar - is that the castle in Monty P and the holy grail ?

Best regards,


Joe

[NeMo]

Who made them "experts'? I think few are....

Understood. But we shouldn't be anti-expertise either. That's a dangerous path to go down! Would you want your doctor to be some bloke off the street with common sense? I think not.

The big problem with education is you can't do proper scientific experiment. Suppose someone said to you that your child's school will be dividing all the students into two categories. Half would get five years of the original-style teaching, and the other half would get five years of what they think will be better teaching that delivers higher exam results and improved life outcomes.

That's the best way to do this sort of experiment. But can you imagine how the parents of the kids with the old-style teaching would feel? Knowing that the chances are that their children will be receiving a second-rate education compared to the kids getting the improved system?

Obviously you can't do this; politically it'd be impossible to propose, and how would you decide which schools were going to be guinea pigs? So what tends to happen is that new education methods are rolled out countrywide. Usually they improve things, but sometimes you could argue they don't.

Cheers, NeMo

[oscar]

"Would you want your doctor to be some bloke off the street with common sense?"

Yes, after a few of the 'doctors' I've come across. I wouldn't let some of them near my cat!