Groundwork For College Reading With Phonics

[This text]is designed to develop effective reading and clear thinking. [It] begins with basic matters: having the right attitude, learning key study skills, and developing a reading habit. [It] consists of ten additional readings that will help improve both reading and thinking skills. [It also] consists of twelve combined-skills tests. The tests provide a review of the comprehension skills [to] prepare students for the standardized reading exam that is often a requirement at the end of a semester. -Pref. to the instructor.

Ever since the sight word method replaced phonics as the way to teach children to read and spell, there have been arguments -sometimes called "the reading wars" - for and against phonics. The author remembers far enough back to the days before all this started - when teaching letters and sounds went without saying and parents could depend on the school system to teach their children to read. Reading difficulties forced theorists to re-think their strategies so they came up with a philosophy of reading: that children would learn to read on their own because they want to learn to read. There would be plenty of books classed as "children's literature" and teachers would be "facilitators." In Reading With Phonics, the author discusses reading methods and arguments for and against phonics. She tells about some of the children she has tutored since retiring from teaching. An earlier book, Learn To Read From Sounds with an accompanying cassette tape on which phonetically arranged words are read is also available from Trafford Publishing.