they are not ready to read, since they can’t access both sides of the brain simultaneously.
Children who can simultaneously access their reading centers in the right and left hemispheres of their brain will read easily and will create visual images and pictures in their mind related to the content of what they are reading
My greatest concern is that I am seeing more and more fourth, fifth, sixth, and even seventh graders from public and private schools who can’t spell easily and are still reading mostly by sight memory. They can now use their left brain to sound out words, but they approach every word they read first by using the reading center in right brain (by sight). For example, when I give these children a sentence to read like “Six byos wnet on a vaccaiton tohgeter and tehy wnet fsihing in a bule baotâ€, they often do not notice any of the misspelled words. Furthermore, when I have these same children read another paragraph where every word is spelled correctly, they often tell me that both paragraphs are exactly the same or only note one or two words where the spelling is different.
My worry is that these children were pushed to read too early, when only their right brain was developed enough for reading. They compensated by learning to read everything using only sight memory. When the reading center in their left hemisphere finally developed, the habit was still to read by using the reading center of the right hemisphere. Therefore, these children first looked at the words in a sentence using sight memory, and if the words didn’t make any sense, then they accessed the left reading center to sound out the words. The problem was they weren’t using the reading centers in the right and left brains simultaneously. Many of these children still lacked bilateral integration in their physical movements as well as in their reading. For some of the children, reading was slow and took a tremendous amount of effort. For other children, their sight memory was so strong that they could read quickly but their comprehension and spelling were still poor.
These are a couple of the quotes from the article that concerned me. I’d love to hear some feedback from others. I have read this before, but there seems to be so little information available.
Well, as I see it, her target is the phenomenon of “early academics” in the sense of doing worksheets and starting other traditional kindergarten or first grade stuff in preschool. Her view appears to be that teaching children to read at a very early age is a bad idea because they will (a) necessarily have to learn by sight reading (memorizing individual words), and therefore (b) not be able to spell, not understand how language works, and generally not get all the benefits of familiarity with phonics.
From the sound of it, she is pretty much ignorant of what Doman’s methods, and similar methods, are capable of achieving, and as a result, she makes some overgeneralizations. There are also some plain old facts that, if she were to take them on board honestly, would make her go back to the drawing board, I suspect. She says, for example, “A physical sign that children have developed bilateral integration and can now read both by sight memory and phonics is shown by their ability to do do the cross-lateral skip (swinging their opposite leg with opposite arm forward at the same time) without thinking or concentrating.” Well, another physical sign that children can read by phonics is that they, um, read by phonics, as my own boy was doing quite well at age 2. So her notion, not uncommon among some experts, that very young children are incapable of learning phonics is simply wrong. If she had seen my son and the others who learn phonics as toddlers, she would be forced to adjust her views accordingly (or, more likely, live with a little more cognitive dissonance, as so many theorists seem to be happy to do).
I have plenty of respect for experts and the knowledge their hard, careful research has uncovered. But I don’t have so much respect for experts who use imprecise or simply wrong theories dogmatically to draw unwarranted conclusions, especially when specific, hard facts contradict their conclusions. I’m not saying she is wrong about everything, mind you, just some things.
Author is telling us the horror stories without any references. and we know that there are no references because there are no research published on Medline. In this vacuum of information everyone can compile his/her own horror stories without any background or evidences, and without any statistics.
(The only one person I know who learned to read with Doman method is my brother (44). I am sure that he is good in spelling and he is a really good writer; he wrote and published stories and worked in a newspaper.)