Why Johnny Can't Read?

Why Johnny Can't Read?: And What You Can Do About It by Rudolf Franz Flesch, William Morrow, 2012 (originally published 1955). 

Phonics versus Whole Word

The author is an advocate of phonics, and an opponent of the whole-word method.,  In the whole-word method of reading, the reader recognizes the length and overall shape of the word, and guesses which known word it is from that. The whole-word method is similar to the method of Chinese characters. It is also called look-and-say. 

Before the Experts

Until the 1920s, children in the United States learned to read via phonics.

Whole Word

This gradually changed, so by the 1950s most reading instructions was whole-word. In 1908 Dr. Edmund Burke Huey published The Psychology of Reading, which promoted the whole-word method. In the 1920s, Dr. Arthur I. Gates at Teachers College, Columbia University was an opponent of phonics and published the book New Methods in Primary Reading. Psychology experiments have shown that experienced readers do not recognize every letter, but instead grasp words as wholes. But whole-word advocates made the mistaken inference that this is how people initially learn to read. 

England

At the time this book was first published, in the 1950s, schools children in England were still being taught phonics and learned to read at an earlier age than American children, most of whom were being taught by whole-word. Whole-word instruction uses a great deal of repetition, Each of the words to be learned is repeated many times in the story, making the story boring.

English Spelling

English spelling is irregular, but not so irregular that phonetics doesn’t work. Elementary school children learn 400 words a year via whole-word. If they learned reading via phonics, their reading vocabulary would be equal to their listening vocabulary. Third graders know 44,000 words by sound. The average college freshman knows 158, 000 words by sound.