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Podcast: Audio Player
Here is a transcript of the content:
SSSS versus CRESS
Thoughts for Reading Teachers and Administrators
A Fundamental Contrast
- SSSS: Senseless Spelling Sabotaging Society: the existing system of traditional English spelling makes no sense
- We see painful and costly cultural nonsense: traditional spelling is as hard to learn as anything that does not make sense
- CRESS: Consistent Regular English Spelling System: a scientific and engineering innovation carefully designed to fix the problem
- CRESS is carefully designed to be the only fully worked out and effective solution to the English reading problem
- It provides massive benefits for foreign speakers learning to pronounce and write English
- Traditional spelling violates the concept of phonetic spelling upon which much of civilization is based
- There is cultural destruction in teaching a phonetic idea based on massive phonetic confusion
- Teaching of sound letter correspondence is self-defeating by any system that confuses sound letter correspondences.
- CRESS has been carefully engineered for essential requirements over 20 years
- Previous reading systems are remedial and superficial embedding confusion while maintaining it
- CRESS goes back to fundamental underlying basic science principles
- A sound is a sound and a letter is a letter and always the twain shall meet
Goals and Philosophy:
- Maximum simplification of reading education
- Free students to learn things that are fun and make sense
- Allow more joy for more students in the experience of school
- Avoid the waste of minds on useless, senseless, irrational detail
- Encourage important learning over mind-wasting nonsense
- Make it easy to learn to read
- Resolve the reading and writing education problem and dilemma
Thoughts for Teachers and Administrators (What They Already Know)
- Don’t accept change too quickly, but think, try and test, develop your own opinions
- Go gently … slowly … thoughtfully
- Take small steps to gauge children’s feelings and needs without disrupting comfort
- Keep traditional spelling too, but consider CRESS early
- Use CRESS as the early reading step that reading makes sense to children
- Do not launch experiments or programs for children without extreme caution, preparation and testing
- Respect the freedom of parental choice
- Convince rather than contradict
- Don’t be a revolutionary: let truth emerge naturally without confrontation
- Believe in yourself and decide for yourself independently
A Scientific Strategy for Rational Reading Success
- Do not teach two things at once that confuse each other: English spelling confuses and impedes the phonemic awareness it is built on!
- Establish phonemics first, simply and completely, with none of the confusion of English spelling. First things first.
- Teach children carefully engineered simple phonemic reading and writing first, prior to standard spelling.
- Use careful system design to bridge scientific truth and traditional spelling.
- Design a phonemic system
- Maximize similarity to English spelling
- Take learners quickly to achievable mastery of traditional spelling
- Clarify for students that traditional spelling is confused, not they themselves
- Give children the intellectual Eureka and emotional high of seeing easily for themselves the confusions in standard spelling
- Advantages of putting the phonemic spelling bridge in place first
- greatly eases traditional spelling
- shows children traditional spelling for the confusion it is
- creates fast literacy
- offers a functional fallback and alternative
- promotes the liberty of choice by children, parents, educators and the larger culture
- Provide tools to translate back and forth from CRESS to traditional English spelling
- Watch change over time as young people, relieved of nonsense, adapt
The Ultimate Test
- Don’t argue, just analyze and engineer carefully, then wait. Proper solutions will emerge.