Foibles of Phonics

About the Book

The Foibles of Phonics: And Other Roadblocks to Literacy, will disturb and enlighten the reader with a shocking exposure of how traditional school practices can create roadblocks to literacy. It offers workable solutions and issues an invitation to all of us to discuss America’s major educational issues.

 Readers will discover some understanding of a faulty system whereby undiscovered verbal athletes remain on the bench of the slow reading groups building resentment against themselves, achievers, and outward signs of achievement.  Sometimes festering for generations, these attitudes have spread to epidemic proportions.

Intended for parent, professional, and political discussion, teacher education, and curriculum development, this book includes three purposes:  to discuss the confusions about literacy and the teaching of language arts;  to highlight some of the confusions about teaching speaking, writing, and reading;  and to provide some ways teachers can overcome the problems and move the school bus on down the highway to literacy.

This is one of the Wolsch’s new Literacy Assured Series which also includes:

Writers All Around Us: A Search & Enjoy Mission for Parents & Teachers, Language Arts to Communication Arts: Reorganizing For Tomorrow´s Literacy, and Learning Through Speaking: 810 Performance Based Language Lessons.

About the Author

Robert & Lois Wolsch have been pioneers and favorite discussion leaders, for over four decades, in bringing listening, speaking, writing, and reading together. They have demonstrated their ideas, to make composition an enjoyable experience and a major part of every classroom and home, to parent and professional groups throughout the country. Robert Wolsch, Ed.D. Curriculum & Teaching Language Arts, Teachers College, Columbia University, Professor of Communication & Education, emeritus, Western Connecticut State University. Robert Wolsch has been a language arts consultant, providing 400 in class demonstrations each year for 12 years to students and teachers about speaking and writing. Then, as Director of Curriculum Development for the Experimental Program of the Urban Job Corps, his language centered, curriculum research program earned major government funding. His Poetic Composition Through The Grades: A Handbook for Teachers, an outgrowth of his doctoral dissertation under Professor Leland Jacobs, was published by Teachers College Press. The National Council of Teachers of English recommended it for all professional libraries. Robert originated and coordinated the graduate Communication Arts programs for teachers at Western Connecticut State University, which, with composition as a central focus, were recommended in a national study as models for inexpensive, multidisciplined teacher education. The first professor to receive the Connecticut Education Association’s Human Relations Award, Robert is listed in Leaders in Education and Who’s Who in Education. Lois Cothran Wolsch, M.A. Speech & Child Development, University of Michigan, Remedial Speech & Language Teacher, retired, Danbury, Connecticut Public Schools & Adjunct, Western Connecticut State University. Lois Cothran Wolsch, with Robert, previously coauthored From Speaking to Writing to Reading, published by Teachers College Press which stressed the concept of speech first, leading to writing and then to reading. She began her career at the Shady Trails Speech Camp of the University of Michigan and by organizing the speech program in the Ann Arbor, Michigan Public Schools. She continued in the Rockville Centre Public Schools, Nassau Community College, Danbury Public Schools, and part time at Western Connecticut State University. The Wolsch’s have been favorite workshop leaders and long time advocates of interpersonal communication and writing in heterogeneous groups on all levels of education. This is one of their new Litaracy Assured Series including: Language Arts to Communication Arts: Reorganizing For Tomorrow’s Literacy, Foibles of Phonics: And Other Roadblocks to Literacy, and Learning Through Speaking: 810 Performance Based Language Lessons.