11 ms·

The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

187 points by Treblemaker 7y ago

WalterBright 7y ago
Phonetic spelling is probably the greatest invention in written languages since paper. I am constantly amazed that teachers on the front lines fail to recognize this. I'm saddened that UI designers keep replacing phonetically spelled words with icons and emojis.
- AdieuToLogic 7y ago
  > Phonetic spelling is probably the greatest invention in written languages since paper. > I am constantly amazed that teachers on the front lines fail to recognize this. Some have. One system which embodies what you desire in interactive multimedia form is: http://www.explodethecode.com/02_how/ http://www.explodethecode.com/02_how/
- jcranmer 7y ago
  > Phonetic spelling is probably the greatest invention in written languages since paper. Paper dates to about 100 AD. The Greek alphabet, which is the first full alphabet (that records both vowels and consonants), dates to about 800 BC. Therefore, phonetic spelling predates paper by at least 900 years. Possibly older, if you want to count later cuneiform (which is mostly a syllabary) or Egyptian or Phoenician (abjads, lacking vowels) as phonetic spelling.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    Papyrus dates back much further. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus
    - jacobolus 7y ago
      Akkadian was written with phonetic cuneiform from maybe 2500 BCE.
momokoko 7y ago
The reason for this debate is that different IQ levels require different techniques. Higher IQ students will be more able to apply patterns and systems from phonics to words seen for the first time. Lower IQ students tend to struggle with mapping systems onto new material. So the more brute force systems, like memorizing whole words, tends to have more success. We see similar things in learning mathematics.
- AdieuToLogic 7y ago
  > The reason for this debate is that different IQ levels need different techniques. "IQ levels" are almost impossible to measure objectively, excluding medically identified learning disabilities. Reading comprehension difficulties are less a function of fluid intelligence (commonly called "IQ"), and more so environmentally induced. Examples of this are, but not limited to: - Instability at home - Lack of parental involvement - Prejudice, explicit or subliminal, by school staff. - Hunger and/or fatigue - Dejection resulting from some combination of the above.
  - vackosar 7y ago
    Even if they are environmentally caused, isn't it still better to personalize to the kids ability at the time of teaching? That is every now and then remix the students into groups for which you would have some optimized strategies to teach?
    - AdieuToLogic 7y ago
      My response was to directly address the concept of intrinsic low verses high IQ dogma. As far as optimizing teaching techniques, I can only say I believe there is not an easy answer for that. People are different, kids do not operate as adults would, group dynamics sometimes benefit with change and other times not, and I would be hard pressed to think that personalizing to the extent possible would be a bad thing. In short, IMHO there is no universally applicable solution to the teaching problem domain. Which is likely why so many of us hold teachers in high regard and remember them so well. EDIT: preposition and indefinite article use.
AdieuToLogic 7y ago
There is a reading comprehension system[0] which combines visual association (pictures) with various forms of word identification (spelling, phonemes, sentence composition, etc.). In short, associating pictures with the words which describe them in various comprehension exercises, increasing in difficulty based on progress, has shown to help students in their reading comprehension. Perhaps this can help some parents out there. 0 - http://www.explodethecode.com/ http://www.explodethecode.com/
rossdavidh 7y ago
So, it all makes sense, but by this theory, it seems like the english words "through" and "tough" and "benign" should be really hard to learn, compared to "true" and "stuff" and wine". Also, English ought to be harder to learn to read than, say, German or Spanish. But I don't know of any evidence that English-speaking countries have lower literacy than Spanish- or German-speaking countries. I don't mean that phonics isn't useful, but the idea that having multiple strategies can kill your ability to read sounds fishy.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  "through" and "tough" aren't hard, because by the time the reader is exposed to them they are well trained in phonics and are able to handle exceptions to the rules with little difficulty. I learned to read with Dick+Jane, but was taught phonetic reading. I remember looking over my mom's shoulder while she read books that were just walls of text. I couldn't read, and thought reading was some magical skill. It was pretty exciting to learn to read and then I could read anything. It was like someone turned the lights on.
- gumby 7y ago
  Indeed phonics make English spelling harder as English spelling is more etymologically conservative than it is phonetic. It was fascinating watching my kid learn to read: his school hired a native English speaker to teach English, using phonics. He preferred reading to almost any activity, but not in English (though we had plenty of books in that language) until I switched to reading with him only in English for a few months. The phonics led him down a false path.
  - trdtaylor1 7y ago
    Not in my personal case. My school didn't teach phonics, through 6 months of remedial tutoring with phonics I was able to go from being deemed a potential special ed student to being the most 'gifted' one. My full ride scholarship through academics stems from the course correction my parents made to the phonics path. I will be teaching my own children phonics with followups on the non-phonetically standard words.
  - 7y ago
teilo 7y ago
I came from a big family, and I have 6 children. I have taught all my children to read using McGuffey. I helped many of my siblings learn to read. Much of the discussion around phonics is missing the point. It is a caricature to say that "phonetic" reading is completely phonetic to the exclusion of sight reading. This is binary thinking. Nobody teaches it that way. The goal is not and never was to read phonetically ever after. In fact, from very early on, the concept of "sight words" is introduced. The phonetic method is a bridge and a tool to internalize words. The goal is to recognize words effortlessly, without thought. So what is the difference between the old phonetic methods, the later sight methods, and the modern (debunked) contextual methods? It's all about where you start. The phonetic method uses phonics as its foundational concept. You begin with the sounds, and you learn the exceptions as you go. But even the exceptions are aided by phonetics. Most "sight" words still have enough of a phonetic component to clue the reader into what's going on. Sight reading, on the other hand, assumes the reader will pick up enough phonics as they go along, contextually. But with this method, everything must be learned by rote. The "bridge" of having phonetic tools at your disposal is not taught. Now some children are simply sight readers, and do poorly with phonics. Not all minds are alike. But even sight readers benefit from having a foundation in phonics.
- butteredpopcorn 7y ago
  Thanks for your thoughts and observations. I may be one of these “simply sight readers”. I supposedly taught myself to read at an alarmingly, insufferably young age. I have no memory of learning to read whatsoever, only the before and the after. We had a complete set of McGuffey readers lying around (thanks for mentioning these, brought back memories!) but by the time I was looking at them I could already sight read and thought the phonics stuff seemed somewhere between too obvious, too detailed, and too boring. The first word my parents noticed me identify was a pretty bizarre proper noun and not phonics-friendly at all. My best guess is that since everyone in my house could read, and clearly enjoyed it, and did it all the time, I had plenty of readers to study in action and lots of motivation to watch them. Kind of like when you see a little crawling toddler staring at an older kid who’s running, totally stunned with jealousy... calculating, calculating... From before I could read, I remember asking “what does that say?” a lot. Making them read me sentences on demand. I’m a very fortunate person. I’d be interested to know how network effects helped your six children and many siblings, on top of the dedicated instruction. Seeing you reading casually, knowing you enjoyed it, seeing their peers do it.
Marsymars 7y ago
Reading is both one of the great pleasures in my life, and an invaluable tool for acquiring new knowledge. It horrifies me to think that millions could be denied those pleasures and tools because of easily-remedied educational failures.
- LocalH 7y ago
  Nobody gives a shit about things like that. They're too busy worried about left vs right politics, or religion vs secular belief, or any host of other relatively unimportant issues, to even notice this happens. I'd imagine this is worse in the US as well, given the large cultural adversity to intelligence in the first place.
  - wahern 7y ago
    A couple decades ago phonics was a huge issue in the culture wars. For people of a certain age and political bent phonics represents a dumbing-down of early education; a concession to lower-class kids and especially of minorities. As I recall (as an adolescent observer) the debate overlapped with the controversy regarding ebonics, with which phonics might be somewhat conflated in people's minds. If there's an analog today it's Common Core, or something related to Common Core. It doesn't lend itself as well to us vs them politics, though, as it's mostly a constellation of issues about which everybody has something negative to say. And I think that's true more generally--K-12 education is a quintessential political talking point. Everybody has strong opinions, they're just all largely the same uninformed opinions. It takes effort to keep people split along party lines, so you don't see the same persistent talking points across the years. Take vouchers--briefly a strongly divisive issue along party lines, but now a very muddy topic. People still have strong opinions, there's just no simple narrative for the media to play on.
    - LocalH 7y ago
      To me it speaks to this desire people have to have input in a field that they don't know or understand. Somehow, when it comes to education, people feel like they have a right to decide how their kids are taught, even though they know nothing about efficient and non-damaging teaching methods. They don't like change as well, many of them probably say "that's how I learned to read, so it's good enough for everyone". I used to be naive and think that everything should go to popular vote. Now I realize how infeasible and futile that would be. It would end up being an unmitigated disaster as people fight over everything instead of just a few hot-button issues.
knolax 7y ago
The flawed idea in question are the following strategies: > memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don't know Personally I think the phonics vs. sight words debate in English pedagogy misses the point entirely. The problem is that English divides words sentences into "words" and not morphemes. This way words like 'disambiguation' or 'boustrophedon' appear as a hard to parse blob regardless of which strategy you use. In my experience, schools have already started teaching "word roots" and the strategies needed to break words down into those roots. This to me seems like the key strategy.
- pdonis 7y ago
  Word roots are the key strategy for the next step after phonics: figuring out the meaning of what you're reading. But in order to do that, you first have to have the skill of matching what's written on the page with the speech system in your brain, and that's what phonics is for. You learn to speak by making sounds; phonics matches what's written on the page with the sounds you learned to speak. Just as children can speak words whose meanings they don't yet understand, they can read words whose meanings they don't yet understand. From the article, it seems like the original author of the MSV system got this backwards: he thought the understanding had to come first. It doesn't. The understanding builds on the phonetic foundation in reading just as it does in speaking.
  - knolax 7y ago
    I'm not sure sounds are needed to link to the language system in the brain. I remember as a child that there were certain words that I never bothered assigning sounds to until long after I internalized them. Even if sound is needed, I don't understand why the author couldn't just assign the sound of the letters in a word being read out in order for words she didn't know. I'm sure we all do that for certai n bash commands. I do admit though that I don't know much about developmental psychology so it's just my two cents.
    - pdonis 7y ago
      > I'm not sure sounds are needed to link to the language system in the brain. In the sense that, for example, deaf people can still learn speech, just not with sounds, this is of course true. But I'm talking about the case of a child with normal hearing and speech, where meanings are linked to spoken and heard sounds when they learn to speak. > there were certain words that I never bothered assigning sounds to until long after I internalized them Words that you read, or words that you spoke? I'm going to assume the former since speaking a word is assigning a sound to it. If you don't assign sounds to words that you read, how would you speak them? If somebody asked you to repeat what you just read, what would you say? > Even if sound is needed, I don't understand why the author couldn't just assign the sound of the letters in a word being read out in order for words she didn't know. That's what phonics is: you learn to sound out words you don't know letter by letter. Gradually you build up skill to the point where you can effortlessly translate written words to sounds, or more precisely to the structures in your brain that you previously linked to spoken or heard sounds when you learned to speak.
phkahler 7y ago
I like to recommend a kids video called "The Letter Factory". Start around. Age 3. Then move on to "The Word Factory". The 3rd in the series is not nearly as good in my opinion, but those two gave my kid a great start on reading. And they're fun.
eljefe900 7y ago
This article buries the lead. TLDR: Phonics works, Current strategies don’t. What actually works is the shortest part of the article. It’s infatuation with what doesn’t work puts what does work more than halfway into the article. I would have appreciated the article to be structured as “Phonics works, MSV Doesn’t and here’s why they’re different”
- MaximumYComb 7y ago
  I wasn't aware of the methods used in the US. Here in Australia, we have phonics at my daughters' school and she's coming along really well. My 6.5-year-old daughter is able to read basically anything I put in front of her by sounding through words.
  - DanBC 7y ago
    But make sure she has an age appropriate dictionary so that she can learn what the words mean, as well as being able to sound them out. I love phonics. It's powerful. But sometimes children are so confident at sounding out words that we miss the fact they don't always understand those words.
  - eljefe900 7y ago
    My US centric bias is showing. Thanks for the reminder! I suppose that a phonics lesson in Oz probably sounds a bit different than in the US. And they’re both effective. That’s fun to think about.
fiblye 7y ago
That chart for reading proficiency among 12th graders is rather... shocking. Is there similar data for other countries available? It'd be interesting to know if this is an issue unique to America (among developed nations), shared among English-speaking countries, or if it's a problem equally distributed across the world.
- csa 7y ago
  Ehhh... it uses some terms of art that might be slightly misleading to those not familiar with the field. The chart specifically lists “proficient” and “advanced” at 12th grade. What do those words mean? https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/reading/achieveall.asp#2009_grade12 https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/reading/achieveall.asp... For “proficient”, the “inferences” and “interpretative statements” components will rule out most readers. For reference, these are some of the skills that higher level SAT and GRE reading questions attempt to evaluate. The way one could (somewhat crudely) relabel that data is “what percentage of 12 graders could plausibly read college-level texts”. Interestingly, the college attendance numbers match these percentages fairly closely.
williamDafoe 7y ago
My brother in law was taught to sight-read (recognize words on sight and not to analyze phonemes) and he always struggled and regretted it!!! Phonics is the #1 advantage of ALL western languages. The idea that teachers would not leverage the #1 advantage of the entire language just shows how foolish our teacher education system can be! Don't let teachers screw up your kids with educational FADs! We didn't! We taught our kids at 3.5 - 4.5 to read using phonics before kindergarten! We used: http://www.headsprout.com http://www.headsprout.com . Our kids loved it! The risk of these FADs damaging your child's entire education would make this program cheap even if they charged $1000 (it's $200 - a small 10% increase over the last 14 years!)
- googlesux 7y ago
  And don't let mortgages get you down sign up for a free consultation of for a reverse mortgage today!
- nyCA 7y ago
  How about giving kids books instead of a stupid app? Talking about damaging kids...
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  My oldest was in the vanguard of phonics in our local schools in the UK. His spelling is terrible because he spells things phonetically, which simply doesn't work in English.
  - rbobby 7y ago
    > His spelling is terrible There's a fix for that... MS Word and browsers :) Word's little red underline dramatically improved my spelling. Words that I would habitually misspell would annoy me with that little red underline. I'd concentrate on the word and the correct spelling and eventually I stopped misspelling it. My favorite example... their... almost always I'd write "thier" (the few times I'd write "their" I'd doubt myself and switch it to "thier"). Nowadays I almost never misspell it (it also helps me sometimes to think "the IR"). Without Word's instant spell checking I'd still be a bad speller who'd spend too long running the spellchecker.
viburnum 7y ago
My kid’s school did mostly phonics with a fair amount of sight reading for common words. What a weird thing to be an absolutist about.
wallace_f 7y ago
>a third of fourth graders can't read at a basic level Academia/education in America needs to move past this "can't fail" philosophy. Bad schools need to fail. Good schools need to grow.
- jumelles 7y ago
  What does "fail" mean? What would happen to the children who attend a school that has "failed"?
  - wallace_f 7y ago
    Same thing that happens with everything else. They patronize a different service provider.
    - xnyan 7y ago
      In America that idea is absolutely pointless. For almost all children, local property taxes are the source source of education funding. A local school board administers this money and has a huge amount of discretion in spending it with practically no oversight. They were responsible for hiring the previous school administration and will also hire the next, If you have any idea of how to get out of this situation I'd be thrilled to hear it.
      - wallace_f 7y ago
        What is unique about education that it must be funded in such a particular "situation" in the first place, versus all other service industries?
    - DecoPerson 7y ago
      In support of this comment: In Australia, I saw a number of students transferred into the public school I attended because of poor results at other schools. They would be taken out of class when we were doing something beyond their level, so they could spend 1-on-1 time with a tutor who was trained in catching students up to their expected level. Some students, when transferred from another school, would repeat a year if necessary. I've heard of multiple occurrences where an Australian public or private school was been investigated for poor results, and during these times parents were encouraged to transfer their children to other schools as the reduced demand would give the school staff room to improve. (Tangent: I repeated year 4 (9-10yo) because my Mum thought I was "too small" and would be bullied. This led to me being bored by the materials. I thank the spare time this awarded me to why I discovered my Dad's computer, Macromedia Flash, and ActionScript 2.0. Starting programming at such a young age, especially in a C-style language, gave me a massive advantage in my programming career and perhaps life in general.)
SamReidHughes 7y ago
Having been taught with phonics, or at least having seen my classmates taught this way, I'd never imagined the world could be this fucked up. If you're going to teach this way, why not throw out the language and write with Chinese characters? The Japanese have a whole set of phonic letters that they use to teach kids. If a kid can't sound out supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, fire his teachers. "Sound out." Now there's a word I haven't heard in a long time.
- mxcrossb 7y ago
  Even if phonics are not used when reading, they still have an advantage for writing. Rarely in my adult life have I found myself sounding out a word in a book unless it is deliberately ridiculous (as your example). But I definitely sound out words when trying to spell a word.
  - dmoy 7y ago
    I still occasionally sound out words (incorrectly) when I stumble on a word that I finally realize I've gotten wrong in my head. Like I'll know the word, know what it means, but have imagined the wrong pronunciation in my head, only to have it suddenly dawn on me that "Hey, that synonym for this word you know that sounds a bit different, what if it's aactually the same word". Then I'll go look it up in a dictionary, realize I still don't know pronunciation guides, type it into Google or whatever to get audio, and confirm, yup, I'm a dumbass I've been thinking those are two different words for decades. This happens to me about once every other month. Millions of words, I don't expect it'll ever stop happening. Bonus points when the word is like only 6-7 characters long, feel extra dumb those months :P
    - benj111 7y ago
      Ha Ha yes. I find this with a lot of niche things I only ever read about, open source names seem to be the worst. Gnome is allegedly pronounced with a hard G. I've never heard that said in the wild. And I have no idea how anyone else pronounces XFCE.
voldacar 7y ago
>For example, a child who says "horse" when the word was "house" is probably relying too much on visual, or graphic, cues. A teacher in this case would encourage the child to pay more attention to what word would make sense in the sentence. WTF? Wouldn't you just tell the child to slow down, look at the letters that make up the word, and speak the word out loud? This makes zero sense whatsoever
- jdm2212 7y ago
  Yup! And that sane approach (look at the letters that make up the word, and speak the word out loud) is phonics.
  - voldacar 7y ago
    It's staggering to me that something so simple and obvious even needs to have a specific name like "phonics". That's just called reading lol. It's so bizarre how these people get put in positions of power over our educational system
    - tylorr 7y ago
      I believe there are some languages that are not phonetic, you cannot read them by sound out the parts of the word.
      - csa 7y ago
        Can you name one that does not have a phonetic system as well? Note that Japanese has kana, and Chinese has pinyin and bopomofo/zhuyin. Other than that... ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics? Please let me know if you are aware of more.
        voldacar 7y ago
        I'm not the parent, but the ancient sumerian cuneiform script comes to mind. Egyptian hieroglyphics did have a set of phonetic glyphs as well as the more complex logographic ones
ianbicking 7y ago
I sometimes wonder if we need a better phonics. Doing it by letters feels crude, it requires a big gestalt moment when the kid puts the sounds together, and overemphasizes our very malleable vowels. Something based more on syllables would seem better to me. Consider a simple work like “back”: kids sound out buh-ah-kuh which is a completely crazy version of the real word. You can’t say a B without a vowel, but instead of using the actual vowel (a) consonants usually get an “uh” added to them. Learning syllables means learning maybe 5-10 times as many sounds, but then it’s also easy to add “ing” and “sh” and all the many combinations of letters that can’t be individually decoded. The second problem is the kid has to pick out those letter combinations even though words are just a stream of letters. I wonder if it would be supportive to write the words in multiple colors to show the internal structure? I feel like this must all exist already in some curriculum...?
- teilo 7y ago
  This is already being done. In fact, that's central to almost any phonics course. Phonics isn't about letters in isolation. It's about letters in context. You start with the basic sounds, and quickly move onto letter pairings / groupings and how they effect the sound. To use your example, the -ack suffix is shown with a whole bunch of words on a single card to make the idea plain: back, sack, pack, black, tack, etc. So what you suggest is quite common in home and private school curriculums.
- SPascareli13 7y ago
  Some languages are more based on syllables than English, like Portuguese for example. When I was first learning English, being a portuguese speaker, I thought it would be easy to learn english, I just had to know the english syllables and translate words syllable by syllable. To my dismay, not only that doesn't work, english barely has a concept of syllables that makes any sense. So I wonder if languages that are have more phonetic writing like Korean for example, have better readers than other languages.
- rossriley 7y ago
  Modern phonics teaching introduces digraphs and trigraphs at an early stage of the process, so children learn to recognise these. My partner is a specialist phonics teacher and places a dot underneath each digraph, trigraph or individual letter sound so that they can quickly recognise the components. So boil will have a dot under b, one under o-i and one under the l. They can then spot that oi is a digraph; in the early stages they do this by saying out loud, an o and a i make 'oy'
wisty 7y ago
A lot of education experts (teachers, and worse, education academics and bureaucrats) are intelligent, white, upper-middle class people who are interested in academic stuff. They remember how BORING it was to be forced to memorise times tables and phonics in primary school like the low socio-economic kids. Their parents had taught them to read and do basic arithmetic long before the rest of the class, and they might have benefited a bit of acceleration, so surely making the whole class skip the boring stuff would benefit everyone?
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  I feel like a step got skipped here. 1. Covering the times tables in school is pointless when you already know the times tables because you learned them at home. 2. Therefore, people shouldn't learn the times tables? Saying something shouldn't be taught is a completely different idea from saying that schools shouldn't teach it because incoming students are expected to have learned it already.
  - wisty 7y ago
    There's a Romantic (Rousseau was a major perpetrator) view of education that seems to be based mostly on just whistful thinking and novels. But I think there is a grain of truth to it. Emile, or On Education (by Rousseau) proposes an idealistic goal in which a boy is educated by a tutor (a class size of) without being 'denatured' (losing the innocence and good moral quantities that the romantics think small children naturally possess). I'm not sure how realistic this is - Rousseau had five children but he dumped them all in orphanages as soon as they were born, but I think it rings partly true as something that works if you have sufficient inputs. If you have one really good tutor / parent you can raise a child to really understand things without cold but efficient methods like drills. Imagine you want to teach times tables without using times tables. You can keep track of what the child knows, and work out fun activities that lets them figure these out themselves, and guide them when they have a misunderstanding. But it's going to be labor intensive (for both the child and the tutor) and can't scale. Maybe computer teaching systems will turn drill work into a more fun system for teaching these fundamentals, since it can personalise at scale, but I suspect the opponents of drill will the complain about how soulless machines are pumping lifeless low-level skills into the heads of children who should instead be learning more high-level things in a more humane way. After all they didn't need a computer to teach them how to read, they just picked it up after their parents read with them every night for half a decade.
dqpb 7y ago
Oakland California. Wow. The bay area can't even teach their kids how to read.
milesskorpen 7y ago
I think this article is missing some basics. I know, for example, that Lucy Calkins’ program has a phonics program in _addition_ to the parts referenced in this article.
- teilo 7y ago
  The article specifically addresses the problems with mixing cueing and phonics when teaching reading.
ajuc 7y ago
It's very funny looking at this discussion from a mostly-phonetic writing system POV. In Polish the system is regular (even the exceptions) and nobody considers trying to teach kids not to exploit that. You just remember how each letter sounds and then the dozen of so special combinations (which are still mostly regular). And you can read. Yes you learn to read slow at first, and then you develop fast reading by yourself, it's natural and comes with reading a lot. I don't know anybody reading sound-by-sound past the age of 10, and usually kids learn to read whole words after they read their first long book (traditionally it's "Kids from Bullerbyn" here). I wonder how much longer it takes to teach kids reading such complicated writing system like English. Here it takes about 1 year, usually when they are in the first class of school.
- jnwatson 7y ago
  That we have spelling tests and spelling contests through secondary school is indicative that it takes roughly forever.
  - ajuc 7y ago
    That's only about writing, not reading. And it's exactly because our system is only simple one-way (letters->sounds), but not the other way (1 sound can be represented with many letter combinations so you have to learn rules and exceptions to write correctly). You never ask kids "read this word" or "how is this word pronounced" because that's always obvious. I would prefer if we fixed our system the other way as well, it wouldn't take much, we can start by removing rz, ch and ó and replacing them as needed with ż/sz, h, and u. Suddenly we have like 1 year at school free to teach other actually useful stuff :) It's not like it's impossible - we already had orthography reform in early 20th century and another minor one in 90s.
    - jfk13 7y ago
      > You never ask kids "read this word" or "how is this word pronounced" because that's always obvious. Except when it isn't. Colonel? Yacht? Victuals? Boatswain? Of course, we shouldn't forget Mark Twain's proposal: https://www.plainlanguage.gov/resources/humor/spelling-in-the-english-language/ https://www.plainlanguage.gov/resources/humor/spelling-in-th...
calf 7y ago
I'm a little confused, was Shakespeare taught phonics?
- juped 7y ago
  In Shakespeare's day, words didn't even have consistent spellings. Of course he wrote and read phonetically.
  - calf 7y ago
    But English is phonetic (but is it, compared to German or Japanese?) which is conflation with phonics. The article did not clearly explain what cognitive science has to do with phonics, which AFAIT is a heuristic system for Western languages. So when I studied Chinese as a child, how did I learn to write Chinese, nonphonetically, without confusing horses and ponies? A heuristic is an optimization but not fundamental but the article clearly asserts that phonics is fundamental to language in that if you don't use phonics you get illiterate students... I think there's some conceptual conflation or some middle case being ignored by the author: A) Is [formal instruction in] phonics necessary? v.s. B) Is 3-Cue harmful? These are not proper opposites. Here's a provocative claim made in a more sciencey article I just found: "The linguist David Crystal (2003) estimates that the phonics can explain only about 50 percent of English spellings." [https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/03/27/case-why-both-sides-reading-wars-debate-are-wrong-proposed-solution/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/03/27/case-why...] And further down: "As the linguists Venezky (1967) and Carol Chomsky (1970) explained, English prioritizes the consistent spelling of morphemes over the consistent spellings of phonemes."
    - knolax 7y ago
      English's primary strength over other European languages is its use of logography. It's sad to see how most English speakers see that as "BuT iT IsN't PHoNeTicALlY rEgUlaR!". This is despite the fact that phonetic shifts across time and space mean that no writing systen will ever be completely phonetically regular. Phonics can be useful but they can't be fundamental because the impossibility of phonetic regularity means that phonics will always be somewhat misleading.
yoz-y 7y ago
I was taught with phonics (not English) and one of the reasons was that reading is taught at the same moment as writing. So you learn to write first letters at the same time as you learn to read them. Iirc the first two were M and A
SubiculumCode 7y ago
So what is a good phonics system for my child? Advice?
- DanBC 7y ago
  In England you can try Jolly Phonics, or books by Ruth Miskin. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jolly-Phonics-Activity-Books-1-7/dp/1844141608/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jolly-Phonics-Activity-Books-1-7/dp... Ruth Miskin (Amazon haven't arranged this page well) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ruth-Miskin/e/B0034N7454 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ruth-Miskin/e/B0034N7454
  - GordonS 7y ago
    I used Jolly Phonics with my 2 kids (in Scotland) - they both enjoyed it, and it allowed them to learn all the phonics surprisingly quickly. I think the major feature of Jolly Phonics is that each phonic is accompanied by an action, which not only makes it fun, but also helps distinguish between similar phonics. For example, for 'd' you make a drumming motion; for 't', you move your head from side-to-side as if watching a tennis volley. Can't recommend it enough!
wvenable 7y ago
I haven't noticed this so much with reading, but it seems like the same misguided strategy is also being used for math. Instead of teaching the fundamentals (like algorithms for long division) and instead they teach all the mental tricks for doing quick math. This should be especially concerning for software developers -- it seems they no longer teach (at an early age) the very things that made me like math and eventually computers.
patsplat 7y ago
This is a disturbing article to read after watching my son struggling to learn to read.
heyiforgotmypwd 7y ago
In the early 80's, my parents pulled me out of California's public schools when the state/county ditched phonics for some unproven nonsense, to a private school that was founded on proven teaching methods (name of the school was Challenger). When I reentered a different public school district in grade 3, I was ahead of other students by around 2 grade-levels. In retrospect, the private school was far superior to the public school system, even in an upper-middle class area because the public schools experiment/ed arbitrarily with curriculum in unproven ways on a large scale and didn't seem to be held accountable at a large-scale for playing with children's futures. Instead, individual teachers are micromanaged with outcomes of BS standardized tests. And also, US public schools were further ruined by NCLBA of 2001, and now the head of Navient is in charge of the DOEd. sigh Bottom line: Find a Waldorf forest school that instills curiosity, excellence and basic subjects using proven methods, because US schools are rearranging the deckchairs while the band is playing... glurg, glurg, glurg.
ptx 7y ago
> For Goodman, accurate word recognition was not necessarily the goal of reading. The goal was to comprehend text. If the sentences were making sense, the reader must be getting the words right, or right enough. That's like saying "if the code compiles, it must be correct enough". Seems like a terrible idea.
mkagenius 7y ago
Nobody teaches to picture the story though. Mostly what we read are some actions, almost always. Actions need to mentally pictured to get involved and have a superior understanding. Without lack of this skill, we are distracted by our vision. Half the time my brain is thinking of other things while I am reading something. There is too much distraction in your while you are reading something. Even your own eyes will give you unnecessary visuals like "wow look at the font and the color and how the corners of the phone is rounded, the url of chrome changed to a new round url bar" "https is just a symbol of lock in black color"
learnstats2 7y ago
I'd say the pathway to fluent reading is: 1. no concept of reading, context is not helpful 2. start to read, use context to cover any weaknesses and gaps 3. become fluent reader, no longer need context to cover weaknesses and gaps. As an experienced educator, I would say there is no process of learning (anything) that doesn't follow this path, whether using context is formally taught or not. It's an important part of teaching to understand where weaknesses are being papered over and support fixing that. It may be that one teaching method or another makes certain weaknesses easier to identify or fix, but in the end, enough dedicated practice is going to sort out these weaknesses either way. The article presents this as though context is bad - but you need context to bridge from the start to the end of the process. The article repeatedly says "poor reader" when it is really talking about a stage of learning to read (the anecdotes describe people stuck on this stage). In my opinion: This is a really dangerous way of representing the problem of educating people, which denies agency to learners.
- em-bee 7y ago
  does the teaching method provide a way to get beyond that stage? while the anecdotes are about people stuck in this stage, the article strongly implies that the teaching method stops at that stage and does not help readers to get beyond it. in other words, it suggests that according to this teaching method this stage defines a good reader.
- praestigiare 7y ago
  This article is discussing the transition from #1 to #2 in your pathway. It cites multiple studies showing that the method being criticized is not effective.
- scotty79 7y ago
  > 1. no concept of reading, context is not helpful > 2. start to read, use context to cover any weaknesses and gaps > 3. become fluent reader, no longer need context to cover weaknesses and gaps. That's completely not how you learn to read. Step 2. is start to learn what sounds to make when you are seeing given combination of letters. And then learn gradually how to make the sounds faster and for longer sequences of letters. Until you reach step 3 where you can blurt a word or even few at a time as one or few sounds at good pace. At no point the context comes into play. It usually is even harmful because it makes you make stuff up instead of reading. Often wrong, occasionally correct which seems even more harmful. Context is important only after you read completely fluently and begin to read new domain of knowledg with completely unknow vocabulary. Then you can get some words meaning from context. Although you should always check if you guessed correctly. If you would like to know more about how most people in the world learn to read please find out how kids learn to read in other languages than english. English is a bit quirky but in no way unique. What's unique is english approach to reading teaching. I don't think anywhere else kids are encouraged to make stuff up as they go.
scotty79 7y ago
Such a long article on reading and teaching and no mention of syllables. Is this completley unrecognized concept in eanglish reading teaching? Teaching kids to read in polish goes like this: letters -> syllables -> words -> sentences (with an overlap of the steps). Known words and sentences are used throughout the process to illustrate the things you are learning at the moment and sort of tease what you will be able to do when you master current step. I imagine in language where same letters can have so many different sounds the concept of syllables should be even more useful. Teaching kids to read sentences before they can recognize what sound which letter bunches mean seems like telling kid to swim before he learns to float or tread water.
- mabbo 7y ago
  The danger here is that many of the patterns that go from letters -> syllables are completely messed up in English. (Come to think of it, the entire darned language can be like that). I remember in grade 3 having a teacher give a lesson on syllables. We would clap along with each syllable in the word. She asked me to do this for "Fire". I clapped twice, as there is clearly an audible Fy-er" two syllables in Canadian English. She told me I was wrong, clapped once, and said "Fire" quickly. She "knew" that a word with "consonant - vowel - consonant - vowel" pattern makes a single syllable. Never mind that my ears, and the rest of the students' ears, can hear that she's wrong. The end result was her confusing the class about what syllables are. I remember the lesson well, because what I really learned was that teachers mean well but aren't always right.
  - scotty79 7y ago
    I don't mean syllables as in precise definition (they are kind of fuzzy as your expeirience shows) or especially not counting them or learning which you should put the accent on. I'm talking about the fact that if you know how fi-(i)re sounds, you can guess how hi-(i)re sounds or even ty-(y)re or de-si-(i)re.
    - dqv 7y ago
      That's more or less what phonics is. It's discussed in the article. There's a combination of learning how sounds map to letters/letter combinations and then learning how they are used in real words (with spelling tests). The teacher shows the letter combinations first and the students sound them out. Then the reverse happens: the teacher sounds out the letters and the students have to write down every letter combination that corresponds with that sound. Then there is a spelling test that uses the sounds with a lot of edge cases where patterns/guessing won't work. They would also have students read aloud to make sure they were moving along smoothly.
pts_ 7y ago
The Indian private school educational system does teach phonics which might be why lots of Indian origin kids ace the spelling bee in the US.
warabe 7y ago
Thank you for sharing this. It was such a good read.
lowbloodsugar 7y ago
I asked my teenager about this, and they described this method as how they read. Any advice on teaching her how to read properly, now that they are a teenager?
whenanother 7y ago
so obviously a scam to destroy public schools and handicap the working class children. if you want to fix this just force the wealthy kids to attend public schools. the reason why the wealthy actively are destroying public institutions is because they are not using it.

187 points by Treblemaker 7y ago

Phonetic spelling is probably the greatest invention in written languages since paper. I am constantly amazed that teachers on the front lines fail to recognize this. I'm saddened that UI designers keep replacing phonetically spelled words with icons and emojis.

AdieuToLogic 7y ago
> Phonetic spelling is probably the greatest invention in written languages since paper. > I am constantly amazed that teachers on the front lines fail to recognize this. Some have. One system which embodies what you desire in interactive multimedia form is: http://www.explodethecode.com/02_how/ http://www.explodethecode.com/02_how/
jcranmer 7y ago
> Phonetic spelling is probably the greatest invention in written languages since paper. Paper dates to about 100 AD. The Greek alphabet, which is the first full alphabet (that records both vowels and consonants), dates to about 800 BC. Therefore, phonetic spelling predates paper by at least 900 years. Possibly older, if you want to count later cuneiform (which is mostly a syllabary) or Egyptian or Phoenician (abjads, lacking vowels) as phonetic spelling.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  Papyrus dates back much further. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    Akkadian was written with phonetic cuneiform from maybe 2500 BCE.

momokoko 7y ago

The reason for this debate is that different IQ levels require different techniques. Higher IQ students will be more able to apply patterns and systems from phonics to words seen for the first time. Lower IQ students tend to struggle with mapping systems onto new material. So the more brute force systems, like memorizing whole words, tends to have more success. We see similar things in learning mathematics.

AdieuToLogic 7y ago
> The reason for this debate is that different IQ levels need different techniques. "IQ levels" are almost impossible to measure objectively, excluding medically identified learning disabilities. Reading comprehension difficulties are less a function of fluid intelligence (commonly called "IQ"), and more so environmentally induced. Examples of this are, but not limited to: - Instability at home - Lack of parental involvement - Prejudice, explicit or subliminal, by school staff. - Hunger and/or fatigue - Dejection resulting from some combination of the above.
- vackosar 7y ago
  Even if they are environmentally caused, isn't it still better to personalize to the kids ability at the time of teaching? That is every now and then remix the students into groups for which you would have some optimized strategies to teach?
  - AdieuToLogic 7y ago
    My response was to directly address the concept of intrinsic low verses high IQ dogma. As far as optimizing teaching techniques, I can only say I believe there is not an easy answer for that. People are different, kids do not operate as adults would, group dynamics sometimes benefit with change and other times not, and I would be hard pressed to think that personalizing to the extent possible would be a bad thing. In short, IMHO there is no universally applicable solution to the teaching problem domain. Which is likely why so many of us hold teachers in high regard and remember them so well. EDIT: preposition and indefinite article use.

AdieuToLogic 7y ago

There is a reading comprehension system[0] which combines visual association (pictures) with various forms of word identification (spelling, phonemes, sentence composition, etc.). In short, associating pictures with the words which describe them in various comprehension exercises, increasing in difficulty based on progress, has shown to help students in their reading comprehension. Perhaps this can help some parents out there. 0 - http://www.explodethecode.com/ http://www.explodethecode.com/

rossdavidh 7y ago

So, it all makes sense, but by this theory, it seems like the english words "through" and "tough" and "benign" should be really hard to learn, compared to "true" and "stuff" and wine". Also, English ought to be harder to learn to read than, say, German or Spanish. But I don't know of any evidence that English-speaking countries have lower literacy than Spanish- or German-speaking countries. I don't mean that phonics isn't useful, but the idea that having multiple strategies can kill your ability to read sounds fishy.

WalterBright 7y ago
"through" and "tough" aren't hard, because by the time the reader is exposed to them they are well trained in phonics and are able to handle exceptions to the rules with little difficulty. I learned to read with Dick+Jane, but was taught phonetic reading. I remember looking over my mom's shoulder while she read books that were just walls of text. I couldn't read, and thought reading was some magical skill. It was pretty exciting to learn to read and then I could read anything. It was like someone turned the lights on.
gumby 7y ago
Indeed phonics make English spelling harder as English spelling is more etymologically conservative than it is phonetic. It was fascinating watching my kid learn to read: his school hired a native English speaker to teach English, using phonics. He preferred reading to almost any activity, but not in English (though we had plenty of books in that language) until I switched to reading with him only in English for a few months. The phonics led him down a false path.
- trdtaylor1 7y ago
  Not in my personal case. My school didn't teach phonics, through 6 months of remedial tutoring with phonics I was able to go from being deemed a potential special ed student to being the most 'gifted' one. My full ride scholarship through academics stems from the course correction my parents made to the phonics path. I will be teaching my own children phonics with followups on the non-phonetically standard words.
- 7y ago

teilo 7y ago

I came from a big family, and I have 6 children. I have taught all my children to read using McGuffey. I helped many of my siblings learn to read. Much of the discussion around phonics is missing the point. It is a caricature to say that "phonetic" reading is completely phonetic to the exclusion of sight reading. This is binary thinking. Nobody teaches it that way. The goal is not and never was to read phonetically ever after. In fact, from very early on, the concept of "sight words" is introduced. The phonetic method is a bridge and a tool to internalize words. The goal is to recognize words effortlessly, without thought. So what is the difference between the old phonetic methods, the later sight methods, and the modern (debunked) contextual methods? It's all about where you start. The phonetic method uses phonics as its foundational concept. You begin with the sounds, and you learn the exceptions as you go. But even the exceptions are aided by phonetics. Most "sight" words still have enough of a phonetic component to clue the reader into what's going on. Sight reading, on the other hand, assumes the reader will pick up enough phonics as they go along, contextually. But with this method, everything must be learned by rote. The "bridge" of having phonetic tools at your disposal is not taught. Now some children are simply sight readers, and do poorly with phonics. Not all minds are alike. But even sight readers benefit from having a foundation in phonics.

butteredpopcorn 7y ago
Thanks for your thoughts and observations. I may be one of these “simply sight readers”. I supposedly taught myself to read at an alarmingly, insufferably young age. I have no memory of learning to read whatsoever, only the before and the after. We had a complete set of McGuffey readers lying around (thanks for mentioning these, brought back memories!) but by the time I was looking at them I could already sight read and thought the phonics stuff seemed somewhere between too obvious, too detailed, and too boring. The first word my parents noticed me identify was a pretty bizarre proper noun and not phonics-friendly at all. My best guess is that since everyone in my house could read, and clearly enjoyed it, and did it all the time, I had plenty of readers to study in action and lots of motivation to watch them. Kind of like when you see a little crawling toddler staring at an older kid who’s running, totally stunned with jealousy... calculating, calculating... From before I could read, I remember asking “what does that say?” a lot. Making them read me sentences on demand. I’m a very fortunate person. I’d be interested to know how network effects helped your six children and many siblings, on top of the dedicated instruction. Seeing you reading casually, knowing you enjoyed it, seeing their peers do it.

Marsymars 7y ago

Reading is both one of the great pleasures in my life, and an invaluable tool for acquiring new knowledge. It horrifies me to think that millions could be denied those pleasures and tools because of easily-remedied educational failures.

LocalH 7y ago
Nobody gives a shit about things like that. They're too busy worried about left vs right politics, or religion vs secular belief, or any host of other relatively unimportant issues, to even notice this happens. I'd imagine this is worse in the US as well, given the large cultural adversity to intelligence in the first place.
- wahern 7y ago
  A couple decades ago phonics was a huge issue in the culture wars. For people of a certain age and political bent phonics represents a dumbing-down of early education; a concession to lower-class kids and especially of minorities. As I recall (as an adolescent observer) the debate overlapped with the controversy regarding ebonics, with which phonics might be somewhat conflated in people's minds. If there's an analog today it's Common Core, or something related to Common Core. It doesn't lend itself as well to us vs them politics, though, as it's mostly a constellation of issues about which everybody has something negative to say. And I think that's true more generally--K-12 education is a quintessential political talking point. Everybody has strong opinions, they're just all largely the same uninformed opinions. It takes effort to keep people split along party lines, so you don't see the same persistent talking points across the years. Take vouchers--briefly a strongly divisive issue along party lines, but now a very muddy topic. People still have strong opinions, there's just no simple narrative for the media to play on.
  - LocalH 7y ago
    To me it speaks to this desire people have to have input in a field that they don't know or understand. Somehow, when it comes to education, people feel like they have a right to decide how their kids are taught, even though they know nothing about efficient and non-damaging teaching methods. They don't like change as well, many of them probably say "that's how I learned to read, so it's good enough for everyone". I used to be naive and think that everything should go to popular vote. Now I realize how infeasible and futile that would be. It would end up being an unmitigated disaster as people fight over everything instead of just a few hot-button issues.

knolax 7y ago

The flawed idea in question are the following strategies: > memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don't know Personally I think the phonics vs. sight words debate in English pedagogy misses the point entirely. The problem is that English divides words sentences into "words" and not morphemes. This way words like 'disambiguation' or 'boustrophedon' appear as a hard to parse blob regardless of which strategy you use. In my experience, schools have already started teaching "word roots" and the strategies needed to break words down into those roots. This to me seems like the key strategy.

pdonis 7y ago
Word roots are the key strategy for the next step after phonics: figuring out the meaning of what you're reading. But in order to do that, you first have to have the skill of matching what's written on the page with the speech system in your brain, and that's what phonics is for. You learn to speak by making sounds; phonics matches what's written on the page with the sounds you learned to speak. Just as children can speak words whose meanings they don't yet understand, they can read words whose meanings they don't yet understand. From the article, it seems like the original author of the MSV system got this backwards: he thought the understanding had to come first. It doesn't. The understanding builds on the phonetic foundation in reading just as it does in speaking.
- knolax 7y ago
  I'm not sure sounds are needed to link to the language system in the brain. I remember as a child that there were certain words that I never bothered assigning sounds to until long after I internalized them. Even if sound is needed, I don't understand why the author couldn't just assign the sound of the letters in a word being read out in order for words she didn't know. I'm sure we all do that for certai n bash commands. I do admit though that I don't know much about developmental psychology so it's just my two cents.
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > I'm not sure sounds are needed to link to the language system in the brain. In the sense that, for example, deaf people can still learn speech, just not with sounds, this is of course true. But I'm talking about the case of a child with normal hearing and speech, where meanings are linked to spoken and heard sounds when they learn to speak. > there were certain words that I never bothered assigning sounds to until long after I internalized them Words that you read, or words that you spoke? I'm going to assume the former since speaking a word is assigning a sound to it. If you don't assign sounds to words that you read, how would you speak them? If somebody asked you to repeat what you just read, what would you say? > Even if sound is needed, I don't understand why the author couldn't just assign the sound of the letters in a word being read out in order for words she didn't know. That's what phonics is: you learn to sound out words you don't know letter by letter. Gradually you build up skill to the point where you can effortlessly translate written words to sounds, or more precisely to the structures in your brain that you previously linked to spoken or heard sounds when you learned to speak.

phkahler 7y ago

I like to recommend a kids video called "The Letter Factory". Start around. Age 3. Then move on to "The Word Factory". The 3rd in the series is not nearly as good in my opinion, but those two gave my kid a great start on reading. And they're fun.

eljefe900 7y ago

This article buries the lead. TLDR: Phonics works, Current strategies don’t. What actually works is the shortest part of the article. It’s infatuation with what doesn’t work puts what does work more than halfway into the article. I would have appreciated the article to be structured as “Phonics works, MSV Doesn’t and here’s why they’re different”

MaximumYComb 7y ago
I wasn't aware of the methods used in the US. Here in Australia, we have phonics at my daughters' school and she's coming along really well. My 6.5-year-old daughter is able to read basically anything I put in front of her by sounding through words.
- DanBC 7y ago
  But make sure she has an age appropriate dictionary so that she can learn what the words mean, as well as being able to sound them out. I love phonics. It's powerful. But sometimes children are so confident at sounding out words that we miss the fact they don't always understand those words.
- eljefe900 7y ago
  My US centric bias is showing. Thanks for the reminder! I suppose that a phonics lesson in Oz probably sounds a bit different than in the US. And they’re both effective. That’s fun to think about.

fiblye 7y ago

That chart for reading proficiency among 12th graders is rather... shocking. Is there similar data for other countries available? It'd be interesting to know if this is an issue unique to America (among developed nations), shared among English-speaking countries, or if it's a problem equally distributed across the world.

csa 7y ago
Ehhh... it uses some terms of art that might be slightly misleading to those not familiar with the field. The chart specifically lists “proficient” and “advanced” at 12th grade. What do those words mean? https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/reading/achieveall.asp#2009_grade12 https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/reading/achieveall.asp... For “proficient”, the “inferences” and “interpretative statements” components will rule out most readers. For reference, these are some of the skills that higher level SAT and GRE reading questions attempt to evaluate. The way one could (somewhat crudely) relabel that data is “what percentage of 12 graders could plausibly read college-level texts”. Interestingly, the college attendance numbers match these percentages fairly closely.

williamDafoe 7y ago

My brother in law was taught to sight-read (recognize words on sight and not to analyze phonemes) and he always struggled and regretted it!!! Phonics is the #1 advantage of ALL western languages. The idea that teachers would not leverage the #1 advantage of the entire language just shows how foolish our teacher education system can be! Don't let teachers screw up your kids with educational FADs! We didn't! We taught our kids at 3.5 - 4.5 to read using phonics before kindergarten! We used: http://www.headsprout.com http://www.headsprout.com . Our kids loved it! The risk of these FADs damaging your child's entire education would make this program cheap even if they charged $1000 (it's $200 - a small 10% increase over the last 14 years!)

googlesux 7y ago
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nyCA 7y ago
How about giving kids books instead of a stupid app? Talking about damaging kids...
pbhjpbhj 7y ago
My oldest was in the vanguard of phonics in our local schools in the UK. His spelling is terrible because he spells things phonetically, which simply doesn't work in English.
- rbobby 7y ago
  > His spelling is terrible There's a fix for that... MS Word and browsers :) Word's little red underline dramatically improved my spelling. Words that I would habitually misspell would annoy me with that little red underline. I'd concentrate on the word and the correct spelling and eventually I stopped misspelling it. My favorite example... their... almost always I'd write "thier" (the few times I'd write "their" I'd doubt myself and switch it to "thier"). Nowadays I almost never misspell it (it also helps me sometimes to think "the IR"). Without Word's instant spell checking I'd still be a bad speller who'd spend too long running the spellchecker.

viburnum 7y ago

My kid’s school did mostly phonics with a fair amount of sight reading for common words. What a weird thing to be an absolutist about.

wallace_f 7y ago

>a third of fourth graders can't read at a basic level Academia/education in America needs to move past this "can't fail" philosophy. Bad schools need to fail. Good schools need to grow.

jumelles 7y ago
What does "fail" mean? What would happen to the children who attend a school that has "failed"?
- wallace_f 7y ago
  Same thing that happens with everything else. They patronize a different service provider.
  - xnyan 7y ago
    In America that idea is absolutely pointless. For almost all children, local property taxes are the source source of education funding. A local school board administers this money and has a huge amount of discretion in spending it with practically no oversight. They were responsible for hiring the previous school administration and will also hire the next, If you have any idea of how to get out of this situation I'd be thrilled to hear it.
    - wallace_f 7y ago
      What is unique about education that it must be funded in such a particular "situation" in the first place, versus all other service industries?
  - DecoPerson 7y ago
    In support of this comment: In Australia, I saw a number of students transferred into the public school I attended because of poor results at other schools. They would be taken out of class when we were doing something beyond their level, so they could spend 1-on-1 time with a tutor who was trained in catching students up to their expected level. Some students, when transferred from another school, would repeat a year if necessary. I've heard of multiple occurrences where an Australian public or private school was been investigated for poor results, and during these times parents were encouraged to transfer their children to other schools as the reduced demand would give the school staff room to improve. (Tangent: I repeated year 4 (9-10yo) because my Mum thought I was "too small" and would be bullied. This led to me being bored by the materials. I thank the spare time this awarded me to why I discovered my Dad's computer, Macromedia Flash, and ActionScript 2.0. Starting programming at such a young age, especially in a C-style language, gave me a massive advantage in my programming career and perhaps life in general.)

SamReidHughes 7y ago

Having been taught with phonics, or at least having seen my classmates taught this way, I'd never imagined the world could be this fucked up. If you're going to teach this way, why not throw out the language and write with Chinese characters? The Japanese have a whole set of phonic letters that they use to teach kids. If a kid can't sound out supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, fire his teachers. "Sound out." Now there's a word I haven't heard in a long time.

mxcrossb 7y ago
Even if phonics are not used when reading, they still have an advantage for writing. Rarely in my adult life have I found myself sounding out a word in a book unless it is deliberately ridiculous (as your example). But I definitely sound out words when trying to spell a word.
- dmoy 7y ago
  I still occasionally sound out words (incorrectly) when I stumble on a word that I finally realize I've gotten wrong in my head. Like I'll know the word, know what it means, but have imagined the wrong pronunciation in my head, only to have it suddenly dawn on me that "Hey, that synonym for this word you know that sounds a bit different, what if it's aactually the same word". Then I'll go look it up in a dictionary, realize I still don't know pronunciation guides, type it into Google or whatever to get audio, and confirm, yup, I'm a dumbass I've been thinking those are two different words for decades. This happens to me about once every other month. Millions of words, I don't expect it'll ever stop happening. Bonus points when the word is like only 6-7 characters long, feel extra dumb those months :P
  - benj111 7y ago
    Ha Ha yes. I find this with a lot of niche things I only ever read about, open source names seem to be the worst. Gnome is allegedly pronounced with a hard G. I've never heard that said in the wild. And I have no idea how anyone else pronounces XFCE.

voldacar 7y ago

>For example, a child who says "horse" when the word was "house" is probably relying too much on visual, or graphic, cues. A teacher in this case would encourage the child to pay more attention to what word would make sense in the sentence. WTF? Wouldn't you just tell the child to slow down, look at the letters that make up the word, and speak the word out loud? This makes zero sense whatsoever

jdm2212 7y ago
Yup! And that sane approach (look at the letters that make up the word, and speak the word out loud) is phonics.
- voldacar 7y ago
  It's staggering to me that something so simple and obvious even needs to have a specific name like "phonics". That's just called reading lol. It's so bizarre how these people get put in positions of power over our educational system
  - tylorr 7y ago
    I believe there are some languages that are not phonetic, you cannot read them by sound out the parts of the word.
    - csa 7y ago
      Can you name one that does not have a phonetic system as well? Note that Japanese has kana, and Chinese has pinyin and bopomofo/zhuyin. Other than that... ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics? Please let me know if you are aware of more.
      - voldacar 7y ago
        I'm not the parent, but the ancient sumerian cuneiform script comes to mind. Egyptian hieroglyphics did have a set of phonetic glyphs as well as the more complex logographic ones

ianbicking 7y ago

I sometimes wonder if we need a better phonics. Doing it by letters feels crude, it requires a big gestalt moment when the kid puts the sounds together, and overemphasizes our very malleable vowels. Something based more on syllables would seem better to me. Consider a simple work like “back”: kids sound out buh-ah-kuh which is a completely crazy version of the real word. You can’t say a B without a vowel, but instead of using the actual vowel (a) consonants usually get an “uh” added to them. Learning syllables means learning maybe 5-10 times as many sounds, but then it’s also easy to add “ing” and “sh” and all the many combinations of letters that can’t be individually decoded. The second problem is the kid has to pick out those letter combinations even though words are just a stream of letters. I wonder if it would be supportive to write the words in multiple colors to show the internal structure? I feel like this must all exist already in some curriculum...?

teilo 7y ago
This is already being done. In fact, that's central to almost any phonics course. Phonics isn't about letters in isolation. It's about letters in context. You start with the basic sounds, and quickly move onto letter pairings / groupings and how they effect the sound. To use your example, the -ack suffix is shown with a whole bunch of words on a single card to make the idea plain: back, sack, pack, black, tack, etc. So what you suggest is quite common in home and private school curriculums.
SPascareli13 7y ago
Some languages are more based on syllables than English, like Portuguese for example. When I was first learning English, being a portuguese speaker, I thought it would be easy to learn english, I just had to know the english syllables and translate words syllable by syllable. To my dismay, not only that doesn't work, english barely has a concept of syllables that makes any sense. So I wonder if languages that are have more phonetic writing like Korean for example, have better readers than other languages.
rossriley 7y ago
Modern phonics teaching introduces digraphs and trigraphs at an early stage of the process, so children learn to recognise these. My partner is a specialist phonics teacher and places a dot underneath each digraph, trigraph or individual letter sound so that they can quickly recognise the components. So boil will have a dot under b, one under o-i and one under the l. They can then spot that oi is a digraph; in the early stages they do this by saying out loud, an o and a i make 'oy'

wisty 7y ago

A lot of education experts (teachers, and worse, education academics and bureaucrats) are intelligent, white, upper-middle class people who are interested in academic stuff. They remember how BORING it was to be forced to memorise times tables and phonics in primary school like the low socio-economic kids. Their parents had taught them to read and do basic arithmetic long before the rest of the class, and they might have benefited a bit of acceleration, so surely making the whole class skip the boring stuff would benefit everyone?

thaumasiotes 7y ago
I feel like a step got skipped here. 1. Covering the times tables in school is pointless when you already know the times tables because you learned them at home. 2. Therefore, people shouldn't learn the times tables? Saying something shouldn't be taught is a completely different idea from saying that schools shouldn't teach it because incoming students are expected to have learned it already.
- wisty 7y ago
  There's a Romantic (Rousseau was a major perpetrator) view of education that seems to be based mostly on just whistful thinking and novels. But I think there is a grain of truth to it. Emile, or On Education (by Rousseau) proposes an idealistic goal in which a boy is educated by a tutor (a class size of) without being 'denatured' (losing the innocence and good moral quantities that the romantics think small children naturally possess). I'm not sure how realistic this is - Rousseau had five children but he dumped them all in orphanages as soon as they were born, but I think it rings partly true as something that works if you have sufficient inputs. If you have one really good tutor / parent you can raise a child to really understand things without cold but efficient methods like drills. Imagine you want to teach times tables without using times tables. You can keep track of what the child knows, and work out fun activities that lets them figure these out themselves, and guide them when they have a misunderstanding. But it's going to be labor intensive (for both the child and the tutor) and can't scale. Maybe computer teaching systems will turn drill work into a more fun system for teaching these fundamentals, since it can personalise at scale, but I suspect the opponents of drill will the complain about how soulless machines are pumping lifeless low-level skills into the heads of children who should instead be learning more high-level things in a more humane way. After all they didn't need a computer to teach them how to read, they just picked it up after their parents read with them every night for half a decade.

dqpb 7y ago

Oakland California. Wow. The bay area can't even teach their kids how to read.

milesskorpen 7y ago

I think this article is missing some basics. I know, for example, that Lucy Calkins’ program has a phonics program in _addition_ to the parts referenced in this article.

teilo 7y ago
The article specifically addresses the problems with mixing cueing and phonics when teaching reading.

ajuc 7y ago

It's very funny looking at this discussion from a mostly-phonetic writing system POV. In Polish the system is regular (even the exceptions) and nobody considers trying to teach kids not to exploit that. You just remember how each letter sounds and then the dozen of so special combinations (which are still mostly regular). And you can read. Yes you learn to read slow at first, and then you develop fast reading by yourself, it's natural and comes with reading a lot. I don't know anybody reading sound-by-sound past the age of 10, and usually kids learn to read whole words after they read their first long book (traditionally it's "Kids from Bullerbyn" here). I wonder how much longer it takes to teach kids reading such complicated writing system like English. Here it takes about 1 year, usually when they are in the first class of school.

jnwatson 7y ago
That we have spelling tests and spelling contests through secondary school is indicative that it takes roughly forever.
- ajuc 7y ago
  That's only about writing, not reading. And it's exactly because our system is only simple one-way (letters->sounds), but not the other way (1 sound can be represented with many letter combinations so you have to learn rules and exceptions to write correctly). You never ask kids "read this word" or "how is this word pronounced" because that's always obvious. I would prefer if we fixed our system the other way as well, it wouldn't take much, we can start by removing rz, ch and ó and replacing them as needed with ż/sz, h, and u. Suddenly we have like 1 year at school free to teach other actually useful stuff :) It's not like it's impossible - we already had orthography reform in early 20th century and another minor one in 90s.
  - jfk13 7y ago
    > You never ask kids "read this word" or "how is this word pronounced" because that's always obvious. Except when it isn't. Colonel? Yacht? Victuals? Boatswain? Of course, we shouldn't forget Mark Twain's proposal: https://www.plainlanguage.gov/resources/humor/spelling-in-the-english-language/ https://www.plainlanguage.gov/resources/humor/spelling-in-th...

calf 7y ago

I'm a little confused, was Shakespeare taught phonics?

juped 7y ago
In Shakespeare's day, words didn't even have consistent spellings. Of course he wrote and read phonetically.
- calf 7y ago
  But English is phonetic (but is it, compared to German or Japanese?) which is conflation with phonics. The article did not clearly explain what cognitive science has to do with phonics, which AFAIT is a heuristic system for Western languages. So when I studied Chinese as a child, how did I learn to write Chinese, nonphonetically, without confusing horses and ponies? A heuristic is an optimization but not fundamental but the article clearly asserts that phonics is fundamental to language in that if you don't use phonics you get illiterate students... I think there's some conceptual conflation or some middle case being ignored by the author: A) Is [formal instruction in] phonics necessary? v.s. B) Is 3-Cue harmful? These are not proper opposites. Here's a provocative claim made in a more sciencey article I just found: "The linguist David Crystal (2003) estimates that the phonics can explain only about 50 percent of English spellings." [https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/03/27/case-why-both-sides-reading-wars-debate-are-wrong-proposed-solution/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/03/27/case-why...] And further down: "As the linguists Venezky (1967) and Carol Chomsky (1970) explained, English prioritizes the consistent spelling of morphemes over the consistent spellings of phonemes."
  - knolax 7y ago
    English's primary strength over other European languages is its use of logography. It's sad to see how most English speakers see that as "BuT iT IsN't PHoNeTicALlY rEgUlaR!". This is despite the fact that phonetic shifts across time and space mean that no writing systen will ever be completely phonetically regular. Phonics can be useful but they can't be fundamental because the impossibility of phonetic regularity means that phonics will always be somewhat misleading.

yoz-y 7y ago

I was taught with phonics (not English) and one of the reasons was that reading is taught at the same moment as writing. So you learn to write first letters at the same time as you learn to read them. Iirc the first two were M and A

SubiculumCode 7y ago

So what is a good phonics system for my child? Advice?

DanBC 7y ago
In England you can try Jolly Phonics, or books by Ruth Miskin. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jolly-Phonics-Activity-Books-1-7/dp/1844141608/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jolly-Phonics-Activity-Books-1-7/dp... Ruth Miskin (Amazon haven't arranged this page well) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ruth-Miskin/e/B0034N7454 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ruth-Miskin/e/B0034N7454
- GordonS 7y ago
  I used Jolly Phonics with my 2 kids (in Scotland) - they both enjoyed it, and it allowed them to learn all the phonics surprisingly quickly. I think the major feature of Jolly Phonics is that each phonic is accompanied by an action, which not only makes it fun, but also helps distinguish between similar phonics. For example, for 'd' you make a drumming motion; for 't', you move your head from side-to-side as if watching a tennis volley. Can't recommend it enough!

wvenable 7y ago

I haven't noticed this so much with reading, but it seems like the same misguided strategy is also being used for math. Instead of teaching the fundamentals (like algorithms for long division) and instead they teach all the mental tricks for doing quick math. This should be especially concerning for software developers -- it seems they no longer teach (at an early age) the very things that made me like math and eventually computers.

patsplat 7y ago

This is a disturbing article to read after watching my son struggling to learn to read.

heyiforgotmypwd 7y ago

In the early 80's, my parents pulled me out of California's public schools when the state/county ditched phonics for some unproven nonsense, to a private school that was founded on proven teaching methods (name of the school was Challenger). When I reentered a different public school district in grade 3, I was ahead of other students by around 2 grade-levels. In retrospect, the private school was far superior to the public school system, even in an upper-middle class area because the public schools experiment/ed arbitrarily with curriculum in unproven ways on a large scale and didn't seem to be held accountable at a large-scale for playing with children's futures. Instead, individual teachers are micromanaged with outcomes of BS standardized tests. And also, US public schools were further ruined by NCLBA of 2001, and now the head of Navient is in charge of the DOEd. sigh Bottom line: Find a Waldorf forest school that instills curiosity, excellence and basic subjects using proven methods, because US schools are rearranging the deckchairs while the band is playing... glurg, glurg, glurg.

ptx 7y ago

> For Goodman, accurate word recognition was not necessarily the goal of reading. The goal was to comprehend text. If the sentences were making sense, the reader must be getting the words right, or right enough. That's like saying "if the code compiles, it must be correct enough". Seems like a terrible idea.

mkagenius 7y ago

Nobody teaches to picture the story though. Mostly what we read are some actions, almost always. Actions need to mentally pictured to get involved and have a superior understanding. Without lack of this skill, we are distracted by our vision. Half the time my brain is thinking of other things while I am reading something. There is too much distraction in your while you are reading something. Even your own eyes will give you unnecessary visuals like "wow look at the font and the color and how the corners of the phone is rounded, the url of chrome changed to a new round url bar" "https is just a symbol of lock in black color"

learnstats2 7y ago

I'd say the pathway to fluent reading is: 1. no concept of reading, context is not helpful 2. start to read, use context to cover any weaknesses and gaps 3. become fluent reader, no longer need context to cover weaknesses and gaps. As an experienced educator, I would say there is no process of learning (anything) that doesn't follow this path, whether using context is formally taught or not. It's an important part of teaching to understand where weaknesses are being papered over and support fixing that. It may be that one teaching method or another makes certain weaknesses easier to identify or fix, but in the end, enough dedicated practice is going to sort out these weaknesses either way. The article presents this as though context is bad - but you need context to bridge from the start to the end of the process. The article repeatedly says "poor reader" when it is really talking about a stage of learning to read (the anecdotes describe people stuck on this stage). In my opinion: This is a really dangerous way of representing the problem of educating people, which denies agency to learners.

em-bee 7y ago
does the teaching method provide a way to get beyond that stage? while the anecdotes are about people stuck in this stage, the article strongly implies that the teaching method stops at that stage and does not help readers to get beyond it. in other words, it suggests that according to this teaching method this stage defines a good reader.
praestigiare 7y ago
This article is discussing the transition from #1 to #2 in your pathway. It cites multiple studies showing that the method being criticized is not effective.
scotty79 7y ago
> 1. no concept of reading, context is not helpful > 2. start to read, use context to cover any weaknesses and gaps > 3. become fluent reader, no longer need context to cover weaknesses and gaps. That's completely not how you learn to read. Step 2. is start to learn what sounds to make when you are seeing given combination of letters. And then learn gradually how to make the sounds faster and for longer sequences of letters. Until you reach step 3 where you can blurt a word or even few at a time as one or few sounds at good pace. At no point the context comes into play. It usually is even harmful because it makes you make stuff up instead of reading. Often wrong, occasionally correct which seems even more harmful. Context is important only after you read completely fluently and begin to read new domain of knowledg with completely unknow vocabulary. Then you can get some words meaning from context. Although you should always check if you guessed correctly. If you would like to know more about how most people in the world learn to read please find out how kids learn to read in other languages than english. English is a bit quirky but in no way unique. What's unique is english approach to reading teaching. I don't think anywhere else kids are encouraged to make stuff up as they go.

scotty79 7y ago

Such a long article on reading and teaching and no mention of syllables. Is this completley unrecognized concept in eanglish reading teaching? Teaching kids to read in polish goes like this: letters -> syllables -> words -> sentences (with an overlap of the steps). Known words and sentences are used throughout the process to illustrate the things you are learning at the moment and sort of tease what you will be able to do when you master current step. I imagine in language where same letters can have so many different sounds the concept of syllables should be even more useful. Teaching kids to read sentences before they can recognize what sound which letter bunches mean seems like telling kid to swim before he learns to float or tread water.

mabbo 7y ago
The danger here is that many of the patterns that go from letters -> syllables are completely messed up in English. (Come to think of it, the entire darned language can be like that). I remember in grade 3 having a teacher give a lesson on syllables. We would clap along with each syllable in the word. She asked me to do this for "Fire". I clapped twice, as there is clearly an audible Fy-er" two syllables in Canadian English. She told me I was wrong, clapped once, and said "Fire" quickly. She "knew" that a word with "consonant - vowel - consonant - vowel" pattern makes a single syllable. Never mind that my ears, and the rest of the students' ears, can hear that she's wrong. The end result was her confusing the class about what syllables are. I remember the lesson well, because what I really learned was that teachers mean well but aren't always right.
- scotty79 7y ago
  I don't mean syllables as in precise definition (they are kind of fuzzy as your expeirience shows) or especially not counting them or learning which you should put the accent on. I'm talking about the fact that if you know how fi-(i)re sounds, you can guess how hi-(i)re sounds or even ty-(y)re or de-si-(i)re.
  - dqv 7y ago
    That's more or less what phonics is. It's discussed in the article. There's a combination of learning how sounds map to letters/letter combinations and then learning how they are used in real words (with spelling tests). The teacher shows the letter combinations first and the students sound them out. Then the reverse happens: the teacher sounds out the letters and the students have to write down every letter combination that corresponds with that sound. Then there is a spelling test that uses the sounds with a lot of edge cases where patterns/guessing won't work. They would also have students read aloud to make sure they were moving along smoothly.

pts_ 7y ago

The Indian private school educational system does teach phonics which might be why lots of Indian origin kids ace the spelling bee in the US.

warabe 7y ago

Thank you for sharing this. It was such a good read.

lowbloodsugar 7y ago

I asked my teenager about this, and they described this method as how they read. Any advice on teaching her how to read properly, now that they are a teenager?

whenanother 7y ago

so obviously a scam to destroy public schools and handicap the working class children. if you want to fix this just force the wealthy kids to attend public schools. the reason why the wealthy actively are destroying public institutions is because they are not using it.