17 ms·

How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers (2019)

258 points by ColinWright 6y ago

analog31 6y ago
I learned to read at home, as did my parents, and my kids. My mom used what i think is called "phonics," where we learned the letters, then learned to sound out words. Written English isn't perfect, but it has a phonetic alphabet, suggesting a clue as to how reading works in a language with a phonetic alphabet. Everybody I know who has taught their own kids uses phonics. Most don't use a manual or any special teaching materials other than starting with really easy words. Now there's another factor as well: We learned to read without the stress and pressure of learning it in a classroom. We had time to break it up into tiny pieces throughout the day. I see parents out with their kids. They'll point to a sign, and say: "What's that word?" Also, we were given time to read on our own rather than moving on to the next subject, because there were no other subjects at home.
- cardamomo 6y ago
  A good teacher in a school will also break up phonics instruction and weave it in throughout the day. The challenge of giving individual instruction to 20-35 students is monumental, though. Source: I'm a kindergarten and first grade teacher.
  - opwieurposiu 6y ago
    You teach 30+ first graders solo? Each kid would get 2 minutes an hour. A close to impossible teaching task. Is that a normal teacher student ratio in your district? Is that normal for public school?
    - tasogare 6y ago
      This is the norm almost everywhere worldwide.
    - pfranz 6y ago
      Looking around in the US[1], it looks like legally the cap can be from 1:15 - 1:25 (K-3). It looks like 1/3 of states don't have any legal cap. Funny enough, this chart[2] correlating reading performance and class size stops at 1:21 for 4th and 8th grade. [1] http://ecs.force.com/mbdata/MBQuest2RTanw?rep=KK3Q1807 http://ecs.force.com/mbdata/MBQuest2RTanw?rep=KK3Q1807 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student%E2%80%93teacher_ratio#/media/File:US_correlation_between_class_size_and_reading_performance.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student%E2%80%93teacher_ratio#...
    - analog31 6y ago
      Indeed, my kindergarten class was 36 kids.
- axaxs 6y ago
  My daughter when learning to read used to just memorize what words looked like, which really frustrated me. So 'apply' is 'apple' because it looks like the memory word. Anyhow, relevant part of my story, I taught her 100% with phonics post that point. In the above scenario, I might say 'wait there's a y there where did that go? sound it out slowly'. In no time she became a near perfect reader. I highly recommend the approach to anyone.
  - bigiain 6y ago
    I occasionally get to see a friend's ~7year old son practicing reading by reading out load. He obviously uses semantic cue to "assume" what a word is based on previous words, and occasionally gets a few words further then realises what he just said doesn't make sense, and he goes back and sounds out the incorrect work phonetically. In this plague and WFH era, I've watched as the GoogleMeet live transcription does exalted the same sort of thing - it'll make a wrong word choice, then a few words later go back and correct itself based on grammar/syntax/context from subsequent words. I sometimes wonder if that's an algorithm told to do something like "pick the highest priority word possibility that makes grammatical sense with all the previous words, if subsequent highest probability words then make the previous sentence fragment non grammatically correct, go back to previous words and try the next highest probability words to maximise grammatical correctness if the entire sentence so far" - or if it's just blackbox machine learned "magic" that happens to make similar mistakes and corrections as a sample 7 year old? (Knowing Google, it's almost as likely that their algorithm is "keep building n-grams from each of the top n best-guesses of the previous y transcribed words, then count the number of times this each possible n-gram appears across the entire Google corpus of web pages, usenet, email, and google books, and pick the one with the highest historical use count"...)
    - 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
      > live transcription does exalted the same sort of thing - it'll make a wrong word choice, then a few words later go back and correct itself based on grammar/syntax/context from subsequent words. If only HN text input boxes were smart enough to do the same!
- jimmaswell 6y ago
  Was it "Hooked on Phonics"? That's what I had and my reading was apparently very above average.
  - analog31 6y ago
    It was in the late 1960s. I grew up near Detroit. We had visited the Henry Ford Museum where they had reprints of the classic McGuffy's Reader, mentioned in the article. We just went through that book. As others have mentioned, at some point it "clicked" and I needed no further instruction. Like programming. ;-) My mom also made a big deal of going to the library every week, like it was some kind of amazing sanctuary, which of course it was. Now an odd thing I remember is that my office mate in grad school listened to the Rush Limbaugh Program, and the two advertisers I remember were Snapple and Hooked on Phonics. Funny what things we remember.
- bigiain 6y ago
  Heh. The first "product" I was ever technical lead on was a phonics based reading education "interactive CDROM" for children, a teaching course created by an educational psychologist as a reaction against the then-fashionable "holistic" method of teaching kids to read: https://www.phonicsalive.com.au https://www.phonicsalive.com.au We launched that in late 1995 scrambling to get it into shops for the xmas market and before schools closed for the year. We were significantly screwed over by changes in the multi track audio capabilities between Win3.3 and Windows95. I'm inordinately proud that (at least some of them) are still for sale, and I break out into a huge smile every time I see a shelf full of them at a bricks and mortar retailer. Last time I checked (maybe 5 years back now) my name (and those of my team) were still printed around the edge of the CDROM. (I'm also astounded it still works at all, and impressed by Microsoft's dedication to backwards compatibility. That was largely developed in MacOS9 and Windows 3.3 using Macromind (later Macromedia) Director. It stopped working on Mac back when Apple gave up on supporting running legacy MacOS9 apps and the owner/client didn't want to pay to upgrade for Mac. Now it's sold as "Windows only", but I'd bet pretty good money if you bought a copy and resurrected a MacOS9 machine, it'd still run just fine...)
  - spacephysics 6y ago
    If I’m not mistaken, I recall using your software to learn to read (rather my parents bought it for me). Many thanks! Now instead of reading just books I read code.
    - bigiain 6y ago
      This also made me break out into a huge smile! Thank _you!_
- elihu 6y ago
  I don't remember exactly how I learned to read, but it seems very strange to me that anyone would try to teach someone to read English without teaching them the sounds that the letters make.
  - sergers 6y ago
    I am sure they have changed curriculum overs years, but I was born in 86 west coast canada. I learned using phonics. We have been introducing our daughter to phonics for a few months now (16 months old). I am suprised to read in this article that it's not part of American curriculum... very strange indeed. Every toy, video, for english alphabet we have/seen has a phonics component
- underwater 6y ago
  My kids are both strong readers, but took different paths. The first taught herself to read before she started school. On day one the teacher tested her and she could read the first 200 words they were to be taught. She had had support and encouragement from us, and we read to her every night, but we never did any structured lessons with her The second couldn't read when she started school, and was taught using phonics. It took a couple of months for it to click, but then she was getting letter sounds, understanding digraphs, joining sounds together, and then reading words. When she got to that point she just took off. I feel like our first would have succeeded in the American system just fine. But the second really benefitted from laying that groundwork that let her understand the fundamentals. If she'd learned using the three cues system I feel like her self-directed progress would have been much slower.
- deleted 6y ago
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- Someone 6y ago
  “Written English isn't perfect, but it has a phonetic alphabet“ What do you mean by “phonetic alphabet?” I thought the correlation between spelling and pronunciation is extremely weak in English. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos
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mcguire 6y ago
"The teachers drew her a Venn diagram of the three-cueing system. Adams thought this diagram made perfect sense. The research clearly shows that readers use all of these cues to understand what they're reading. "But Adams soon figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not just as the way readers construct meaning from text, but as the way readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary." Ultimately, this sounds like a difficulty in translating research into application. The cueing theory was incomplete but has taken over because it usually works. The newer theory is better, but has to fight its way in. Teachers are required to have continuous training. There seems to be a breakdown between research and teacher education that isn't addressed in the article.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > The cueing theory was incomplete but has taken over because it usually works. Except it doesn't. > The newer theory is better, but has to fight its way in. The “newer” theory is one of the two older theories mentioned in the article, both of which work better in practice and well as having better support in terms of research on how people actually read that the three-cue approach. Three-cues seems to have taken off because it was easy to frame in terms of being a broad holistic approach at a time when that was fashionable for ideological/aesthetic reasons, and now it's gotten entrenched minds share and a bunch of commercial interests around it making it hard to dislodge organically. Kind of like MBTI only more prone to being abused where it actually matters. > Teachers are required to have continuous training. There seems to be a breakdown between research and teacher education that isn't addressed in the article. It's actually fairly directly addressed, as the vendors of both material for teaching reading and educational material and training on teaching reading are among those shoveling the debunked woo. And in many cases it's not a matter of what teachers choose, but what district administrators have chosen and purchased decades ago.
- GavinMcG 6y ago
  > Teachers are required to have continuous training. There seems to be a breakdown between research and teacher education that isn't addressed in the article. Absolutely. And actually, the breakdown starts with teaching education, where many classroom teachers are taught how to teach broadly, but not the sort of (more specialized) subject knowledge that lets you get inside a student's head to see where the errors are coming from. Elizabeth Green's book "Building A Better Teacher" was eye-opening to me.
cardamomo 6y ago
I'm a kindergarten and first grade teacher. I have taught children how to read. It's amazing! I try to follow current research, but it's clear to me through articles like this that there is so much we don't know about how children learn to read. EDIT (just adding on): It's clear to me from my experience that there is not one single way children learn to read. That much should be obvious to anyone who spends a lot of time with young children, but the field of education clings to the idea of "best practices." Second, a lot of our practices in the U.S. still stem from the National Reading Panel, which was convened nearly 20 (!) years ago as part of No Child Left Behind. Yet it's easy to find criticisms of the report the Panel issued. Just Google it. Here's a good one to start with: https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2003/04/30/33yatvin.h22.html https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2003/04/30/33yatvin.h22.h...
- istjohn 6y ago
  > It's clear to me from my experience that there is not one single way children learn to read. That much should be obvious to anyone who spends a lot of time with young children, but the field of education clings to the idea of "best practices." One of the key points the article makes is that a "balanced literacy" approach doesn't work. A footnote explains: > "If children are taught systematic phonics in one part of the reading program but are encouraged to use context to guess at words when reading passages, they may not apply their phonics skills consistently. Thus, the phonics component of the reading program may be undermined." — from The Use of Context Cues in Reading.[1] I'm not sure why you think there shouldn't be best practices in reading education. Certain methods will outperform others. Why shouldn't we identify and refine the methods that prove to work best? 1. https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading#footnote-content-44 https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
  - cardamomo 6y ago
    Thanks for calling out that footnote. To clarify, I'm a proponent of a strong phonics program. Within that, however, there are a myriad of ways to organize and structure the instruction. But I don't disagree with the article. I called out the term "best practices" because it's often used to refer to pedagogy that is no longer supported by the research. I suspect this is the case in other fields as well: the so-called best practices we espouse are more a function of the values of our workplace or work community than anything else.
selleck 6y ago
We homeschool and my wife has taught 7 of our 8 kids using: Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. Highly recommended for parents with kids at the age to start reading.
- cardamomo 6y ago
  With the rise in homeschooling due to the pandemic, I'm not surprised this book is currently out of stock on Amazon!
  - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
    At first I misread your sentence as "With the rise in the homeschooling pandemic, ..." :) I'm finding that as I get older, I make more mistakes like that when I'm tired.
    - cardamomo 6y ago
      You may be forgiven for your double-take: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/opinion/pandemic-pods-schools.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/opinion/pandemic-pods-sch...
      - mensetmanusman 6y ago
        Thanks for posting. Leave it to the NYT to fear monger about small groups of children. Hahaha
- novalis78 6y ago
  Yes, I taught all 4 of my children using that book and it’s amazing and works and should be the standard everywhere. It was actually recommended to us by our first daycare teacher who used to teach elementary school before retiring. She said that early in her career they were all using this book and never had a problem teaching any of the children how to read ... until the school system was flooded with new theories every year that promised to do it better only to end up worse with every decade she taught. So she went out and told every parent she could to get the this book and do it themselves. Worked like a charm.
portmanteaufu 6y ago
The flawed idea, buried deep within the article, is: > The theory is known as "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information — or "cues" — to identify words as they are reading. > .... > In the paper,5 Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words. Instead, he argued that as people read, they make predictions about the words on the page using these three cues: * graphic cues (what do the letters tell you about what the word might be?) * syntactic cues (what kind of word could it be, for example, a noun or a verb?) * semantic cues (what word would make sense here, based on the context?) > .... > Goodman's proposal became the theoretical basis for a new approach to teaching reading that would soon take hold in American schools.
- arkitaip 6y ago
  Thank you for the TLDR.
- xrd 6y ago
  Thank you for assuring me I wasn't the only one wondering throughout the article: "I must be a really poor reader to have missed the topic of the article!" I don't finish the article because when I got to that point it seemed problematic but not something that couldn't be overcome. Aren't all learners going to find strategies to learn something and then alter those over time with the right teachers and introspection? I didn't finish the article but does it explain (perhaps after a dozen or so foreshadowing paragraphs) why this method could not be overcome once learned?
  - _hofstadter 6y ago
    Finishing the article is highly recommended. It is very good the entire way through and ends with a doozie!
    - xrd 6y ago
      Thanks for saying that, I will!
briga 6y ago
I think the real problem here is systemic, rather than being linked to any one cause. Reading is an active process, it's something you have to want to do. Kids mimic the adults around them, so if a child lives in a household or neighborhood where no adults are ever seen reading for pleasure, how is are they supposed to know that reading is something worth doing? Another issue is aversion to hard work: unless you practice the difficult task of trying to understand symbols you don't recognize, you're never going to get better at reading. Those sorts of mental hurdles are unpleasant for most, certainly enough to throw many readers off track. On another note, who's to say there's any one best way to read? Surely there's more than one way you can get something out of a book. People's brains are wired differently, some might learn better one way than another.
- GavinMcG 6y ago
  I'm not sure how your comment addresses the article, which spent some time explaining research that does tell us what is more and less effective in teaching reading. > Surely there's more than one way you can get something out of a book. Maybe so, but probably not for first graders, which is what this article addresses.
  - briga 6y ago
    Why "probably not"?
    - GavinMcG 6y ago
      Because, as the article describes, the books they're reading are extremely formulaic, to the point where the whole book may be made up of identical sentences, except for the final word.
      - briga 6y ago
        Well sure, that's one reason they might not be learning well--all I'm saying is there is a larger context outside of the classroom that influences reading
thoughtsimple 6y ago
I’m 57. I have no recollection of learning to read. Somewhere between 5 and 8 it became second nature. How strange. I never really thought about it.
- _hofstadter 6y ago
  Not sure why you are being downvoted. Later in the article, the author speaks to an estimate that 40% of children will learn to read despite how they are taught.
- andai 6y ago
  Apparently, I learned by watching a TV show with my family where contestants guess the letters of a hidden word.
- bigiain 6y ago
  53 here, and I also don't remember "learning to read", but I do still remember wondering why so many of the other kids in my kindergarten class (4-5year olds here) couldn't read already. My parents were always "readers" and growing up our house was always full of bookshelves stacked to overflowing with books and magazines. I spent a lot of time as a pre teen and teenager going through my dad's unbroken collection of Scientific American magazine starting from the late 60s. I suspect Martin Gardner's column has had a direct influence on my career choices and why I hang out here... I remember many occasions when peers at university were first learning about things like Conway's Game Of Life, Penrose Tilings, and RSA public key crypto - and I'd be "Doesn't everybody know all this already? I think I read about this before I was in high school!"
  - bigiain 6y ago
    For nostalgia's sake, I just went and found Gardner's RSA article. It was from 1977 - I was 10 (by which stage I was almost certainly grabbing the magazine from Dad as soon as he'd finished reading it). Notable quote: "For example, to test a 130 digit odd number for primality requires at the most (that is when the number is actually prime) about 7 minutes on a PDP-10 computer." http://simson.net/ref/1977/Gardner_RSA.pdf http://simson.net/ref/1977/Gardner_RSA.pdf (Tonight I might see if I can still remember how to make a hexaflexagon...)
cheerlessbog 6y ago
English has a relatively idiosyncratic relationship between letters and sounds. Does phonics work even better in languages that have regularized spelling, so "sounding out" always works perfectly? I could imagine that a native speaker would find it easy to learn to read in such a language.
- gliese1337 6y ago
  Yes. Speakers of Russian, for example, find the concept of a "spelling bee" to be completely nonsensical--if you hear a word and can't spell it, you must just be completely illiterate, and vice-versa. I have heard this is the case for Spanish as well, but I don't have personal experience in that case.
  - pmoleri 6y ago
    In Spanish: word -> sound (is straightforward). sound -> word (not so straightforward). So, spelling does make sense, but it's not much of a thing like in English. We have some rules to aid the process, but at the end of the day, you need to have read a lot to know how truly write a word. That being said, I find kind of weird the cue process described in the article. I think that in Spanish we always learn by identifying letters with sounds as there's a 1 to 1 relationship in that direction. I.e. every written word has only one possible pronunciation.
    - MandieD 6y ago
      My mom was a middle school Spanish teacher, and her favorite trick was to promise her Spanish I classes that they’d be able to read (but not understand!) just about anything within the first week or two. And indeed, they could - eighth grade Spanish I students had to have had an A in English the previous year, so they were all decent English readers. I’ve found that German is mostly phonetic like that, but not quite as consistent as Spanish is.
  - ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago
    This is not correct. A large part of Russian language curriculum in schools consists of dictations[1], as Russian is not strictly phonic (mostly it's unstressed vowel shifts, such as 'о'>'а'). It's nowhere close to English though. Spanish spelling is a breeze, much simpler than Russian. Unrelated factoid: in my experience, average Russian has more chances to reproduce believable Spanish pronunciation than English. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictation_(exercise) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictation_(exercise)
catchmeifyoucan 6y ago
The text said: "My little dog likes to eat with me." But Rodney said: "My dog likes to lick his bone."
- mypalmike 6y ago
  Fake it til you're illiterate.
tmaly 6y ago
My wife taught my daughter with phonics when she was almost 4. The summer before kindergarten she was already reading chapter books for second graders. I agree that phonics is a good method. Reading to the child is also a great strategy.
Demonsult 6y ago
My child was learning to read this way while I was distracted by some serious medical issues. Eventually I noticed she was making up most of what she was supposed to be reading. When I confronted the teacher, she told me she wanted my child to feel confident about reading. It took years to undo this damage.
prawn 6y ago
My eldest taught himself to read relatively young and by 6-7 yo, he'd read the Harry Potter series through twice. He'd mispronounce words he'd learned (as happens from those who learn by reading) but could define and give context for anything I tested him with. When he started school, I think they were using a system called Jolly Phonics His sister entered school two years after him and they've since changed to Read Write Inc Phonics. She's learning along with the class and take-home books. Hard to truly judge, but the system seems effective. She has confidence and then success sounding out increasingly difficult words.
- bigiain 6y ago
  > He'd mispronounce words he'd learned (as happens from those who learn by reading) but could define and give context for anything I tested him with. I _still_ do something very like this in my 50s. Words that my subconscious brain decides "don't matter", usually irregular character or place names in fiction, just become some kind of signifier in my memory so I recognise what they mean in the context of the story - but when I discuss that book with someone else they'll speak out loud one of those words and I'll have to take a few seconds to "reverse-phonics" it into a sequence of letters then visualise that in my head to work out which "signifier" (that I'd never bothered creating an audible form for) there talking about...
  - tdeck 6y ago
    I have the same experience. Often I have some complete mispronunciation in my head because I never bothered to look carefully at the character name.
  - blt 6y ago
    I participated in MetaFilter for years before I went to any meetup. At my first meetup, I realized I had never thought about how to pronounce the nickname "MeFi" despite reading and typing it countless times.
  - karatinversion 6y ago
    I remember doing this with a play I read for a class back in high school. When I was taking the test on it, I realized to my horror that I didn't know the name of one of the main characters – it started with a distinctive letter, so that was all my brain had kept.
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throwanem 6y ago
Premature optimization is, indeed, the root of all evil. Or maybe that's theorists who don't bother to check with reality whether their brilliant ideas make sense before rushing to implementation. Or maybe those are two different ways of saying the same thing.
quercusa 6y ago
This part captures the importance of parents reading to their children from an early age: Other vocabulary words these first-graders had learned were posted on cards around the classroom. They included: wander, persevere, squint and scrumptious. The kids weren't expected to read those words yet. The idea is to build their oral vocabulary so that when they can read those words, they know what the words mean. The joy a child feels when they finally read one of those words that they've only heard is a huge boost and encouragement to continue.
rubyn00bie 6y ago
A good friend of mine had this bullshit done to him growing up, and can't spell for shit (which he had no trouble venting about through college) exactly because of the method in this article. His elementary school teachers literally told him to "think about how he would spell it" and then, and this is the mind-blowing part, were toooootally okay with whatever the fuck his child mind came up with. "Oh you spelled 'tree' just like the (literal) number: 100,000, that's great!!" I'm just shocked this shit is still going on or that like anyone even thinks that could possibly fucking work. We don't have apriori knowledge to somehow write and read glphys, representing fucking sounds, which are time and location dependent... so how or why would this approach possibly work? </rambling>
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
In my mind reading is the one subject where the child can’t afford to get it wrong. If you don’t do science education well, but the kids learn how to read well, they can always learn science by reading. Same with history, literature, and virtually every subject with possible exception of math. Reading is the key to unlock everything else. As such, we should be very conservative in changing what has been proven to work. The article mentions how new theories came out in the 60’s and displaced the phonics based system which had been proven to work, leading to literally millions of people with an intellectual handicap due to poor reading skills.
- pastage 6y ago
  There has been research that says the same thing, getting reading right early for the whole class is important.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
It is especially true in the west: ‘Children are continually exposed to educational ideas that are younger than they are.’ -G.K.C.
zaphar 6y ago
This is another way in which inequality is persisted. Private schools overwhelmingly tend to teach phonics while those who go to public school end up being taught the 3-cueing system. Getting the schools to change approach requires political action against powerful lobbies. While a private school needs good outcomes to justify it's prices so gravitate to systems that produce that outcome.
- ironmagma 6y ago
  Sometimes you hear these stories and just have to back up two steps and ask why we are obsessed with developing these monolithic curriculums. Can’t we just have teachers use their best judgment? Then we will have a greater diversity of ideas and more opportunity for success in the schools.
  - jancsika 6y ago
    The ambiguity inherent in your solution is similar to the ambiguity that would come from HN parsing all users comments as innerHTML. I suppose it doesn't have to be a "monolithic curriculum" that addresses this kind of problem. But whatever it is it better be functionally equivalent in its ability to successfully thwart clever bad faith exploits. Otherwise you get the less populated parts of the U.S. "teaching the controversy" in biology classes as part of your "greater diversity of ideas."
    - ironmagma 6y ago
      So fire those teachers. There’s a difference between teaching a particular opinion and teaching proven falsehoods. University professors are basically free to teach whatever syllabus they like, why is that approach not translatable to the public school classroom?
    - bananaface 6y ago
      I'm really not sure which approach I prefer. If you contextualise it to a company, it's crazy to think you could develop an effective system by having top-level management of a country-sized company devise a monolithic, cookie-cutter plan that gives teams zero autonomy or ability to use their personal judgement. You have to allow the men on the ground to innovate, and adapt to their specific problems. The cost of autonomy is that some teachers will teach creationism, but it also means the people who are closest to & have the biggest stake in the learning of each child have control over how that kid develops, which in general seems better aligned with incentives.
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pessimizer 6y ago
The absurd number of footnotes and their careful detail make me happy. I wish all articles were this well documented.
krawczstef 6y ago
Whaaat? I wanted to (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ partway through reading this. Blows my mind that someone actually thought that was a better way to teach people to read... Learning to sound letters is the only way IMO...
eric4smith 6y ago
Best way for your kids to learn how to read is to teach them yourself. At Home. From a very early age. With Phonics or whatever technique works best for you and them. Because school is not the place to teach a kid to read. Now, using Phonics has helped in many, many ways. Recently on a trip to the kingdom, many people have been telling me I say Thai names very well. A name like: Surassa Fhaumnuaypol or Vajiralongkorn is easy -- just use phonics principles to slowly say it then speed up.
musicale 6y ago
What year is this from? I'm very surprised, since I thought that phonics was the current preferred method, probably because it is known to actually work, with evidence going back over decades (if not centuries) and across languages. Hasn't phonics been a key part of Sesame Street for half a century or something?
jerrac 6y ago
My parents homeschooled me. They used phonics to teach me to read, and they didn't make me learn to read before I was actually ready. Those two things, plus lots of being read too, had me reading so much growing up, they had to limit me to one novel a day. If COVID has you reevaluating schooling, I highly recommend homeschooling. Also, read up on when schooling should really start. My parents always recommend Better Late Than Early by Raymond S. Moore.
foobiekr 6y ago
I learned to read early enough that I have no memory of it, it was before kindergarten; I was reading competently (e.g., "Citizen of the Galaxy") by then. What I do remember is one moment, after I could already read, and that is the day when I asked my mom if we could please read something other than The Wizard of Oz because I was tired of it. So if you're looking for a method, I recommend applying this technique: read the same book over and over until the kid can't take it any more.
- buddhiajuke 6y ago
  I also learned to read early enough that I have no memory of it, and I’m told I started picking up signs on the street, adverts on the subway etc. I see most children drowning in colorful stimuli and toys. But what did it for me apparently was boredom.
bigtones 6y ago
None of the three cueing techniques mentioned in the article were used to teach my daughter how to read at school this year, and she has just completed her first year of school in California. We're currently preparing her for the new school year at home, and phonics is a very large part of the way Californian children are taught how to read. Books in the CA curriculum include Usborne phonics books set, and we're now using online learning from Lexia core reading software during COVID. It's in a large part phonic based learning too. https://www.lexialearning.com/products/core5 https://www.lexialearning.com/products/core5
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > None of the techniques mentioned in the article were used to teach my daughter how to read at school this year, and she has just completed her first year of school in California. We're currently preparing her for the new year at home, and phonics is a very large part of the way Californian children learn how to read. Phonics is one of the techniques mentioned (positively) in the article, but California is far from uniform in how reading (or anything else) is taught (California is where one of the examples using three-cueing in the article is from.)
blueblimp 6y ago
This was an interesting read. I'm a priori skeptical of the claim that choice of method is actually all that important, but the article did at least try to provide support: "researchers estimate there's a percentage of kids — perhaps about 40 percent — who will learn to read no matter how they're taught." -- implying 60% are sensitive to method 'Goldberg decided to teach some of her students using the phonics program and some of her students using three cueing. And she began to notice differences between the two groups of kids. "Not just in their abilities to read," she said, "but in the way they approached their reading."' And it does seem true that relying on pictures is fundamentally not reading. The whole-word and phonics approaches actually teach to read text, which is kind of the point of learning to read.
- randrews 6y ago
  I was surprised to read that bit, because the graph earlier in the article shows the percentage of twelfth graders who can read as holding steadily around 40%. Implying that whatever we're doing is as good as doing nothing at all.
jccalhoun 6y ago
I don't really remember exactly what method we used in first grade back in the early 80s. I remember memorizing some words and being cued on them. What I do remember is phonics in 3rd grade. I hated phonics and blamed it for not being able to spell because english is so inconsistent. It probably isn't phonics fault that I am terrible at spelling but I still remember hating phonics.
pie_flavor 6y ago
I haven't experienced cueing, but I've seen its fallout, having switched coasts halfway through middle school. The change in literacy among my classmates was vivid. They would read straight past words, saying words similar but unmistakably wrong, due to only looking at the first couple of letters, and then never catching the mistake due to comprehension speed no faster than saying it out loud. In advanced English, it was about half the class that was like this; when I switched to the boring class later, it was absolutely every student except for me, at least in my class. Even in grade flippin' twelve, on books that were easy. Mind-boggling.
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  Thanks, my kid is a good reader but does this too. Looks like we have some work to do.
glaive123 6y ago
Reminds me of how I read Chinese, because there's no alphabet or way to sound out the characters, you just have to memorize.
- calf 6y ago
  That's the thing though; Chinese is a good counterexample that phonics instruction is not universal or fundamental to linguistics, but rather culturally specific. Phonetic written languages have the feature of mapping sounds to words and phonics instruction takes advantage of that.
  - soraminazuki 6y ago
    I doubt phonics isn't fundamental to reading Chinese, though. I've learned how to read Japanese, which uses a mix of their own characters and Chinese characters. If you're reading Japanese and you don't know how to read a written word, you're basically screwed. You might be able to vaguely infer what the words mean based on the meaning associated with the characters, but that's not the same as knowing its exact definition. I guess it would also be the same for Chinese.
    - calf 6y ago
      I think you are confusing phonics and phonetic? They are very different concepts.
      - soraminazuki 6y ago
        I was trying to argue that Chinese readers probably do correlate sounds with letters, so I meant phonics.
  - burfog 6y ago
    It's worth a 2-year difference in the age at which kids read. On one end is Chinese. On the other end is Russian and Spanish. English sits right in the middle.
shirro 6y ago
They don't do this in my kids' school. Phonics all the way. It has its weaknesses as well. English spelling is a mess and there are so many rules it is hard as a parent to remember them all as adults don't read like this. And the rules often only hint at the word, they still have to try various combinations and have the word in their vocab and know it fits the context or it would often turn out nonsense. I get kind of frustrated when my kids are breaking down a word into phonemes continually and still get it wrong. It is frustrating listening to a kid break down the same word page after page instead of trying to retain it.
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  It has to be done eventually. Sounds like they have the tools they need to improve.
owyn 6y ago
Wow. Pretty sure I learned to read through phonics (also in California). I think the tricks of quickly skimming words and just inferring words from context are things that I do when I'm not deeply engaged in a text and just want to pick up the gist. I would never recommending learning to read that way. Maybe it's not as fun to teach? I got towards the end of the article though and just kinda speechless at this reaction from the guy who came up with this theory. The damage that this kind of arrogance has done is hard to measure... He brought up the example of a child who comes to the word "horse" and says "pony" instead. His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept. I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn't the same thing as a horse. Second, don't you want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ says "pony"? And different letters say "horse"? He dismissed my question. And Goodman rejected the idea that you can make a distinction between skilled readers and unskilled readers; he doesn't like the value judgment that implies. He said dyslexia does not exist...
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  Not as fun to learn or teach. But if you want to learn how to read there's no substitute.
ajuc 6y ago
Just fix your language, it's based on latin script, it's supposed to be phonetic. Then learning to read becomes trivial.
ggm 6y ago
My partner did EFL for years. She always said that truth lies both sides of the whole-word vs phonics debate. Here in Queensland Australia it was deeply politicised in a left right electoral battle between state governments, teaching unions, public and privately funded schools. As an EFL teacher her praxis was focussed on adults not pre-literate children which is an important distinction. That said, I like this nutshell exemplifier of the problem. "Cat" c-a-t. Cee aaye tee spells cat. Now do that for "women" (UK english, Australian english typically pronounced "wimmin")
- pastage 6y ago
  English sucks, the phonic rules are all over the place but; Is women the only word you do pronounce according to those rules, would you understand me if I said "women"? A key concept is having a reading buddy that can listen to you and try to understand. I would say that the more frequent the word the more likely it is that the pronounciation is a tad different from spelling.
  - ggm 6y ago
    Ax me that in another century
liquidify 6y ago
Yeah, teaching phonics works well. Seems a bit odd to claim that there is no way to teach it. Phonetic understanding makes both visual, and auditory memory connections. I have never found anyone who can't learn phonics.
ponker 6y ago
If you just read massive amounts of books to your kids starting at 6 months you don't have to worry about any of this. My kids were reading chapter books at age 4 because I read them 20+ board books a day when they were babies, and I didn't have to stress about strategies like "phonics" vs "sight words."
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dang 6y ago
Related from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790600
72deluxe 6y ago
It's a terrible way to learn. The example of context based words mentioned just doesn't work: "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." This sentence could be either: "The man climbed onto the horse". "The man climbed onto the house". Both make sense. Appalling. "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." But text is made up of words, so if you cannot recognise the words the text will not make sense. "right enough" isn't good enough for text because subtle variations in spellings completely change the meaning, eg. bought / brought which everyone I know gets wrong - they mean completely different things. Also, skipping words seems like an extremely stupid thing to do because the word could be the crux of the sentence. Without knowing what the word is, the sentence will lose its full meaning and make the entire sentence pointless. If skipping words is the "solution" to difficult words, surely this will reinforce the "skipping" concept so that any difficult word is skipped and their reading will not ever improve.
082349872349872 6y ago
If you can raed tihs, you hvae a conuter elxapme wtih rpceset to pihcons.
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  Adults aren't kindergartners.
- ColinWright 6y ago
  Learning something is different from practised usage. What you have provided is not a counter example at all, it's evidence that once you have learned to read, you (usually) have deeper structures that can adapt to and survive perturbations. The ability of adults who can read to be able to decode examples such as yours might be behind the drive to use the "guess and move on" method being discussed. My personal experience of working with a wide range of people is that many of them see the words, say the words, and move on without actually internalising what they've said. The derogatory term "barking at print" comes to mind. I've seen it, and I find it sad that there are otherwise intelligent and capable people who fundamentally can't read.
mixmastamyk 6y ago
Wow this article hit home. In the old days we learned looksay and phonics; it worked well for me, can't complain. A few years ago it was time for the offspring and the school had this new system. Sounded odd but I didn't worry too much. A few years pass, kiddo is a good reader, though brute force possibly as we have no TV at home. But I noticed something weird. When encountering an unknown word it is replaced with something else and passed on. Say the word was Pennsylvania, something bizarre like "probably" is said instead. "Wait, what, I ask? That's not particularly close." How can you really understand what you're reading with important words changed at random? The point where you stop and say, what is this word?... pen syl vvva neea (oh!) is incredibly important! That's when the lightbulb goes off and you learn, and my kid has been taught it's too difficult. Just skim on and worry about it later! Or don't? Who cares. Perhaps in elementary but sounds like a disaster later. Now that I understand the problem, it looks like we have a lot of work ahead. Just remembered, they skimped on spelling too. :-/
- huffmsa 6y ago
  Got me thinking about how I learned. Definitely wasn't cueing, even though I was in the late 90s - early 2000s cohort. Lots of spelling tests, and A gamified computer program. Can't remember the name, but it was A system with quizzes for literally thousands of books that tested your reading comprehension and rewarded points for how well you performed. Entirely optional. I remember I and one other kid were miles out ahead of everyone else. So much so that we started to run out of big point books to read. It's curious that this article never mentions the Hooked on Phonics program. It was always being advertised on TV 20 years ago. Edit: the program was Accelerated Reader. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Reader https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Reader
SagelyGuru 6y ago
Here is a link outlining why such crazy ideas are being adopted: http://deliberatedumbingdown.com/ddd/ http://deliberatedumbingdown.com/ddd/
occamschainsaw 6y ago
The examples of kids who learnt reading through the three cuing systems on the article and in the comments remind me of GPT-2/3 produced text. Mostly correct but some unexplored words replaced by something that doesn't make much sense.
SuperNinKenDo 6y ago
My father was a volunteer teacher at my school for reading classes and was told to use this top-down method of whole words, guessing, etc. Having struggled with dyslexia his whole life, but being an avid reader despite it, he simply disregarded what he was told and taught everyone in the class using phonics instead. To this day, even as a very late reader (I was probably 9 before I picked up my first real book, period), I'm astonished how much difficulty people have with reading when it comes to unfamiliar words or even familiar words that they haven't seen written before. I'm also astonished how much difficulty people have taking written words and integrating them into their speech. I used to think it was simply the product of my being such an avid reader, but I'm starting to suspect it may be because I have that base in phonics. As someone completing my Masters in Applied Linguistics, I see this focus on top-down strategies as an example of teaching people to run before they can walk. Sure they might get good at running, but sometimes you need to go slower, and while walking forms a strong foundation for the former, it's easy to conceive how the converse is not true. Meanwhile many kids get left in the dust with both a subpar run, and no ability to walk properly. Just because people develop the ability to read words as a whole and use inference and other strategies to read quickly, doesn't mean those are the skills we should be teaching as "reading". When I was younger I used to sometimes look at my father's disregard for academic knowledge as a flaw, but I'm understanding more and more that his skepticism is often quite healthy.
spuz 6y ago
Does anyone know what teaching system is currently used to teach kids in the UK? Specifically Scotland if that matters.
tarka0 6y ago
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
- ColinWright 6y ago
  Largely debunked: http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/personal/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/ http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/personal/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/
- ivanche 6y ago
  Totally false. This isn't that easy to read, is it? Accdinorg to a racceehrsh at Cabdgimre Ueiinrstvy...
ivanche 6y ago
Interesting that nobody mentioned a magnificient essay "How and Why I Thought My Toddler To Read" [1]. I tried it with my son. He's now 6 years 3 months and reads fluently German, good Serbian (cyrillic), and okay-ish English. [1] http://larrysanger.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/How-and-Why-I-Taught-My-Toddler-to-Read.pdf http://larrysanger.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/How-and-Wh...
dsign 6y ago
> A disproportionate number of poor readers become high school dropouts and end up in the criminal justice system That escalated quickly.

258 points by ColinWright 6y ago

I learned to read at home, as did my parents, and my kids. My mom used what i think is called "phonics," where we learned the letters, then learned to sound out words. Written English isn't perfect, but it has a phonetic alphabet, suggesting a clue as to how reading works in a language with a phonetic alphabet. Everybody I know who has taught their own kids uses phonics. Most don't use a manual or any special teaching materials other than starting with really easy words. Now there's another factor as well: We learned to read without the stress and pressure of learning it in a classroom. We had time to break it up into tiny pieces throughout the day. I see parents out with their kids. They'll point to a sign, and say: "What's that word?" Also, we were given time to read on our own rather than moving on to the next subject, because there were no other subjects at home.

cardamomo 6y ago
A good teacher in a school will also break up phonics instruction and weave it in throughout the day. The challenge of giving individual instruction to 20-35 students is monumental, though. Source: I'm a kindergarten and first grade teacher.
- opwieurposiu 6y ago
  You teach 30+ first graders solo? Each kid would get 2 minutes an hour. A close to impossible teaching task. Is that a normal teacher student ratio in your district? Is that normal for public school?
  - tasogare 6y ago
    This is the norm almost everywhere worldwide.
  - pfranz 6y ago
    Looking around in the US[1], it looks like legally the cap can be from 1:15 - 1:25 (K-3). It looks like 1/3 of states don't have any legal cap. Funny enough, this chart[2] correlating reading performance and class size stops at 1:21 for 4th and 8th grade. [1] http://ecs.force.com/mbdata/MBQuest2RTanw?rep=KK3Q1807 http://ecs.force.com/mbdata/MBQuest2RTanw?rep=KK3Q1807 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student%E2%80%93teacher_ratio#/media/File:US_correlation_between_class_size_and_reading_performance.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student%E2%80%93teacher_ratio#...
  - analog31 6y ago
    Indeed, my kindergarten class was 36 kids.
axaxs 6y ago
My daughter when learning to read used to just memorize what words looked like, which really frustrated me. So 'apply' is 'apple' because it looks like the memory word. Anyhow, relevant part of my story, I taught her 100% with phonics post that point. In the above scenario, I might say 'wait there's a y there where did that go? sound it out slowly'. In no time she became a near perfect reader. I highly recommend the approach to anyone.
- bigiain 6y ago
  I occasionally get to see a friend's ~7year old son practicing reading by reading out load. He obviously uses semantic cue to "assume" what a word is based on previous words, and occasionally gets a few words further then realises what he just said doesn't make sense, and he goes back and sounds out the incorrect work phonetically. In this plague and WFH era, I've watched as the GoogleMeet live transcription does exalted the same sort of thing - it'll make a wrong word choice, then a few words later go back and correct itself based on grammar/syntax/context from subsequent words. I sometimes wonder if that's an algorithm told to do something like "pick the highest priority word possibility that makes grammatical sense with all the previous words, if subsequent highest probability words then make the previous sentence fragment non grammatically correct, go back to previous words and try the next highest probability words to maximise grammatical correctness if the entire sentence so far" - or if it's just blackbox machine learned "magic" that happens to make similar mistakes and corrections as a sample 7 year old? (Knowing Google, it's almost as likely that their algorithm is "keep building n-grams from each of the top n best-guesses of the previous y transcribed words, then count the number of times this each possible n-gram appears across the entire Google corpus of web pages, usenet, email, and google books, and pick the one with the highest historical use count"...)
  - 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
    > live transcription does exalted the same sort of thing - it'll make a wrong word choice, then a few words later go back and correct itself based on grammar/syntax/context from subsequent words. If only HN text input boxes were smart enough to do the same!
jimmaswell 6y ago
Was it "Hooked on Phonics"? That's what I had and my reading was apparently very above average.
- analog31 6y ago
  It was in the late 1960s. I grew up near Detroit. We had visited the Henry Ford Museum where they had reprints of the classic McGuffy's Reader, mentioned in the article. We just went through that book. As others have mentioned, at some point it "clicked" and I needed no further instruction. Like programming. ;-) My mom also made a big deal of going to the library every week, like it was some kind of amazing sanctuary, which of course it was. Now an odd thing I remember is that my office mate in grad school listened to the Rush Limbaugh Program, and the two advertisers I remember were Snapple and Hooked on Phonics. Funny what things we remember.
bigiain 6y ago
Heh. The first "product" I was ever technical lead on was a phonics based reading education "interactive CDROM" for children, a teaching course created by an educational psychologist as a reaction against the then-fashionable "holistic" method of teaching kids to read: https://www.phonicsalive.com.au https://www.phonicsalive.com.au We launched that in late 1995 scrambling to get it into shops for the xmas market and before schools closed for the year. We were significantly screwed over by changes in the multi track audio capabilities between Win3.3 and Windows95. I'm inordinately proud that (at least some of them) are still for sale, and I break out into a huge smile every time I see a shelf full of them at a bricks and mortar retailer. Last time I checked (maybe 5 years back now) my name (and those of my team) were still printed around the edge of the CDROM. (I'm also astounded it still works at all, and impressed by Microsoft's dedication to backwards compatibility. That was largely developed in MacOS9 and Windows 3.3 using Macromind (later Macromedia) Director. It stopped working on Mac back when Apple gave up on supporting running legacy MacOS9 apps and the owner/client didn't want to pay to upgrade for Mac. Now it's sold as "Windows only", but I'd bet pretty good money if you bought a copy and resurrected a MacOS9 machine, it'd still run just fine...)
- spacephysics 6y ago
  If I’m not mistaken, I recall using your software to learn to read (rather my parents bought it for me). Many thanks! Now instead of reading just books I read code.
  - bigiain 6y ago
    This also made me break out into a huge smile! Thank _you!_
elihu 6y ago
I don't remember exactly how I learned to read, but it seems very strange to me that anyone would try to teach someone to read English without teaching them the sounds that the letters make.
- sergers 6y ago
  I am sure they have changed curriculum overs years, but I was born in 86 west coast canada. I learned using phonics. We have been introducing our daughter to phonics for a few months now (16 months old). I am suprised to read in this article that it's not part of American curriculum... very strange indeed. Every toy, video, for english alphabet we have/seen has a phonics component
underwater 6y ago
My kids are both strong readers, but took different paths. The first taught herself to read before she started school. On day one the teacher tested her and she could read the first 200 words they were to be taught. She had had support and encouragement from us, and we read to her every night, but we never did any structured lessons with her The second couldn't read when she started school, and was taught using phonics. It took a couple of months for it to click, but then she was getting letter sounds, understanding digraphs, joining sounds together, and then reading words. When she got to that point she just took off. I feel like our first would have succeeded in the American system just fine. But the second really benefitted from laying that groundwork that let her understand the fundamentals. If she'd learned using the three cues system I feel like her self-directed progress would have been much slower.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Someone 6y ago
“Written English isn't perfect, but it has a phonetic alphabet“ What do you mean by “phonetic alphabet?” I thought the correlation between spelling and pronunciation is extremely weak in English. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mcguire 6y ago

"The teachers drew her a Venn diagram of the three-cueing system. Adams thought this diagram made perfect sense. The research clearly shows that readers use all of these cues to understand what they're reading. "But Adams soon figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not just as the way readers construct meaning from text, but as the way readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary." Ultimately, this sounds like a difficulty in translating research into application. The cueing theory was incomplete but has taken over because it usually works. The newer theory is better, but has to fight its way in. Teachers are required to have continuous training. There seems to be a breakdown between research and teacher education that isn't addressed in the article.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> The cueing theory was incomplete but has taken over because it usually works. Except it doesn't. > The newer theory is better, but has to fight its way in. The “newer” theory is one of the two older theories mentioned in the article, both of which work better in practice and well as having better support in terms of research on how people actually read that the three-cue approach. Three-cues seems to have taken off because it was easy to frame in terms of being a broad holistic approach at a time when that was fashionable for ideological/aesthetic reasons, and now it's gotten entrenched minds share and a bunch of commercial interests around it making it hard to dislodge organically. Kind of like MBTI only more prone to being abused where it actually matters. > Teachers are required to have continuous training. There seems to be a breakdown between research and teacher education that isn't addressed in the article. It's actually fairly directly addressed, as the vendors of both material for teaching reading and educational material and training on teaching reading are among those shoveling the debunked woo. And in many cases it's not a matter of what teachers choose, but what district administrators have chosen and purchased decades ago.
GavinMcG 6y ago
> Teachers are required to have continuous training. There seems to be a breakdown between research and teacher education that isn't addressed in the article. Absolutely. And actually, the breakdown starts with teaching education, where many classroom teachers are taught how to teach broadly, but not the sort of (more specialized) subject knowledge that lets you get inside a student's head to see where the errors are coming from. Elizabeth Green's book "Building A Better Teacher" was eye-opening to me.

cardamomo 6y ago

I'm a kindergarten and first grade teacher. I have taught children how to read. It's amazing! I try to follow current research, but it's clear to me through articles like this that there is so much we don't know about how children learn to read. EDIT (just adding on): It's clear to me from my experience that there is not one single way children learn to read. That much should be obvious to anyone who spends a lot of time with young children, but the field of education clings to the idea of "best practices." Second, a lot of our practices in the U.S. still stem from the National Reading Panel, which was convened nearly 20 (!) years ago as part of No Child Left Behind. Yet it's easy to find criticisms of the report the Panel issued. Just Google it. Here's a good one to start with: https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2003/04/30/33yatvin.h22.html https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2003/04/30/33yatvin.h22.h...

istjohn 6y ago
> It's clear to me from my experience that there is not one single way children learn to read. That much should be obvious to anyone who spends a lot of time with young children, but the field of education clings to the idea of "best practices." One of the key points the article makes is that a "balanced literacy" approach doesn't work. A footnote explains: > "If children are taught systematic phonics in one part of the reading program but are encouraged to use context to guess at words when reading passages, they may not apply their phonics skills consistently. Thus, the phonics component of the reading program may be undermined." — from The Use of Context Cues in Reading.[1] I'm not sure why you think there shouldn't be best practices in reading education. Certain methods will outperform others. Why shouldn't we identify and refine the methods that prove to work best? 1. https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading#footnote-content-44 https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
- cardamomo 6y ago
  Thanks for calling out that footnote. To clarify, I'm a proponent of a strong phonics program. Within that, however, there are a myriad of ways to organize and structure the instruction. But I don't disagree with the article. I called out the term "best practices" because it's often used to refer to pedagogy that is no longer supported by the research. I suspect this is the case in other fields as well: the so-called best practices we espouse are more a function of the values of our workplace or work community than anything else.

selleck 6y ago

We homeschool and my wife has taught 7 of our 8 kids using: Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. Highly recommended for parents with kids at the age to start reading.

cardamomo 6y ago
With the rise in homeschooling due to the pandemic, I'm not surprised this book is currently out of stock on Amazon!
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  At first I misread your sentence as "With the rise in the homeschooling pandemic, ..." :) I'm finding that as I get older, I make more mistakes like that when I'm tired.
  - cardamomo 6y ago
    You may be forgiven for your double-take: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/opinion/pandemic-pods-schools.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/opinion/pandemic-pods-sch...
    - mensetmanusman 6y ago
      Thanks for posting. Leave it to the NYT to fear monger about small groups of children. Hahaha
novalis78 6y ago
Yes, I taught all 4 of my children using that book and it’s amazing and works and should be the standard everywhere. It was actually recommended to us by our first daycare teacher who used to teach elementary school before retiring. She said that early in her career they were all using this book and never had a problem teaching any of the children how to read ... until the school system was flooded with new theories every year that promised to do it better only to end up worse with every decade she taught. So she went out and told every parent she could to get the this book and do it themselves. Worked like a charm.

portmanteaufu 6y ago

The flawed idea, buried deep within the article, is: > The theory is known as "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information — or "cues" — to identify words as they are reading. > .... > In the paper,5 Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words. Instead, he argued that as people read, they make predictions about the words on the page using these three cues: * graphic cues (what do the letters tell you about what the word might be?) * syntactic cues (what kind of word could it be, for example, a noun or a verb?) * semantic cues (what word would make sense here, based on the context?) > .... > Goodman's proposal became the theoretical basis for a new approach to teaching reading that would soon take hold in American schools.

arkitaip 6y ago
Thank you for the TLDR.
xrd 6y ago
Thank you for assuring me I wasn't the only one wondering throughout the article: "I must be a really poor reader to have missed the topic of the article!" I don't finish the article because when I got to that point it seemed problematic but not something that couldn't be overcome. Aren't all learners going to find strategies to learn something and then alter those over time with the right teachers and introspection? I didn't finish the article but does it explain (perhaps after a dozen or so foreshadowing paragraphs) why this method could not be overcome once learned?
- _hofstadter 6y ago
  Finishing the article is highly recommended. It is very good the entire way through and ends with a doozie!
  - xrd 6y ago
    Thanks for saying that, I will!

briga 6y ago

I think the real problem here is systemic, rather than being linked to any one cause. Reading is an active process, it's something you have to want to do. Kids mimic the adults around them, so if a child lives in a household or neighborhood where no adults are ever seen reading for pleasure, how is are they supposed to know that reading is something worth doing? Another issue is aversion to hard work: unless you practice the difficult task of trying to understand symbols you don't recognize, you're never going to get better at reading. Those sorts of mental hurdles are unpleasant for most, certainly enough to throw many readers off track. On another note, who's to say there's any one best way to read? Surely there's more than one way you can get something out of a book. People's brains are wired differently, some might learn better one way than another.

GavinMcG 6y ago
I'm not sure how your comment addresses the article, which spent some time explaining research that does tell us what is more and less effective in teaching reading. > Surely there's more than one way you can get something out of a book. Maybe so, but probably not for first graders, which is what this article addresses.
- briga 6y ago
  Why "probably not"?
  - GavinMcG 6y ago
    Because, as the article describes, the books they're reading are extremely formulaic, to the point where the whole book may be made up of identical sentences, except for the final word.
    - briga 6y ago
      Well sure, that's one reason they might not be learning well--all I'm saying is there is a larger context outside of the classroom that influences reading

thoughtsimple 6y ago

I’m 57. I have no recollection of learning to read. Somewhere between 5 and 8 it became second nature. How strange. I never really thought about it.

_hofstadter 6y ago
Not sure why you are being downvoted. Later in the article, the author speaks to an estimate that 40% of children will learn to read despite how they are taught.
andai 6y ago
Apparently, I learned by watching a TV show with my family where contestants guess the letters of a hidden word.
bigiain 6y ago
53 here, and I also don't remember "learning to read", but I do still remember wondering why so many of the other kids in my kindergarten class (4-5year olds here) couldn't read already. My parents were always "readers" and growing up our house was always full of bookshelves stacked to overflowing with books and magazines. I spent a lot of time as a pre teen and teenager going through my dad's unbroken collection of Scientific American magazine starting from the late 60s. I suspect Martin Gardner's column has had a direct influence on my career choices and why I hang out here... I remember many occasions when peers at university were first learning about things like Conway's Game Of Life, Penrose Tilings, and RSA public key crypto - and I'd be "Doesn't everybody know all this already? I think I read about this before I was in high school!"
- bigiain 6y ago
  For nostalgia's sake, I just went and found Gardner's RSA article. It was from 1977 - I was 10 (by which stage I was almost certainly grabbing the magazine from Dad as soon as he'd finished reading it). Notable quote: "For example, to test a 130 digit odd number for primality requires at the most (that is when the number is actually prime) about 7 minutes on a PDP-10 computer." http://simson.net/ref/1977/Gardner_RSA.pdf http://simson.net/ref/1977/Gardner_RSA.pdf (Tonight I might see if I can still remember how to make a hexaflexagon...)

cheerlessbog 6y ago

English has a relatively idiosyncratic relationship between letters and sounds. Does phonics work even better in languages that have regularized spelling, so "sounding out" always works perfectly? I could imagine that a native speaker would find it easy to learn to read in such a language.

gliese1337 6y ago
Yes. Speakers of Russian, for example, find the concept of a "spelling bee" to be completely nonsensical--if you hear a word and can't spell it, you must just be completely illiterate, and vice-versa. I have heard this is the case for Spanish as well, but I don't have personal experience in that case.
- pmoleri 6y ago
  In Spanish: word -> sound (is straightforward). sound -> word (not so straightforward). So, spelling does make sense, but it's not much of a thing like in English. We have some rules to aid the process, but at the end of the day, you need to have read a lot to know how truly write a word. That being said, I find kind of weird the cue process described in the article. I think that in Spanish we always learn by identifying letters with sounds as there's a 1 to 1 relationship in that direction. I.e. every written word has only one possible pronunciation.
  - MandieD 6y ago
    My mom was a middle school Spanish teacher, and her favorite trick was to promise her Spanish I classes that they’d be able to read (but not understand!) just about anything within the first week or two. And indeed, they could - eighth grade Spanish I students had to have had an A in English the previous year, so they were all decent English readers. I’ve found that German is mostly phonetic like that, but not quite as consistent as Spanish is.
- ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago
  This is not correct. A large part of Russian language curriculum in schools consists of dictations[1], as Russian is not strictly phonic (mostly it's unstressed vowel shifts, such as 'о'>'а'). It's nowhere close to English though. Spanish spelling is a breeze, much simpler than Russian. Unrelated factoid: in my experience, average Russian has more chances to reproduce believable Spanish pronunciation than English. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictation_(exercise) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictation_(exercise)

catchmeifyoucan 6y ago

The text said: "My little dog likes to eat with me." But Rodney said: "My dog likes to lick his bone."

mypalmike 6y ago
Fake it til you're illiterate.

tmaly 6y ago

My wife taught my daughter with phonics when she was almost 4. The summer before kindergarten she was already reading chapter books for second graders. I agree that phonics is a good method. Reading to the child is also a great strategy.

Demonsult 6y ago

My child was learning to read this way while I was distracted by some serious medical issues. Eventually I noticed she was making up most of what she was supposed to be reading. When I confronted the teacher, she told me she wanted my child to feel confident about reading. It took years to undo this damage.

prawn 6y ago

My eldest taught himself to read relatively young and by 6-7 yo, he'd read the Harry Potter series through twice. He'd mispronounce words he'd learned (as happens from those who learn by reading) but could define and give context for anything I tested him with. When he started school, I think they were using a system called Jolly Phonics His sister entered school two years after him and they've since changed to Read Write Inc Phonics. She's learning along with the class and take-home books. Hard to truly judge, but the system seems effective. She has confidence and then success sounding out increasingly difficult words.

bigiain 6y ago
> He'd mispronounce words he'd learned (as happens from those who learn by reading) but could define and give context for anything I tested him with. I _still_ do something very like this in my 50s. Words that my subconscious brain decides "don't matter", usually irregular character or place names in fiction, just become some kind of signifier in my memory so I recognise what they mean in the context of the story - but when I discuss that book with someone else they'll speak out loud one of those words and I'll have to take a few seconds to "reverse-phonics" it into a sequence of letters then visualise that in my head to work out which "signifier" (that I'd never bothered creating an audible form for) there talking about...
- tdeck 6y ago
  I have the same experience. Often I have some complete mispronunciation in my head because I never bothered to look carefully at the character name.
- blt 6y ago
  I participated in MetaFilter for years before I went to any meetup. At my first meetup, I realized I had never thought about how to pronounce the nickname "MeFi" despite reading and typing it countless times.
- karatinversion 6y ago
  I remember doing this with a play I read for a class back in high school. When I was taking the test on it, I realized to my horror that I didn't know the name of one of the main characters – it started with a distinctive letter, so that was all my brain had kept.

deleted 6y ago

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throwanem 6y ago

Premature optimization is, indeed, the root of all evil. Or maybe that's theorists who don't bother to check with reality whether their brilliant ideas make sense before rushing to implementation. Or maybe those are two different ways of saying the same thing.

quercusa 6y ago

This part captures the importance of parents reading to their children from an early age: Other vocabulary words these first-graders had learned were posted on cards around the classroom. They included: wander, persevere, squint and scrumptious. The kids weren't expected to read those words yet. The idea is to build their oral vocabulary so that when they can read those words, they know what the words mean. The joy a child feels when they finally read one of those words that they've only heard is a huge boost and encouragement to continue.

rubyn00bie 6y ago

A good friend of mine had this bullshit done to him growing up, and can't spell for shit (which he had no trouble venting about through college) exactly because of the method in this article. His elementary school teachers literally told him to "think about how he would spell it" and then, and this is the mind-blowing part, were toooootally okay with whatever the fuck his child mind came up with. "Oh you spelled 'tree' just like the (literal) number: 100,000, that's great!!" I'm just shocked this shit is still going on or that like anyone even thinks that could possibly fucking work. We don't have apriori knowledge to somehow write and read glphys, representing fucking sounds, which are time and location dependent... so how or why would this approach possibly work? </rambling>

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

In my mind reading is the one subject where the child can’t afford to get it wrong. If you don’t do science education well, but the kids learn how to read well, they can always learn science by reading. Same with history, literature, and virtually every subject with possible exception of math. Reading is the key to unlock everything else. As such, we should be very conservative in changing what has been proven to work. The article mentions how new theories came out in the 60’s and displaced the phonics based system which had been proven to work, leading to literally millions of people with an intellectual handicap due to poor reading skills.

pastage 6y ago
There has been research that says the same thing, getting reading right early for the whole class is important.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

It is especially true in the west: ‘Children are continually exposed to educational ideas that are younger than they are.’ -G.K.C.

zaphar 6y ago

This is another way in which inequality is persisted. Private schools overwhelmingly tend to teach phonics while those who go to public school end up being taught the 3-cueing system. Getting the schools to change approach requires political action against powerful lobbies. While a private school needs good outcomes to justify it's prices so gravitate to systems that produce that outcome.

ironmagma 6y ago
Sometimes you hear these stories and just have to back up two steps and ask why we are obsessed with developing these monolithic curriculums. Can’t we just have teachers use their best judgment? Then we will have a greater diversity of ideas and more opportunity for success in the schools.
- jancsika 6y ago
  The ambiguity inherent in your solution is similar to the ambiguity that would come from HN parsing all users comments as innerHTML. I suppose it doesn't have to be a "monolithic curriculum" that addresses this kind of problem. But whatever it is it better be functionally equivalent in its ability to successfully thwart clever bad faith exploits. Otherwise you get the less populated parts of the U.S. "teaching the controversy" in biology classes as part of your "greater diversity of ideas."
  - ironmagma 6y ago
    So fire those teachers. There’s a difference between teaching a particular opinion and teaching proven falsehoods. University professors are basically free to teach whatever syllabus they like, why is that approach not translatable to the public school classroom?
  - bananaface 6y ago
    I'm really not sure which approach I prefer. If you contextualise it to a company, it's crazy to think you could develop an effective system by having top-level management of a country-sized company devise a monolithic, cookie-cutter plan that gives teams zero autonomy or ability to use their personal judgement. You have to allow the men on the ground to innovate, and adapt to their specific problems. The cost of autonomy is that some teachers will teach creationism, but it also means the people who are closest to & have the biggest stake in the learning of each child have control over how that kid develops, which in general seems better aligned with incentives.

deleted 6y ago

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pessimizer 6y ago

The absurd number of footnotes and their careful detail make me happy. I wish all articles were this well documented.

krawczstef 6y ago

Whaaat? I wanted to (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ partway through reading this. Blows my mind that someone actually thought that was a better way to teach people to read... Learning to sound letters is the only way IMO...

eric4smith 6y ago

Best way for your kids to learn how to read is to teach them yourself. At Home. From a very early age. With Phonics or whatever technique works best for you and them. Because school is not the place to teach a kid to read. Now, using Phonics has helped in many, many ways. Recently on a trip to the kingdom, many people have been telling me I say Thai names very well. A name like: Surassa Fhaumnuaypol or Vajiralongkorn is easy -- just use phonics principles to slowly say it then speed up.

musicale 6y ago

What year is this from? I'm very surprised, since I thought that phonics was the current preferred method, probably because it is known to actually work, with evidence going back over decades (if not centuries) and across languages. Hasn't phonics been a key part of Sesame Street for half a century or something?

jerrac 6y ago

My parents homeschooled me. They used phonics to teach me to read, and they didn't make me learn to read before I was actually ready. Those two things, plus lots of being read too, had me reading so much growing up, they had to limit me to one novel a day. If COVID has you reevaluating schooling, I highly recommend homeschooling. Also, read up on when schooling should really start. My parents always recommend Better Late Than Early by Raymond S. Moore.

foobiekr 6y ago

I learned to read early enough that I have no memory of it, it was before kindergarten; I was reading competently (e.g., "Citizen of the Galaxy") by then. What I do remember is one moment, after I could already read, and that is the day when I asked my mom if we could please read something other than The Wizard of Oz because I was tired of it. So if you're looking for a method, I recommend applying this technique: read the same book over and over until the kid can't take it any more.

buddhiajuke 6y ago
I also learned to read early enough that I have no memory of it, and I’m told I started picking up signs on the street, adverts on the subway etc. I see most children drowning in colorful stimuli and toys. But what did it for me apparently was boredom.

bigtones 6y ago

None of the three cueing techniques mentioned in the article were used to teach my daughter how to read at school this year, and she has just completed her first year of school in California. We're currently preparing her for the new school year at home, and phonics is a very large part of the way Californian children are taught how to read. Books in the CA curriculum include Usborne phonics books set, and we're now using online learning from Lexia core reading software during COVID. It's in a large part phonic based learning too. https://www.lexialearning.com/products/core5 https://www.lexialearning.com/products/core5

dragonwriter 6y ago
> None of the techniques mentioned in the article were used to teach my daughter how to read at school this year, and she has just completed her first year of school in California. We're currently preparing her for the new year at home, and phonics is a very large part of the way Californian children learn how to read. Phonics is one of the techniques mentioned (positively) in the article, but California is far from uniform in how reading (or anything else) is taught (California is where one of the examples using three-cueing in the article is from.)

blueblimp 6y ago

This was an interesting read. I'm a priori skeptical of the claim that choice of method is actually all that important, but the article did at least try to provide support: "researchers estimate there's a percentage of kids — perhaps about 40 percent — who will learn to read no matter how they're taught." -- implying 60% are sensitive to method 'Goldberg decided to teach some of her students using the phonics program and some of her students using three cueing. And she began to notice differences between the two groups of kids. "Not just in their abilities to read," she said, "but in the way they approached their reading."' And it does seem true that relying on pictures is fundamentally not reading. The whole-word and phonics approaches actually teach to read text, which is kind of the point of learning to read.

randrews 6y ago
I was surprised to read that bit, because the graph earlier in the article shows the percentage of twelfth graders who can read as holding steadily around 40%. Implying that whatever we're doing is as good as doing nothing at all.

jccalhoun 6y ago

I don't really remember exactly what method we used in first grade back in the early 80s. I remember memorizing some words and being cued on them. What I do remember is phonics in 3rd grade. I hated phonics and blamed it for not being able to spell because english is so inconsistent. It probably isn't phonics fault that I am terrible at spelling but I still remember hating phonics.

pie_flavor 6y ago

I haven't experienced cueing, but I've seen its fallout, having switched coasts halfway through middle school. The change in literacy among my classmates was vivid. They would read straight past words, saying words similar but unmistakably wrong, due to only looking at the first couple of letters, and then never catching the mistake due to comprehension speed no faster than saying it out loud. In advanced English, it was about half the class that was like this; when I switched to the boring class later, it was absolutely every student except for me, at least in my class. Even in grade flippin' twelve, on books that were easy. Mind-boggling.

mixmastamyk 6y ago
Thanks, my kid is a good reader but does this too. Looks like we have some work to do.

glaive123 6y ago

Reminds me of how I read Chinese, because there's no alphabet or way to sound out the characters, you just have to memorize.

calf 6y ago
That's the thing though; Chinese is a good counterexample that phonics instruction is not universal or fundamental to linguistics, but rather culturally specific. Phonetic written languages have the feature of mapping sounds to words and phonics instruction takes advantage of that.
- soraminazuki 6y ago
  I doubt phonics isn't fundamental to reading Chinese, though. I've learned how to read Japanese, which uses a mix of their own characters and Chinese characters. If you're reading Japanese and you don't know how to read a written word, you're basically screwed. You might be able to vaguely infer what the words mean based on the meaning associated with the characters, but that's not the same as knowing its exact definition. I guess it would also be the same for Chinese.
  - calf 6y ago
    I think you are confusing phonics and phonetic? They are very different concepts.
    - soraminazuki 6y ago
      I was trying to argue that Chinese readers probably do correlate sounds with letters, so I meant phonics.
- burfog 6y ago
  It's worth a 2-year difference in the age at which kids read. On one end is Chinese. On the other end is Russian and Spanish. English sits right in the middle.

shirro 6y ago

They don't do this in my kids' school. Phonics all the way. It has its weaknesses as well. English spelling is a mess and there are so many rules it is hard as a parent to remember them all as adults don't read like this. And the rules often only hint at the word, they still have to try various combinations and have the word in their vocab and know it fits the context or it would often turn out nonsense. I get kind of frustrated when my kids are breaking down a word into phonemes continually and still get it wrong. It is frustrating listening to a kid break down the same word page after page instead of trying to retain it.

mixmastamyk 6y ago
It has to be done eventually. Sounds like they have the tools they need to improve.

owyn 6y ago

Wow. Pretty sure I learned to read through phonics (also in California). I think the tricks of quickly skimming words and just inferring words from context are things that I do when I'm not deeply engaged in a text and just want to pick up the gist. I would never recommending learning to read that way. Maybe it's not as fun to teach? I got towards the end of the article though and just kinda speechless at this reaction from the guy who came up with this theory. The damage that this kind of arrogance has done is hard to measure... He brought up the example of a child who comes to the word "horse" and says "pony" instead. His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept. I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn't the same thing as a horse. Second, don't you want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ says "pony"? And different letters say "horse"? He dismissed my question. And Goodman rejected the idea that you can make a distinction between skilled readers and unskilled readers; he doesn't like the value judgment that implies. He said dyslexia does not exist...

mixmastamyk 6y ago
Not as fun to learn or teach. But if you want to learn how to read there's no substitute.

ajuc 6y ago

Just fix your language, it's based on latin script, it's supposed to be phonetic. Then learning to read becomes trivial.

ggm 6y ago

My partner did EFL for years. She always said that truth lies both sides of the whole-word vs phonics debate. Here in Queensland Australia it was deeply politicised in a left right electoral battle between state governments, teaching unions, public and privately funded schools. As an EFL teacher her praxis was focussed on adults not pre-literate children which is an important distinction. That said, I like this nutshell exemplifier of the problem. "Cat" c-a-t. Cee aaye tee spells cat. Now do that for "women" (UK english, Australian english typically pronounced "wimmin")

pastage 6y ago
English sucks, the phonic rules are all over the place but; Is women the only word you do pronounce according to those rules, would you understand me if I said "women"? A key concept is having a reading buddy that can listen to you and try to understand. I would say that the more frequent the word the more likely it is that the pronounciation is a tad different from spelling.
- ggm 6y ago
  Ax me that in another century

liquidify 6y ago

Yeah, teaching phonics works well. Seems a bit odd to claim that there is no way to teach it. Phonetic understanding makes both visual, and auditory memory connections. I have never found anyone who can't learn phonics.

ponker 6y ago

If you just read massive amounts of books to your kids starting at 6 months you don't have to worry about any of this. My kids were reading chapter books at age 4 because I read them 20+ board books a day when they were babies, and I didn't have to stress about strategies like "phonics" vs "sight words."

deleted 6y ago
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dang 6y ago

Related from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790600 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20790600

72deluxe 6y ago

It's a terrible way to learn. The example of context based words mentioned just doesn't work: "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." This sentence could be either: "The man climbed onto the horse". "The man climbed onto the house". Both make sense. Appalling. "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." But text is made up of words, so if you cannot recognise the words the text will not make sense. "right enough" isn't good enough for text because subtle variations in spellings completely change the meaning, eg. bought / brought which everyone I know gets wrong - they mean completely different things. Also, skipping words seems like an extremely stupid thing to do because the word could be the crux of the sentence. Without knowing what the word is, the sentence will lose its full meaning and make the entire sentence pointless. If skipping words is the "solution" to difficult words, surely this will reinforce the "skipping" concept so that any difficult word is skipped and their reading will not ever improve.

082349872349872 6y ago

If you can raed tihs, you hvae a conuter elxapme wtih rpceset to pihcons.

mixmastamyk 6y ago
Adults aren't kindergartners.
ColinWright 6y ago
Learning something is different from practised usage. What you have provided is not a counter example at all, it's evidence that once you have learned to read, you (usually) have deeper structures that can adapt to and survive perturbations. The ability of adults who can read to be able to decode examples such as yours might be behind the drive to use the "guess and move on" method being discussed. My personal experience of working with a wide range of people is that many of them see the words, say the words, and move on without actually internalising what they've said. The derogatory term "barking at print" comes to mind. I've seen it, and I find it sad that there are otherwise intelligent and capable people who fundamentally can't read.

mixmastamyk 6y ago

Wow this article hit home. In the old days we learned looksay and phonics; it worked well for me, can't complain. A few years ago it was time for the offspring and the school had this new system. Sounded odd but I didn't worry too much. A few years pass, kiddo is a good reader, though brute force possibly as we have no TV at home. But I noticed something weird. When encountering an unknown word it is replaced with something else and passed on. Say the word was Pennsylvania, something bizarre like "probably" is said instead. "Wait, what, I ask? That's not particularly close." How can you really understand what you're reading with important words changed at random? The point where you stop and say, what is this word?... pen syl vvva neea (oh!) is incredibly important! That's when the lightbulb goes off and you learn, and my kid has been taught it's too difficult. Just skim on and worry about it later! Or don't? Who cares. Perhaps in elementary but sounds like a disaster later. Now that I understand the problem, it looks like we have a lot of work ahead. Just remembered, they skimped on spelling too. :-/

huffmsa 6y ago
Got me thinking about how I learned. Definitely wasn't cueing, even though I was in the late 90s - early 2000s cohort. Lots of spelling tests, and A gamified computer program. Can't remember the name, but it was A system with quizzes for literally thousands of books that tested your reading comprehension and rewarded points for how well you performed. Entirely optional. I remember I and one other kid were miles out ahead of everyone else. So much so that we started to run out of big point books to read. It's curious that this article never mentions the Hooked on Phonics program. It was always being advertised on TV 20 years ago. Edit: the program was Accelerated Reader. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Reader https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Reader

SagelyGuru 6y ago

Here is a link outlining why such crazy ideas are being adopted: http://deliberatedumbingdown.com/ddd/ http://deliberatedumbingdown.com/ddd/

occamschainsaw 6y ago

The examples of kids who learnt reading through the three cuing systems on the article and in the comments remind me of GPT-2/3 produced text. Mostly correct but some unexplored words replaced by something that doesn't make much sense.

SuperNinKenDo 6y ago

My father was a volunteer teacher at my school for reading classes and was told to use this top-down method of whole words, guessing, etc. Having struggled with dyslexia his whole life, but being an avid reader despite it, he simply disregarded what he was told and taught everyone in the class using phonics instead. To this day, even as a very late reader (I was probably 9 before I picked up my first real book, period), I'm astonished how much difficulty people have with reading when it comes to unfamiliar words or even familiar words that they haven't seen written before. I'm also astonished how much difficulty people have taking written words and integrating them into their speech. I used to think it was simply the product of my being such an avid reader, but I'm starting to suspect it may be because I have that base in phonics. As someone completing my Masters in Applied Linguistics, I see this focus on top-down strategies as an example of teaching people to run before they can walk. Sure they might get good at running, but sometimes you need to go slower, and while walking forms a strong foundation for the former, it's easy to conceive how the converse is not true. Meanwhile many kids get left in the dust with both a subpar run, and no ability to walk properly. Just because people develop the ability to read words as a whole and use inference and other strategies to read quickly, doesn't mean those are the skills we should be teaching as "reading". When I was younger I used to sometimes look at my father's disregard for academic knowledge as a flaw, but I'm understanding more and more that his skepticism is often quite healthy.

spuz 6y ago

Does anyone know what teaching system is currently used to teach kids in the UK? Specifically Scotland if that matters.

tarka0 6y ago

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

ColinWright 6y ago
Largely debunked: http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/personal/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/ http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/personal/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/
ivanche 6y ago
Totally false. This isn't that easy to read, is it? Accdinorg to a racceehrsh at Cabdgimre Ueiinrstvy...

ivanche 6y ago

Interesting that nobody mentioned a magnificient essay "How and Why I Thought My Toddler To Read" [1]. I tried it with my son. He's now 6 years 3 months and reads fluently German, good Serbian (cyrillic), and okay-ish English. [1] http://larrysanger.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/How-and-Why-I-Taught-My-Toddler-to-Read.pdf http://larrysanger.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/How-and-Wh...

dsign 6y ago

> A disproportionate number of poor readers become high school dropouts and end up in the criminal justice system That escalated quickly.