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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 k

• 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!
  • bawolff 6y ago
    I agree, i find the style of writing this article uses endlessly frustrating.
    • msie 6y ago
      Yes, it will fail to reach a wide audience on such an important topic.
    • SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
      I wish it was less common, but I’ve been seeing a lot of this ... article extending. I think that’s what it is.
      • Robotbeat 6y ago
        Yeah, I’ve started to skip the first two paragraphs of all articles, now. This, combined with click-bait headlines, has started to make media articles more and more worthless. (In scientific writing and encyclopedia entries, they start with a summary so they immediately get to the point...)
        • SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
          > Yeah, I’ve started to skip the first two paragraphs of all articles I go down and read the last two paragraphs to see if they summed it up well. It’s a 33% I read the whole article based on summary and content. I’m not asking for a great writer... just someone that knew what they were writing about before they started typing.
      • Groxx 6y ago
        It's encouraged by being paid by the word (implicitly via time-on-page due to ads) in some cases.
    • MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      Even the BBC aren't above this sort of thing. My 'favourite' example of this kind of writing is a BBC News article titled This little-known inventor has probably saved your life. [0] You have to read about half of the lengthy, rambling article before you discover what on Earth they're talking about. Turns out to be about the inventor of the flight recorder. It follows of course that the title is simply untrue, which makes for a nice bonus. [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-49012771 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-49012771
  • causality0 6y ago
    Learning something badly can be disastrous. I self-taught myself to type years before I took a typing class in school. Despite multiple attempts to learn both qwerty and dvorak I still use my invented four-finger method that doesn't allow me to fully touch-type without looking down.
    • klibertp 6y ago
      I recently read somewhere (maybe on the Wiki?) that there was a study that didn't find any advantage of classical touch typing over self-learned touch typing, in terms of speed of input at least. In other words, nothing is stopping you from using your four fingers to type without looking at the keyboard. If you spend a whole day typing anyway, make a conscious effort, for a few minutes every day, to type by guessing where to move your fingers (whichever finger feels the closest or just the most comfortable). If you're like me, you already know where the keys are, you're just looking down to make sure. After a while, you'll see that you can write without looking, no problem. And at that point, it stops mattering if you use 4, 5, 6, or 10 fingers. I was a 5-6-fingers non-touch typer for a very long time, my input speed was satisfactory anyway, so I didn't feel the need to learn the "proper technique," which seemed like a huge PITA. I was convinced that the proper touch typing is the only way to type without looking at the keyboard. I changed my mind due to a situation at work, where I was explaining something to a co-worker and had to use her laptop for demonstration. The catch was that her keyboard was completely blank. I was stumped for a while, but - having a reputation of a senior to uphold - I said (internally) 'fuck it, whatever happens, happens,' closed my eyes, and just typed. It worked, not 100%, but close enough. The co-worker wasn't impressed (well, she was the one who used such a keyboard, to begin with), but I was in awe. I realized that looking at the keyboard is just a habit, not an essential part of the typing process. Now I type mostly by touch, still use 5-6 fingers, still have satisfactory WPM, and I look down at the keyboard only when I'm distracted or when I have to reach some very rarely used key (like F5 - F9). To summarize: if your work is based on typing on the keyboard, then the chances are that - after a few years - your fingers already know where the keys are. It's like riding a bike with hands away from the handlebar: if you've been cycling for a few years, you most likely are capable of doing this, you just need to realize it.
  • SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
    Apparently writing is just as hard as reading. It was first mentioned 17 “paragraphs” in that: memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don't know — are the strategies that many beginning readers are taught in school. This makes it harder for many kids to learn how to read, and children who don't get off to a good start in reading find it difficult to ever master the process. That should have been the opener.
  • est 6y ago
    > I didn't finish the article The last part about Ken Goodman was the best of the whole article.
• verdverm 6y ago
  The correct idea is Phonics, explained in detail further down. The section "this is not reading" blew my mind, that people will make up words from pictures that aren't even on the page. Then I thought about social media. Fascinating article, ColinWright is on fire today (3 front page posts).
  • wahern 6y ago
    > The correct idea is Phonics, explained in detail further down. That seems too narrow. I think the general idea is that there's no substitute for rote memorization of the basic characteristics of the writing system and its association to pre-existing language knowledge (usually spoken language). Phonics is simply one way to help speed that along in some scripts, though you still need to memorize the alphabet and basic syllables. In Chinese script (logograms), for example, the process is a little different and more laborious, including more initial memorization. It's like when learning basic arithmetic. One has to learn by rote memorization the numbers 1-10 and their association to the abstract counting groups (2 of this, 4 of that, etc). No phonics involved. Then you similarly need to learn, through rote memorization, basic sums--1+1=2, etc. The concept of summation comes later. Without having that very basic foundation, you can't begin systematically exploring and building abstractions (through inference and, later, deduction) in the language of numbers.
    • zaphar 6y ago
      Phonics is memorizing the alphabet and basic syllables as well as learning how to combine them into a spoken word. It's not narrow since phonics is by definition what you describe.
      • wahern 6y ago
        I was considering the distinguishing characteristic of phonics as sounding out a word so you can make an aural association to a word you already know. So rather than memorizing whole words you can memorize some basic syllables and rules to speed up the recognition and memorization process. You can't do that with a logogram script, or if your first language is sign language. (I'm sure remembering and identifying phonemes is still important for deaf children in the context of a phonetic language, but I'd bet it's a more arduous process, more akin to learning strokes in Chinese logograms.)
• lehi 6y ago
  Is that wrong? It may not be correct to use that as the basis for teaching reading, but it describes what my reading process developed into.
  • GavinMcG 6y ago
    That's precisely the problem. That describes tools good readers use to understand meaning across a text, but teaching it as a way to recognize words is problematic. > 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.
  • verdverm 6y ago
    Later in the article, Cueing or MVS are shown to be actually harmful to reading. This is backed by extensive research, and the final section shows how bad of a researcher Goodman is, still to this day. He is quotes as saying "My science is different."
  • jerf 6y ago
    Brains are lazy. They are lazy for good reasons. They have a lot of work to do during a day and don't have the spare capacity to burn multiples of what they are already burning. They are already epic energy hogs in biological terms. Just telling them to "stop being so lazy!" doesn't work, and if you dig into it would probably be a bad idea if you could. Consequently, one of the most dangerous ideas to feed a brain is one that works in the short term but fails in the long term. Once mired in the bad term idea, one must expend effort to switch to the better idea, and in the process, one might even go backwards temporarily, convincing the brain (quite rationally from a certain point of view) that this is a bad idea, thus making it even harder to convince the brain this switch is a good idea. (You have less control over this decision than you fancy.) Without a lot of energy or help to get out, you can get stuck there permanently. It's not just reading. Many skills have this pattern to them. I myself am stuck there with bowling. I have the classic "got decent at throwing the ball straight down the lane" failure. I know that I need to learn to curve the ball to get better, and I just don't care enough to do it. Given how rarely I play, my time of "getting worse before I get better" would probably be "every game I play for the rest of my life." But I am stuck in that hole. I've been there with some other skills, too; I'm not sure one can jump straight to ideal piano technique without going through this a few times. But those are no big deal to me. Screwing up reading from the get-go is devastating.
• GavinMcG 6y ago
  Furthermore: > You know tens of thousands of words instantly, on sight. How did you learn to do that? > It happens through a process called "orthographic mapping." This occurs when you pay attention to the details of a written word and link the word's pronunciation and meaning with its sequence of letters. > ... > That requires an awareness of the speech sounds in words and an understanding of how those sounds are represented by letters. In other words, you need phonics skills. > ... > when children don't have good phonics skills, the process is different. > "They sample from the letters because they're not good at sounding them out," said David Kilpatrick, a psychology professor at SUNY Cortland and the author of a book about preventing reading difficulties. > ... > "The three-cueing system is the way poor readers read," said Kilpatrick. > And if teachers use the system to teach reading, Kilpatrick says they're not just teaching children the habits of poor readers, they are actually impeding the orthographic mapping process. > "The minute you ask them just to pay attention to the first letter or look at the picture, look at the context, you're drawing their attention away from the very thing that they need to interact with in order for them to read the word [and] remember the word," Kilpatrick said.
  • throw333542 6y ago
    This idea is fascinating and makes me wonder if languages like Chinese are naturally learned this way, since that’s really the only way to learn it.
    • _nalply 6y ago
      Perhaps you should consider that characters are not images but consist of distinct groups of strokes. When I learned about 20 words suddenly I realized that some of them have sub-words embedded into them. So it's a bit more complicated.
      • Izkata 6y ago
        My favorite example of this, because it looks kinda silly and yet makes perfect sense (and appears to be the same between Chinese and Japanese, where I first ran across it): 木 - tree 森 - forest