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> Third, about 60 percent of the words on any page are “noncontent words”—words like the, so and what that cannot be decoded by sounding out. Ironically, three

> Third, about 60 percent of the words on any page are “noncontent words”—words like the, so and what that cannot be decoded by sounding out. Ironically, three of the five words in the The Cat in The Hat title are noncontent words. Characterizing them as “renegades,” phonics accords them minimal teaching time. Those are taught very early as “sight words” in every school program I’m aware of—most of which are unfortunately still doing some whole-language crap, but that’s not why they do sight words, it’s because the author’s observation is trivial and already accounted for by any serious system for teaching reading. Teaching time isn’t “minimized”, they do enough that the kids get it, then move on. If they didn’t, literacy rates would be far worse, since, as the author observes, these are most words on a page. I’m not aware of a single teacher of reading who doesn’t take these very seriously, but that doesn’t mean you need to spend tons and tons of time on them. [edit] further, their ubiquity is precisely why they generally don’t take a ton of time: daily review of sight words happens naturally the whole rest of the kids’ lives. If they kinda get a set of sight words one week, they’ll typically really get them before long, with little or no further time dedicated just to them. Most kids can memorize a set of sight words just barely well enough to pass the quiz or whatever, then never need to formally review or revisit them because the knowledge will solidify due to being incidentally reviewed in practically all later reading instruction.

WalterBright 3y ago
> three of the five words in the The Cat in The Hat title are noncontent words Wat? They're all easily sounded out, and only one word (the) is "non-content".
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  Yeah, I’d certainly say “in” isn’t somehow difficult to sound out, though “the” is a bit weird and not necessarily intuitive (plus we don’t always pronounce it the same way)
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    If you sound out "t" and "h" quickly, it slushes into to the "th" sound. Besides, there's nothing wrong with teaching that "th" has its own sound, just like "ng" has its own sound.
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      That’s exactly what they do—I think they call that a “blend” (I’m not a teacher, I just know lots of them) when they’re teaching phonics, and they don’t try to do some insane thing like treating the two letters as meaningfully separate, but teach them as a unit that makes one sound. It’s what to do with the “e” that’s a bit tough to guess, I should think—and that’s not consistent, at least in American English, because we’ll say it like “thuh” or “thee” depending on context. “Thus” without the S, or “these” without the SE.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        People hear "the" so often I can't believe the kids have a problem with pronouncing the "e".
        hotnfresh 3y ago
        It’s more that it’s not a word you can rely on them to sound out, if they don’t know what it’s supposed to be. And, anyway, not all “sight words” are difficult to sound out—it’s a kind of loose category of short words that occur so often that you must not need to sound them out to recognize them if you’re going to read fluently. Of course any successfully reader will accumulate even more words that they recognize at a glance (that’s why the “jumble all but the first and last letter” trick works—fluent readers rarely need to sound out words, and don’t really look at every letter, so they can still read texts so-jumbled with little difficulty) but sight words are taught that way explicitly, from early on, almost like learning the alphabet. They do know what “the” sounds like, spoken, they just might not be able to figure out that “the” represents that sound (or may struggle with it longer than you’d expect). Other sight words are very straightforward, but lots are subtly tricky for early readers (“of”—that’s gotta be the word “off”, right? The sound the same letters make in “often”, surely? But no.)
- codersfocus 3y ago
  The problem as I understand it is that schools have stopped teaching students to sound out words and instead are teaching words as pictograms. https://nypost.com/2023/09/17/columbia-quietly-closes-down-teachers-college-project-that-ruined-countless-lives/amp/ https://nypost.com/2023/09/17/columbia-quietly-closes-down-t...
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    What’s weird about this just getting traction in the media now is that the Golden Age of whole-language was decades ago, AFAIK. Academics had data to show it sucked and a list of reading pathologies that could be traced to it by 2000 or so, and had had those long enough for consensus at that level to have already swung to “um, yeah, this is very bad.” It’s still hanging on in many schools, at least in part, so I’m glad everyone’s talking about it now (my kids have seen a bit of it, and the main effect each time has been to make them worse at reading, temporarily, for reasons that are obvious if you look at the work they have them doing) but it’s weird to see stuff I was hearing about from education students as fairly settled science in the ‘00s brought up like it’s a brand new finding. This has been known to be bad for a long time, what’s news is a bunch of folks running schools and school districts won’t let go of it. Like the guy at your tech job who hung his hat on some bad database tech and just will not stop pushing the damn thing.

WalterBright 3y ago

> three of the five words in the The Cat in The Hat title are noncontent words Wat? They're all easily sounded out, and only one word (the) is "non-content".

hotnfresh 3y ago
Yeah, I’d certainly say “in” isn’t somehow difficult to sound out, though “the” is a bit weird and not necessarily intuitive (plus we don’t always pronounce it the same way)
- WalterBright 3y ago
  If you sound out "t" and "h" quickly, it slushes into to the "th" sound. Besides, there's nothing wrong with teaching that "th" has its own sound, just like "ng" has its own sound.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    That’s exactly what they do—I think they call that a “blend” (I’m not a teacher, I just know lots of them) when they’re teaching phonics, and they don’t try to do some insane thing like treating the two letters as meaningfully separate, but teach them as a unit that makes one sound. It’s what to do with the “e” that’s a bit tough to guess, I should think—and that’s not consistent, at least in American English, because we’ll say it like “thuh” or “thee” depending on context. “Thus” without the S, or “these” without the SE.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      People hear "the" so often I can't believe the kids have a problem with pronouncing the "e".
      - hotnfresh 3y ago
        It’s more that it’s not a word you can rely on them to sound out, if they don’t know what it’s supposed to be. And, anyway, not all “sight words” are difficult to sound out—it’s a kind of loose category of short words that occur so often that you must not need to sound them out to recognize them if you’re going to read fluently. Of course any successfully reader will accumulate even more words that they recognize at a glance (that’s why the “jumble all but the first and last letter” trick works—fluent readers rarely need to sound out words, and don’t really look at every letter, so they can still read texts so-jumbled with little difficulty) but sight words are taught that way explicitly, from early on, almost like learning the alphabet. They do know what “the” sounds like, spoken, they just might not be able to figure out that “the” represents that sound (or may struggle with it longer than you’d expect). Other sight words are very straightforward, but lots are subtly tricky for early readers (“of”—that’s gotta be the word “off”, right? The sound the same letters make in “often”, surely? But no.)
codersfocus 3y ago
The problem as I understand it is that schools have stopped teaching students to sound out words and instead are teaching words as pictograms. https://nypost.com/2023/09/17/columbia-quietly-closes-down-teachers-college-project-that-ruined-countless-lives/amp/ https://nypost.com/2023/09/17/columbia-quietly-closes-down-t...
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  What’s weird about this just getting traction in the media now is that the Golden Age of whole-language was decades ago, AFAIK. Academics had data to show it sucked and a list of reading pathologies that could be traced to it by 2000 or so, and had had those long enough for consensus at that level to have already swung to “um, yeah, this is very bad.” It’s still hanging on in many schools, at least in part, so I’m glad everyone’s talking about it now (my kids have seen a bit of it, and the main effect each time has been to make them worse at reading, temporarily, for reasons that are obvious if you look at the work they have them doing) but it’s weird to see stuff I was hearing about from education students as fairly settled science in the ‘00s brought up like it’s a brand new finding. This has been known to be bad for a long time, what’s news is a bunch of folks running schools and school districts won’t let go of it. Like the guy at your tech job who hung his hat on some bad database tech and just will not stop pushing the damn thing.