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At a Loss for Words: A flawed idea is teaching kids to be poor readers (2019)

• bell-cot 1y ago
  (2019), and previously on HN (with plenty of comments) a few times: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=apmreports.org https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=apmreports.org
  • dang 1y ago
    Thanks! Macroexpanded: How a flawed idea is teaching kids to be poor readers (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41344613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41344613 - Aug 2024 (119 comments) Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35599181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35599181 - April 2023 (508 comments) Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34011841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34011841 - Dec 2022 (1 comment) How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23981447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23981447 - July 2020 (225 comments)
• nottorp 1y ago
  Interesting... I was expecting an article about teaching kids to read to have ... text ... in it.
  • Akronymus 1y ago
    https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
    • dang 1y ago
      Thanks! I've put that URL at the top, and put the submitted URL (https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/) in the text up there.
• mrangle 1y ago
  Whatever the culture and resources of the parents, the buck stops at home. Gaining the ability to read begins from birth, and by the time that kids are school age they should be clamoring for books if the parents did their job. After time-worn basic reading instruction in first grade, it's a matter of parents enforcing reading-time at home for school mandated reading. Then providing access to the reading material that the child desires for their free reading. Whatever it is. Book-bound comic strips are an early popular grade-level choice, and are fantastic. If a child is behind, then go simpler. Everything else is a band-aid or less practical if not detrimental in comparison. Some kids need services if they have deficits, but that doesn't imply that the standard practice is flawed. All top readers came out of this type of early progression. So have most middling readers, often just separated by the amount of time they've chosen to put in. Or were compelled to put in.
  • lazyasciiart 1y ago
    Right, so having bad or incapable parents is just a reason to what, toss those kids off a cliff?
  • clickety_clack 1y ago
    I think that we can demand that our education systems teach our kids to read and do math. Many parents are not academic and can’t do a good job in passing on academic skills no matter how hard they might try. Many other parents would prefer to teach their kids different things about how to live a life. I grew up on a farm, and the start of my journey into tech was fixing machinery and building things outside with my father. With my kids I want to create a similar experience so they feel like they have the power to take things apart, fix them and make whatever they want. I don’t want to jam them up all evening reading and doing times tables.
    • Akronymus 1y ago
      > I think that we can demand that our education systems teach our kids to read and do math. I've heard many anecdotes of teachers discouraging teaching kids those things at home ahead of the curriculum.
• bluesounddirect 1y ago
  As the husband of an Orton-Gillingham trained tutor , teachers and the industry supporting teachers , not OG ; are very much in the business of making money not making kids read . The entire economy around "services" like OT , Speech , etc is all about how to monetize it, not how do we do the most good for the children.
  • mrangle 1y ago
    SLP here. I hear you. But the reality is greyer. Yes, it's easy for anyone and everyone to see the financial layer of developmental services. But virtually 100% of working SLPs care about getting clients to their goals, even if that client's access to services is determined by insurance. Money is an inescapable reality for every service in society. But most clinics are busy, and so there isn't a real incentive to try to slow walk clients. Which would be radically corrupt on a number of levels. Even if some backroom financial functionary in a clinic were to have that thought on occasion. I've never heard it verbalized nor seen any evidence of it trickling down from management. Moreover, most (but not all) clients will be perpetually slightly behind if they start behind. Even if they catch up at a faster rate, with the help of services. Thereby justifying services if the family wants them. But that's not the same as clinic level corruption. It's just a fact of cognitive development. But there's no better advertisement for a clinic or clinician than graduating a client. Although I can't speak to reading in the following regard, I agree that there are sometimes lesser supported therapy methods for some delays. This is where the art of picking one's therapist is important, as they differ and what they use is within their discretion. As is the case across the rehab field.
    • bombcar 1y ago
      A system can do something without any of its members directly intending it. Quite common, actually.
      • mrangle 1y ago
        "Can do something" is carrying a lot of weight here. I explained how it is in practice.
• kathyw 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • Jabrov 1y ago
    What demographic? Do you have a link to or some additional information about the data source? Or are you just speculating?
    • yorwba 1y ago
      The source is linked under each graph in the article.
      • isleyaardvark 1y ago
        The source linked under each graph says "No significant change in fourth-grade reading scores across student groups compared to 2015" and "No change in score gaps among selected racial/ethnic groups in reading at grade 4 compared to 2015". If OP thinks removing a certain demographic changes the results they should state what demographic that is.
        • yorwba 1y ago
          The article isn't using the graphs to talk about a difference between 2015 and 2017, but about the overall level, so it would indeed be surprising if there had been a large change between those years. But there are several demographic variables that show substantial differences between groups (and sometimes over longer timescales within a group), so I think it would be more enlightening to look at all of them, rather than letting someone pick their preferred comparison and then trying to argue with that.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• SoftTalker 1y ago
  This seems so weird. When I think about how I learned to read, in the 1970s, it was (as best I can remember) first learning the letters and the sounds they make. Then starting to read words by "sounding them out." I never remember learning about "context" or "what word would make sense here" or "what do the pictures show." Pictures were just there to make the pages more fun to look at for a 7 year old. Of course after some exposure and repetition you start to recognize whole words at a glance. That's just natural, but I never remember learning to read by memorizing whole words.
  • trhway 1y ago
    > in the 1970s, it was (as best I can remember) first learning the letters and the sounds they make. Then starting to read words by "sounding them out." USSR, 70s, the same, my older cousin, 5th grader a the time, taught me to read that way before my first grade. (It was pretty normal to learn to read before starting the school. The writing though was taught at school.)
    • cyberax 1y ago
      That's because the Russian alphabet is phonetic (in one direction). So you just need to learn the sounds corresponding to the letters and a handful of rules used to combine them. After that, you can sound out the words aloud, and then it's just a matter of practice. English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach doesn't quite work well. But at the same time, English teachers don't want to go the full Chinese route. Because if learning letter combinations is somehow "colonizing" ( https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers/ https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers... ), grinding through thousands of words to memorize their pronunciation is probably something like torture and genocide.
      • SoftTalker 1y ago
        Now that you mention it, yes we did learn some combination sounds, and rules about when letters are hard, soft, or silent etc. And exceptions, such as "ph" sounding like "f" but those came later. The first books were like "Dick and Jane" with very simple words.
• giardini 1y ago
  I learned phonics and became an excellent reader without hesitation. Later, some morons in the education system created "better" reading techniques, f*cking up my younger brothers and sisters. Glad to see a return to phonics.
  • hirvi74 1y ago
    While the data on phonics suggests it works well, I feel like I may have benefited from an alternative method (my school taught phonics growing up). I personally do not think I am all the special, but I from what I remember, I believe many of my issues with phonics were: 1. The inconsistency of the English language makes it so phonics is limited after a certain number of words, and then memorization and context must be used. For example, take words like cough, rough, through, though, etc. or words like read, lead, wound, etc. Not to mention all the silent letters we have too. If I am not mistaken, most languages do not have Spelling Bee contests because how clearly the language phonics map to spelling, e.g., German. 2. This is purely a hypothesis on my part, but I wonder if certain accents of English are better suited for phonics than other English accents? I grew up in the Southeast, USA. People slur words, drop off endings, contract words n >= 2 words, and even mispronounce words all. For example, the words "ten" and "tin" or "pen" and "pin" are not typically pronounced differently where I am from. 3. If you are like me and had speech problems, then phonics are substantially harder. It's hard to sound out the words when one's mouth cannot produce the proper sounds. I do not doubt the other alternative methods are worse than phonics, and perhaps I am ignorant, but this debate also seems to be predominately an English only issue. Mandarin Chinese does not have phonics instruction to my knowledge, and they can read just fine. So, perhaps English is just a difficult language to read and pronounce correctly -- even for native speakers?
    • faster 1y ago
      My daughter learned to read english before her 3rd birthday and French before her 5th. We started with sounds but not the phonics instruction that I got as a kid, just matching letters and letter combinations to sounds, and vice versa. But the way I read to her was far closer to whole-word instruction, and her friends who only learned via phonics can't spell to save their lives while she makes very few spelling mistakes. Because as you noted, english spelling is a mess. When I was in elementary school, every kid who didn't form sounds like "normal" went to speech therapy until they did. By 6th grade none of my friends lisped or stuttered or spoke with excessive sibilance. S-backing was not a thing then (it seems half cultural/regional now and half unconscious/untrained/lazy but I have nothing but my experiences to base that on; it is not a conscious choice for anyone I've asked) but today, I hear all of those things so I have to assume that there is not very much speech therapy any more.
• didibus 1y ago
  I'm curious what's the difference between "observational science" and "cognitive science"? I assume it means the former is just one person theorizing from his personal experience as a teacher? That's what we call "observational science"? Where as the cognitive labs, they tried to setup some experiments and did some double blind? Or was it more looking at brain activation?
  • Nevermark 1y ago
    Observational: watch kids, come up with correlations in behavior, then with controls identify causation. Cognitive: watch kids, but pay attention to details and pair them with models of relevant psychological/cognitive models. Ideally, the models help explain the details, or the details help update the models. Cognitive models have much more explanatory and prediction power. But are not much help, no help, or misleading, wherever there are no good models yet. Given cognition is nowhere near a complete model, more a (not entirely consistent) patchwork of a great variety of models, both approaches remain important.
    • didibus 1y ago
      So in this case, both can corroborate their findings because both demonstrate success in learning to read? Since you said both look at controls to assess that they're better than random ? But from the article, it seems to imply there hasn't been controls applied to the three cues system. Therefore it would have always remained just some children become good readers with this methods, so it probably works. And what I'm not able to gather is, how much better are the controls applied by the cognitive one?
      • Nevermark 1y ago
        > how much better are the controls applied by the cognitive one? Good question! Psychology is so complex, my guess is there isn't a clear difference between the two types of studies, but lots of variation in individual paper quality for both.
• chrisgd 1y ago
  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sold-a-story/id1649580473 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sold-a-story/id1649580... A link to the multi episode podcast this article is the basis of. Incredible reporting
• camgunz 1y ago
  APM keeps pushing phonics, but the UK tried it and it's been a disaster: reading ability craters after a couple years. It's not the solution. https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/rev3.3314 https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.10... https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-phonics-to-teach-reading-is-failing-children-says-landmark-study https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p...
  • fn-mote 1y ago
    Education is a system that resists change. Any time you research an educational innovation, part of the work is to measure to what extent the implementation is faithful to the intent. Education research is not like physics research. I absolutely apply that understanding when I read research about major changes in the way reading is taught. I actually think the only way to be confident is to do some kind of primary research yourself. Otherwise, tread lightly and skeptically.
  • naasking 1y ago
    Calling it a disaster seems like an exaggeration, the article literally says UK's PISA scores for reading have not changed. In fact, the experts cited in the article don't even seem to suggest moving away from phonics, but to give teachers more leeway adapt to what their students seem to respond to.
    • phatskat 1y ago
      > give teachers more leeway adapt to what their students seem to respond to. This always feels like one of those “of course, duh” things when the concept of adapting curriculum to students comes up, because it works so well. It’s a bummer that in the US at least, priority for funding that kind of education across public schools is a non-starter. If teachers are buying their own supplies and cramming 20-30 kids in a class, everyone gets the same educational slop and a masters in rote memorization.
      • parineum 1y ago
• luckydata 1y ago
  As an immigrant to the USA teaching in this country is a mess. Teachers apply a lot of semi scientific mumbo jumbo to justify a completely inadequate amount of work required from students to learn. I know it's not popular to say it but my son learns anything I teach him, he might not enjoy the process very much but he never forgot anything I taught him because I make him work. His teachers don't make him do anything with the results you can imagine. If you point it out they say if they did parents would complain.
  • fn-mote 1y ago
    > I know it's not popular to say it but my son learns anything I teach him 1. Remember that you are looking at an experiment with n=1. 2. It sounds like you think the key to education is coercion. ("His teachers don't make him do anything...".) That's a grim world, too. Also, I hope you are looking at your home country's educational system with clear eyes. Not to say I disagree that the US educatonal system is a mess. If you stopped at your second sentence I would entirely agree. As you went on, I started to wonder if you had an experience teaching your child something that was difficult for them. It's not just _forgetting_ that makes learning difficult.
    • luckydata 1y ago
      if a kid is being lazy there's simply no way around "cohercion" as you put it. You know how I know he's being lazy? Because I used to do the same stuff for the same reasons, and my parents and teachers saw through it and didn't make excuses for me or any other kid. We were expected to grow up and learn to do work even when we didn't want to.
      • goopypoop 1y ago
        I remember being at a point where I could read but it took effort, so I would just vibe it. It wasn't coercion that got me to be less lazy, it was the time when I put clearly labelled sugar on my food instead of salt.
        • 1y ago
• aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
  I am dyslectic (as my username suggest), and i was taught the method phonetics in school (in Sweden, not the us), and transitioned naturally to whole word (which i suspect is the intention in that method). I initially struggled to pick up reading, as phonetics is a very difficult method if i cannot tell the letters apart half the time. Once my reading speed started to pick up, it was thanks to dismissing phonetics entirely and reading by whole word, but that leap took time. Talking with others in adulthood, i seem to rely more on whole word than is typical. Others get tricked up by incorrect letters in words, yet i match the word anyway if it has the right shape. The below sentences read to me equally. - I am unbothered by spelling mistakes to a much higher degree than others - l ma unloethsred bs sqellnig mitsakes la a mucb hgiher degeee thna ahters Another issue i encountered is finding reading fun. My parents read a lot for me to make me like stories (which is commonly given as advice to get children reading), but this backfired. My comprehension and appreciation of stories were years ahead of my capacity to read them. Being barely able to get thru "harry potter and the philosophers stone", but preferring "The Lord of the Rings". I now work in a field where reading highly technical text is a major part of my day. Peculiarly, my lower reading speed from my inability to skip properly (something i struggle with because of aforementioned dyslexia) seems to raise my reading comprehension. I many times found details or explanations others don't because they skimmed over important words or phrasings in highly information-dense text. --- I really think foreign words should be read phonetically. Taking the first letter and guessing is an insane way to teach to kids to me. I could imagine they don't pick up new words since they learn to guess words they know instead. Using contexts may become important later as we learn to skim-read, but i don't think we should teach kids to guess anything as they first start to learn.
  • djeastm 1y ago
    >The below sentences read to me equally. I have a dyslexic friend that's the same way. She's great at anagram puzzles. And apparently numbers are not an issue since she's a CFO of a successful company.
  • Izkata 1y ago
    I don't have dyslexia and was taught to read by my parents by sounding out words using regular childrens' books before I started school (so I don't think it was a full-on phonics method, but it definitely wasn't even close to three-cueing either). Those two sentences aren't equal to me, but they're close enough I'm only mildly slowed down reading the second one. Correct letters in the wrong order, instead of also mixing in similar-looking letters, would also be a little easier than that example.
• hyperman1 1y ago
  I remember my first music (note reading) lesson. We got a paper with sentences, and the teacher replaced each word with either 'titi' or 'ta' and we had to repeat it. Our homework for that week was an A4 paper full of words and sentences, and we had to replace them with 'titi' or 'ta' as made sense from context. I somehow managed to get a good grade, but it confused the hell out of me, and made me think of giving up music as too hard. I remember it bothering me the whole week. The second lesson, the teacher says: 'Now we have to learn some hard words. The 'ti' is called a quarter note, and the ta is a half note'. Finally, the whole thing started to make sense to me. Then the teacher says: 'But don't try to understand that, these are very hard words for adults, just memorize them and do what makes sense from context.' Trough that lesson, the teacher kept stressing that same message: Too hard, adult words, do what makes sense instead and use the hard words only to impress the outsiders. I've kept a deep distrust for teachers telling me to do what makes sense in context. I've always kept asking for the actual rules and correct words instead, however complicated they were. It happened a few times later in life too, like my economy teacher giving 'debit' and 'credit' guidelines based on vibes without telling they should be balanced, with subtraction being complicated math according to her.
  • djtango 1y ago
    My first piano teacher was very artsy and whimsical, she and I simply were never able to establish any connection as I have always been a very logical learner. I suffered under her for almost 10 years as a child while she tried to teach music to me in the way that made sense to her. My latest piano teacher was a professor and specialised in the pedagogy of music so he was more than equipped to deal with an overthinking logical type music student like myself. Learning music and an instrument can and should be quite intuitive. And as performing is quite expressive, music can attract people that stereotypical creative type who just wants to play and feel music. But the study of music theory and classical music are quite rigorous subjects and they can be attractive to logical thinkers who thrive learning all the nomenclature. But knowing the nomenclature is not strictly necessary to play music and so you have this disconnect between the very diverse spectrum of people drawn to music. In fact, there is a certain inescapable intuitiveness to music and the professor taught me to really learn to via feeling and establish feedback loops that always come back to the sound and my own motor sensations (did you achieve the sound you want while playing freely?). You can't really logic things like that and if anything it's more like a sport than something you can science when every person's body and dimensions are different. I am now having singing classes and singing is even more mindbending than piano has ever been
• andrewstuart 1y ago
  I try to make sure there’s always age appropriate modern books around for kids to pick up and read. If they like one, and it’s a series, then I rapidly buy the remaining books in the series.
• xg15 1y ago
  > That's how good readers instantly know the difference between "house" and "horse," for example. I like how this sentence itself is an example where the MSV system falls flat: Neither graphic, nor syntactic nor semantic cues would help here to decide whether "house" or "horse" comes first in the sentence.
  • flufluflufluffy 1y ago
    yeah, it seems it is not good for dealing with abstractness
    • scotty79 1y ago
      It's just not good. It's bad.
• appease7727 1y ago
  Did we collectively forget that most written languages directly encode the sounds of the spoken language? Your brain tokenizes sounds into words. A beginner reader has to parse text into sounds and then into the token. An advanced reader can skip the middle step and parse text into tokens. But you still have to know how to parse text into sounds, there's no way around it. It'd be like giving someone a French texbook, only instruct them in English, don't even mention the different sounds, and somehow expect them to learn conversational spoken French. It's nonsense.
• rudimentary_phy 1y ago
  I feel this way about most teaching research, but it's likely a sign that I'm starting to get old. Many instructors at my local university have shifted to the "flipped classroom" approach, and the students just don't feel as confident at the conclusion of a class (this is my highly subjective take). I feel like we have too many methods that try to sneak around the hard parts, or the parts that people might initially find boring, as well as eliminated much of the independent struggle to learn. Educators are more likely to choose this path because it avoids having to deal with the pain of that initial start (it's probably often done unconsciously). Of course, happier students also signals to our brains that we are more successful at the same time. A vicious cycle. For me: I've found that constantly moving towards more difficult things that you aren't quite prepared for is the most effective route. The foundational work I require to accomplish the task is the first thing that gets solidified for me, even if, in my opinion, I'm awful at it when I start. This is one of my criticisms of the modern educational institution and their focus on grades: it discourages this sort of exploration, since it will negatively impact your future (especially if you are the only one doing it). I've always thought that if you are getting an A+ on everything you do, you're wasting most of your time. /{End of Rant}
  • cwillu 1y ago
    Avoiding frustration in learning is like avoiding resistance in weight lifting: it certaining makes it easier, at the cost of entirely eliminating the benefit. Frustration is what a learning brain feels like.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• bravesoul2 1y ago
  what's the tl;dr on a better way to learn to read?
  • dpritchett 1y ago
    Sound words out at the smallest level. Practice. Example: “skin” has multiple sounds to help decipher the word as spelled: “sss”, “sk”, “ih”, “nnn”, “iinn”. Identifying some of those sounds in order helps a reader to sound out the word “skin”. After doing this a few times in a context that helps the reader confirm the meaning of the word they’ve just sounded out they’ll learn it outright. From that point forward they can recognize “skin” on sight without requiring any context.
• zahirbmirza 1y ago
  But actually, you should read this... https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jan/opinion-phonics-teaching-england-needs-change-our-new-research-points-better-approach https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jan/opinion-phonics-teaching...
• twotwotwo 1y ago
  For any parents of small kids here, I have to mention the book Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. We went through it while my kid was in kindergarten, and after that, I absolutely believe what I've heard from parents who did it successfully a bit earlier. And it didn't prevent my kid from figuring out how to use context or recognize full words. Reading English is a lot, and kids are resourceful; if we teach the 'slow' but reliable way to read, they'll be happy to feel out shortcuts. The toughest thing was getting a reliable bit of time each day to sit down and do it. Routine, cajoling, and rewards were all involved. So was keeping it lighthearted; the kid has to be on board! Each lesson has straightforward exercises then a brief story, very short at first, longer later in the book. We'd do the exercises and one read of the story, then kid would read the story to my partner. We started in September, and I remember by Halloween the kid was reading candy wrappers. After finishing it, the next big thing was finding stories the kid genuinely liked to keep it going. Continuing to read together after the lessons ended helped: for a while, kids will keep running into lots of new exceptions to the usual rules, etc. English spelling and pronunciation are a lot, and the book is also, implicitly, a catalog of the tricks English plays on kids and other learners. Part of the book uses a semi-phonetic alphabet where e.g. ee and sh/ch/th have distinct glyphs, but it all still looks enough like English that the jump to regular writing later in the book is doable for the kid. Even with that alphabet, the book has to teach common words like "is" and "was" as exceptions (with s sounding like z). Decades later one can forget little kids deal with all this and eventually handle it like second nature. The book's originator thought that you could teach math with a broadly similar approach--breaking things down into very small steps and practicing them in isolation then in larger tasks--and doing that was part of his career, but I haven't found similar teach-your-kid book for arithmetic/basic math. If such a book did exist I'd've given it a try!
  • euvin 1y ago
    It's not a book, but you might find this interesting: https://mathacademy.com https://mathacademy.com It's a (paid) online platform that breaks down mathematics (from 4th grade to university level) down into very small steps/skills, makes you drill them periodically, and also integrate them in increasingly advanced skills. The platform tracks your successes and failures to give you just the right amount of training at just the right time (in theory). You can see the exact skills they train as these really huge interconnected graphs, all created manually. I read their pedagogy https://www.mathacademy.com/pedagogy https://www.mathacademy.com/pedagogy and it seems to line up a lot with that philosophy. To use their language, they emphasize "finely-scaffolded steps" and "developing automaticity". I always love to see more projects or initiatives in this area. I also know of https://physicsgraph.com https://physicsgraph.com that was inspired by it, but for physics.
• lowbloodsugar 1y ago
  So the system is working as intended then.
• largbae 1y ago
  Three Cue-ing, the flawed idea is three-cueing (looking for context clues to figure out words you don't know). I didn't read the rest of the article out of infuriation with the number of times they alluded to and discredited the technique before naming it.
  • flufluflufluffy 1y ago
    It gets better once they go into it but you’re right, I was also infuriated! The first 10 or so paragraphs read like tabloid click bait. I recommend reading the whole thing though, it actually gets compelling.
• bitwize 1y ago
  The three-cue system is what convinced me that, per Robert Conquest, American education is secretly controlled by a cabal of its enemies. I mean, if I were one of Bezmenov's supposed evil-genius agents of influence seeking to undermine and ruin Western civilization, introducing the way that illiterate people bluff their way through reading as the standard for reading education would definitely be in my toolkit of delightfully devilish methods of cultural sabotage. My wife and I both acquired reading very early -- age three or so. So I don't remember the details of how I acquired it, only driving some of my teachers nuts once I actually did enter school, because I didn't follow the timetable they learned in their expensive university education of when and how kids are supposed to learn to read, do math, or anything else really. But I suspect that one thing you can do to help kids with their reading skills is to read to them, starting very early. My wife and I have similar experience of being read to by our moms, eventually seeing the ability to read as a "magic power"[0] of sorts, and becoming determined to learn this skill, so that we could unlock the tremendous power of books and writing for ourselves. Contrariwise, the kids I've known who struggled with reading early on (even my own sister when I was younger) tended to get bored quickly, give up, and want to do other things. Reading is an intellectually demanding skill, much like computer programming except for degree -- there's a bit at the beginning that's really hard, because it's based on insights that you don't have yet, and you just kind of have to bro through it. Those who think it just "comes naturally" or whatever are just really, really well practiced at it. You gotta keep your eyes on the prize in order to stay determined to power through the hard bits. Inspiring kids like this begins at home, though school and even television programs like Reading Rainbow (when I was growing up) certainly help. [0] When the Cherokee silversmith Sequoyah devised a writing system for his people, the Cherokee reacted at first with horror: written material, or "talking leaves", was the white man's evil magic! Once he walked them through how it worked, however, they embraced it and the Cherokee became more literate than the surrounding white population.
• xivzgrev 1y ago
  Wow this cue method was confusing to me. It's like saying the most efficient way to drive a car is to press the pedal, while turning a crank, while also tooting a horn. No. The most efficient way is to just drive the car with the pedal. Likewise, efficiently being able to identify words is, surprise surprise, the most efficient way to then read a series of words (sentence).
• trane_project 1y ago
  I'll keep the self-promotion to a minimum, but I have been spending lots of time reading on the science consensus on how children actually become fluent readers as part of my upcoming product Pictures Are For Babies (https://picturesareforbabies.com https://picturesareforbabies.com), a literacy program that uses a deliberate practice engine I created to teach literacy from A-B-C to post-secondary level. Phonics is all the rage, and I was planning to make it central to my pedagogy, but it turns out the answer is a bit more complicated, especially if you want to work with children with reading difficulties. Phonics is part of the answer, but it's only the first step. Introducing children to the explicit mapping of graphemes to phonemes (letter to sounds) teaches decoding, but skilled reading is not decoding. Actual reading is developed through a process called orthographic mapping. The result of this process is storing the grapheme to phoneme mappings in long-term memory for immediate retrieval. The words stored in this way form a sight vocabulary that spans tens of thousands of words in fluent readers. When taught only phonics, kids run the risk of plateauing in later grades. It's not evident at first because the material they are given is simple and deals with concrete subjects (e.g. "Mike got a bunny for his birthday"). Later material uses many more words that don't follow phonics "rules" and deal with abstract material. Under these circumstances, decoding is too slow and effortful and leaves little remaining capacity to deal with harder tasks like comprehension. The main cause of issues in developing this sight vocabulary is phonological deficits, not IQ, motivation, intelligence, visual processing, or attention like one might imagine. Kids with these deficits have trouble understanding that words are made up of smaller sound units and cannot work with them. Because of that, they cannot store the mapping efficiently and their vocabulary and fluency is limited. Thankfully, the best interventions that fix these deficits are not too complicated and can correct the issues with as little as a dozen of hours of correct instruction. The main drawback is that finding and targeting those deficits is time-consuming for the instructors, but my program deals with that through the practice engine, which automates all that work. The bad news is that most teachers are not aware of this and are simply being moved to phonics, which will not work for all children unless those phonemics deficits are identified and remediated. Worse news is that most commercial products that claim to be evidence-based or backed by the "science of reading" still use phonics and make no mention of orthographic mapping, the actual process that produces fluent readers. Again, phonics instruction is part of the answer, but nowhere near the entire story. You can look at my pedagogy document for more info. Although it's meant to be about my product, it still contains a primer of the actual research on how full literacy (not just reading, but writing as well) is developed: https://picturesareforbabies.com/home/pedagogy/ https://picturesareforbabies.com/home/pedagogy/
• ipython 1y ago
  Just wanted to remind everyone, journalism like this is partially funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was just defunded by this administration this week. See their "Funders" section here: https://features.apmreports.org/about.html https://features.apmreports.org/about.html.
  • tigerlily 1y ago
    Reading TFA felt exhilarating. Like taking drugs on a thrill ride. No seriously. It's hard for me to explain, but as I read, I felt the device I was holding had turned into solid gold in my hand. The scariest part for me: > Cueing was appealing because they didn't know what else to do. A whole pedagogy in the grip of learned helplessness, as if they all caught some insane mind virus, to the point they were virtually inoculated from the knowledge their methods could be considered harmful. Think about it. When you multiply out the disadvantage to kids of a poor start in reading, the compound interest comes back as poor performance in other areas such as writing, maths, science, reasoning skills, technology use. Think it through and you realize it screws everything. The real sci-fi question is, could it scale to bereave a whole society of its very cohesion?
• WalterBright 1y ago
  > The theory was first proposed in 1967 Good thing I learned to read (phonics) before that nut showed up. > Picture Power! This whole word nonsense must have been the motivation for icons promulgated by Steve Jobs, which have infected everything. The latest diseased device I bought was a new scanner, which has a touch screen overflowing with icons. Naturally, the icons are unique and invented by arteests imagining they are Susan Kare. It's all WTF do these things do, which you can only hope to discern by touching them and hoping the scanner does not go into paper-shredding mode.
• bschne 1y ago
  Tangentially related to this issue: I went back to university for a CS undergrad in my mid-20s after already having some experience writing code. One thing that really struck me while both TAing and informally supporting others in an intro programming class with somewhat subpar teaching was how many people went through the whole thing never grokking how the code was actually parsed by the computer. They would sort of learn how to solve problems, but many would still constantly get tripped up by things like confusing meaningful keywords and function names with arbitrary naming of variables and so on. At the beginning, the course just sort of jumped straight to showing finished code for simple problems, introducing python library functions, and so on — without ever really having students develop a low-level understanding of what was going on (by which I don't mean "what's the machine code this turns into", just "how is this code structured at the low level").
• mmis1000 1y ago
  As a chinese user. This story is somewhat confusing to me. Because in my language system. Pronounce is the mapping of some Character combination that express certain meaning. Pronounce may be hugely different or completely unrelated in different area. But meaning of word is the same. So you are forced to link some image (a fixed group of characters) to meaning (there is no other way anyway). Does the technics in this article still applies? Or it's just different in different language?
  • iainmerrick 1y ago
    I think a roughly comparable procedure in Chinese might be to take in only a few radicals, and guess the likely meaning of a character based on the surrounding context, rather than fully recognising each character individually. The theory is that skilled readers do this unconsciously, blending various factors and using shortcuts rather than fully comprehending each character / word. It sounds very plausible - how else would skilled readers get so fast? But in experimental tests, apparently skilled readers are very good at fully comprehending individual characters / words, without any context available. So it seems that if you don’t learn to do that, you won’t become a skilled reader.
    • mmis1000 1y ago
      > fully recognising each character individually. > comprehending individual characters / words, Weirdly enough, the elementary school here does taught both at same time. We have article reading in the test. Which don't really ask you recognize the characters down to the stroke. We also have "改錯字". Which roughly means "find the typo", but with a bit difference. The teacher may alter the character itself (add a stroke or remove a stroke) instead of replace it by some other characters. So you need to know how "exactly" should the character look like to pass the test.
• burnt-resistor 1y ago
  Evidence-based education > recurring failures. Trying what doesn't work and expecting a different result is either madness or stupidity.
• ryao 1y ago
  I found this article painful to read, not because reading it was difficult, but because of how deeply flawed it is. It correctly identifies one system of teaching reading as flawed (to put it mildly), but then is an advertisement for another slightly less flawed system by advocating for phonetics. The problem with phonetics is that it is unreliable when applied to the English language. The following video shows the problem: https://youtu.be/uZV40f0cXF4 https://youtu.be/uZV40f0cXF4 English does not follow the alphabetic principle, so any ability to sound out words is vestigial. It might work for a number of words, but then you will hit one where it does not work. I remember as a child, trying to sound out words as I was told to do, and getting them wrong. I eventually realized that the word pronunciations had to be memorized. I did not understand why until I was an adult. The reason is that English writing does not follow the alphabetic principle unlike many other languages which do. This is why schools in English speaking countries have spelling bees, while countries where languages that follow the alphabetic principle do not. Just about all of the students in the latter countries will always get the spelling of words in their local language correct, 100% of the time, such that there will be no winner and thus there is no point to a spelling bee. Look at the actual sounds used in American English: https://americanipachart.com/ https://americanipachart.com/ There are 39. Just for fun, British Received Pronunciation has 44: https://englishwithlucy.com/phonemic-chart/ https://englishwithlucy.com/phonemic-chart/ Let’s not forget foreign loanwords, which might or might not be pronounced using the native foreign pronunciation. With only 26 letters, how are people supposed to ever be able to sound out words correctly? The only way is to memorize what is right in advance, which is the only way poor Ricky Ricardo ever learned how to pronounce the -ough words in English. It is also how my younger self learned to read. The article suggests this is called the “whole word” approach, and despite what the article claims, that is the only sane way to learn to read. As someone who learned a number of words by “sounding them out”, prior to realizing sounding them out does not work, I can recall humiliation after evoking laughter when adults heard me pronounce words such as rendezvous and polygamy, which I pronounced as /rɛndɛzəvus/ and /poligami/. You can hear just how wrong these pronunciations are by copy and pasting the IPA into this site: https://ipa-reader.com/ https://ipa-reader.com/ In a number of cases, I learned words twice. Once via “sounding out” and another via hearing it said. I had no idea that the two were the same word and thought that they were distinct words. I only ever realized they were not after hearing someone read the word, expecting to hear the former and instead hearing the latter, which in a number of cases, took several years to happen. The phonetics approach relies on children doing recitations of cherrypicked texts to give the illusion of reading, but reading involves not just recitation but comprehension. In a language that follows the alphabetic principle, a child could trivially recite a graduate level text, but would not understand any of it. That is easily determined by asking questions about the text. However, since cherrypicked children‘s texts are used by phonetics based learning, people assume they recitation equals understanding, when that is not necessarily true. The children will only understand it when the words are words that they learned orally a priori. That said, the phonetic approach could be less flawed if they taught children to anticipate every possible variation of pronunciation, which would at least help them identify words that they have previously heard. However, that would require admitting that children cannot know the words if they had not previously learned them. That would be a fantastic admission as it would avoid making life difficult for children (and it would have prevented my embarrassment over mispronouncing words such as rendezvous and polygamy), but it would not allow for the smoke and mirrors demonstrations that proponents of the phonetics approach use to advocate for it, which is to get children that could not read well previously to recite cherry-picked children’s texts, under the false premise that recitation equals understanding.
• bsenftner 1y ago
  I was never "taught to read", one of my earliest memories was being gifted a old trunk filled with comic books from a cousin's return from Vietnam. Several hundred comics, many of them dating back to the early 60's, the time this occurred was 1969. Everything from all the DC/Marvel, Donald Duck, European comics, the oversized and banned horror comics with nudity, and of course a shit load of underground comics like the Freak Bros, and more. When school started, kindergarten, I knew how to read. I had a kid's novel with me I was reading, something like "Mrs Frisby & the rats of NIMN".
  • OJFord 1y ago
    You claim you just inferred sounds from letter shapes and started putting it together yourself, with no training data?
    • bsenftner 1y ago
      I remember just looking at the pictures, and for some reason I really liked Spiderman. (There was a Spiderman cartoon in the late 60's.) I noticed that Spiderman's comics when they showed him in his ghetto apartment, it was always filled with books, with the titles readable. I could not read the titles, but figured if the people making the comics were putting all these books in Peter Parker's apartment, the books are probably useful for superheros. That idiot logic is what got me to start wanting to read, to know what Peter Parker was reading. I started, slowly, and taught myself with a goal.
    • ashwinsundar 1y ago
      Are you implying that people use “training data” to learn things
      • HappMacDonald 1y ago
        I think he's implying that humans require available information from which to learn new things, and that borrowing a term from AI research is one valid (if backwards-sounding) way to describe that fact.
      • 1y ago
• pards 1y ago
  Summary: The current system of 3 cues (pictures, context, syntax) is ineffective because kids don't actually read the words. SIPPS is a better way. > Around the same time, Goldberg was trained in a program that uses a different strategy for teaching children how to read words. The program is called "Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words," or SIPPS.24 It's a phonics program that teaches children how to sound out words and uses what are known as "decodable books." Most words in the books have spelling patterns that kids have been taught in their phonics lessons.
• xtiansimon 1y ago
  Curious about the controversy, reading this was only more confusing. I learned to read by the phonics method, and the idea there are words whose meaning I don’t know. If you don’t know the meaning you try to intuit the meaning from it’s part of speech, context, and if you can’t figure it out, move on. So I was surprised and confused reading this article to believe that readers were taught to skip the phonics and jump to some kind of gestalt of the word shape? It should be no wonder that some people don’t like creative typography and layouts.
  • altairprime 1y ago
    > skip the phonics and jump to some kind of gestalt of the word shape I like that summary. It highlights something specific for me: this teaching method is essentially about word grifting, as in “trying to cheat the text out of a meaning without having paid its cost of reading”. With that mindset instilled early and decades ago, it’s no wonder AI text is so prevalent in schools and that such schisms exist between its adherents and detractors. I bet the students who were taught to grift reading don’t realize anyone who learned reading one of the hard ways can identify AI text from nuances invisible to them.
  • graemep 1y ago
    Yes, its called whole word learning. Its how I learned to read, and how my kids learned to read. its not a gestalt, its simply shape recognition. You learn letters and common letter combinations and how to work out words you do not know later instead of first. its not a very reliable process in English though! Are you sure of the correct pronunciation of a word you come across only in written form? The advantage, in my experience is that you learn to read faster and its more fun. You start off with something like guessing game with flashcards and kids quickly learn a wide range of words. The disadvantage maybe that it really needs one to one attention. Great for kids that learn to read from parents (like me and mine), but not going to work well in a classroom.
• ajsnigrutin 1y ago
  As someone living in a slavic country, i never understood the english/americans and their spelling bees, because 99% of the words in my language (slovene) can be spelled by phonetics (with some, but few exceptions), but english had a bunch of weird rules and extra letters, especially when you come to british (ahem "leicester"). Serbian for example is even more literal with "write how you say it and say it how you write it", and that includes "Britni Spirs" and "Arnold Švarceneger". If you didn't know the spelling for "xylophone", you'd assume it's "zylophone", but for some reason there's an 'x' there. Waiting in line? Well, you have to "queue" but not "cue". Sure, historic reasons, like with "ye olde pub" not having a "yee" there... but it's a pain to learn, especially for children who are not that exposed to englsh texts (but mostly cartoons, especially in my time, where dubbing was almost non-existant). Same for french (ahem "jouaient"). On the other hand, we have some messed up rules too... slovenia was a part of yugoslavia, but we don't have the leter "ć", while most yugoslav countries do. We also have a rule that we write words (especially names) from non-latin alphabets phonetically (president of china is "Ši Džinping"), with the exception of serbian cyrilic. So, let's say you have someone with a surname (anglicized to) Petrovich ("son of Peter"). If the person is from croatia, his surname is writen in latin alphabet as "Petrović" (note the "ć"), and since it' a latin alphabet, we write it "Petrović", as the original (same for names with "x", "y", "z", "q"" that we also don't natively use). If it's someome from russa etc. (cyrillic) or any other non-latin-alphabet using country, he'd be "Petrovič" (since we don't have the letter "ć" we'd transcribe to "č". But if he's a serb (cyrillic Петровић), he'd be "Petrović" (with a "ć" again). So yeah... My languge of choice will be Perl, it's simpler.
• inglor_cz 1y ago
  In an alternate universe, the Ottomans sailed the Atlantic first and now we are all speaking Turkish, a very regular language with few exceptions to anything. I mean, I love English, but the learning curve is crazy, though nowhere near as crazy as Chinese would be.
• jvvw 1y ago
  It's pretty much impossible to find a school in the UK that doesn't use phonics. One of my sons learned to read mostly using phonics, whereas the other one I think learned through a mixture of phonics and whole word recognition (not necessarily taught by the school - he just seemed to remember and recognise words and not really need phonics so much). It was interesting seeing how our particular school did teach reading using phonics. They used something called a 'Thrass chart'. It had 120 boxes, each one containing a letter or combination of letters that could make a particular sound and an example of a word containing that combination and sound. So, importantly, some combinations of letters appeared more than once on the chart. It looks rather complicated when you first looked it at but obviously they introduced it all very gradually. So if somebody was stuck on a word, it would be 'Let's find those letters on the Thrass chart and see what sounds they could make'. I can't find a good image of it online, but you can see a slightly blurred one on this page: https://www.thrass.co.uk/ https://www.thrass.co.uk/
  • deleted 1y ago
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• upofadown 1y ago
  The experimental science behind this revolution in understanding the cognition of reading is pretty interesting. One of the things that is done is to switch the text on the screen while the subject is moving their eyes to see how badly it messes up the reading process. Here is an article that talks about this research in relation to the long accepted, but now discredited, idea that word shape is important in reading. * https://learn.microsoft.com/en-ca/typography/develop/word-recognition https://learn.microsoft.com/en-ca/typography/develop/word-re... BTW, this in turn suggests that the long accepted idea that lower case is easer to read than upper case is also wrong.
  • HappMacDonald 1y ago
    > the long accepted idea that lower case is easer to read than upper case uh.. that sounds to me about as accepted as "cursive is easier to read than print". Upper case is the canonical form of our alphabet (as written in Latin) while lower case is a newer addition (adapted from many greek letter shapes) that may be easier to write in rapid succession, but as such that also makes it one step towards cursive. When I was a child in elementary school I was taught that "you all have to learn cursive because when you grow up that's what adults use, they don't use print any more". I remember thinking about that while driving with my parents, and asking them "if adults use cursive exclusively like my teacher says then why are all the road signs in print"? I can levy that same query to your statement: if it is a long accepted idea that lower case is easier to read, then why are all of the road signs (which famously prioritize ease of reading) always written in all caps?
• scotty79 1y ago
  Isn't this purely English problem? I never heard about any other language culture encouraging children to guess words. They have natural tendency to do so, which pretty much anyone understands, is counterproductive to reading and must be suppressed. The most common "in the moment" instruction for a kid learning to read, when they try and fail is "Don't make stuff up! Read!" (In their respective language of course). Encouraging kid to guess what's on paper seems absolutely idiotic. Is Ken Goodman the Andre Wakefield of education, just without the ulterior motiv?
• agys 1y ago
  Meta-reading! I couldn’t stop inspecting my own reading mechanism while reading through the article.
• deleted 1y ago
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• bwanab 1y ago
  For anybody who's interested in spending an hour listening, this podcast (https://www.econtalk.org/read-like-a-champion-with-doug-lemov/?share=true https://www.econtalk.org/read-like-a-champion-with-doug-lemo...) gives a very good, detailed look at what's wrong with current reading programs in the U.S. and how to do it better. Phonics, vocabulary and background knowledge.
• rapatel0 1y ago
  As a father trying to get my kindergartner to read and also someone working in ML, it's amazing to me how this mirrors my life experience and ml concepts. When I was a kid, there was a big effort to experiment on our grade using a concept called whole language, as compared to phonics for reading. I am a whole language person and I've learned to read and retain pretty quickly. Anyways, this totally mirrors the concept of tokenization. Phonics vs whole languge is suspiciously similar to letter, word, and subword tokenization. One wonders if we as human do a proxy for BPE in our brains when we learn to read. To this day I'm an absolutely shitty speller.
• hosh 1y ago
  The strategies and outcome for the three-cue system reminds me of how LLMs autocompletes, and even hallucinates. Maybe for some, vibe reading is good enough. But given our culture wars where people of different beliefs cannot talk to each other without flamewars on social media platforms where people read and write, I think the big societal risk here is that people will infer the meaning they are biased towards, and not actually communicating with each other.
• morpheos137 1y ago
  I didn't read the whole article yet (lol) but I am not sure what the author's issue is. She seems to take issue with memorizing words. That's how I think I read. I recognize the shape of the whole word, instantly, unconsciously. I don't sound out the word or pay attention to the letters. I don't see why memorizing words is a bad strategy. Many English words are not spelled regularly or phonetically so phonics reading strategies are not necessarily a good route? What else is there besides associating each word with an meaining in memory. It seems less direct to associate a word with a sound and then associate that sound with a meaning. When I am reading I never consider the sounds of parts of words or of letters to get the meaning of the whole word. Rather I associate each word with an idea visually and then my brain makes it available to my consciousness as that idea spoken in my internal reading voice, or less often as a visual experience. For example if I read "red" I hear "red" and see red in my mind's eye and mind's ear.
  • slibhb 1y ago
    You're making the same mistake as the researchers who invented "three cueing". They asked themselves "what do I do when I read?" and tried to reverse-engineer a teaching method. Well, turns out that approach doesn't work very well. Part of this may be that "how you think you read" isn't actually how you read. There's plenty of experimental evidence that adept adult readers do use letters as cues rather than "holistically recognizing the word". You could be an outlier but I doubt it. Anyway, empirically, it's quite clear that phonics works and the "whole language" approach (which "three cueing" is an example of) doesn't. One of the main reasons teachers in the US continue to avoid phonics is that they don't like teaching it.
    • morpheos137 1y ago
      I absolutely suspect that most adult readers myself included use letters as clues for recognizing the shape of the word. What I dispute is that reading necessarily goes letters->sound recognition->meaning / understanding. I suspect for myself and many others it goes letters->word shape recognition->understanding ->then last part is sound in my mind's ear. Infact when I am writing and reading I find myself thinking about the shapes of printed words. I don't even consider what they sound like except maybe in retrospect. Maybe I am an outlier. To me it makes logical sense. When I read a word I see the word in my mind's eye (eg m i n d) and hear the word after an after effect. Printed text is a visual item. Meaning need not have a sound associated with it. It makes sense to go directly from vision to recognition of meaning. I don't need to know what words sound like to understand their meaning. As a kid I took Latin and Ancient greek. Honestly I don't think anyone knows the precise phonetics as they were spoken at the time of these ancient languages and yet that is no impediment to understanding the meaning of word by reading the written word with your eyes. There is no need for phonics in reading. It's based on the misunderstanding that the sound is the unique vehicle of meaning when it need not be.
• ajuc 1y ago
  It sucks that instead of fixing the spelling you add workaround everywhere else.
• ropable 1y ago
  It's been touched on in many other comments, but I think that one of the key things that affects reading proficiency is practice time. This definitely includes being read to; parents spending time reading to their kids is often a large multiple of what the school environment provides. Nothing beats kids getting in those additional hours of practice at home. I don't have strong opinions about different methods of teaching but an important principal is that education cannot be totally outsourced to the education system. To the best of their capability, parents make a large contribution. The best educational result is always a shared effort.
• MashaBell 1y ago
  Google brought this thread to my attention and I can't help making a few observations. Learning 7 languages made it clear to me that the ease of learning to read depends mainly on the consistency of the spelling system in which this happens. The adoption of Pinyin in China is clear proof of that. I found English spelling furthest removed from the alphabetic principle of representing speech sounds in a regular manner and hardest to cope with http://englishspellingproblems.blogspot.co.uk http://englishspellingproblems.blogspot.co.uk. I am certain that a few well-aimed changes could make learning to read English much easier http://improvingenglishspelling.blogspot.co.uk http://improvingenglishspelling.blogspot.co.uk and used to advocate this, but at 80 have come to realise that the chances of it happening are slim, but think that it's important for more people, especially teachers, to understand what an exceptionally flawed spelling system English has and how it ended up like that http://englishspellingproblems.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/history-of-english-spelling.html http://englishspellingproblems.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/histor...