5 ms·

I learned phonics and became an excellent reader without hesitation. Later, some morons in the education system created "better" reading techniques, f*cking up

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.
  - gsinclair 1y ago
    Anyone who learned to read before their third birthday is exceptional and not an example from which we can draw inferences. But good on her! My son is similarly talented with language and it’s a beautiful thing to watch.
    - graemep 1y ago
      I am not sure the child is exceptional so much as the environment. It depends on what you mean by being able to read. What level of reading?
      - faster 1y ago
        I want to believe that my kid is exceptional but based on grades in school and accomplishments since graduating, I'd say that she has a talent for languages and is solidly above average but not otherwise exceptional. She has traveled a lot starting at about 6 months, and has been exposed to lots of languages and cultures. She has some Mandarin now, a little German and a lot of Japanese. So I definitely agree that her environment has supported her language acquisition. When she was 8, she often read the same books that I read, mostly science fiction, some but not all YA. When she was 10 her class read The Oddysey in French. She was always at least a couple years ahead of her peers in reading level.
        mlyle 1y ago
        IMO: a whole lot of this, in circles like ours, is Bloom's two sigma effect. (Individual tutorial methods routinely produce results similar to what you get at the top of a normal class). The parenting/environmental effects fade a lot (but are still present) by adolescence.
        graemep 1y ago
        Thanks, I did not know about that term, but it fits in with other things I have read and my own experience. While the effects fade, the advantages gained thereby can last. Being ahead of age norm for reading allowed access to more books, and both learning opportunities. More for my kids who were home educated up to 16[1] so had more time to read stuff they chose, than for me. It also formed a liking for reading. Parental influence can have a lasting impact. My older daughter is now an electronic engineer, which is the result of an interest that started with making circuits with me as a child. [1] This makes sense in the British system where the usual age for finishing one set of exams (GCSEs) is 16 (which is the end of compulsory school age) and you then do more specialist exams (A levels in my kids case, there are qualifications too) after that.
- akdor1154 1y ago
  > 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? I think your conclusion is right but that example is a bad one (though interesting). Chinese is not a phonetic language. Each symbol is a 'word', roughly. This means you can quite possibly read without knowing how it sounds. This is how the many Chinese languages co-exist - the written forms are roughly the same, it's just spoken with different sounds. It's an interesting tangent on this topic because Chinese are starting to see a comparable literacy problem - inability to recall the written characters when hand-writing. This is because most writing these days is done by IMEs on computers and phones, where you actually DO input a phonetic latin 'word', and the IME turns it into the Chinese character you want. I still read that as somewhat supporting your opinion - that purely phonetic languages are easier to learn, and that languages that are less phonetic (English) or completely unphonetic (Chinese) are harder. Whether that supports phonics or not? I'm not sure, personally i think it does, but your experience that it's still a difficult system is not wrong.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- seszett 1y ago
  > Mandarin Chinese does not have phonics instruction to my knowledge, and they can read just fine. Learning Chinese with a phonetic alphabet (bopomofo) is pretty common as far as I know, maybe just in Taiwan though. I suppose China mostly uses pinyin for this now.
  - musicale 1y ago
    > Learning Chinese with a phonetic alphabet (bopomofo) is pretty common as far as I know, maybe just in Taiwan though. I suppose China mostly uses pinyin for this now. I have also seen this in learning materials: 1. Putting the phonetic spelling (e.g. pinyin or bopomofo) in small print above the characters; a similar approach (furigana) is used for kanji in Japanese (in language textbooks and apps as well as books for beginning readers); there are special fonts as well as browser extensions, etc.; for Chinese/hanzi a font with phonetic superscripts would probably work well. 2. Phonetic sets; in addition to semantic elements/radicals, many characters also contain a phonetic element, which may not be exact (perhaps a bit like phonics in English) but studying groups of characters that share the same phonetic element can help with figuring out pronunciation or recognizing less familiar characters.
- giardini 1y ago
  hirvi74says >"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."< In grade school English class, our teacher raised as examples "cough", "rough", "through", "though", etc.(i.e., all the "ough" words). She pointed out that sometimes words are inconsistent with phonics. I became annoyed and complained about the inconsistency. Her response (to me and the class) was straightforward: phonics wasn't exact and some parts of speaking and reading must be memorized. But she also pointed out that everybody else had learned it as a child and that we would too, which was a pretty convincing argument. Within a few days the desire for a foolish consistency evaporated as we advanced through our reading assignments, slaughtering armies of text before us. English words are composed of characters from a phonetic alphabetic. In Chinese each word is a unique character. So there is no phonics system for Chinese.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - khuey 1y ago
    > In Chinese each word is a unique character. This is not true in contemporary Chinese. There are plenty of Chinese words that consist of multiple characters. There are also Chinese characters that have no meaning outside of a multicharacter word (e.g. the 葡 in 葡萄 ).
    - lisper 1y ago
      But do these characters correspond to sounds?
      - acyou 1y ago
        Not exactly, more or less to some extent without a 1:1 correspondence, more like a 1:100 or something like that technically, but practically it probably works out to roughly 1:1 to 1:2 correspondence on average?
- WalterBright 1y ago
  > 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. True, but it's not actually a problem. Just sound out the words, and you'll infer from the context which word it actually is and "fix" it in your mind. People listening to you read aloud will also know what what the correct pronunciation is and will help you correct it.
- dfawcus 1y ago
  Are 'spelling bee' contests only (or mainly) a USA thing? My first experience of the idea was in US films and TV programs. I never came across it at school in England. FWIW, my reading lessons (both at school in the early '70s), and at home at the same time used a form of phonics. Although I never knew that term until over 30 years later. We simply knew it as breaking the word apart in to pronounceable pieces. As mentioned in the article, I still occasionally use the technique if and when I come across an unknown word.
  - davidgay 1y ago
    > Are 'spelling bee' contests only (or mainly) a USA thing? The French "dictée" is similar, but has you write down a spoken (coherent text). One that usually gets weekly practiced (and graded...) in primary school, but there's also spelling-bee-like events, e.g., https://dicteepourtous.fr/ https://dicteepourtous.fr/ French pronunciation is mostly consistent (more so than English at least), but there's several complications: - multiple ways to spell the same sound (so you just need to know for that word) - often silent terminal consonants (but they must be present, because they are pronounced in some contexts) - the pronounced syllables don't always match word boundaries ("liaison") The last two points also explain why a coherent text is a more useful test than just single complex words.
    - HappMacDonald 1y ago
      > French pronunciation is mostly consistent (more so than English at least) Most of English's inconsistencies stem from words absorbed from other languages, and far and away the largest helping of that was the French that British nobility picked up during the Norman invasion. My understanding of French pronunciation primarily revolves around the idea that 80% of words end in three randomly selected vowels followed by 1-3 randomly selected maximally hard consonants such as j, x, z, k.. and that the sum total of those randomly selected letters always sound identical to the vowel portion of the word "œuf" which means "egg". Which is also basically like trying to say "eww" while you have an egg in your mouth.
      - 1y ago
Jensson 1y ago
I can see that being different from language to language, phonics is pretty complicated in English but in other languages with a much more direct relationship between the letters and the sounds its much easier. I learned to read in another language and I went from not being able to read to being able to read just about anything in a few weeks, because the phonics are much more consistent if I have heard a word and then I see it written I could easily connect the two without someone telling me.
graemep 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. I, my siblings, and my kids all learned to read using whole words and we are all excellent readers. Neither your family nor mine are statistically significant samples. My experience of teaching my kids words before letters was that it was pretty easy. On the other hand we all learned to read young, and at home, and with the assumption it was a fun thing to do, all of which makes it a very different experience to learning at school in classes.
- happyopossum 1y ago
  Your description of learning using whole words is not contradictory to the article - TFA takes issue with cueing and whole language systems, which don’t teach words - they teach kids to guess or skip words.
nosioptar 1y ago
Phonics was a great way to learn. But, now I'm hooked on the bastards. You'd weep if you knew the stuff I've done in poorly lit truck stops for just a single line of phonics...
rapatel0 1y ago
I don't think the research is as clear cut as the article suggests. Firstly, the concept was created in the 60s and only became wide spread in the 80s. The study was conducted in the 1975. This has two important implications: - There were fewer people that were actually instructed in whole language and they skewed younger (and less practiced) - The teaching profession had fewer years of as practitioners so methods resources were likely unrefined. Fewer books, instructional materials. Also, there is always a bias to publish a scoop in acadamia, so unless there were multiple corroborating studies we should take it with a grain of salt. Most importantly, I think that different kids learn differently. My son has been working on phonics for a long time and still struggles connecting sounds to words. In contrast, whole language approaches have been working better for him.

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.
- gsinclair 1y ago
  Anyone who learned to read before their third birthday is exceptional and not an example from which we can draw inferences. But good on her! My son is similarly talented with language and it’s a beautiful thing to watch.
  - graemep 1y ago
    I am not sure the child is exceptional so much as the environment. It depends on what you mean by being able to read. What level of reading?
    - faster 1y ago
      I want to believe that my kid is exceptional but based on grades in school and accomplishments since graduating, I'd say that she has a talent for languages and is solidly above average but not otherwise exceptional. She has traveled a lot starting at about 6 months, and has been exposed to lots of languages and cultures. She has some Mandarin now, a little German and a lot of Japanese. So I definitely agree that her environment has supported her language acquisition. When she was 8, she often read the same books that I read, mostly science fiction, some but not all YA. When she was 10 her class read The Oddysey in French. She was always at least a couple years ahead of her peers in reading level.
      - mlyle 1y ago
        IMO: a whole lot of this, in circles like ours, is Bloom's two sigma effect. (Individual tutorial methods routinely produce results similar to what you get at the top of a normal class). The parenting/environmental effects fade a lot (but are still present) by adolescence.
        graemep 1y ago
        Thanks, I did not know about that term, but it fits in with other things I have read and my own experience. While the effects fade, the advantages gained thereby can last. Being ahead of age norm for reading allowed access to more books, and both learning opportunities. More for my kids who were home educated up to 16[1] so had more time to read stuff they chose, than for me. It also formed a liking for reading. Parental influence can have a lasting impact. My older daughter is now an electronic engineer, which is the result of an interest that started with making circuits with me as a child. [1] This makes sense in the British system where the usual age for finishing one set of exams (GCSEs) is 16 (which is the end of compulsory school age) and you then do more specialist exams (A levels in my kids case, there are qualifications too) after that.
akdor1154 1y ago
> 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? I think your conclusion is right but that example is a bad one (though interesting). Chinese is not a phonetic language. Each symbol is a 'word', roughly. This means you can quite possibly read without knowing how it sounds. This is how the many Chinese languages co-exist - the written forms are roughly the same, it's just spoken with different sounds. It's an interesting tangent on this topic because Chinese are starting to see a comparable literacy problem - inability to recall the written characters when hand-writing. This is because most writing these days is done by IMEs on computers and phones, where you actually DO input a phonetic latin 'word', and the IME turns it into the Chinese character you want. I still read that as somewhat supporting your opinion - that purely phonetic languages are easier to learn, and that languages that are less phonetic (English) or completely unphonetic (Chinese) are harder. Whether that supports phonics or not? I'm not sure, personally i think it does, but your experience that it's still a difficult system is not wrong.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
seszett 1y ago
> Mandarin Chinese does not have phonics instruction to my knowledge, and they can read just fine. Learning Chinese with a phonetic alphabet (bopomofo) is pretty common as far as I know, maybe just in Taiwan though. I suppose China mostly uses pinyin for this now.
- musicale 1y ago
  > Learning Chinese with a phonetic alphabet (bopomofo) is pretty common as far as I know, maybe just in Taiwan though. I suppose China mostly uses pinyin for this now. I have also seen this in learning materials: 1. Putting the phonetic spelling (e.g. pinyin or bopomofo) in small print above the characters; a similar approach (furigana) is used for kanji in Japanese (in language textbooks and apps as well as books for beginning readers); there are special fonts as well as browser extensions, etc.; for Chinese/hanzi a font with phonetic superscripts would probably work well. 2. Phonetic sets; in addition to semantic elements/radicals, many characters also contain a phonetic element, which may not be exact (perhaps a bit like phonics in English) but studying groups of characters that share the same phonetic element can help with figuring out pronunciation or recognizing less familiar characters.
giardini 1y ago
hirvi74says >"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."< In grade school English class, our teacher raised as examples "cough", "rough", "through", "though", etc.(i.e., all the "ough" words). She pointed out that sometimes words are inconsistent with phonics. I became annoyed and complained about the inconsistency. Her response (to me and the class) was straightforward: phonics wasn't exact and some parts of speaking and reading must be memorized. But she also pointed out that everybody else had learned it as a child and that we would too, which was a pretty convincing argument. Within a few days the desire for a foolish consistency evaporated as we advanced through our reading assignments, slaughtering armies of text before us. English words are composed of characters from a phonetic alphabetic. In Chinese each word is a unique character. So there is no phonics system for Chinese.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- khuey 1y ago
  > In Chinese each word is a unique character. This is not true in contemporary Chinese. There are plenty of Chinese words that consist of multiple characters. There are also Chinese characters that have no meaning outside of a multicharacter word (e.g. the 葡 in 葡萄 ).
  - lisper 1y ago
    But do these characters correspond to sounds?
    - acyou 1y ago
      Not exactly, more or less to some extent without a 1:1 correspondence, more like a 1:100 or something like that technically, but practically it probably works out to roughly 1:1 to 1:2 correspondence on average?
WalterBright 1y ago
> 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. True, but it's not actually a problem. Just sound out the words, and you'll infer from the context which word it actually is and "fix" it in your mind. People listening to you read aloud will also know what what the correct pronunciation is and will help you correct it.
dfawcus 1y ago
Are 'spelling bee' contests only (or mainly) a USA thing? My first experience of the idea was in US films and TV programs. I never came across it at school in England. FWIW, my reading lessons (both at school in the early '70s), and at home at the same time used a form of phonics. Although I never knew that term until over 30 years later. We simply knew it as breaking the word apart in to pronounceable pieces. As mentioned in the article, I still occasionally use the technique if and when I come across an unknown word.
- davidgay 1y ago
  > Are 'spelling bee' contests only (or mainly) a USA thing? The French "dictée" is similar, but has you write down a spoken (coherent text). One that usually gets weekly practiced (and graded...) in primary school, but there's also spelling-bee-like events, e.g., https://dicteepourtous.fr/ https://dicteepourtous.fr/ French pronunciation is mostly consistent (more so than English at least), but there's several complications: - multiple ways to spell the same sound (so you just need to know for that word) - often silent terminal consonants (but they must be present, because they are pronounced in some contexts) - the pronounced syllables don't always match word boundaries ("liaison") The last two points also explain why a coherent text is a more useful test than just single complex words.
  - HappMacDonald 1y ago
    > French pronunciation is mostly consistent (more so than English at least) Most of English's inconsistencies stem from words absorbed from other languages, and far and away the largest helping of that was the French that British nobility picked up during the Norman invasion. My understanding of French pronunciation primarily revolves around the idea that 80% of words end in three randomly selected vowels followed by 1-3 randomly selected maximally hard consonants such as j, x, z, k.. and that the sum total of those randomly selected letters always sound identical to the vowel portion of the word "œuf" which means "egg". Which is also basically like trying to say "eww" while you have an egg in your mouth.
    - 1y ago

Jensson 1y ago

I can see that being different from language to language, phonics is pretty complicated in English but in other languages with a much more direct relationship between the letters and the sounds its much easier. I learned to read in another language and I went from not being able to read to being able to read just about anything in a few weeks, because the phonics are much more consistent if I have heard a word and then I see it written I could easily connect the two without someone telling me.

graemep 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. I, my siblings, and my kids all learned to read using whole words and we are all excellent readers. Neither your family nor mine are statistically significant samples. My experience of teaching my kids words before letters was that it was pretty easy. On the other hand we all learned to read young, and at home, and with the assumption it was a fun thing to do, all of which makes it a very different experience to learning at school in classes.

happyopossum 1y ago
Your description of learning using whole words is not contradictory to the article - TFA takes issue with cueing and whole language systems, which don’t teach words - they teach kids to guess or skip words.

nosioptar 1y ago

Phonics was a great way to learn. But, now I'm hooked on the bastards. You'd weep if you knew the stuff I've done in poorly lit truck stops for just a single line of phonics...

rapatel0 1y ago

I don't think the research is as clear cut as the article suggests. Firstly, the concept was created in the 60s and only became wide spread in the 80s. The study was conducted in the 1975. This has two important implications: - There were fewer people that were actually instructed in whole language and they skewed younger (and less practiced) - The teaching profession had fewer years of as practitioners so methods resources were likely unrefined. Fewer books, instructional materials. Also, there is always a bias to publish a scoop in acadamia, so unless there were multiple corroborating studies we should take it with a grain of salt. Most importantly, I think that different kids learn differently. My son has been working on phonics for a long time and still struggles connecting sounds to words. In contrast, whole language approaches have been working better for him.