[HN Gopher] At a Loss for Words: A flawed idea is teaching kids ...
___________________________________________________________________
At a Loss for Words: A flawed idea is teaching kids to be poor
readers (2019)
https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
Author : Akronymus
Score : 228 points
Date : 2025-08-02 12:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.apmreports.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.apmreports.org)
| bell-cot wrote:
| (2019), and previously on HN (with plenty of comments) a few
| times: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=apmreports.org
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _How a flawed idea is teaching kids to be poor readers (2019)_
| - 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 - April 2023 (508
| comments)
|
| _Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong_ -
| 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
| - July 2020 (225 comments)
| nottorp wrote:
| Interesting... I was expecting an article about teaching kids to
| read to have ... text ... in it.
| Akronymus wrote:
| https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! I've put that URL at the top, and put the submitted
| URL (https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/) in the
| text up there.
| mrangle wrote:
| 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.
| clickety_clack wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| mrangle wrote:
| Those teachers couldn't be more wrong. Though, to clarify I
| am referring to reading and the exposure to it. We'd need
| someone who is informed on the developmental process of
| math skill to comment on "times tables".
| notnullorvoid wrote:
| I'm guessing the advice stems from school being boring
| already and being ahead of your class makes it even more
| boring.
|
| Though reading should be something teachers are equipped
| to handle very wide range of competency.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| > We'd need someone who is informed on the developmental
| process of math skill to comment on "times tables".
|
| (I feel somewhat qualified...)
|
| It is a mistake to make the kids memorize the times
| tables _before_ they intuitively understand that
| multiplication is a repeated addition (or visually, that
| multiplication is a rectangle). The right moment to
| memorize comes a few weeks or months _after_ they can
| calculate the result without memorizing. I think it is
| safer to wait, because many parents would be tempted to
| make it prematurely, in order "not to waste time".
|
| Generally: understanding first, memorizing later. If you
| memorize first... many kids won't even try to understand,
| because "they already know it". The problem is, if you
| remember without understanding, there is nothing to
| correct you if you make a mistake. An incorrectly
| remembered fact feels exactly the same way as a correctly
| remembered fact, and you have no alternative way to
| check.
|
| Also, memorizing instead of understanding is a strategy
| that works well in short term and terribly in long term,
| because memorizing a small thing for a few days is easy,
| but then you forget it (kids famously lose a lot of what
| they learned at school over summer holidays), and when
| the memorized things accumulate, it becomes too much and
| you start confusing them. Actual understanding takes more
| time, but it can survive the summer holidays, and already
| understanding many things makes understanding an
| additional thing _easier_.
|
| (But when the day comes to memorize the times tables,
| spaced repetition is your friend.)
| em-bee wrote:
| montessori does advanced math in kindergarten (advanced
| compared to regular kindergarten). i haven't heard
| anything about that leading to problems when those kids
| go to regular primary schools after that.
| mrangle wrote:
| That sounds sort of noble, perhaps, but that's not how it
| works. Ignoring the fact that there is more than enough time
| in childhood for what you propose, reading, and much else.
|
| Cognitive development is a process, of which language
| development and reading are a major subset. That development
| is always in-process.
|
| The longer that one waits to start children down the path of
| language development skills, the lesser the chance that they
| will be able to fully develop their potential for that skill.
|
| For example if you speak to a child less than you should or
| could, that child's language and overall cognitive
| development will be significantly disadvantaged when compared
| to a child with similar potential but much more attentive
| parents.
|
| Think of a disability where one hears less language, and then
| research developmental outcomes for that group.
|
| The same carries over to reading skill. The earlier that you
| start, and the more that they get, both listening and
| eventually reading themselves, the much higher likelihood
| that they will become an advanced reader.
|
| You aren't jamming them up. You are giving them an immense
| lifelong gift. In addition to attending to a significant
| cognitive need.
|
| And again, plenty of children raised with reading are also
| commonly taught be adept at technical and manual skills. Most
| people would choose a smarter mechanic, who among other
| things has the proficiency to read complex documentation.
|
| Kids want to be read stories at night. Its a major
| developmental need. You should read stories to your kids.
| Then, when they are ready, you should buy them simple books
| like comics. Then age appropriate books as they are ready.
| Content doesn't matter so much. It's mostly the volume of
| reading that matters. Every little bit helps.
| nkrisc wrote:
| You are not "jamming" up your kid by reading to them. Reading
| to them is probably one of the most important things you can
| do to begin their journey towards literacy, and during it.
|
| Connecting the words they hear as you read to what they see
| on the page is an important early step. You don't need any
| academic training - just read to them.
|
| > Many other parents would prefer to teach their kids
| different things about how to live a life.
|
| Reading and writing are probably among _the_ most important
| skills you can teach your child in order for them to fully
| participate in modern societies.
| clickety_clack wrote:
| There's a difference between reading to your kids and
| "enforcing reading-time at home for school mandated
| reading".
|
| I absolutely agree that reading and writing are critical
| skills. In fact, I think they're so critical that we should
| demand that professional educators teach children how to do
| it.
| nkrisc wrote:
| They are so critical I would not solely trust someone
| else to do it, unless you are supremely confident in
| their ability.
| em-bee wrote:
| children should have lots of opportunities to read, at
| home too. but i think the scientific consensus is that
| required homework is not as beneficial as once thought.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| My parents read to me when I was very young, but never tried to
| teach me to read. So all I knew of reading was that it was
| something my parents could do. I learned to read in first
| grade, at school. I found it compelling and did it on my own at
| home without much prompting or "enforcing."
|
| That didn't really change until High School, when I found most
| of the standard reading assignments in English class to be
| tedious and hopelessly old-fashioned. If I'd also had trouble
| reading from a technical standpoint at that time, I have no
| idea how I would have gotten through it.
| vincent-manis wrote:
| By contrast, my parents were high school dropouts. When I was
| little, my mum would read to me, with her finger following
| the text. I somehow got the idea, and started to sound out
| the words with her. By kindergarten, I was reading at a Grade
| 2 level. I think there are as many paths to reading as there
| are kids.
|
| The cueing theory seems misguided, in teaching kids to regard
| pictures as the source of information. I'd say that teaching
| kids to read requires a mix of activities, with a heavy dose
| of phonics, but also activities that create a joy of reading,
| by showing interesting people and stories. I can't see how
| cueing helps.
|
| Cueing reminds me of some of the stranger ideas in math
| pedagogy in elementary schools, notably that rather than
| learning algorithms for arithmetic operations, kids should
| invent their own, and maybe have several, which they choose
| from in a specific problem. Of course, some students have
| much more difficulty than others, but there really are some
| basic ideas they must master in order to be competent at
| arithmetic. Allowing a kid to amass a forest of partially
| working techniques and then have to hack through it to solve
| any problem seems ridiculous to me, much like putting a
| student driver in a car, with no training, and telling them
| to try various things to see how to drive to a given point
| without getting killed.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| > Allowing a kid to amass a forest of partially working
| techniques and then have to hack through it to solve any
| problem seems ridiculous to me, much like putting a student
| driver in a car, with no training, and telling them to try
| various things to see how to drive to a given point without
| getting killed.
|
| Trying to invent ways to do math operations is not a bad
| idea _per se_... it 's just that at some moment you should
| teach them the universal and efficient algorithm instead.
|
| It's like, if you are learning to program, and try your own
| ways to design the code, and then someone teaches you the
| design patterns. I don't believe that you were harmed by
| trying to program your own way first. You will probably
| appreciate the design patterns more, and maybe understand
| them on a deeper level, now that you have a first-hand
| experience of the problem they were designed to solve. I
| even suspect that without this extra experience, people
| would be more likely to over-engineer their code, e.g. to
| use a complicated design pattern where a simple function
| call would suffice.
|
| Similarly, after trying a few ad-hoc ways to add numbers,
| you will appreciate the standard "put them in a right-
| aligned column, proceed from right to left" algorithm more.
| But you will also notice that you can add 199 and 601
| without putting them in a column first.
|
| The crime of these approaches was failing to teach the kids
| the standard solutions. Experimenting for a while is itself
| OK.
| pstuart wrote:
| We did everything we could to encourage reading with our kids
| (reading to them, book fairs, bookshelves full of kid friendly
| books, etc).
|
| 1 kid has grown into an avid reader, the other two (twins) have
| never embraced it. It's easy (and often appropriate) to blame
| the parents, but sometimes it's on the student to actually want
| to do it.
|
| It makes me sad and I would love to change it. Having video
| games come into the environment (not my choice) certainly did
| not help.
| pstuart wrote:
| I know it's poor form to complain about downvotes, but I'd
| like to understand what was disagreeable about what I said
| (for my own edification). My point was simply that nature vs.
| nurture is a thing (nature wins, but nurture shapes).
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Right, so having bad or incapable parents is just a reason to
| what, toss those kids off a cliff?
| tolerance wrote:
| How dare you hold people to such high expectations for the
| development of the lives that they bring into the world.
| bluesounddirect wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| A system can do something without any of its members directly
| intending it. Quite common, actually.
| mrangle wrote:
| "Can do something" is carrying a lot of weight here. I
| explained how it is in practice.
| magicalist wrote:
| The GGP's claim was quite a bit stronger than that, though.
| worik wrote:
| > Money is an inescapable reality for every service in
| society.
|
| Yes
|
| That is a problem
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| Unfortunately "Every fruit has its seed (yes even seedless
| ones, in that circumstance the seed is the effort humans
| put into grafting it)" which is a saying that clarifies in
| all situations far beyond fruit, any replicating system
| that is of benefit to a third party must also wrap some
| portion of its benefit into self-replication that does not
| immediately benefit a third party.
|
| Whether that takes the shape of money or some different
| shape, it remains the case that "free benefit" cannot
| exist, and that any beneficial system requires some _kind
| of_ give to supplement the take that it offers.
|
| Finding a way to establish that with balance is the
| challenge.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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... ), grinding through thousands
| of words to memorize their pronunciation is probably
| something like torture and genocide.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| trhway wrote:
| >English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach
| doesn't quite work well.
|
| That seems to be one of the main components of Russian
| accent in ESL.
| cyberax wrote:
| Not really? The accent source is typical for any pair of
| languages: different sets of sounds. E.g. Russian doesn't
| quite have sounds for "th", "w" ("William"), "a" (as in
| "apple"), etc.
| stavros wrote:
| What do you mean by "in one direction"?
| em-bee wrote:
| it would mean that each letter has one and only one
| sound, but multiple letters can share the same sound. or
| if it is the reverse direction for each sound you only
| have one letter, but multiple sounds can share the same
| letter. which one is true for russian i don't know.
|
| i learned to read the cyrilic letters, but i didn't learn
| russian (i did try though) but with that knowledge i
| could read cyrilic texts aloud to someone who understands
| the language, assuming i learned all letters correctly
| and the first case is true.
|
| in the second case i could write down anything i hear.
| much harder, but as a traveler that would actually be
| useful. be able to write down names and addresses i hear
| when asking someone for directions for example. i did
| learn to write (well, type) korean that way, but of
| course i had to ask a local to proofread what i wrote
| since i would not be able to spot mistakes.
| cyberax wrote:
| In Russian, unstressed vowels are reduced so they are
| pronounced ambiguously. And when you try to write them
| down, you need to choose the correct letter for the full-
| length vowel. There are also double consonants that often
| are not pronounced differently.
|
| On the other hand, if you just sound out the words
| syllable by syllable with full-length vowels, they will
| be completely understandable. You'll just sound a bit
| over-formal and/or robotic.
|
| There were several attempts at spelling reforms, but only
| the first one (in 1917) stuck.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| > English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach
| doesn't quite work well.
|
| For each letter you can find a way it is pronounced _most
| frequently_ , and then take a subset of English consisting
| of words that follow those rules completely. (For example,
| the word "cat" _is_ pronounced as a concatenation of the
| most frequent way to read "c", the most frequent way to
| read "a", and the most frequent way to read "t".) You learn
| to read these words. Later you start adding exceptions, for
| example you teach how to read "ch", and then you add the
| new words that follow the new rules. Etc, one rule at a
| time. (You leave the worst exceptions for later grades.)
|
| >> This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the
| man telling us what to do
|
| If you feel "colonized" by reality, I guess you can rebel,
| but you shouldn't expect reality to reward you for doing
| so.
| Nevermark wrote:
| > English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach
| doesn't quite work well.
|
| I presume you mean it's not particularly 1-to-1 spelling
| <--> phonetic.
|
| It is highly phonetic, but it does have alternate mappings
| between individual or adjacent letters and sounds. And
| silent letters or syllables.
|
| But alternate rules are rarely random. There are usually
| many words represented by each rule. And those words often
| have similar overall spellings and phoneme patterns.
| o11c wrote:
| > English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach
| doesn't quite work well.
|
| English pronunciation <-> spelling is actually pretty
| predictable as long as you aren't considering
| letters/phonemes in isolation.
|
| 1. recognize whether it's a compound word or a word with
| affixes, and if so break it down (e.g. shep-herd)
|
| 2. recognize the "origin" of the word - at a minimum,
| "native" (German/Norse) vs "foreign" (Greek/Latin/French
| mostly, though others come up) is usually obvious, though
| sometimes it becomes necessary to be more specific or even
| care about _when_ it was borrowed.
|
| 3. recognize the stress pattern in the word, and how that
| will affect possible vowel sounds
|
| 4. recognize the letter pattern or sound pattern (depending
| on which you're starting with)
|
| These are not independent recognitions; often one or two is
| enough to imply everything you'd need to know about the
| others (and this in fact _reinforces_ the pattern
| recognition humans are so good at).
|
| An informative example is "arch". "ar" fixes the
| pronunciation of the "a", and "r" is not ambiguous (ever,
| for rhotic accents; after syllable division for non-rhotic
| accents). The "ch" is pronounced "tsh" for most words
| (whether German or French), but when it is of Greek origin
| (or at least came via Greek) it is pronounced "k". Usually
| such words are compounds with other visible Greek
| components.
| cyberax wrote:
| > English pronunciation <-> spelling is actually pretty
| predictable as long as you aren't considering
| letters/phonemes in isolation.
|
| Yeah, and you also learn the etymology of each word. With
| plenty of exceptions.
|
| I learned English mostly as a written language, by
| reading books. And for _years_ after moving to the US, I
| had a problem with pronouncing words that I knew
| perfectly well how to spell.
|
| E.g. I was confused when a doctor told me that I had
| "neumonia", even though I knew the word "pneumonia"
| perfectly well. Or that "gearbox" is not pronounced
| "jearbox".
|
| > but when it is of Greek origin (or at least came via
| Greek) it is pronounced "k"
|
| Or Latin. I volunteer to teach English to refugees, so my
| rule of thumb: if a word is similar to a
| Russian/Ukrainian word then it's pronounced with a "k"
| sound. But there's also a bunch of French words where
| "ch" is pronounced as "sh".
|
| But really, the main rule is to just memorize what the
| pronunciation is.
| laurent_du wrote:
| The Russian alphabet is not phonetic. a can be pronounced
| a, i, y; e can be pronounced i, io, e, and so on, and most
| consonants can be pronounced in two ways depending on the
| vowel that follows, or the presence of '. You need to know
| where the tonic accent lies in every word to be able to
| pronounce it, because the position of a vowel w.r.t. the
| accent modifies its pronunciation. It is more phonetic than
| English or French, but less than Belorussian or Finnish or
| Spanish.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Germany, 2010s: We learned the letters with pictures of
| animals, that started with that letter. Also complicated
| words were initially replaced with inline pictures.
| astura wrote:
| >first learning the letters and the sounds they make. Then
| starting to read words by "sounding them out."
|
| This is called "phonics" and was universal until recently. The
| 1980s had commercials advertising "Hooked on Phonics works for
| me." - Hooked on Phonics being a books on tape program to help
| children read.
|
| TFA says phonics was popularized in the 1800s.
| wongarsu wrote:
| That's how writing used to work for the longest time. Each
| letter has a sound, and you write down the letters that match
| the sounds you make when pronouncing the word. Two people
| might not spell a word the same, so the only viable way to
| learn would be what is now apparently called phonics.
|
| We only really started to standardize spelling in the 1500s.
| Which I guess means that by the 1800s English spelling and
| pronunciation had drifted far enough apart that phonics was a
| concept worth putting in words.
|
| In most languages with alphabets the pronunciation of letters
| is consistent enough that the issue doesn't seem to come up a
| lot. Phonics is just the obvious way to do it in those cases
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Arabic is very phonic. I found it pleasurable to learn a
| little of it. Like a lisp after using c++!
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| But you have to guess every vowel, correct?
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| You learn to walk before you learn to run.
|
| This should be obvious, but a surprisingly large number of
| people don't get it. They don't see "running" as the logical
| next step _after_ "walking", but rather as an _alternative_ to
| it. "Why are you teaching my child to walk, when you could
| teach him/her to run _instead_? "
|
| They imagine that the fastest way to get to the advanced
| lessons is to skip the beginner lessons. Yeah, it's a good way
| to get fast to the Lesson 1 in the Advanced textbook... and to
| remain stuck there forever, because you don't know the
| prerequisites.
|
| The article describes what happens when the people who don't
| get it are setting the rules for others to follow.
|
| Someone noticed that the advanced readers read fast (correct),
| sometimes entire sentences at once (kinda correct), and
| concluded that the proper way to teach children is to insist
| that they do it from the start (utterly insanely wrong). You
| should increase your reading speed naturally, as you get lots
| and lots of _practice_ ; not because you skip letters - that's
| actually when we should tell the kids to slow down and read it
| again.
| hkpack wrote:
| Or maybe, listen out, not everyone is stupid and the reality
| is just really complicated?
|
| As an anecdote, my daughter was learning reading in her
| native language in school starting with letters, then
| syllables and had a very hard time moving past that with a
| lot of support from teachers and family.
|
| She started learning to read in English almost 5 years later
| by reading the whole words from the start and outperformed
| her reading and comprehension speed to her native language
| very quickly.
|
| There are huge number of variables in play and common sense
| frequently doesn't work.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| A small portion of people are different, but we should
| start with the simple way first.
|
| And while context can get one ahead early, you don't want
| to be like the adult who couldn't actually read.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| Don't know why this has to constantly be mentioned, but
| people who read this website, and their children, are not
| representative of the general population.
|
| It is well known that some kids will learn to read no
| matter how they are taught. Most kids will not.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| Yeah, people are different. I guess there may be some kids
| for whom the slow reading does not work for some reason,
| and who benefit from reading the whole words. But in my
| experience, most kids start making mistakes when they try
| to read too fast.
|
| Perhaps the method was helpful to some children, and the
| mistake was to prescribe it to everyone.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| In the 90s I was taught to read via phonics. Context was
| mentioned further down the road as a tool to reach for when one
| understands all but one word in a sentence, in which case
| context can be used to infer the meaning of the mystery word
| sometimes (but not always).
|
| I can't imagine not having a functional knowledge of phonics.
| That must make long unfamiliar words daunting and reading
| overall more scary than it needs to be.
| giardini wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| akdor1154 wrote:
| > 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.
| seszett wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| khuey wrote:
| > 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 Pu in Pu Tao ).
| lisper wrote:
| But do these characters correspond to _sounds_?
| acyou wrote:
| 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?
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| I guess to try to echo the question: If a reader was
| reading along and just ran into "Pu " in isolation in the
| text (eg, not adjacent to another character that it
| normally combines with) would they be able to confidently
| emit any sound that corresponds to what they are saying,
| or would it be perceived more like a punctuation error in
| English given that anglophones do very little to change
| the sound they are making as a result of punctuation
| (possibly just changing rhythm instead)?
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| > In Chinese each word is a unique character. So there is
| no phonics system for Chinese.
|
| We know. Their point is that the fact that Chinese children
| succeed in learning to read (non-phonetic) Chinese well
| contradicts the core argument of TFA, which is that phonics
| is _necessary_ to learn to read well.
|
| I'm very pro-phonics, but this is nevertheless a compelling
| argument against it being necessary. If you know of another
| explanation for why Chinese reading education seems to work
| well despite the lack of phonics, please give it. (Or is it
| that learning to read Chinese actually _is_ a big problem
| in China?)
| mook wrote:
| Chinese education starts with phonics, as in pinyin (or
| in Taiwan, zhuyin). Similarly, in Japanese it starts with
| kana. The difference is that afterwards you have to learn
| to read a separate system (hanzi/kanji) after.
|
| Korean fixed that by revamping the writing system...
| khuey wrote:
| > Or is it that learning to read Chinese actually is a
| big problem in China?
|
| Historically it was. Reforming the writing system
| (potentially even ditching it entirely in favor of a
| Latin/etc derived script) to improve literacy rates was a
| major topic among Chinese intellectuals during the 20th
| century.
|
| Some combination of character simplification, reading and
| writing the vernacular instead of "Classical Chinese",
| brute force, and modern technology has made this less
| acute. But it still is not unusual for even educated
| native Chinese speakers to simply not remember how to
| write some uncommon character. (You will see this in
| English occasionally too, of course. I have to think
| twice when I write rendezvous.)
| peterfirefly wrote:
| The overwhelming majority of Chinese characters are
| composed of simpler characters. That helps a lot. You
| don't even have to be told that, you'll figure that out
| yourself fairly quickly. Being taught what the typical
| components are (there are several hundred) doesn't seem
| to be a shortcut, but you will need to roughly know them
| in order to use old-fashioned paper dictionaries.
|
| Most characters have a sound part and a semantic part.
| The sound part is not very precise, but it helps. The
| semantic part can be quite abstract, such as the sign for
| mouth (a square or a squarish rectangle) for parts of
| speech (He = and).
|
| Like the others wrote, a phonetic system is used in the
| beginning to provide the pronunciation to the kids. The
| same system is usually used later for text input on
| computers or cell phones, possibly supplemented with
| support for drawing characters.
|
| They have the additional problem that they might not
| speak Mandarin and the pronunciation support they are
| using is based on Mandarin.
|
| It works much better than it has any right to, but it
| requires much more training to reach basic literacy than
| even an imperfect sound-based system like English. Weeks
| versus years. To reach proper literacy takes years and
| mountains of text in both cases.
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| > old-fashioned paper dictionaries
|
| Since English dictionaries are arranged in "alphabetical
| order" to make finding the word one wishes to know the
| definition easier, I'm not curious if the Chinese writing
| system has anything approaching an "alphabetical order",
| or any kind of canonical way to order strings of Chinese
| text. And relatedly, how do they find words in their
| dictionaries?
|
| (this is normally something I would google but it doesn't
| sound like something I'd get a high signal to noise ratio
| on given the ambiguous terms at hand)
| peterfirefly wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collation#Radical-and-
| stroke_s...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radicals
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_Dictionary
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zihui
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Shuowen_Jiezi_radic
| als
|
| The alphabet is a marvelous invention. I seem to remember
| that Europeans in China (and places with a large Chinese
| diaspora) used alphabetical sorting of whatever
| romanization they favoured (different between English,
| French, Dutch). Much easier than radicals and stroke
| counting.
| sarchertech wrote:
| > Chinese reading education seems to work well despite
| the lack of phonics,
|
| From what I remember from taking Mandarin in college,
| Chinese students learn to read much slower than speakers
| of languages with phonetic alphabets.
|
| I did a quick Google search for the exact numbers and it
| looks like Chinese students are expected to recognize 3k
| characters by the end of 6th grade. While US students are
| expected to be able to read 20k words by that time and
| some sources I found said up to 40k.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Character aren't words though, and many words are at
| least two characters. Heck, most given names are two
| characters. 3k characters covers most of the words
| frequently used in modern Chinese (the estimate ranges
| from 2K to 4K characters), the remaining 70k characters
| that you don't learn by sixth grade aren't as useful
| (well, Jiong can be used as an emoji in a pinch).
| sarchertech wrote:
| That true, but I definitely remember my Chinese teacher
| (born and studied in China, did grad school here) telling
| us that it takes much longer for Chinese students to
| learn to read.
|
| Some more googling looking for something similar to
| compare is that Chinese students know enough characters
| to read simple newspaper articles at age 11 or so. While
| a 6 or 7 year old American student can read simple
| newspaper articles.
| ginko wrote:
| >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.
|
| "At least it's not as hard as learning Chinese" doesn't
| sound like a convincing argument against language reform to
| me.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > So there is no phonics system for Chinese.
|
| Many Chinese characters include "phonic" components, and
| Chinese characters were historically learned using
| "rhyming" dictionaries. The systems are not totally
| equivalent but they're similar - the approach is not a pure
| "whole language" one.
| altairprime wrote:
| > _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._
|
| This is some next-level teaching skills. Thank you for
| sharing it in particular :)
| mannykannot wrote:
| These examples point to a further complication: there is no
| single pronunciation for the "ough" (cough versus through
| versus thorough, and then there's cases where the "ough" is
| not terminal, such as thought.)
|
| I doubt that reading English can be taught without a dose
| of rote learning.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > Are 'spelling bee' contests only (or mainly) a USA thing?
|
| The French "dictee" 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/
|
| 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 wrote:
| > 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
| "oeuf" which means "egg". Which is also basically like
| trying to say "eww" while you have an egg in your mouth.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| To further this, a perfect example are some of the
| culinary words vs. the animal words in English.
|
| Pork, Beef, Poultry, Venison, etc. are thought to have
| French etymologies.
|
| Pig, Cow, Chicken, etc. are thought to have Germanic
| etymologies.
|
| It's because the French speaking nobility ate the meat,
| and the lower-class old English speakers raised the
| animals.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| No offense but this is a sophomoric take. I'd be willing
| to bet that more native English words have irregular
| spelling than norman/Latin/other imports. The same thing
| happened in French too. Often orthographic changes lags
| pronouciation changes. The reason many English words have
| irregular spellig is because English has been a written
| language for a long time. That is why you have words like
| Knight, Knee, Enough, Eight, Cough, etc which are all
| native words. My understanding is the k in kn words used
| to be prounouced.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| I am not sure. It would not surprise me though. As an
| American, we are always striving to turn the most mundane
| activities into competitions for some reason...
|
| For what it is worth, I also think British English is more
| consistent than American English in pronunciation.
|
| For example, you all pronounce "Zebra" like "Zeh-bra" and
| "Zeppelin" like "Zehp-pellin" if I am not mistaken.
|
| American English, where I live, would say "Zee-bra" and
| 'Zehp-uh-lin." for no good reason. Fundamentally, I think
| that was also my issue with phonics. So many spoken words
| have more complex sounds replaced with shorter sounds like
| "uh", "un", "in", "an", "oh", etc..
|
| Simple words like:
|
| Definitely => "Def-in-ut-ly"
|
| Interesting => "In-tra-sting"
|
| etc..
|
| > As mentioned in the article, I still occasionally use the
| technique if and when I come across an unknown word.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I do too, but even as an adult, it's
| usually the words with French etymologies that burn me.
|
| Trivial example would be "resume" (like applying for a job
| -- yes, Americans often drop the accent on the 'e'). No way
| sounding out the word would have mapped to "Rez-oo-may"
| without previous knowledge. Somehow 'Receipt' => "Re-seat",
| "Debt" => "Deht", "Motion" => "Mo-shun", and so on.
|
| I think phonetics of germanic words: hunger, anger, hack,
| ball, etc. are far more consistent.
| hibikir wrote:
| In spanish we never did this, because even though there's
| exceptions to spelling rules, there aren't all that many.
| motivated elementary school children would just not miss
| barring lack of concentration.
| Jensson wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| nosioptar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| didibus wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| chrisgd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/10.10...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p...
| fn-mote wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| The Department of Education and standardized testing are to
| thank for a lot of that.
|
| It seems like the idea has gotten more controversial since
| a certain administration has considered getting rid of it
| but, since it's inception, it's not like US education has
| improved.
| camgunz wrote:
| Well, it's an old article. Comparable countries Canada and
| Ireland with more holistic approaches (including phonics)
| have way better PISA scores.
|
| https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/656dc3321104c.
| ..
| scotty79 wrote:
| Isn't Canada multilingual?
| ethan_smith wrote:
| The UK phonics data shows mixed results with plateaus rather
| than "cratering" - the second link you shared actually
| indicates the issue is over-focusing on phonics alone rather
| than combining it with comprehension strategies.
| IanCal wrote:
| My kids have been taught phonics here in the uk along with
| comprehension and it's been great. I can clearly see how each
| has developed - and materials have things like basic
| comprehension of just picture stories to teach it without
| relying on reading for those who are struggling with the
| words.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I have a 5 year old daughter who learnt to read through the
| phonics system. I was initially fairly skeptical but actually I
| think it's great. It's just explicitly teaching the
| pronunciation heuristics that we all learn implicitly.
|
| They have a pretty good way of testing too - they show a list
| of 40 real words and made up words ("alien words") and the kids
| have to pronounce them. They only include words that closely
| follow the normal English pronunciation heuristics and are
| unambiguous. E.g. "glot" and "bime" would be ok but "sough" and
| "gow" would not.
|
| > Critics say phonics training only helps children to do well
| in phonics tests - they learn how to pronounce words presented
| to them in a list rather than understand what they read - and
| does nothing to encourage a love of reading.
|
| If this is the best criticism of it then.. that's pretty dumb.
| The entire point is to learn how to pronounce words. It isn't
| intended to teach them to _understand_ words - they can already
| do that. And it isn 't meant to instill a love of reading.
| That's basically innate.
|
| I'm not too surprised it makes no difference to overall reading
| levels. It's not really _that_ different to the previous method
| of teaching reading, and a very large component of reading
| ability is innate... But to say it 's been a disaster is
| absolutely ridiculous.
| camgunz wrote:
| It's definitely not innate. While phonics test scores are
| pretty high, PISA and KS 2 reading scores are down. The DfA
| on reading in 2021 is like, _solely_ about phonics. The 2023
| update adds tons more guidance beyond phonics. Comparable
| countries Canada and Ireland are doing better, they didn't go
| all in on phonics. So, depends on what you mean by disaster,
| but IMO in the policy world, this counts.
| trane_project wrote:
| See my other, more detailed, comment on this thread, but the
| reason for this is that phonics is part of the solution, but
| it's not what creates fluent readers.
|
| Most phonics programs do not treat automaticity as the goal, so
| kids with effortful and slow decoding count as "reading". The
| science is very clear on what causes this lack of automaticity
| and what exercises best correct it, but most programs ignore
| it.
|
| So kids with no deficits will develop mostly fine, but those
| with them will look to be "reading" but will have trouble once
| the material requires too much of them.
| luckydata wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| When I was in kindergarten, we were read a book called
| _The Little Old Man Who Could Not Read_. The main
| character was a Mr. Magoo-type character, except merely
| illiterate instead of functionally blind. He was always
| making mistakes like this, for example buying wax paper
| instead of spaghetti because they both came in long
| boxes. Eventually his wife teaches him how to read and
| his next grocery trip has all the correct items.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Of course education is coercion. Same way work is things you
| do for money. Education without coercion is just learning, at
| best.
|
| Teachers are there because of the coercion they provide. Even
| in the US they coerce kids to at least sit in class, because
| if they didn't kids would just walk out and go learn how to
| properly light up a cigarette from some older kid.
| aDyslecticCrow wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| davidbanham wrote:
| That resonates for me. I spend lot of time teaching
| volunteers. Early on, I encourage them to learn the skill
| from me, but also take any opportunity to have others explain
| and demonstrate the same thing to them. I tend to work from
| first principles, explaining how the pump functions and why
| that means water goes in here and out there, and what
| different configurations of valves are therefore valid and
| which ones will never do anything useful. Others often
| explain it in terms of which valves to turn in which order to
| achieve a given outcome.
|
| Neither is right or wrong. Most people will be left pretty
| cold by one explanation while the other will land neatly into
| a hole in their brain shaped perfectly for it. Which one is
| which will be different for each person.
|
| I think that there's value in gearing educational settings
| towards having a plurality of instructors available on each
| subject and letting students gravitate towards the ones that
| work for them.
| yial wrote:
| One of the hardest things about teaching others in my
| opinion is that to really teach effectively you have to be
| able to meet them where they are.
|
| As in, you have to be able to have some understanding still
| of what being fresh and new to the subject is like, coupled
| with the ability to change how you teach something.
|
| I wouldn't say I'm exceptionally good at changing how I
| teach unless someone can give me a hint of how they learn
| best. (Unfortunately, this is one of those things people
| don't always know well about themselves and can sometimes
| change based on context. ).
|
| I try to always stay humble in that 1. I know I'm not the
| best at anything I'm teaching. 2. Usually if someone isn't
| understanding, it's 100% on how I'm communicating, and 3.
| Really it's both of us learning - many insights can come
| from those new to material at times.
|
| Those are abbreviated and perhaps not communicated in the
| best way.
|
| But 100% a plurality of instructors, and techniques, is
| incredibly helpful.
| hosh wrote:
| I once heard, that a masters degree qualifies one to
| teach the subject matter. To do so, you had to organize
| the material in a way to accommodate students with
| different backgrounds, learning, and thinking process. In
| the process of doing so, you come to explore the
| limitations of your own understanding of the subject.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > I am now having singing classes and singing is even more
| mindbending than piano has ever been
|
| The thing that drives me crazy about singing is that while I
| don't have a trained ear, much less perfect pitch, when I
| made a spectrogram of my voice I was more or less correct in
| terms of pitch. Apparently it's enough to do this for years
| to have some frequencies baked in.
| ggregoryarms wrote:
| I fear this is an analogy for what's happening with LLMs and
| context engineering.
| Tcepsa wrote:
| I had basically the same thought: This sounds a _lot_ like
| how they describe LLMs working!
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| I'm struggling to understand what the assignment was supposed
| to be teaching?
|
| If it's possible can you share an example sentence and then the
| "correct' translation of that sentence with titi and ta?
|
| I'm no professional, but I've played the piano an guitar since
| I was 13 and I still can't wrap my head around what you would
| even get out of that exercise.
|
| But maybe the issue is with me lol?
| opello wrote:
| I may have missed what you're asking about, but the
| ta/ti/tika quarter/eighth/sixteenth syllable system is a
| rhythm counting system to teach music, the Kodaly Method[1].
| This was coincidentally also what my first music teacher used
| but I didn't know the name until I was reminded of it even
| existing here and did a little digging.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kod%C3%A1ly_method
| hattmall wrote:
| I mean just saying that out loud I can exactly see how it
| works, pretty interesting. Like why do I naturally say Tika
| faster than ti and ti faster than ta?
| jhanschoo wrote:
| The /t/ consonant in the method requires you to have your
| tongue touch the roof of your mouth, and the /a/ vowel
| requires you to have your jaw hang low. The /ti/ sound in
| the method has your jaw fixed in place whereas it has to
| move to produce the /ta:/ sound.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| I might still just be totally misreading things but I don't
| see how the assignment above is a valid, let alone a normal
| application of the Kodaly Method?
|
| Seems like the teacher really misunderstood what it
| was/meant for. I could totally be wrong here.
|
| Translating sentences on paper (and again, how? why? by
| what metrics?) seems like the exact opposite of what the
| Kodaly Method utilizes and its underpinning principles?
| opello wrote:
| I understand the confusion and it's why I wasn't quite
| sure if I'd correctly identified what was happening. I
| took sentence and word as the music theory terms
| sentence[1] and motive[2]. Then translating the beats of
| an example into Kodaly syllables seemed like a reasonable
| exercise that could be objectively evaluated.
|
| [1] https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/mt21c/SentenceStru
| cture.h...
|
| [2] https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/mt21c/MotiveSectio
| n.html
| hyperman1 wrote:
| You're asking me to tell about a homework from 1988, in
| dutch, when I was 8 years old. I think the last sentence was
| 'honderdduizend apen hingen daar te gapen' being translated
| to 'titi titi ta ta. Titi titi ta ta'.
|
| The weird thing is: I could do it, even if I had no idea what
| I was doing. There was some pronunciation that seemed
| natural. My answers were mostly right ( Or maybe I got a good
| grade just for turning something in?).
|
| Also, the teacher was a really nice lady, she was good with
| the piano and knew music, and she did teach us what she was
| supposed to. I have fond memories for her lessons. She
| succeeded.
|
| I just think, the first lesson being a bit if a sampler, she
| didn't want to scare kids away. Artsy people sometimes have
| learned that math must be hard. So she accidentally
| oversimplified for me. I have no idea if the other kids felt
| the same. She might even have self-corrected starting the
| third lesson.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| >You're asking me to tell about a homework from 1988, in
| dutch, when I was 8 years old
|
| Well asking certainly, but I'm not demanding? I don't know,
| seems like a very weird application. I certainly don't know
| ANY dutch, which doesn't help.
|
| Is it just a "rhythm" mapping exercise based on the
| syllables? I probably read the first post a little bit to
| literally.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| Yeah that 'asking' sounded wrong. Sorry. Read it as 'dont
| quote me on this, long time ago, memory untrustworthy'.
|
| As an adult, I can say today: It is indeed a rhythm
| exercise, with some syllables being longer than others. I
| just wish someone had told me this at the time.
| opello wrote:
| > I think the last sentence was 'honderdduizend apen hingen
| daar te gapen' being translated to 'titi titi ta ta. Titi
| titi ta ta'.
|
| Oh wow, interesting, so the exercise was really taking a
| Dutch language sentence and breaking it into musical
| syllables? I'm more confused than before because the
| example here has 6 words and ends up as 8 notes -- but that
| could just be something I don't follow since I don't know
| Dutch. Unless 'honderdduizend' ('hundred thousand' it
| seems) is a compound that makes sense to split into two?
| jpc0 wrote:
| I don't speak dutch but a language descendant from it and
| I completely understand how it would be broken down that
| way.
|
| Effectively I would pronounce honderdduizend as 4 quick
| syllables.
|
| Again do not speak dutch and translate the same work into
| my languages pronunciation which I wouldn't be surprised
| if it wasn't almost identical. "Honderd duisend" if you
| are interested.
| bitwize wrote:
| My elementary school music teacher was very schoolmarmish and
| prim -- almost like Ana Gasteyer's Bobbi Mohan-Culp character
| -- and had training in opera performance. She also did the
| "ta"/"titi" thing, but backwards. She would, for example, teach
| us a ta/titi sequence -- writing the notes on the board,
| teaching us the names and shapes of the notes, having us
| sing/perform it several times -- and only then reveal the
| lyrics to be "Baa Baa Black Sheep, have you any wool?" Her
| years of musical training taught her that getting the details
| right early on was super important. I'm incredibly thankful for
| having had teachers like this.
|
| It sounds like the teachers you've had who said "just do what
| makes sense" have punted on the act of teaching itself. They
| either don't know how to, or are unwilling to, do the hard work
| of providing detailed instruction and holding kids to a high
| standard of learning. That's just sad to see man.
| trod1234 wrote:
| The pedagogy you describe has a name and it is called "Lying to
| Children" by the people who came up with this, and its based in
| Paulo Freire's work (Pedagogy of the Oppressed), hitting a peak
| around late 1990s. The same Marxist groups that brought wokeism
| to the masses.
|
| This has largely taken over starting in the lax hiring
| standards that came about as a result of Sputnik late 60s. By
| 1978 most teaching books abandoned the First-principled
| approach favoring this approach instead.
|
| The First-principled approach to teaching began with the
| Greeks/Rome (Trivium/Quadrivium); the process starts with an
| objective real system which you break observations down into
| core relationships, from such intuitive relations you then
| build up the model of relationships to predict future states
| within that same system, checking each time for correctness,
| and deviations to eliminate falsehoods/assumptions made.
|
| The "Lying to Children" approach, is an abominable deviation of
| that process, or what many referred to without proper
| definition, as by-rote teaching, starts with an inherently
| flawed/fake system where you must learn to competency true and
| false things at the same time to progress to the next level of
| gnosis or mastery.
|
| Upon each iteration in the path you are taught increasingly
| more useful versions of the ultimate model expected, but are
| subjected to psychological torture in the unlearning of false
| things which were learned to competency and will stonewall
| further progress; while relearning the true principles. Those
| who can put perceptual blinders on are able to pass this filter
| at the cost of intuition, as are those who tend towards
| lying/deceit. The process is by purposeful intent torturous,
| and intelligent people are most susceptible to this kind of
| torture (it is exactly that).
|
| In Electronics, the water pipe analogy is one such example of
| this type of teaching method when the behavior of diffusion of
| charge is much more appropriate.
|
| There are also induced failure points that operate on a lag, to
| plausibly prevent people from going into science backgrounds
| using this same methodology. Setting them up to fail through
| devious changes in grading and structure designed to burn the
| bridge (so you can't go backwards and are left stranded unable
| to move forward).
|
| You are right to distrust teachers that do this. They are truly
| evil people (no hyperbole). Good people don't torture people
| and gaslight them into thinking its teaching. It doesn't matter
| if they didn't know the origin of the things they were taught,
| part of the responsibility for positions of such trust is to
| understand and comprehend what you do; and many just believe
| you aren't learning until you are struggling.
|
| Evil people can seem nice, but what makes them truly evil is
| the wilful blindness towards the consequences of their evil
| actions; where its to the point where they repeat such actions
| unless stopped by external force.
|
| Evil actions being defined as anything that does not result in
| the long-term beneficial growth of self or others (action or
| inaction).
|
| They get to this point through repeated acts of self-violation
| until they no longer resist those evil choices (non-
| resistance), and then in fact accept it, subjorning themselves
| to it and becoming its plaything.
|
| False justification for example is one such self-violation.
|
| There are a lot of evil people out in the world today because
| society has followed Tolstoy's approach to non-resistance to
| evil in much of the policy.
|
| These people think they are good, or at worst not bad, and you
| recognize them by that blindness, and inability to choose
| differently.
|
| Torture is the imposition of psychological stress beyond a
| certain individual threshold. From that point, rational thought
| degrades, involuntary hypnosis occurs, eventually culminating
| in psychological break towards disassociation or a semi-lucid
| state of psychosis seeking annihilation (suicide or mass
| shooter types).
|
| Wouldn't it be sad if the majority of intelligent people are
| actually killing themselves because of these things.
|
| Most people today don't recognize torture because its become so
| sophisticated and their individual education of things have
| been deprived by past generations, purposefully so.
|
| Torture includes elements, structures, and clustering, and if
| you'd like to know more about the process to recognize it you
| can read the following books (in order), most of this is common
| knowledge in certain fields (foundational back in the 1950s).
|
| Robert Cialdini - Influence (psychological blindspots leveraged
| for clustering without distorted reflected appraisal)
|
| Joost Meerloo - Rape of the Mind (1950s) - Overview and related
| factors
|
| Robert Lifton - Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism -
| Case Studies of PoWs returning from Mao's China during Korean
| Conflict covers structuring and elements.
| xerox13ster wrote:
| I got taught about lying to children at the same time that I
| learned about the orbitals of the electron and that Neil Bohr
| model of the atom wasn't totally correct, by the least woke
| chemistry teacher I've probably ever known.
|
| Even he would read this and think That you were suffering
| from a semi lucid state of psychosis and he would begin
| seeking an annihilation after reading this.
|
| While yes, lying to children does induce some cognitive
| overhead cost--and I personally believe that the act of
| learning and the act of changing one's mind from something
| already learned is in a way painful (in so much as the brain
| can feel pain since it doesn't really have any nerve endings)
| because of the forming of new connections and the breaking of
| old--I fail to see how that has anything to do with wokeism,
| other than being "woke" inherently requiring the critical
| thinking capacity to make those changes in things that you've
| learned.
|
| My pet theory is that conservatives are conservatives because
| that pain is unbearable for them and they just hate learning
| or relearning or changing their mind at all.
|
| Which leads me to ask after this ramble of yours: do you
| suffer from this pain?
| trod1234 wrote:
| The willfully blind by themselves are helpless, hopeless
| people who are incapable of perceiving things which they
| have at one point chosen not to see.
|
| The lack of reasoning faculties is self-inflicted, as are
| the consequences that eventually pile up (without them
| noticing).
|
| This makes them particularly weak people who bring
| misfortune on others, who are especially prone to delusion,
| as well as other forms of mental illness
| (psychopath/schizophrenia-like tendencies).
|
| When they gaslight strangers, because they disagree with
| what that person is saying, they demonstrate their lack of
| inherent moral character. Good people don't do this.
|
| There is an old saying, that's understood by many as
| extremely accurate wisdom: "What a person does in the small
| things that do not matter is what that person will do every
| time, in big things that do matter, when everything is on
| the line."
|
| You communicated far more than you meant to say for the
| people who can read between the lines.
|
| One can hardly call the circular subjective abuse of the
| contrast principle, requiring any form of critical thinking
| capacity (its fallacy). Critical theory while resembling
| critical thinking are two very different (mutually
| exclusive) things.
| nosioptar wrote:
| My orchestra teacher would just throw us in the deep end of
| things.
|
| I never felt overwhelmed with it. Compared to other people with
| gentler teachers, I think I learned more.
| dash2 wrote:
| I've seen exactly the same thing in Latin, where instead of
| learning "nominative", "accusative" and "genitive" cases for
| nouns, pupils were told about "case 1", "case 2" and "case 3".
| First, this disconnects their knowledge from the previous
| centuries of knowledge about Latin grammar. Second, it relies
| on the assumption that long Latinate words must be difficult,
| whereas meaningless numbers must be easy. So silly.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| I really wish the top comments on this article were not about
| the off topic and in my opinion unrelated process of reading
| music.
|
| Musical notes deal with sounds and possibly with time where as
| words deal with abstract meaning. There is no such thing in
| written music. Each note corresponds to a sound wereas for
| words each letter is effectively meaningless on its own and at
| least for me the reading process is about my mind recognizing
| words and associating their consensus cultural meaning with the
| shape word I know. For me the sound of the word is irrelevant
| with respect to whether I know the word or not. In fact I
| remember when I was younger my vocabulary would often exceed my
| understanding of what words sound like for rarely used words
| that i knew the meaning of but seldom if ever heard spoken. So
| I could read the word but might not pronounce it right. Anyway
| for how my mind works memorizing words has been effective. I
| don't really understand the phonics people.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| yeah, it seems it is not good for dealing with abstractness
| scotty79 wrote:
| It's just not good. It's bad.
| appease7727 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| what's the tl;dr on a better way to learn to read?
| dpritchett wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| But actually, you should read this...
|
| https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jan/opinion-phonics-teaching...
| twotwotwo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It's not a book, but you might find this interesting:
| 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 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 that was inspired by
| it, but for physics.
| mindcrime wrote:
| I don't know that my personal n=1 anecdote adds much to this
| discussion, but FWIW...
|
| My mom taught me to read when I was young (pre kindergarten),
| but as far as I know she wasn't specifically _trying_ to teach
| me to read. She just read to me a lot, where I could see the
| page she was reading from. Mostly she read me comic books. I
| loved the DC characters back then - Batman, Superman, Wonder
| Woman, Flash, Aquaman, Green Lantern, etc. and so she read me
| that stuff many many times. I mean, yeah, I had some of those
| "Little Golden Books" and stuff around as well, although I
| don't pointedly remember reading those the way I do the comic
| books. Anyway, she did all that and when I started kindergarten
| at 4 (due to being a summer baby) I was already reading. And
| then stayed well above my grade level on the reading tests all
| through school.
|
| So I dunno. Maybe it was dumb luck that things worked out that
| way for me. Maybe there is a genetic element. Or maybe more
| than anything what mom conveyed to me was a passion _for_
| reading (she was a very avid reader herself). Maybe part of it
| was just that there were always plenty of books around the
| house and so reading felt like a very natural thing to do. Or
| maybe it was that whole Pizza Hut BOOK IT thing they had back
| in the day. Who knows?
|
| In either case, I feel very fortunate in this regard, as
| reading has remained a big part of my life ever since, and
| still is to this day.
| trane_project wrote:
| So the reason some kids seem to read with some instruction,
| even if it's not formal and super explicit, is that they have
| a good phonemic system. That is, they quickly understand that
| words are made up of smaller units (e.g. cat is /k/ + /a/ +
| /t/) and can manipulate them without much trouble. That
| ability is essential to map words efficiently in long term
| memory for effortlessly retrieval, which in turns creates a
| sight vocabulary (a large bank of words that are instantly
| recognized).
|
| Kids with phonemic deficits, on the other hand, cannot
| efficiently develop a sight vocabulary. Even if they are
| taught phonics and can decode, that decoding is effortful and
| leaves little room for more complex tasks.
| twotwotwo wrote:
| For what it's worth, a pivotal moment for _keeping reading
| going_ after the lessons was when my partner picked up a
| comic book at a library event. For a few weeks after the end
| of the lessons, reading time had been traditional early
| readers and some of the books we 'd previously read to them--
| even with us offering rewards, there had been ups and downs.
| As soon as kid started that comic, though, they were pushing
| right through our protests that it was bedtime, and chewing
| through the whole series. Luckily we managed to find another
| series to start before running out of the first one. As
| parents we can nudge or put stuff on the menu but but kid is
| pretty much in the driver's seat about what to read next.
|
| In retrospect, of course! The kid just hadn't liked reading
| _those books_ and things took off once we found stuff they
| liked. Best first readers are whatever your kid actually
| wants to read!
| mizzao wrote:
| Second this! My daughter stopped around lesson 53 when she was
| 4, but it stuck now at 6 years old she's able to read full
| books on her own, with her reading speed and ability
| increasingly exponentially.
|
| TL;DR version of the article, and our experience with kids'
| reading, is that phonics is probably the best way to teach
| reading but people have tried many other crackpot techniques
| that don't work very well.
| trane_project wrote:
| So direct instruction (the philosophy behind this book) has
| been shown to only have modest gains compared to the best
| interventions, which have more than double the effect size.
|
| It works fine (not the best) for kids with no reading
| difficulties, but it completely lacks the understanding and the
| tasks that fix phonemic deficits, the actual source of most
| reading difficulties.
|
| It's not entirely a bad book, but won't be of too much use for
| kids with reading difficulties. Since it's only a few bucks,
| it's not a bad investment. Just be aware of its limitations. If
| your kid is not developing fluent and effortless reading (not
| just decoding), you will need to use a method that is aware of
| how to fix phonemic deficits.
|
| See my other comments in this page for more.
| twotwotwo wrote:
| trane_project is selling a $20/mo subscription or $1000
| perpetual license to their own reading program and folks
| should read this and their other comments aware of that
| context. It's disappointing to tell a personal story, come
| back, and see it was someone's jumping-off point for just
| slightly indirect self-promotion.
| trane_project wrote:
| Sure, no problem in pointing it out. I did not hide the
| fact and I invite anyone to do their own research. The
| comments mostly draw from David Kilpatrick's book
| "Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming
| Reading Difficulties".
|
| It's a very academic book and I didn't see anyone in the
| comments aware of orthographic mapping. The critique of
| direct instruction can also be found there. No intervention
| that does not train phonemic awareness to the advanced
| level had the massive results of those which do. That also
| applies to OG, which was mentioned in the thread.
|
| Not selling anything yet, that page is a placeholder. But I
| will have a free and untimed version that should be enough
| to fix most reading difficulties caused by phonemic
| deficits.
|
| Which I can do without worrying about cannibalizing my own
| business because I am not selling a reading app, but a
| complete path to mastery of reading and writing to college
| level and beyond. That hopefully helps clarify the
| difference in price.
| huhkerrf wrote:
| Why? Obviously the person who replied to you has experience
| and a POV. I think that's a useful addition to the
| conversation.
|
| Plus, I wouldn't have even thought to check out the profile
| if you hadn't mentioned it. It's not slightly indirect
| self-promotion, it's not self-promotion at all.
| SomewhatLikely wrote:
| I saw a very similar timely appeal here on Hacker News a few
| years ago and taught my son with this book at the age of 4. It
| has become my go-to comparison when prompting chat bots on what
| I want in a teaching material for other subjects. I listened to
| the entire article posted here and it makes me wonder if
| schools are getting something as foundational as reading wrong
| how can we trust the attention to research on anything else
| they're teaching? Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to pull my
| kid out of school but I'll dig a little deeper into how well
| he's learning. For math, we've been doing the Beast Academy
| books. It has gone... Okay. I like that they approach problems
| from many different ways which simulate the many different ways
| math is hidden in our interactions with the world. For my
| younger son I've recently started Teaching Your Child...
| because of how well it went for his brother but for math I may
| try something else to have a new data point. Something that
| occurred to me listening to the article is I wonder if certain
| skills are learned much faster with one on one instruction like
| the book has you do. Our schools pretty much never teach that
| way out of efficiency, though home schools often do. It may not
| be true for most subjects though or home school students would
| be so far ahead by college and that's not the impression I
| have.
| graemep wrote:
| > Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to pull my kid out of
| school
|
| Why not? I did and it has worked out really well. One is an
| adult, the other is nearly and adult so its pretty much all
| done now.
|
| I certainly think its an option worth considering
| GarnetFloride wrote:
| For math you'll want the Saxon Math books, but they have to be
| the old ones from before they were bought out and turned into
| yet another New Math or whatever they call it now.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| So the system is working as intended then.
| largbae wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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), 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/
| RunSet wrote:
| > I'll keep the self-promotion to a minimum
|
| I don't believe you'll.
| ipython wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 "Gai Cuo Zi ". 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 wrote:
| Evidence-based education > recurring failures.
|
| Trying what doesn't work and expecting a different result is
| either madness or stupidity.
| ryao wrote:
| 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
|
| 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/
|
| There are 39. Just for fun, British Received Pronunciation has
| 44:
|
| 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
| /rendez@vus/ and /poligami/. You can hear just how wrong these
| pronunciations are by copy and pasting the IPA into this site:
|
| 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.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| Isn't there a bootstrapping thing going on here, though?
|
| The only way to memorize all those random-ish pronunciations is
| with a lot of practice, and the best way to do that is with a
| lot of reading, so you have rich context and meaning to draw on
| to help you memorize stuff.
|
| But if you can't read, how do you even get started with that
| practice? Maybe there are better ways, but in English, phonics
| seems like a pretty decent way to get started with simple
| children's books.
| ryao wrote:
| The "whole word" approach had been used to successfully teach
| children in the past without phonetics and it worked. This
| avoids the downsides of phonetics. In any case, my earliest
| memories of learning English involved the "whole word"
| approach where my mother had taken me to the library to read
| books with such profound literary prose as "This is Spot. See
| Spot run." after I had learned the alphabet. There was
| substantial repetition before I learned. It worked for me as
| far as bootstrapping went.
|
| All of the phonetics material included in my elementary
| school's curriculum had been detrimental overall in
| hindsight. There were many times teachers would tell me to
| sound words out, I would do it wrong and I was considered the
| one at fault. If I asked how to sound out words correctly, I
| would get a non-answer, such as "you just do it". That is a
| form of sadism that no child should have to endure.
|
| Thanks to the inclusion of elements of phonetics into
| elementary school's English curricula, I remember one time
| being asked to identify the syllables in words. I asked what
| a syllable was. I would be told it was the smallest
| subdivision of a word and be given an example. Then I would
| identify that I could say a vowel from it (not knowing that
| was a vowel) so by the definition, the example was not a
| syllable and just told I was wrong. At no point was how
| anything actually worked explained. Of course, this would be
| touched on as if it were important, but then would not be
| used for anything in the rest of the year, which illustrated
| how useless knowing this was for English. I would not learn
| what a syllable was until college when I studied Latin, where
| it actually matters somewhat due to the stress accent that
| English also has in some form, but goes untaught in school.
| :/
| scotty79 wrote:
| Maybe reading English should be initially taught using Shavian
| alphabet and transition to Latin alphabet later in life, or not
| at all, using AI for conversation between Latin and Shavian
| characters?
| bsenftner wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You claim you just inferred sounds from letter shapes and
| started putting it together yourself, with no training data?
| bsenftner wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Are you implying that people use "training data" to learn
| things
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| 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.
| ryankrage77 wrote:
| I don't remember learning to read, or a time in my life where I
| couldn't read at least a bit. As best I can figure I began
| reading before my episodic memory fully developed.
|
| I do wonder how I managed to learn anything just by reading on
| my own though. There were certainly words and concepts I didn't
| understand (I have a vivid memory of reading a childrens
| science book that explained the big bang, and misinterpreting
| it as 'the universe started when the sun exploded'. I noticed
| the logical inconsistency but didn't pursue it), but I can't
| think of any instances where those gaps in my knowledge were
| filled by someone else and I had an 'aha' moment of
| understanding. I guess we do a lot of learning without
| realising it.
| pards wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 Svarceneger".
|
| 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 "c", 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 "Si Dzinping"), 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 "Petrovic"
| (note the "c"), and since it' a latin alphabet, we write it
| "Petrovic", 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 "Petrovic" (since we don't have the letter "c" we'd
| transcribe to "c". But if he's a serb (cyrillic Petrovitsh), he'd
| be "Petrovic" (with a "c" again).
|
| So yeah...
|
| My languge of choice will be Perl, it's simpler.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
| upofadown wrote:
| 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-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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Meta-reading! I couldn't stop inspecting my own reading mechanism
| while reading through the article.
| bwanab wrote:
| For anybody who's interested in spending an hour listening, this
| podcast (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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It sucks that instead of fixing the spelling you add workaround
| everywhere else.
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