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.
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
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.
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.
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 Kodály 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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. HN will be HN, I guess?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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); you can even get fonts that have this, making it easier to read web pages, online documents, or character subtitles for videos.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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
> 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.)
Germany, 2010s: We learned the letters with pictures of animals, that started with that letter. Also complicated words were initially replaced with inline pictures.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
The source linked under each graph says "No significant change in fourth-grade reading scores across student groups compared to 2015" and "No change in score gaps among selected racial/ethnic groups in reading at grade 4 compared to 2015".
If OP thinks removing a certain demographic changes the results they should state what demographic that is.
The article isn't using the graphs to talk about a difference between 2015 and 2017, but about the overall level, so it would indeed be surprising if there had been a large change between those years.
But there are several demographic variables that show substantial differences between groups (and sometimes over longer timescales within a group), so I think it would be more enlightening to look at all of them, rather than letting someone pick their preferred comparison and then trying to argue with that.
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.
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.
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".
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kod%C3%A1ly_method
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Glad to see a return to phonics.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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); you can even get fonts that have this, making it easier to read web pages, online documents, or character subtitles for videos.
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
https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.10...
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes
That is a problem
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.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jan/opinion-phonics-teaching...
A link to the multi episode podcast this article is the basis of. Incredible reporting
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is well known that some kids will learn to read no matter how they are taught. Most kids will not.
And while context can get one ahead early, you don’t want to be like the adult who couldn’t actually read.
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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That seems to be one of the main components of Russian accent in ESL.
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.
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.
We were expected to grow up and learn to do work even when we didn't want to.
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.
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/
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).
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.
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?
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.
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?
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)
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.
If OP thinks removing a certain demographic changes the results they should state what demographic that is.
But there are several demographic variables that show substantial differences between groups (and sometimes over longer timescales within a group), so I think it would be more enlightening to look at all of them, rather than letting someone pick their preferred comparison and then trying to argue with that.
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.
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.
I've heard many anecdotes of teachers discouraging teaching kids those things at home ahead of the curriculum.
(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.)
Though reading should be something teachers are equipped to handle very wide range of competency.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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}