1/3 of US schools teach reading in a way that doesn't work.

[ahhell]

https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

An infuriating story and naturally this hurts the poor kids and minorities more. Rich parents get their kids tutored. Basically, a bunch of teachers and schools bought into a teaching method about 30 years ago that doesn't work and the science was pretty clear at the time that it doesn't work.

There's also some classic skeptics stuff here. The folks profiting from the pseudoscience accuse big education of doing exactly that.

I blame the Kiwi's, one of them created this method in the 60s. To be fair, before the science was clear.

Anyrate, if you have kids and their schools use a method other than phonics, go to the school board meetings and get them to stop.

Anything from Lucy Caulkins, Fountas and Pinnell, or Maire Clay, is bad bad bad.

[Brainster]

Love this bit:

Quote:

The teacher shows the class photographs of avid readers and asks the children to discuss what they notice.

Then the children are sent off to find comfortable spots so they can practice avid reading. These are kindergarteners. Most of them don’t know how to read yet. But they’re supposed to spend 35 to 45 minutes reading independently, and with partners, and in small groups. The teacher circulates and observes and confers with the children. At some point, the teacher gets the attention of the whole class for what’s called a mid-workshop teaching point. She might share something she’s noticed. The example in the teacher guide is to say something like this: “Everywhere I look, you are reading avidly. I don’t need those photographs of strangers to see avid reading. No way! It’s right here in front of me!”

They spend 35-45 minutes looking at pictures, because of course they can't read.

[Delvo]

Telling them to be avid about it? What could anybody think is the point? Obviously you can't tell people how to feel about something and have that actually cause them to feel that way.

[novaphile]

I can't be bothered to watch the videos to find out five seconds of content.

However, John Taylor Gatto's books about reading are interesting.

Luckily, I was taught by my parents, and was reading relatively well before I attended school. My parents taught me how pronounce words phonetically, and how to use a dictionary to look up new words. Similarly, they taught me how to break a word down and how to attempt to decode the meaning that way.

According to JTG children are/were being taught whole word recognition of words, typically with flash-cards, with no attention given to the meaning of the letters, phonemes, syllables etc.

The problem with that approach, is that a new word is just a meaningless symbol and the student has no way to progress further.

Similarly, he argued that children's 'readers' were deliberately and desperately low in the new vocabulary that was introduced year by year. Resulting in children finishing primary school with a tiny vocabulary compared to children from 100 years ago.

(My own experience with this, was reading 'Wind in the Willows' to a friends children, including a couple of teenagers, a lot of time was spent explaining all the unfamiliar words.)



To this day, I hope that he was wrong/mistaken, because not being taught the basic skills I was given, would massively set the student back.

[theprestige]

I can't even claim to read well because my parents taught me. It was just something I turned out to be good at. Getting the traditional rote repetition of the letters education in kindergarten probably helped. Maybe my dad reading to me (the Hobbit is the book I recall) around that age helped. But by first grade, reading was what I did. Even today, it's still a large part of my self-identity. At six or seven, I was reading Lord of the Rings for the first time. After that, I was off to the races.

So I have nothing to say about what it takes to learn to read, or what's the best way to teach it. Kind of like how a fish has nothing to say about what it's like to be wet.

But this is also why I absolutely hate video clips as information transfer mechanisms. I'm too used to absorbing words off a page or a screen, at my own pace. I can skim for general ideas, go back and read closely for details, etc. Very few youtubers and the like can get to the point clearly or quickly enough to satisfy my expectations. I can grasp much more of your idea from five seconds of reading about it than I can from five seconds of you welcoming me to your goddamn channel.

[marting]

A nuanced discussion:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/educa...osed-solution/

It's frankly appalling the way various "innovations" come along like some new religion and get adopted uncritically. Reminds me of the math wars.

Meanwhile parents pay attention to their own kids and do what they can. The more resources the parents have the more likely they can taylor their supplementation to their child's needs. And there are far more available now than ever before. And many are free.

[3point14]

Originally Posted by Delvo

Telling them to be avid about it? What could anybody think is the point? Obviously you can't tell people how to feel about something and have that actually cause them to feel that way.

Cargo cult reading..?

[Brainster]

Originally Posted by novaphile

I can't be bothered to watch the videos to find out five seconds of content.

There are transcripts of each segment.

[ahhell]

Originally Posted by novaphile

I can't be bothered to watch the videos to find out five seconds of content.

However, John Taylor Gatto's books about reading are interesting.

Luckily, I was taught by my parents, and was reading relatively well before I attended school. My parents taught me how pronounce words phonetically, and how to use a dictionary to look up new words. Similarly, they taught me how to break a word down and how to attempt to decode the meaning that way.

According to JTG children are/were being taught whole word recognition of words, typically with flash-cards, with no attention given to the meaning of the letters, phonemes, syllables etc.

The problem with that approach, is that a new word is just a meaningless symbol and the student has no way to progress further.

Similarly, he argued that children's 'readers' were deliberately and desperately low in the new vocabulary that was introduced year by year. Resulting in children finishing primary school with a tiny vocabulary compared to children from 100 years ago.

(My own experience with this, was reading 'Wind in the Willows' to a friends children, including a couple of teenagers, a lot of time was spent explaining all the unfamiliar words.)



To this day, I hope that he was wrong/mistaken, because not being taught the basic skills I was given, would massively set the student back.

The method under discussion is basically teaching kids to figure out the words based on context. So, looking at any pictures and guessing the words based on the sentance. Maire Claire claimed this is what good readers did. The research since has shown the exact opposite, its the bad readers that do that. Its basically the homoeopathy of reading. When she came up with the method, nobody knew any better and it was based on her observational "research".

It also has parallels with theraputic touch. The methods feel empowering to teachers but really aren't. Much like Theraputic touch feels empowering to nurses.

[Delvo]

That sounds like something that was going around in the 1960s-70s called "see & say": see the whole word, say the whole word. It was one of the two reasons why my parents put all of us in a private school which still treated the alphabet as an alphabet instead of the local public school district.

The public schools later figured out how terrible it was and went back to acting as if English were English not Chinese. But it's no surprise that something like it would come back around. Something about the profession of education-administration incentivizes its people to come up with changes and rush them to implementation immediately, and, whenever what you've been doing has been working fine, changes just for the sake of changing things break it.

[smartcooky]

Originally Posted by ahhell

https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

An infuriating story and naturally this hurts the poor kids and minorities more. Rich parents get their kids tutored. Basically, a bunch of teachers and schools bought into a teaching method about 30 years ago that doesn't work and the science was pretty clear at the time that it doesn't work.

There's also some classic skeptics stuff here. The folks profiting from the pseudoscience accuse big education of doing exactly that.

I blame the Kiwi's, one of them created this method in the 60s. To be fair, before the science was clear.

Anyrate, if you have kids and their schools use a method other than phonics, go to the school board meetings and get them to stop.

Anything from Lucy Caulkins, Fountas and Pinnell, or Maire Clay, is bad bad bad.

100% agree with this. Marie Clay has literally ****** up the reading skills of hundreds of thousands of kids.. Her stupid, ill-founded, ill thought-out ideas have directly lead to an explosion of illiteracy in this country.

I was fortunate in that I was taught to read when schools in this country were still using phonics and hadn't yet adopted Clay's bat-**** crazy ideas about teaching kids to read.

[alfaniner]

Originally Posted by theprestige

I can't even claim to read well because my parents taught me. It was just something I turned out to be good at. Getting the traditional rote repetition of the letters education in kindergarten probably helped. Maybe my dad reading to me (the Hobbit is the book I recall) around that age helped. But by first grade, reading was what I did. Even today, it's still a large part of my self-identity. At six or seven, I was reading Lord of the Rings for the first time. After that, I was off to the races.

So I have nothing to say about what it takes to learn to read, or what's the best way to teach it. Kind of like how a fish has nothing to say about what it's like to be wet.

But this is also why I absolutely hate video clips as information transfer mechanisms. I'm too used to absorbing words off a page or a screen, at my own pace. I can skim for general ideas, go back and read closely for details, etc. Very few youtubers and the like can get to the point clearly or quickly enough to satisfy my expectations. I can grasp much more of your idea from five seconds of reading about it than I can from five seconds of you welcoming me to your goddamn channel.

Agree 100% here. A lot of times I have a question about a procedure and the first several hits are videos. It's always a potluck because you can't tell which are front-loaded with ads. It's the rare instance where I have to actually see something in motion (like assembling something) that the video is preferred.

[ahhell]

Originally Posted by smartcooky

100% agree with this. Marie Clay has literally ****** up the reading skills of hundreds of thousands of kids.. Her stupid, ill-founded, ill thought-out ideas have directly lead to an explosion of illiteracy in this country.

I was fortunate in that I was taught to read when schools in this country were still using phonics and hadn't yet adopted Clay's bat-**** crazy ideas about teaching kids to read.

To be fair to her, she came up with the ideas before the science had really been done. She was actually one of the first people to try and do some research on teaching literacy. But, its a bit like Freude. He was the first but he was wrong about almost everything. Now, she never backed down even when the science had become clear. So, there is that. The podcast was fascinating. Of the three folks pushing these ideas, only Lucy Caulkins as changed her mind. I still wouldn't trust her curriculum, she's changing it but how would a parent know if the local school has adopted the new version or is coasting on the old.

[theprestige]

Originally Posted by ahhell

To be fair to her, she came up with the ideas before the science had really been done. She was actually one of the first people to try and do some research on teaching literacy.

I would like to be fair, but I would also like to understand whose idea it was to promulgate her system of education before the research had been completed and the scientific results were in. Because if it was some jackass secretary of education or misguided but influential school board or something, that grabbed her half-baked idea and ran with it? Then yeah, stop blaming her for other people's jackassery. But if it was her? Then I don't think she can 'well ackshully' her way out of it by saying she hadn't tested her idea before applying it to schoolchildren.

[ahhell]

Originally Posted by theprestige

I would like to be fair, but I would also like to understand whose idea it was to promulgate her system of education before the research had been completed and the scientific results were in. Because if it was some jackass secretary of education or misguided but influential school board or something, that grabbed her half-baked idea and ran with it? Then yeah, stop blaming her for other people's jackassery. But if it was her? Then I don't think she can 'well ackshully' her way out of it by saying she hadn't tested her idea before applying it to schoolchildren.

Also to be clear, she never did back down on her belief in the system even after the science was in.

It is school boards, teachers, an influential publishing house, and at least one well respected college of education that have really pushed this into US schools.

[Jack by the hedge]

Originally Posted by alfaniner

Agree 100% here. A lot of times I have a question about a procedure and the first several hits are videos. It's always a potluck because you can't tell which are front-loaded with ads. It's the rare instance where I have to actually see something in motion (like assembling something) that the video is preferred.

Concisely and helpfully showing you the answer to your query would take a few seconds. The channel owner won't get paid unless you watch for longer than that.

The way YouTube works specifically selects against brief, useful and non-frustrating clips.

On topic, a few years after I was taught to read, there was an experiment with teaching phonetic spellings with the idea that kids could learn to work out reading with simplified regular rules, then be taught conventional spelling later. Of course it meant having to un-learn all the wrong spellings you had absorbed, and was quickly dropped.

[marting]

Math has had a similar experience.

https://www.sfgate.com/education/art...nd-3318060.php

Quote:

In 1989, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics released the trendy math standards -- which eschewed traditional math in favor of group work and discovery learning
...
Five years ago, the dissident math group Mathematically Correct was born when parents angry about the "exemplary" College Preparatory Mathematics realized the problem wasn't just in their three school districts, but had become widespread.

I have some familiarity with this. CPM's initial approach was to connect math with things the students were familiar with. This was expected to produce deeper understanding of the usefulness and application ubiquity. I can relate to this as it was how I learned even though my classes were conventional. I'd bounce from math to physics to chemistry and back again as new learning new science stuff required deeper math.

But it didn't work out well for most classrooms. Few teachers had the background or interest to explain the connections beyond (or even) what was in the texts. And the small group self learning approach failed in many cases. The slower kids got more frustated and stopped learning while the others weren't challenged.

And, of course, being able to read proficiently is a predicate to success in any other area.

[lomiller]

Originally Posted by marting

A nuanced discussion:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/educa...osed-solution/

It's frankly appalling the way various "innovations" come along like some new religion and get adopted uncritically. Reminds me of the math wars.

Meanwhile parents pay attention to their own kids and do what they can. The more resources the parents have the more likely they can taylor their supplementation to their child's needs. And there are far more available now than ever before. And many are free.

Thanks, this is much better than the podcast in the OP. I actually tend to side with the phonics approach, but the podcast itself is long on advocacy, emotional appeals and repetition of "facts" for which no evidence has yet been presented. Sure they get around to providing some evidence eventually, but not until they have repeated their claims dozens of times.

This approach of repeating claims, making emotional appeals about those claims then "bringing it together at the end" with a little evidence pertinent to the claims is something I associate with promoting pseudoscience and woo. It could, of course, be used to promote real science but it still leaves a bad taste.

[ahhell]

Originally Posted by lomiller

Thanks, this is much better than the podcast in the OP. I actually tend to side with the phonics approach, but the podcast itself is long on advocacy, emotional appeals and repetition of "facts" for which no evidence has yet been presented. Sure they get around to providing some evidence eventually, but not until they have repeated their claims dozens of times.

This approach of repeating claims, making emotional appeals about those claims then "bringing it together at the end" with a little evidence pertinent to the claims is something I associate with promoting pseudoscience and woo. It could, of course, be used to promote real science but it still leaves a bad taste.

I think this is a valid criticism of the podcast. I tend to think they are largely correct however, mostly emotional appeal rather than evidence.

[novaphile]

Originally Posted by theprestige

I can't even claim to read well because my parents taught me. It was just something I turned out to be good at. Getting the traditional rote repetition of the letters education in kindergarten probably helped. Maybe my dad reading to me (the Hobbit is the book I recall) around that age helped. But by first grade, reading was what I did. Even today, it's still a large part of my self-identity. At six or seven, I was reading Lord of the Rings for the first time. After that, I was off to the races.

So I have nothing to say about what it takes to learn to read, or what's the best way to teach it. Kind of like how a fish has nothing to say about what it's like to be wet.

But this is also why I absolutely hate video clips as information transfer mechanisms. I'm too used to absorbing words off a page or a screen, at my own pace. I can skim for general ideas, go back and read closely for details, etc. Very few youtubers and the like can get to the point clearly or quickly enough to satisfy my expectations. I can grasp much more of your idea from five seconds of reading about it than I can from five seconds of you welcoming me to your goddamn channel.

Good grief! We may be long lost twins!

I routinely read at 3,000 words per minute, with 98% comprehension (yes I've been tested many times). Youtubers speak at about 100 words per minute and 90% of their speech is padding. I routinely skip past their introductions.

I think you read LOTR earlier than me, but I did have it taken off me in Primary school by an idiot teacher, who declared that it was 'too old for me'. That was the one time my parents took an active interest in anything that happened at school and they made an incredible fuss. The result of which, was the book being returned and the teacher apologising.

In grade seven, we had a 'reading age' test administered by education authorities, along with a vocabulary test. In both, I was assessed as being at post-graduate level.

I attribute all of that to early exposure to reading, and particularly my parents reading to me.

They decided that they would read a story every night and didn't waver. NB my brother had the same, and sometimes he'd read my story for me (he was four years older than me).

From what I've read about 'whole word' reading education and reading 'primers' it sounds like I dodged a massive bullet.

And this makes me wonder if that trend could be what has caused the 'reverse Flynn effect' where measured IQs are going down now, rather the previously trending up.

[lomiller]

Originally Posted by Delvo

That sounds like something that was going around in the 1960s-70s called "see & say": see the whole word, say the whole word. It was one of the two reasons why my parents put all of us in a private school which still treated the alphabet as an alphabet instead of the local public school district.

The public schools later figured out how terrible it was and went back to acting as if English were English not Chinese. But it's no surprise that something like it would come back around. Something about the profession of education-administration incentivizes its people to come up with changes and rush them to implementation immediately, and, whenever what you've been doing has been working fine, changes just for the sake of changing things break it.

Read the WSJ link for why things may not be as simple as this. It turns out that only about half of of English word spelling makes sense phonetically. IMO if you can work out half the words with a relatively simple repeatable system that's a win, but that's not good enough by itself because English spelling conveys meaning not just sound. (Eg the s at the end of dogs and cats, one sounds like an z the other sounds like an s but the use of the s itself adds meaning to the word so we spell both with an s)

Ultimately learning to read English requires you to recognize whole words in a way that isn't that much different than cartographic alphabets like Chinese. The real question is how you get there, do you just memorize all the words up front? Do you decode them using phonics knowing you still have to memorize all the words that don't make sense phonetically? Do you use context clues in the test itself to figure out unfamiliar words? Do you teach all the other rules needed to understand English word spelling?


It seems to me the obvious answer is that you need to do all of the above, the only question is when you introduce each but no one seems to have a really good answer to this question. My gut feeling is that starting with systematic phonics and decodable books that stick to the words for which that works is probably the best starting point, but just a starting point. All the other stuff needs to be introduced at some point.

[ahhell]

Originally Posted by lomiller

Read the WSJ link for why things may not be as simple as this. It turns out that only about half of of English word spelling makes sense phonetically. IMO if you can work out half the words with a relatively simple repeatable system that's a win, but that's not good enough by itself because English spelling conveys meaning not just sound. (Eg the s at the end of dogs and cats, one sounds like an z the other sounds like an s but the use of the s itself adds meaning to the word so we spell both with an s)

Ultimately learning to read English requires you to recognize whole words in a way that isn't that much different than cartographic alphabets like Chinese. The real question is how you get there, do you just memorize all the words up front? Do you decode them using phonics knowing you still have to memorize all the words that don't make sense phonetically? Do you use context clues in the test itself to figure out unfamiliar words? Do you teach all the other rules needed to understand English word spelling?


It seems to me the obvious answer is that you need to do all of the above, the only question is when you introduce each but no one seems to have a really good answer to this question. My gut feeling is that starting with systematic phonics and decodable books that stick to the words for which that works is probably the best starting point, but just a starting point. All the other stuff needs to be introduced at some point.

That highlighted bit seems to be pretty clearly wrong. It seems pretty clear from the last 50 years of research that you need to start with phonics, in fact that's all you really should teach. Even the words that aren't quite phonetic are still things that you can get pretty close, for the most part.

[lomiller]

Originally Posted by ahhell

That highlighted bit seems to be pretty clearly wrong. It seems pretty clear from the last 50 years of research that you need to start with phonics, in fact that's all you really should teach. Even the words that aren't quite phonetic are still things that you can get pretty close, for the most part.

Again, I suggest checking out the WSJ link.

Quote:

More important, when Camilli et al. (2006) reanalyzed the National Reading Panel (2000) data set and directly compared systematic to unsystematic phonics (excluding studies that had no phonics, such as “whole word” interventions), the advantage for systematic phonics was greatly reduced and no longer statistically significant.

This undermines the claim that systematic phonics is more effective than whole-language instruction that includes unsystematic phonics. Nevertheless, this finding has largely been ignored. The National Reading Panel has been cited will over 22,000 times, and over 2,000 times since 2017. By contrast, the Camilli et al. (2006) paper has been cited a total of 58 times, and only 9 times since 2017 (with 3 of these citations coming from us).

This conceptual confusion persists. Bowers (2018) shows that every subsequent meta-analysis taken to support systematic phonics over whole language has made the same mistake of comparing systematic phonics to a mixture of different methods, or comparing systematic phonics to interventions that included no phonics. Accordingly, none of these meta-analyses should be taken to support systematic phonics over whole language.

[Roger Ramjets]

Originally Posted by smartcooky

100% agree with this. Marie Clay has literally ****** up the reading skills of hundreds of thousands of kids.. Her stupid, ill-founded, ill thought-out ideas have directly lead to an explosion of illiteracy in this country.

I was fortunate in that I was taught to read when schools in this country were still using phonics and hadn't yet adopted Clay's bat-**** crazy ideas about teaching kids to read.

I was fortunate that when I first went to school I wasn't doing well ('disruptive in class' they said), so my parents pulled me out and taught me at home until the next year. I well remember my father writing simple words like 'cat' and 'mat' on the blackboard and showing me how they were made up phonetically. Once I understood how it worked the rest was easy.

Of course at school phonetic spelling was discouraged. The books were full of words deliberately chosen to not be phonetic. One I remember was 'Viscount' being used for - an airliner! The first example of product placement that I can remember - from way back in 1962.

My brother wasn't so lucky. He started school 2 years after me, and still couldn't read and write when he left at age 15.

[novaphile]

Originally Posted by Roger Ramjets

I was fortunate that when I first went to school I wasn't doing well ('disruptive in class' they said), so my parents pulled me out and taught me at home until the next year. I well remember my father writing simple words like 'cat' and 'mat' on the blackboard and showing me how they were made up phonetically. Once I understood how it worked the rest was easy.

Of course at school phonetic spelling was discouraged. The books were full of words deliberately chosen to not be phonetic. One I remember was 'Viscount' being used for - an airliner! The first example of product placement that I can remember - from way back in 1962.

My brother wasn't so lucky. He started school 2 years after me, and still couldn't read and write when he left at age 15.

I love your example. It immediately flashed me back to 'cuh ah tuh, cuh-a-tuh, cat'.

Then all the homophones, cat, bat, sat, fat, pat (the fat cat sat on the mat) etc.

I still remember feeling like a fish out of water in infant school, because it felt like I was starting again from scratch. Imagine the childhood indignation of having to do that stuff again, when I'd already mastered 'once' (me at five years old).

NB. That one was particularly difficult for me, because my parents pronounced it as 'wunce' (being Geordies). By I knew it as 'wonce' from other sources.

[marting]

Originally Posted by lomiller

Thanks, this is much better than the podcast in the OP. I actually tend to side with the phonics approach, but the podcast itself is long on advocacy, emotional appeals and repetition of "facts" for which no evidence has yet been presented. Sure they get around to providing some evidence eventually, but not until they have repeated their claims dozens of times.

Agree. Their approach put me off as well even though I'm inclinded to think phonics is probably more effective. Not as clear cut as the potcast makes out. Too heavy handed.

[Roger Ramjets]

Originally Posted by lomiller

Read the WSJ link for why things may not be as simple as this. It turns out that only about half of of English word spelling makes sense phonetically. IMO if you can work out half the words with a relatively simple repeatable system that's a win, but that's not good enough by itself because English spelling conveys meaning not just sound. (Eg the s at the end of dogs and cats, one sounds like an z the other sounds like an s but the use of the s itself adds meaning to the word so we spell both with an s)

That's right, and once you are 'winning' the rest is easy (just look up any word you don't know in the dictionary). But what if you aren't winning? What if you are taught not to figure out unfamiliar words because the same rules might not apply to all of them? I'll tell you what happens - you never learn the most important skill, how to read unfamiliar text by yourself.

Quote:

Ultimately learning to read English requires you to recognize whole words in a way that isn't that much different than cartographic alphabets like Chinese.

You make it sound like Chinese isn't phonetic. In fact that's only half true.

Phonetic Components: The Secret Trick to Guessing the Pronunciation of Chinese Characters.

Quote:

At first glance, the many strokes that compose a Chinese character don’t look like they give out many hints as to how they are to be pronounced. In fact, for a long time, you were expected to connect the strokes of characters to the sounds they refer to by sheer rote memorization. But, this is no longer the case. The Chinese know something you don’t and we’re going to let you in on their big secret: Chinese characters do represent sound, thanks to phonetic components. Phonetic components are indications the character contains on its pronunciation.

You can break down the characters yourself, or look at a Chinese dictionary, like Ninchanese’s. The dictionary will show you how the character can be decomposed, and allow you to look up the different elements in the character.
What can you expect to see?

Most of the time (over 80% of the time), the character you’ll be looking at will be a picto-phonetic character.

This is the most common way of forming characters. In fact, more than 80% of all Chinese characters are pictophonetic characters.

Chinese characters are also used in Japanese and Korean, but these languages are strongly phonetic even though they use pictograms.

The majority of English words can be be broken down phonetically once you know how to pronounce the component parts. English borrows from many other languages with different rules, so it may seem like a lot of words are not phonetic when they are. However many foreign words have been anglicised to make them easier to spell in English. Americans take it one step further - we change the spelling of English words to match the pronunciation, eg. color vs colour, eon vs aeon, center vs centre, check vs cheque.

But even for other English speakers it's not that hard once you know that eg. 'tre' is pronounced 'ter' or 'our' is often pronounced 'or'. You will probably get 'Viscount' wrong if you don't know how the French pronounce it, but it's not a biggy. More important is how could you possibly know (without sufficient context) that it is was the name of an airplane?

The most important thing about reading is not how to pronounce words, but what they mean. You can often deduce the meaning from the context, but it helps if the word can be broken down into components that build up the full meaning. That is why Greek and Latin - which are strongly phonetic - were chosen for scientific and technical literature.

Pronunciation can be a bit of a problem where people are reading words instead of hearing them. In some cases the 'correct' pronunciation is not even agreed on by experts. For example in computing the words 'gif' (pronounced 'jif' according to its inventor) and 'Linux' (pronounced 'li·nuhks' according to Linus Torvald himself) are often the subject of debate. Clearly many people have decided what these words sound like from how they are written, not spoken. However despite the pronunciation ambiguities, nobody is confused about what these words mean. And with 99% of communications referencing them being in written form, most of the time it doesn't matter how they are pronounced.

As for the 'whole word' thing, that's nonsense. Nobody recognizes the word antidisestablishmentarianism or acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS) by simply looking at the whole thing. If words weren't meant to be phonetic they would consist of mixtures of characters designed to be easily distinguishable by shape, not sound. We would communicate using emoticons and ascii art.

[Roger Ramjets]

Originally Posted by novaphile

I think you read LOTR earlier than me, but I did have it taken off me in Primary school by an idiot teacher, who declared that it was 'too old for me'.

That was a common problem for me too.

But the mention of LOTR reminds me of the time the teacher assigned us two books to read. The girls got 'The Hobbit', and the boys got 'The Gun' by C. S. Forester (not at all sexist, oh no...). Me and my friend weren't interested in some hyper-violent testosterone fueled war story, so we petitioned the teacher to read The Hobbit instead. Remarkably she agreed, and for the first time I thoroughly enjoyed an assigned reading book.

[Horhang]

Just a minor correction on Korean. It does not use pictograms. It is phonetic and each letter has a unique sound. I learned to read the alphabet in a weekend when I was there.
They do also use Chinese characters for reasons no one could ever give me a reasonable explanation for given Hangul is so easy to learn to read and write.

[Blue Mountain]

Originally Posted by Roger Ramjets

My brother wasn't so lucky. He started school 2 years after me, and still couldn't read and write when he left at age 15.

Given what you know about your brother and how the two of you were raised, are you sure this down all simply due to a difference in teaching methods? Or could it be because he has differences in how he learns?

[Darat]

I thought her system^(TM) was meant to help those failing to read not a reading system in itself? It was meant to be used in a remedial manner?

[lomiller]

Originally Posted by Roger Ramjets

As for the 'whole word' thing, that's nonsense. Nobody recognizes the word antidisestablishmentarianism or acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS) by simply looking at the whole thing.

I never suggested people would not have to stop and decode unfamiliar words, but good luck trying to decode either of those phonetically. Their writing and spelling doesn't arise phonetically it comes from how prefixes and suffixes alter the meaning of the root words. The key to decoding words like this isn't phonetics, it's understanding the meaning conveyed by how the word is written and spelled.

[theprestige]

Originally Posted by Roger Ramjets

As for the 'whole word' thing, that's nonsense. Nobody recognizes the word antidisestablishmentarianism or acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS) by simply looking at the whole thing.

Bet you're wrong. In fact, I know you're wrong in the case of antidisestablishmentarianism, because I do in fact recognize it just by looking at it. But that's because I've seen it enough, and have spent enough time with the English language, to intuit what's happening by the time I've got the first syllable in front of me and the last syllable in my peripheral vision. I absolutely do not need to work through each syllable in order, all the way through the word, to have the entire word whole and complete in my head. It's already there, from my first glance.

And I bet the same is true for acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene-copolymer. I bet career chemists, and other people who spend a lot of their time working with and thinking in terms of the field's technical jargon, can easily intuit the sense of those words at a glance, without having to read each letter out to themselves first.

The question, which educators seem to have answered very badly in recent decades, is how do you get a new reader to transition from reading out each letter in order, to grasping whole words and phrases at a glance.

There seems to have been a fad for insisting it could be done immediately, bypassing the laborious process of rote rehearsal and memorization. But as far as I can tell, the only real way to do it is through constant lifelong practice. The more words you see the more often you see them, the easier it gets.

[TragicMonkey]

Originally Posted by Horhang

Just a minor correction on Korean. It does not use pictograms. It is phonetic and each letter has a unique sound.

Korean is also remarkable because unlike most other alphabets it didn't develop gradually over time: someone actually sat down and invented it on purpose all at once, putting real thought to how it should work.

[TragicMonkey]

Originally Posted by theprestige

I can't even claim to read well because my parents taught me. It was just something I turned out to be good at. Getting the traditional rote repetition of the letters education in kindergarten probably helped. Maybe my dad reading to me (the Hobbit is the book I recall) around that age helped. But by first grade, reading was what I did. Even today, it's still a large part of my self-identity. At six or seven, I was reading Lord of the Rings for the first time. After that, I was off to the races.

So I have nothing to say about what it takes to learn to read, or what's the best way to teach it. Kind of like how a fish has nothing to say about what it's like to be wet.

But this is also why I absolutely hate video clips as information transfer mechanisms. I'm too used to absorbing words off a page or a screen, at my own pace. I can skim for general ideas, go back and read closely for details, etc. Very few youtubers and the like can get to the point clearly or quickly enough to satisfy my expectations. I can grasp much more of your idea from five seconds of reading about it than I can from five seconds of you welcoming me to your goddamn channel.

I was the same. My parents taught me the alphabet, and would read books to me, and gradually somehow that transitioned to me learning to read the books myself. There was definitely a point at which I couldn't read (I actually have a memory from that time: looking at a road sign and wishing I could decipher it), and then through repetition had memorized the kids' books verbatim without being able to read them (I'm not a genius, this was Dr Seuss level crap), then...the jump, somehow, was made to being able to read new material. I don't remember it happening. My parents didn't do anything beyond teaching the alphabet itself and reading to me, moving their finger along the text as they read. Somehow that's enough, at least it was for me and I doubt I'm particularly special. I'd say that learning to read is mostly automatic, something the brain figures out for itself, given the correct input and sufficient practice!

I could definitely read for real before kindergarten, and was reading well ahead of most of my classmates. In first grade I was into the Hardy Boys (although much of the content of the ancient 1920s editions I had was confusing to me), in third I managed LotR (although it did take me weeks and weeks), and by fifth grade I was pretty much reading the then-sparse "young adult" genre and proper adult books. I remember in sixth grade we got a chance to do our monthly book report on our choice of book and practically everyone did Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew and I did Mrs Pollifax.

[Roger Ramjets]

Originally Posted by Horhang

Just a minor correction on Korean. It does not use pictograms. It is phonetic and each letter has a unique sound. I learned to read the alphabet in a weekend when I was there.
They do also use Chinese characters for reasons no one could ever give me a reasonable explanation for given Hangul is so easy to learn to read and write.

Hangul

Quote:

Hangul was created in 1443 CE by King Sejong the Great in an attempt to increase literacy by serving as a complement (or alternative) to the logographic Sino-Korean Hanja, which had been used by Koreans as its primary script to write the Korean language since as early as the Gojoseon period (spanning more than a thousand years and ending around 108 BCE), along with the usage of Classical Chinese. As a result, Hangul was initially denounced and disparaged by the Korean educated class. The script became known as eonmun ("vernacular writing", 언문, 諺文) and became the primary Korean script only in the decades after Korea's independence from Japan in the mid-20th century...

Koreans primarily wrote using Classical Chinese alongside native phonetic writing systems that predate Hangul by hundreds of years, including Idu script, Hyangchal, Gugyeol and Gakpil. However, many lower class uneducated Koreans were illiterate due to the difficulty of learning the Korean and Chinese languages, as well as the large number of Chinese characters that are used...

The Korean alphabet was designed so that people with little education could learn to read and write. A popular saying about the alphabet is, "A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; even a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days."

Hangul does use 'pictograms' (or more correctly logograms) but they represent sounds rather than objects.

[Roger Ramjets]

Originally Posted by TragicMonkey

There was definitely a point at which I couldn't read (I actually have a memory from that time: looking at a road sign and wishing I could decipher it), and then through repetition had memorized the kids' books verbatim without being able to read them (I'm not a genius, this was Dr Seuss level crap), then...the jump, somehow, was made to being able to read new material. I don't remember it happening. My parents didn't do anything beyond teaching the alphabet itself and reading to me, moving their finger along the text as they read. Somehow that's enough,

I too remember a time when I couldn't read, and it was quite frustrating. Your parents did the right things, teaching the alphabet so you knew what the letters looked and sounded like, and pointing to the letters as they read the words. That way you could see that words are made up of sounds represented by letters, ie. phonetics.

Phonics and Word Recognition Instruction in Early Reading Programs:

Quote:

The goal of phonics is not that children be able to state the "rules" governing letter-sound relationships. Rather, the purpose is to get across the alphabetic principle, the principle that there are systematic relationships between letters and sounds.

Phonics ought to be conceived as a technique for getting children off to a fast start in mapping the relationships between letters and sounds. It follows that phonics instruction should aim to teach only the most important and regular of letter-to-sound relationships, because this is the sort of instruction that will most directly lay bare the alphabetic principle. Once the basic relationships have been taught, the best way to get children to refine and extend their knowledge of letter-sound correspondences is through repeated opportunities to read.

Your comment about memorizing books verbatim without being able to read them is interesting. I remember being given the task of helping children in a lower class with their schoolwork. The girl I was 'teaching' did a wonderful job of reading the book she had, except it was the wrong book! I was shocked. IIRC the system used at that time was called 'word association', where a word was associated with a picture. Phonetic spelling was actively discouraged.

My brother was 'taught' to read in that system. Unfortunately, unlike me he quickly adjusted to the school environment and seemed to be doing well, so it was years before we discovered he wasn't actually learning. By that time the teachers had discovered it too, and their response was dismiss him as a lost cause so they could concentrate on the 'bright' ones like me. In the end it worked out OK though, because soon after leaving school my brother taught himself to read - no thanks to the education system.

[Samson]

Originally Posted by ahhell

https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

An infuriating story and naturally this hurts the poor kids and minorities more. Rich parents get their kids tutored. Basically, a bunch of teachers and schools bought into a teaching method about 30 years ago that doesn't work and the science was pretty clear at the time that it doesn't work.

There's also some classic skeptics stuff here. The folks profiting from the pseudoscience accuse big education of doing exactly that.

I blame the Kiwi's, one of them created this method in the 60s. To be fair, before the science was clear.

Anyrate, if you have kids and their schools use a method other than phonics, go to the school board meetings and get them to stop.

Anything from Lucy Caulkins, Fountas and Pinnell, or Maire Clay, is bad bad bad.

The greatest tragedy in my memory is the lack of phonetics in New Zealand and yes, we are to blame.
Our prisons would be empty with phonetics at age 4.

[Roger Ramjets]

Originally Posted by theprestige

Bet you're wrong. In fact, I know you're wrong in the case of antidisestablishmentarianism, because I do in fact recognize it just by looking at it. But that's because I've seen it enough, and have spent enough time with the English language, to intuit what's happening by the time I've got the first syllable in front of me and the last syllable in my peripheral vision. I absolutely do not need to work through each syllable in order, all the way through the word, to have the entire word whole and complete in my head. It's already there, from my first glance.

Are you sure about that? You just have to see the first and last syllable of antidestablementarianism to know that it's not antidisectmentarianism or antidisentitlementarianism? If so I'm impressed.

Quote:

And I bet the same is true for acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene-copolymer. I bet career chemists, and other people who spend a lot of their time working with and thinking in terms of the field's technical jargon, can easily intuit the sense of those words at a glance, without having to read each letter out to themselves first.

I bet they use abbreviations like ABS in part because they can't easily intuit the sense of those long words at a glance. There are over 30 million organic compounds known, many with very similar names. It might be acceptable to misread a word or two in a fiction novel, but not in the laboratory.

[Roger Ramjets]

Originally Posted by ahhell

[url]I blame the Kiwi's, one of them created this method in the 60s.

Do you have a cite for that?

Sorry if was in the podcast and I missed it. I don't have the patience to listen to it and the transcript is a mess.