How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers (2019)
apmreports.org
apmreports.org
> The theory is known as "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information — or "cues" — to identify words as they are reading.
> ....
> In the paper,5 Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words. Instead, he argued that as people read, they make predictions about the words on the page using these three cues:
* graphic cues (what do the letters tell you about what the word might be?)
* syntactic cues (what kind of word could it be, for example, a noun or a verb?)
* semantic cues (what word would make sense here, based on the context?)
> Goodman's proposal became the theoretical basis for a new approach to teaching reading that would soon take hold in American schools.
I don't finish the article because when I got to that point it seemed problematic but not something that couldn't be overcome. Aren't all learners going to find strategies to learn something and then alter those over time with the right teachers and introspection?
I didn't finish the article but does it explain (perhaps after a dozen or so foreshadowing paragraphs) why this method could not be overcome once learned?
I go down and read the last two paragraphs to see if they summed it up well. It’s a 33% I read the whole article based on summary and content.
I’m not asking for a great writer... just someone that knew what they were writing about before they started typing.
You have to read about half of the lengthy, rambling article before you discover what on Earth they're talking about. Turns out to be about the inventor of the flight recorder. It follows of course that the title is simply untrue, which makes for a nice bonus.
In other words, nothing is stopping you from using your four fingers to type without looking at the keyboard. If you spend a whole day typing anyway, make a conscious effort, for a few minutes every day, to type by guessing where to move your fingers (whichever finger feels the closest or just the most comfortable). If you're like me, you already know where the keys are, you're just looking down to make sure. After a while, you'll see that you can write without looking, no problem. And at that point, it stops mattering if you use 4, 5, 6, or 10 fingers.
I was a 5-6-fingers non-touch typer for a very long time, my input speed was satisfactory anyway, so I didn't feel the need to learn the "proper technique," which seemed like a huge PITA. I was convinced that the proper touch typing is the only way to type without looking at the keyboard. I changed my mind due to a situation at work, where I was explaining something to a co-worker and had to use her laptop for demonstration. The catch was that her keyboard was completely blank. I was stumped for a while, but - having a reputation of a senior to uphold - I said (internally) 'fuck it, whatever happens, happens,' closed my eyes, and just typed. It worked, not 100%, but close enough. The co-worker wasn't impressed (well, she was the one who used such a keyboard, to begin with), but I was in awe. I realized that looking at the keyboard is just a habit, not an essential part of the typing process. Now I type mostly by touch, still use 5-6 fingers, still have satisfactory WPM, and I look down at the keyboard only when I'm distracted or when I have to reach some very rarely used key (like F5 - F9).
To summarize: if your work is based on typing on the keyboard, then the chances are that - after a few years - your fingers already know where the keys are. It's like riding a bike with hands away from the handlebar: if you've been cycling for a few years, you most likely are capable of doing this, you just need to realize it.
It was first mentioned 17 “paragraphs” in that:
memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don't know — are the strategies that many beginning readers are taught in school. This makes it harder for many kids to learn how to read, and children who don't get off to a good start in reading find it difficult to ever master the process.
That should have been the opener.
The last part about Ken Goodman was the best of the whole article.
The section "this is not reading" blew my mind, that people will make up words from pictures that aren't even on the page. Then I thought about social media.
Fascinating article, ColinWright is on fire today (3 front page posts).
That seems too narrow. I think the general idea is that there's no substitute for rote memorization of the basic characteristics of the writing system and its association to pre-existing language knowledge (usually spoken language). Phonics is simply one way to help speed that along in some scripts, though you still need to memorize the alphabet and basic syllables. In Chinese script (logograms), for example, the process is a little different and more laborious, including more initial memorization.
It's like when learning basic arithmetic. One has to learn by rote memorization the numbers 1-10 and their association to the abstract counting groups (2 of this, 4 of that, etc). No phonics involved. Then you similarly need to learn, through rote memorization, basic sums--1+1=2, etc. The concept of summation comes later. Without having that very basic foundation, you can't begin systematically exploring and building abstractions (through inference and, later, deduction) in the language of numbers.
https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
get a pile of beads, count them. get another pile, count them. put the two piles together, count.
they have beads that let you count up to 1000. i don't know at which point they introduce written numbers, but they certainly learn to say and use the numbers, and experience them through counting before reading and writing them.
> Adams thought this diagram made perfect sense. The research clearly shows that readers use all of these cues to understand what they're reading.
> But Adams soon figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not just as the way readers construct meaning from text, but as the way readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary.
Consequently, one of the most dangerous ideas to feed a brain is one that works in the short term but fails in the long term. Once mired in the bad term idea, one must expend effort to switch to the better idea, and in the process, one might even go backwards temporarily, convincing the brain (quite rationally from a certain point of view) that this is a bad idea, thus making it even harder to convince the brain this switch is a good idea. (You have less control over this decision than you fancy.)
Without a lot of energy or help to get out, you can get stuck there permanently.
It's not just reading. Many skills have this pattern to them. I myself am stuck there with bowling. I have the classic "got decent at throwing the ball straight down the lane" failure. I know that I need to learn to curve the ball to get better, and I just don't care enough to do it. Given how rarely I play, my time of "getting worse before I get better" would probably be "every game I play for the rest of my life." But I am stuck in that hole. I've been there with some other skills, too; I'm not sure one can jump straight to ideal piano technique without going through this a few times.
But those are no big deal to me. Screwing up reading from the get-go is devastating.
I takes a lot of willpower to stick with it and fully internalize that idea. Then I read a new book and it starts all over again.
> You know tens of thousands of words instantly, on sight. How did you learn to do that?
> It happens through a process called "orthographic mapping." This occurs when you pay attention to the details of a written word and link the word's pronunciation and meaning with its sequence of letters.
> ...
> That requires an awareness of the speech sounds in words and an understanding of how those sounds are represented by letters. In other words, you need phonics skills.
> ...
> when children don't have good phonics skills, the process is different.
> "They sample from the letters because they're not good at sounding them out," said David Kilpatrick, a psychology professor at SUNY Cortland and the author of a book about preventing reading difficulties.
> ...
> "The three-cueing system is the way poor readers read," said Kilpatrick.
> And if teachers use the system to teach reading, Kilpatrick says they're not just teaching children the habits of poor readers, they are actually impeding the orthographic mapping process.
> "The minute you ask them just to pay attention to the first letter or look at the picture, look at the context, you're drawing their attention away from the very thing that they need to interact with in order for them to read the word [and] remember the word," Kilpatrick said.
So it's a bit more complicated.
木 - tree
森 - forest
The introduction of pinyin revolutionised Chinese language teaching and had a near-miraculous effect on literacy rates; As a second-language user of Mandarin Chinese, I am indescribably grateful for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1080/09500780508668693
Also I expect the onyomi/Chinese readings of many kanji might fall into phonetic groups as they do in the hanzi. (Note also that kanji and hanzi are basically the same word with some phonetic shifts.) Apparently onyomi actually means "sound reading."
There definitely is a phonetic element to it. Since most/many complex words (jukugo) you'll encounter are formed from the same ~2k kanji, you often end up quite literally sounding it out. As a simple-ish example, 音読み itself: 音 is read 'on', 'in' or 'son' in descending order of frequency. 読's usual onyomi is 'doku', but the み ('mi') at the end clues you in that this is a on-kun jukugo, where the second kanji uses the kunyomi reading because... nevermind. Anyway, kunyomi is... 'yomi', so, onyomi.
It's plenty complicated in practice with all kinds of stuff messing you up (multiple onyomi, nonstandard readings of all kinds, rendaku, etc.) but fundamentally you're operating phonetically, at least when you first encounter the written form of a word you probably have heard before.
On furigana: it's useful but also absolutely can be a crutch. Although you're generally going to want to acquire jukugo vocab from various sources and not just sound everything out after learning common kanji, that process of phonetically processing a compound word is a great workout for your fundamental kanji knowledge. On top of that, for whatever reason, I find it makes me feel like I've comprehended the text when I actually haven't, like the kid in the article with the dog story, though in this case it's lack of understanding through phonetic over, rather than under, emphasis. At least personally, it's easy to rip through the furigana reading and have my brain be like "yep, just turned all of those symbols into sounds, job done." That's probably part of why many resources, like https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/, allow you to quickly toggle them. Open a story and hit the 漢字の読み方を消す button.
So true, especially when you encounter a proper noun that includes kanjis. It's almost impossible to guess how to read them, even for native speakers, because the usual rules surrounding how to read kanjis are largely ignored when it comes to proper nouns.
And this article says that a second grade reader can learn a new word after being exposed to it just a couple of times, but I'm not having that level of success to new characters I read in my passages.
A) This would allow you to use written language to teach hanzi and
B) This would allow you to have children read text that includes words they don't know how to read, by providing those words in pinyin.
I'm not sure how it actually works in Chinese, but as a adult second language learner of Japanese, having a phonetic system I can use to transcribe the logoriphic system is quite helpful.
Indeed. Here's a page from a textbook for second-graders: https://i.imgur.com/g1UlUZP.jpg
It's a story teaching the meaning of the proverb 揠苗助长 (pulling sprouts to help them grow). Some of the characters are annotated with their pinyin above, e.g. 揠 yà or 筋疲 jīn pí. This text in particular is a bit weird in that it only uses 揠 yà in the title and replaces it with 拔 bá in the story, so the reader would have to infer that 揠 yà and 拔 bá are synonyms. I think 拔苗助长 is actually the more common way to write the proverb.
It's also not rote memorization, rote memorization is mapping text->text not text->meaning.
You are wrong, it absolutely does. 放方芳房肪舫防紡 are all pronounced fang and contains 方. This stems from the evolution of the script, where a character was used to write various words with the same or close pronunciation. Then those characters where extended with other parts to reduce polysemy. This is similar the determiner of other logographic scripts (hieroglyphic, cuneiform) except the determiner is embedded in the character themselves instead of being separate ones.
While this phenomenon is less reguglar than in an alphabetic script (not that English has a straight graphemes/phonemes mapping either...) because of the script evolution , it’s happening nonetheless and is quite useful. So it’s not true to say that you can’t guess the sound of a character, because in a lot of case it’s possible to get an approximation.
I'm only a year into learning Chinese, but I can often guess the sound of a new character just by recalling components of similar characters. The tone takes memorization, but the sound oftentimes has hints. Especially if it's a complex, uncommon character--almost always the sound derives from one of the common radicals it uses.
It's not as intuitive as, say, pinyin, but it's helpful and straight up taught by any decent Chinese textbook.
I thought it said that memorization is good?
> Reading scientists have known for decades that the hallmark of being a skilled reader is the ability to instantly and accurately recognize words.33 If you're a skilled reader, your brain has gotten so good at reading words that you process the word "chair" faster than you process a picture of a chair.34 You know tens of thousands of words instantly, on sight. How did you learn to do that?
> It happens through a process called "orthographic mapping."35 This occurs when you pay attention to the details of a written word and link the word's pronunciation and meaning with its sequence of letters.
I thought this means people recognize the entire word, rather than the letters of the word. Just like how you recognize a Chinese character.
Then you learn to map the Chinese character with the pronunciation.
This tracks with some self reports for the most advanced L2 language learners though, that your ability to learn new words itself improves while you are learning new words. Maybe just requires a ton of exposure.
MattVsJapan talks about drilling vocab early on, then once he hit a certain level, he could often just look up a new word once and know it almost indefinitely, more like with English.
2nd grade is, what, 8 years of immersion? Exposure to something like 100-250,000 sentences, with practice or exposure for all available hours every day? It's a lot to catch up to.
Even so, with 2nd graders, we're not talking like "perspicacity" or "abrogate." Some words and some concepts will be harder than others.
Whatever success attributed to Pinyin has less to do with Pinyin and more to do with the social changes that coincided with it's introduction. Bopomofo, a more phonetically regular and easier to use system was used for decades before Pinyin and is still used in Taiwan today.
In addition, there are many adults alive today in their 60s and over who never learned any phonetic system and can read and write just fine.
People in Hong Kong also don't seem to learn any romanizatiom system for Cantonese pronounciations in school and can obviously read and write just fine.
Since most Chinese people type Chinese using Pinyin-based input methods (not counting voice recognition and handwriting recognition as typing here, which are also pretty widely used these days), this claim is absolutely, undoubtedly, 100% false.
Edit: Somehow read “many” as “most”. Since “many” can mean anything from one thousand people out of 1.4 billion to all of them, it’s not possible to refute the claim. But the idea should be clear: forgetting Pinyin upon entering high school is not common.
The fact that any number of people forget Pinyin at all demonstrates that it can't be compared to English phonics. You can't forget phonics, you can forget Pinyin.
And yes, I’m aware of the non-phonetic input methods, and that professional typists could type faster in them. But the learning curve is way steeper (compared to basically none).
https://zhidao.baidu.com/question/652630803736726165.html
https://iask.sina.com.cn/b/12990158.html
Most of the results are actually asking what the PinYin for "忘" is so obviously enough people who know how to type the character forgot the PinYin.
For comparison, googling "forgetting how to spell" comes up with webpages about Alzheimer's and "olvidando cómo deletrear" comes up with links about dyslexia.
The learning curve for non-phonetic input methods are exaggerated. Just developing the mechanical skills to type at all takes a long time already and can be done in parallel with learning the input method. If you don't believe me go find someone who rarely uses a computer and ask them to type something in any language. The learning curve for PinYin input methods is only supposedly low because it's already taught in school. It's like saying CAD software has a low learning curve because most engineering degrees include a course in how to use it.
> I personally know elderly people who were educated in 1930s and 40s who later learned Pinyin because it’s easier to type that way.
That's your anecdota I guess. I know plenty of young people who refuse to use anything other than X non-phonetic input method and English speakers who swear by DVORAK or ortholinears or whatever.
2. A lot of older people educated in 70s or earlier may have been taught some Pinyin, but never systematically. I know from talking to people that this is especially true in rural regions (well what can you do when the teachers don't know Pinyin). They simply never mastered Pinyin in the first place. A good part of this population didn't even go to high school, but even highly educated people in this camp can have a bit of trouble with Pinyin later, after relearning; I know a PhD born in the 60s fitting this bill, and he could still stutter on a character's Pinyin from time to time when typing.
The questions you found are very likely from this camp especially when they didn't have to type for decades until smartphones became prevalent.
Younger people from 80s and especially 90s onwards were taught Pinyin from first grade or even kindergarten before they were taught to recognize characters, then PCs and smartphones came along to reinforce the knowledge. It's pretty damn hard to forget that.
Again, of course there are "many"/"plenty" of any kind of people doing fringe stuff in a country of 1.4 billion, but presenting outliers as common or mainstream is misleading.
This is inaccurate. Taiwan continued using Zhuyin, the native syllabary China used prior to the 60s, and Taiwan's literacy rates have never lagged.
Pinyin and Zhuyin have a one-to-one mapping at the syllable level, but Zhuyin is more accurate at the single character scale. E.g., the sounds for both ㄜ and ㄝ are written as an e in Pinyin and ㄨ and ㄩ are both always written as u. Worse still, the ㄩ sound is also sometimes represented as ü in Pinyin (when preceded by an l).
Pinyin requires more context (and rules) to distinguish which vowel sound is being represented.
Zhuyin isn't perfect either. It's definitely a better representation of single consonant or vowel sounds but it still has its own warts around diphthongs and triphthongs.
Pinyin is definitely a flawed phonetic system, but it's usable and widespread. That's it's real strength, along with being less alien to non-Chinese speakers.
It's not insurmountable by any means. However, if Pinyin came in on a code review, I'd have a lot of comments on it :D
I don't disagree. There's nothing particularly special about pinyin, but it was revolutionary precisely because it rapidly became ubiquitous in Mandarin instruction.
I don't think I can reasonably address the issue of zhuyin vs tongyong vs hanyu without stepping into a political minefield, but I will say that there's a world of difference between achieving full literacy on a small and prosperous island versus achieving full literacy in a vast nation with substantial poverty and under-development.
Pinyin may help second language learners greatly, but was never the cause of the literacy spike. It's the rollout of the education system to villages that caused it. If they taught Chinese characters without Pinyin, they would most likely have decreased literacy rates to a similar extent also.
Moreover, some 80% of Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic hybrids (though the pronunciation of characters that share a phonetic element may not be identical in current Mandarin, they will often resemble each other closely, perhaps with a tone or vowel shift.) Learning characters in phonetic groups helps to anchor their pronunciation and phonetic elements can help when you encounter an unfamiliar character in context.
Most languages with phonetic writing systems (alphabet, abugida, syllabary, etc., but not pure abjad [1]) have direct phonetic representations. English, French, and a few other European languages are unusual.
The name for learning (sacred) texts in Sanskrit is “shruti” , that which is heard. Sanskrit grammar did change over time, at least until Panini wrote down the rules around the 6th century bc.
There are several phases of Chinese (the text) learning
1. Mapping your daily voices to phonics and to the characters
2. Expand your vocabulary with phonic tools like PinYin
And the most important part:
3. Learn new words and meanings without any involvements of phonics at all.
Many native speakers can comprehend the concept of a word at young age and when they have grown up and put those words into speeches they found they have the wrong pronunciation or word order. LOL. Chinese words are ideograms and can be linked to "pictures" without proper pronunciation. Also Chinese is analytic language so people can literally guess its meaning from contexts.
A few years pass, kiddo is a good reader, though brute force possibly as we have no TV at home. But I noticed something weird. When encountering an unknown word it is replaced with something else and passed on. Say the word was Pennsylvania, something bizarre like "probably" is said instead. "Wait, what, I ask? That's not particularly close."
How can you really understand what you're reading with important words changed at random? The point where you stop and say, what is this word?... pen syl vvva neea (oh!) is incredibly important! That's when the lightbulb goes off and you learn, and my kid has been taught it's too difficult. Just skim on and worry about it later! Or don't? Who cares. Perhaps in elementary but sounds like a disaster later.
Now that I understand the problem, it looks like we have a lot of work ahead. Just remembered, they skimped on spelling too. :-/
Lots of spelling tests, and A gamified computer program. Can't remember the name, but it was A system with quizzes for literally thousands of books that tested your reading comprehension and rewarded points for how well you performed. Entirely optional. I remember I and one other kid were miles out ahead of everyone else. So much so that we started to run out of big point books to read.
It's curious that this article never mentions the Hooked on Phonics program. It was always being advertised on TV 20 years ago.
Edit: the program was Accelerated Reader. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Reader
Everybody I know who has taught their own kids uses phonics. Most don't use a manual or any special teaching materials other than starting with really easy words.
Now there's another factor as well: We learned to read without the stress and pressure of learning it in a classroom. We had time to break it up into tiny pieces throughout the day. I see parents out with their kids. They'll point to a sign, and say: "What's that word?"
Also, we were given time to read on our own rather than moving on to the next subject, because there were no other subjects at home.
[1] http://ecs.force.com/mbdata/MBQuest2RTanw?rep=KK3Q1807
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student%E2%80%93teacher_ratio#...
Anyhow, relevant part of my story, I taught her 100% with phonics post that point. In the above scenario, I might say 'wait there's a y there where did that go? sound it out slowly'. In no time she became a near perfect reader. I highly recommend the approach to anyone.
In this plague and WFH era, I've watched as the GoogleMeet live transcription does exalted the same sort of thing - it'll make a wrong word choice, then a few words later go back and correct itself based on grammar/syntax/context from subsequent words.
I sometimes wonder if that's an algorithm told to do something like "pick the highest priority word possibility that makes grammatical sense with all the previous words, if subsequent highest probability words then make the previous sentence fragment non grammatically correct, go back to previous words and try the next highest probability words to maximise grammatical correctness if the entire sentence so far" - or if it's just blackbox machine learned "magic" that happens to make similar mistakes and corrections as a sample 7 year old?
(Knowing Google, it's almost as likely that their algorithm is "keep building n-grams from each of the top n best-guesses of the previous y transcribed words, then count the number of times this each possible n-gram appears across the entire Google corpus of web pages, usenet, email, and google books, and pick the one with the highest historical use count"...)
If only HN text input boxes were smart enough to do the same!
I mean, what you describe is basically a Markov Model described by Claude Shannon in his paper on entropy. Applying to speech recognition is pretty straightforward: As you keep speaking after a transcription mis-step, the odds that you said the thing becomes less and less likely given the words that followed it.
Like programming. ;-)
My mom also made a big deal of going to the library every week, like it was some kind of amazing sanctuary, which of course it was.
Now an odd thing I remember is that my office mate in grad school listened to the Rush Limbaugh Program, and the two advertisers I remember were Snapple and Hooked on Phonics. Funny what things we remember.
https://www.phonicsalive.com.au
We launched that in late 1995 scrambling to get it into shops for the xmas market and before schools closed for the year. We were significantly screwed over by changes in the multi track audio capabilities between Win3.3 and Windows95.
I'm inordinately proud that (at least some of them) are still for sale, and I break out into a huge smile every time I see a shelf full of them at a bricks and mortar retailer. Last time I checked (maybe 5 years back now) my name (and those of my team) were still printed around the edge of the CDROM.
(I'm also astounded it still works at all, and impressed by Microsoft's dedication to backwards compatibility. That was largely developed in MacOS9 and Windows 3.3 using Macromind (later Macromedia) Director. It stopped working on Mac back when Apple gave up on supporting running legacy MacOS9 apps and the owner/client didn't want to pay to upgrade for Mac. Now it's sold as "Windows only", but I'd bet pretty good money if you bought a copy and resurrected a MacOS9 machine, it'd still run just fine...)
I learned using phonics.
We have been introducing our daughter to phonics for a few months now (16 months old).
I am suprised to read in this article that it's not part of American curriculum... very strange indeed.
Every toy, video, for english alphabet we have/seen has a phonics component
The first taught herself to read before she started school. On day one the teacher tested her and she could read the first 200 words they were to be taught. She had had support and encouragement from us, and we read to her every night, but we never did any structured lessons with her
The second couldn't read when she started school, and was taught using phonics. It took a couple of months for it to click, but then she was getting letter sounds, understanding digraphs, joining sounds together, and then reading words. When she got to that point she just took off.
I feel like our first would have succeeded in the American system just fine. But the second really benefitted from laying that groundwork that let her understand the fundamentals. If she'd learned using the three cues system I feel like her self-directed progress would have been much slower.
What do you mean by “phonetic alphabet?” I thought the correlation between spelling and pronunciation is extremely weak in English. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos
EDIT (just adding on): It's clear to me from my experience that there is not one single way children learn to read. That much should be obvious to anyone who spends a lot of time with young children, but the field of education clings to the idea of "best practices."
Second, a lot of our practices in the U.S. still stem from the National Reading Panel, which was convened nearly 20 (!) years ago as part of No Child Left Behind. Yet it's easy to find criticisms of the report the Panel issued. Just Google it. Here's a good one to start with: https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2003/04/30/33yatvin.h22.h...
One of the key points the article makes is that a "balanced literacy" approach doesn't work. A footnote explains:
> "If children are taught systematic phonics in one part of the reading program but are encouraged to use context to guess at words when reading passages, they may not apply their phonics skills consistently. Thus, the phonics component of the reading program may be undermined." — from The Use of Context Cues in Reading.[1]
I'm not sure why you think there shouldn't be best practices in reading education. Certain methods will outperform others. Why shouldn't we identify and refine the methods that prove to work best?
1. https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
I called out the term "best practices" because it's often used to refer to pedagogy that is no longer supported by the research. I suspect this is the case in other fields as well: the so-called best practices we espouse are more a function of the values of our workplace or work community than anything else.
Some students are strong with vocab, others with grammar. Some with listening, others with speaking. Some with oral, some with written. I could go on and on with 20 other different things.
Education experts do attempt to identify and refine the methods that prove to work best, but real-world teachers know that those methods come in waves, fads of academia, and that a teacher needs to know the basics of all methods, combined with the strengths and weaknesses of their students, and use their intuition to try to come up with a good combination.
So it's less about a "balanced" approach, and more of a "try everything and see what sticks with any individual student" approach.
Because here's what does work: let students build core competency around wherever their natural strengths are, and then they'll eventually get the other stuff.
But the idea that "certain methods will outperform others" is grossly simplistic. Sure there are some dumb methods that don't work for anybody but those get quickly discarded. Of the rest, even if a method outperforms in the aggregate, it's going to be terribly underperforming for a significant proportion of students.
Remember, phonics gives immediate improvements too, for short words. So it's pretty much a false dichotomy.
For students who are picking up phonics quickly from the start, great. For the students who are struggling from the start, try other methods ASAP.
As a teacher, figuring out which methods work for a student isn't rocket science. Your students are either getting better on a visible daily basis or not. We're not talking a 5% difference in outcomes, it's more like 75% difference. (Of course, bad teachers just don't pay attention at all, or are too swamped with work to be able to.)
On the flip side I agree that only doing phonics might be a local maximum for the group.
Moreover, I think when teachers feel forced to adopt a teaching method they dislike, their enthusiasm flags, and teacher enthusiasm is something that has a big impact on learning (I'd be interested to hear if anyone disputes the idea that miserable or apathetic teachers result in less effective teaching)
I think the most effective approach to this kind of research is a toolkit approach, where teachers adjust their teaching methods using different well-developed practices based on experience, different aspects of the student population, and the teacher's knowledge / enthusiasm for a specific technique.
Getting the schools to change approach requires political action against powerful lobbies. While a private school needs good outcomes to justify it's prices so gravitate to systems that produce that outcome.
I suppose it doesn't have to be a "monolithic curriculum" that addresses this kind of problem. But whatever it is it better be functionally equivalent in its ability to successfully thwart clever bad faith exploits. Otherwise you get the less populated parts of the U.S. "teaching the controversy" in biology classes as part of your "greater diversity of ideas."
The cost of autonomy is that some teachers will teach creationism, but it also means the people who are closest to & have the biggest stake in the learning of each child have control over how that kid develops, which in general seems better aligned with incentives.
I'm finding that as I get older, I make more mistakes like that when I'm tired.
Leave it to the NYT to fear monger about small groups of children. Hahaha
It works far better than most educational programs, but teachers tend to hate it because it doesn't give them latitude for creativity and planning their own lessons!
It took years to undo this damage.
Phonics is one of the techniques mentioned (positively) in the article, but California is far from uniform in how reading (or anything else) is taught (California is where one of the examples using three-cueing in the article is from.)
I used to think it was simply the product of my being such an avid reader, but I'm starting to suspect it may be because I have that base in phonics.
As someone completing my Masters in Applied Linguistics, I see this focus on top-down strategies as an example of teaching people to run before they can walk. Sure they might get good at running, but sometimes you need to go slower, and while walking forms a strong foundation for the former, it's easy to conceive how the converse is not true. Meanwhile many kids get left in the dust with both a subpar run, and no ability to walk properly.
Just because people develop the ability to read words as a whole and use inference and other strategies to read quickly, doesn't mean those are the skills we should be teaching as "reading".
When I was younger I used to sometimes look at my father's disregard for academic knowledge as a flaw, but I'm understanding more and more that his skepticism is often quite healthy.
Later in the article, the author speaks to an estimate that 40% of children will learn to read despite how they are taught.
My parents were always "readers" and growing up our house was always full of bookshelves stacked to overflowing with books and magazines.
I spent a lot of time as a pre teen and teenager going through my dad's unbroken collection of Scientific American magazine starting from the late 60s. I suspect Martin Gardner's column has had a direct influence on my career choices and why I hang out here... I remember many occasions when peers at university were first learning about things like Conway's Game Of Life, Penrose Tilings, and RSA public key crypto - and I'd be "Doesn't everybody know all this already? I think I read about this before I was in high school!"
Notable quote: "For example, to test a 130 digit odd number for primality requires at the most (that is when the number is actually prime) about 7 minutes on a PDP-10 computer."
http://simson.net/ref/1977/Gardner_RSA.pdf
(Tonight I might see if I can still remember how to make a hexaflexagon...)
Somewhat related but I know someone the same age who seems to struggle with this. They regularly misunderstand what people mean online or fail to recognise satire (especially having issues when someone quotes a part of what they said implying that it was very strange/confusing/mocking it). I'm sort of at a loss thinking of a way to resolve this because to me its not even something I really thought had to or could be learned.
Though, like by the time 1st or 2nd grade came along, I don't remember anyone in the class who was having problems reading. And I was kind of a bully, so I'm sure I would have made fun of them if someone was struggling (and I have a good memory of my put-downs!)
I'm just shocked this shit is still going on or that like anyone even thinks that could possibly fucking work. We don't have apriori knowledge to somehow write and read glphys, representing fucking sounds, which are time and location dependent... so how or why would this approach possibly work?
</rambling>
I have heard this is the case for Spanish as well, but I don't have personal experience in that case.
So, spelling does make sense, but it's not much of a thing like in English. We have some rules to aid the process, but at the end of the day, you need to have read a lot to know how truly write a word.
That being said, I find kind of weird the cue process described in the article. I think that in Spanish we always learn by identifying letters with sounds as there's a 1 to 1 relationship in that direction. I.e. every written word has only one possible pronunciation.
And indeed, they could - eighth grade Spanish I students had to have had an A in English the previous year, so they were all decent English readers.
I’ve found that German is mostly phonetic like that, but not quite as consistent as Spanish is.
It's nowhere close to English though. Spanish spelling is a breeze, much simpler than Russian.
Unrelated factoid: in my experience, average Russian has more chances to reproduce believable Spanish pronunciation than English.
Having a regular (and in Czech simple) transliteration is in my mind similar advancement as are letters compared to letter-words (as in Chinese).
And this is no conincidence - the way Czech is written was largerly engineered in the 19th century during the national movement.
In Japanese, they start by teaching the kana syllabaries (which are phonetic and very regular), and then from 1st grade onwards they start the grueling task of memorizing the 2000+ kanji characters you need for basic literacy. But in Chinese it's all characters from day one, with a few crutches like pinyin/bopomofo for annotating readings.
The same principle applies. The challenge just changes from reciting the correct sequence of characters to performing the correct sequence of strokes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Characters_Dictation_C...
I remember how confused I was the first time I saw the concept of a spelling bee in a movie as a kid. If you know how a word is spelled, you can always correctly read and pronounce it.
Written English is jus plain awful and makes no sense whatsoever. It is basically impossible to read english without knowing the words and thus how to pronounce them.
You can read whole german sentences without understanding a word but still pronounce them correctly.
This is something you will often find in children reading a book; where the pronunciation is basically correct and then they ask what a certain word means at the end.
English speakers just stutter step across unknown words and are often unable to finish the sentence when they encounter something unknown.
This sort stuttering is really jarring and happens a lot even to adults.
Being german but reading a lot of technical stuff in english, the nonsensical nature of written English is just mind boggling.
If COVID has you reevaluating schooling, I highly recommend homeschooling. Also, read up on when schooling should really start. My parents always recommend Better Late Than Early by Raymond S. Moore.
His sister entered school two years after him and they've since changed to Read Write Inc Phonics. She's learning along with the class and take-home books. Hard to truly judge, but the system seems effective. She has confidence and then success sounding out increasingly difficult words.
I _still_ do something very like this in my 50s. Words that my subconscious brain decides "don't matter", usually irregular character or place names in fiction, just become some kind of signifier in my memory so I recognise what they mean in the context of the story - but when I discuss that book with someone else they'll speak out loud one of those words and I'll have to take a few seconds to "reverse-phonics" it into a sequence of letters then visualise that in my head to work out which "signifier" (that I'd never bothered creating an audible form for) there talking about...
As a kid, I remember pronouncing “faux pas” as “fox pass” in my head while reading for a number of years.
I get kind of frustrated when my kids are breaking down a word into phonemes continually and still get it wrong. It is frustrating listening to a kid break down the same word page after page instead of trying to retain it.
"For example, a child who says "horse" when the word was "house" is probably relying too much on visual, or graphic, cues. A teacher in this case would encourage the child to pay more attention to what word would make sense in the sentence."
This sentence could be either: "The man climbed onto the horse". "The man climbed onto the house".
Both make sense. Appalling.
"For Goodman, accurate word recognition was not necessarily the goal of reading. The goal was to comprehend text. If the sentences were making sense, the reader must be getting the words right, or right enough."
But text is made up of words, so if you cannot recognise the words the text will not make sense. "right enough" isn't good enough for text because subtle variations in spellings completely change the meaning, eg. bought / brought which everyone I know gets wrong - they mean completely different things.
Also, skipping words seems like an extremely stupid thing to do because the word could be the crux of the sentence. Without knowing what the word is, the sentence will lose its full meaning and make the entire sentence pointless. If skipping words is the "solution" to difficult words, surely this will reinforce the "skipping" concept so that any difficult word is skipped and their reading will not ever improve.
[1] http://larrysanger.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/How-and-Wh...
I got towards the end of the article though and just kinda speechless at this reaction from the guy who came up with this theory. The damage that this kind of arrogance has done is hard to measure...
He brought up the example of a child who comes to the word "horse" and says "pony" instead. His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept.
I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn't the same thing as a horse. Second, don't you want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ says "pony"? And different letters say "horse"?
He dismissed my question.
And
Goodman rejected the idea that you can make a distinction between skilled readers and unskilled readers; he doesn't like the value judgment that implies. He said dyslexia does not exist...
Reading to the child is also a great strategy.
Here in Queensland Australia it was deeply politicised in a left right electoral battle between state governments, teaching unions, public and privately funded schools.
As an EFL teacher her praxis was focussed on adults not pre-literate children which is an important distinction.
That said, I like this nutshell exemplifier of the problem.
"Cat" c-a-t. Cee aaye tee spells cat.
Now do that for "women" (UK english, Australian english typically pronounced "wimmin")
I would say that the more frequent the word the more likely it is that the pronounciation is a tad different from spelling.
What I do remember is one moment, after I could already read, and that is the day when I asked my mom if we could please read something other than The Wizard of Oz because I was tired of it.
So if you're looking for a method, I recommend applying this technique: read the same book over and over until the kid can't take it any more.
I see most children drowning in colorful stimuli and toys. But what did it for me apparently was boredom.
At Home.
From a very early age.
With Phonics or whatever technique works best for you and them.
Because school is not the place to teach a kid to read.
Now, using Phonics has helped in many, many ways. Recently on a trip to the kingdom, many people have been telling me I say Thai names very well. A name like: Surassa Fhaumnuaypol or Vajiralongkorn is easy -- just use phonics principles to slowly say it then speed up.
"But Adams soon figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not just as the way readers construct meaning from text, but as the way readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary."
Ultimately, this sounds like a difficulty in translating research into application. The cueing theory was incomplete but has taken over because it usually works. The newer theory is better, but has to fight its way in.
Teachers are required to have continuous training. There seems to be a breakdown between research and teacher education that isn't addressed in the article.
Except it doesn't.
> The newer theory is better, but has to fight its way in.
The “newer” theory is one of the two older theories mentioned in the article, both of which work better in practice and well as having better support in terms of research on how people actually read that the three-cue approach.
Three-cues seems to have taken off because it was easy to frame in terms of being a broad holistic approach at a time when that was fashionable for ideological/aesthetic reasons, and now it's gotten entrenched minds share and a bunch of commercial interests around it making it hard to dislodge organically. Kind of like MBTI only more prone to being abused where it actually matters.
> Teachers are required to have continuous training. There seems to be a breakdown between research and teacher education that isn't addressed in the article.
It's actually fairly directly addressed, as the vendors of both material for teaching reading and educational material and training on teaching reading are among those shoveling the debunked woo.
And in many cases it's not a matter of what teachers choose, but what district administrators have chosen and purchased decades ago.
Absolutely. And actually, the breakdown starts with teaching education, where many classroom teachers are taught how to teach broadly, but not the sort of (more specialized) subject knowledge that lets you get inside a student's head to see where the errors are coming from. Elizabeth Green's book "Building A Better Teacher" was eye-opening to me.
"researchers estimate there's a percentage of kids — perhaps about 40 percent — who will learn to read no matter how they're taught." -- implying 60% are sensitive to method
'Goldberg decided to teach some of her students using the phonics program and some of her students using three cueing. And she began to notice differences between the two groups of kids. "Not just in their abilities to read," she said, "but in the way they approached their reading."'
And it does seem true that relying on pictures is fundamentally not reading. The whole-word and phonics approaches actually teach to read text, which is kind of the point of learning to read.
‘Children are continually exposed to educational ideas that are younger than they are.’ -G.K.C.
I'm very surprised, since I thought that phonics was the current preferred method, probably because it is known to actually work, with evidence going back over decades (if not centuries) and across languages.
Hasn't phonics been a key part of Sesame Street for half a century or something?
As such, we should be very conservative in changing what has been proven to work. The article mentions how new theories came out in the 60’s and displaced the phonics based system which had been proven to work, leading to literally millions of people with an intellectual handicap due to poor reading skills.
Other vocabulary words these first-graders had learned were posted on cards around the classroom. They included: wander, persevere, squint and scrumptious. The kids weren't expected to read those words yet. The idea is to build their oral vocabulary so that when they can read those words, they know what the words mean.
The joy a child feels when they finally read one of those words that they've only heard is a huge boost and encouragement to continue.
What I do remember is phonics in 3rd grade. I hated phonics and blamed it for not being able to spell because english is so inconsistent. It probably isn't phonics fault that I am terrible at spelling but I still remember hating phonics.
Accdinorg to a racceehrsh at Cabdgimre Ueiinrstvy...
Then learning to read becomes trivial.
On another note, who's to say there's any one best way to read? Surely there's more than one way you can get something out of a book. People's brains are wired differently, some might learn better one way than another.
> Surely there's more than one way you can get something out of a book.
Maybe so, but probably not for first graders, which is what this article addresses.
1) Read for the gist of it. 2) Read competently-or-better aloud based on exact recognition of words, with or without precise understanding. 3) e.g. Read precisely enough to see precise meaning if it is there, or recognize if the meaning is not precisely clear.
The understated outrage is that teaching for #1, only, is short-sighted and worse.
That escalated quickly.
Or maybe that's theorists who don't bother to check with reality whether their brilliant ideas make sense before rushing to implementation.
Or maybe those are two different ways of saying the same thing.
The ability of adults who can read to be able to decode examples such as yours might be behind the drive to use the "guess and move on" method being discussed.
My personal experience of working with a wide range of people is that many of them see the words, say the words, and move on without actually internalising what they've said. The derogatory term "barking at print" comes to mind. I've seen it, and I find it sad that there are otherwise intelligent and capable people who fundamentally can't read.