Analysis points to a unexpected cause of reading difficulties
phys.org
phys.org
Restating the highlighted result: Gc ("Comprehension-Knowledge") had the strongest effect on both lexical and phonological decoding. Knowing a word makes it easiest to comprehend when reading. This is probably completely obvious, but the broader point is that rich conversations with students that involve teaching them lots of words will improve their reading.
Only partially supported interpretation/application - All this business about phonics will only take you so far if the adults in a kids life (including their teachers) are not talking to them richly about a lot of stuff. Asking teachers to do a lot of rote repetition risks cutting out the really important part of school where students are actually building vocabulary. Teachers that use/teach large vocabularies may be unexpectedly more effective at teaching reading.
You mean pronounce the word. Reading is supposed to include comprehension.
Something to check if you are getting older and not enjoying reading as much lately!
I imagine some kind of teacher training handbook or something. I'm pretty good with rote practice and mechanical repetition, so if there is a list out there of "in case of X, do Y" I will be able to memorize it. Do share if you know what I'm talking about.
These approaches work for most children most of the time, but when they don't, you have special education teachers who have a different degree in diagnosing (debugging) learning difficulties big and small as well as implementing interventions etc. The service they provide is also called remedial education [and it's especially cool when a primary school teacher and a special education teacher work in a big classroom together, the latter immediately bringing back to speed anyone who grasped something slower than the others]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remedial_education
I had a look around for resources in English and this site seems highly valuable in math and in general: https://www.understood.org/en/topics/math
Outside of relatively narrow domains, I'm not sure a runbook makes any sense here. People are not, in this sense, machines.
My experience with most things that appear to require holistic knowledge is that techniques do work. It's why education is scalable: you cannot reliably identify hundreds of thousands of individuals capable of modeling learners reliably. Teacher training programs do improve outcomes by training teachers on techniques.
Identifying the right techniques that work across humans is obviously very hard, but we have found quite a few. We know that 'phonics' works better for reading than 'guess the word', as an example.
People do behave mechanically in many ways. The game of basketball is not mechanical, but the training that makes the best players has many mechanical aspects. My wife is an artist and her work isn't mechanical, but gaining mastery over painting has a massive amount of mechanical work. My experience is that almost all things that appear to require some kind of gestalt comprehension have sub-components that can be mechanized.
In any case, The Intentional Teacher mentions quite a few. An obvious one from the first few pages is that children have more complex play in a sufficiently small space which they can fully model. It may seem obvious, but also obvious is the counter-version of "children have more complex play when they have unlimited space and a large number of novel things to work with". But only one of these obvious things is true. Hence, I'm looking for more such "rules of learning" so to speak.
I’m learning Japanese, and I’ve started learning Chinese characters, both their meanings and how to read them. Reading them feels different than English... I have a hypothesis that our brains work differently when processing symbols that encode meanings as opposed to just sounds. English requires an extra step, where characters are translated into sounds and then into words.
With Chinese characters, you are immediately looking at the meaning; you don’t need translation into sounds. This feels like a more efficient process cognitively to me, even though I have to memorize to recognize more characters.
They all activate different regions of the brain and clearly are being processed in different ways.
The spelling of a word is more connected to the meaning than it is to the pronunciation.
But the details of the new study seem to support exactly that original idea.
Perhaps a little more detail on why and what kinds of smart, but it was a pretty broad set of mental skills that mattered
Anyway, from my experience with my daughter, the step from single letters to silabes is difficult.
And just solving for one form of ambiguity does not, necessarily, help. Consider contronyms. Words that are literally their own opposites.
I'm convinced the main thing lost in getting kids to read, is that too many mistake interaction with the words as automatic. It isn't. Taking apart a word symbol by symbol and putting it back together in a different form is the entire point of teaching how to read. And if you don't teach kids to do that with words, are you surprised when they can't do it with equations?
Again, you base the claim that English is not phonetic based on confusions in how different phonemes are represented using the 26 symbols of our alphabet. A thing that is defined as symbols representing phonemes. You could also have a syllabary or a logography. The syllabary would still be phonetic, of course. A logographic writing system is truly not phonetic. Think emoji.
And, of course, I'm summarizing very very briefly.
So, sure, if you want to discuss about how English orthography is deep, go for it. I won't even really disagree. Quite the contrary.
The opening claim was that it wasn't phonetic, though. That is a different thing.
It is funny seeing Japanese as the first example in your quote, as it has both a phonetic syllabary (two, actually) and a non-phonetic logography. That is, you literally have to learn to read a non-phonetic orthography in order to read Japanese!
Probably I missed the exact names, I guess I should have used "deep" vs "shallow", instead of "phonetic" vs "not phonetic". The problem is that there are so many rules that it looks like each word has a special rule.
I agree that Spanish also have subtle rules, we have some unusual cases here in Buenos Aires, in es-ar-bue the last "d" in "ciudad" is very faint and we say the "ll" almost like a English "sh" instead or an English "lee".
The other day I was joking with my wife, and I told her that to make the list of text transformation to allow a Spanish speaker to read German enters in a napkin:
v -> f
w -> v
ei -> ia [in English, something like "ee ah"]
ie -> ii [in English, something like "ee ee"]
eu -> oi [in English, something like "oh ee"]
sch -> sh [loaned from English, perhaps "y" in pure Spanish but it's confusing]
I can't imagine how to do a similar table in English, at least a table that enters in a napkin. Let's start with the infamous case of "yesterday" does it sound like "today" or "Friday"? How is the rule? Can you classify all the words in this table https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordfinder/classic/ends/all/... ?
This got particularly bad when we realized that our kid's school was not teaching phonetics, but that the special tutor we hired was running a basic phonetics routine. And that that is really just 44 flashcards for them to work through.
To your point, Spanish generally has 24 phonemes. This is why they can map it to the 26 letters much more straight forwardly. Though, I'm a touch surprised it can map to German so easily, they have more phonemes than English, if I'm not mistaken.
All of that is to say, I'm glad you found the discussion interesting! Apologies if my pet peeve came on too strong. :D
I am curious, btw, I don't understand what you mean about "yesterday" sounding like either "today" or "Friday" The "day" on both of those sounds the same to me?
We are also cheating with "ñ" :)
> Though, I'm a touch surprised it can map to German so easily, they have more phonemes than English, if I'm not mistaken.
I'm probably collapsing "ch", "sh", "tsch", "x" and a few more shushy sounds.
I'm ignoring the difference of the German "b" and "w".
I somewhat intentionally forgot "ä", "ö", "ü". (We have an "ü", but the use is very different, it's related to the weird cases of the "g" in Spanish.)
I missed "ß", but that's easy to add to the napkin.
> I am curious, btw, I don't understand what you mean about "yesterday" sounding like either "today" or "Friday" The "day" on both of those sounds the same to me?
Using the "Dora the Explorer" encoding method, I pronounce
today -> too-deh-ee
Friday -> frah-ee-dee (a surprising "ah" in "fri", but a mute "a" in "day")
yesterday -> it depends if you are talking or singing :)
Anyway, my English pronunciation is so bad that I never would confuse "then" and "than", but it looks like it's a common error in some native speakers.
Copying from Merriam-Webster for them:
Today: tə-ˈdā
Friday: frī-dā
Yesterday: ˈye-stər-dā
Regardless, fun reading. And please don't take this as a criticism of your pronunciation!
today -> too-deh-I
People who spell words wrong in Spanish are either on the one hand mixing up "k" and "que," "b" and "v," maybe screwing up "c" with "k," "s" and "que" or forgetting the accent placement rules; or on the other hand they've literally heard and said the word incorrectly all their lives.
Also, even the misspellings in Spanish will 99.9% result in perfect pronunciation. The accent rules are just about where you're allowed to omit it, or when you add it to a one-syllable word and it doesn't actually indicate an accent. The error you're most likely to make is to put one in when it is unnecessary.
I do have a bit of a pet peeve on the stance that English doesn't have a phonetic orthography. It absolutely does. To teach kids otherwise is a massive disservice to the kids.
It is easy to think that all of the exceptions to how things work in English are problematic. The catch, of course, is that many of them are specifically used as fun games to play with the words.
To me, it is the equivalent of planned city centers versus organic variants. Reality is almost certainly that both can work. And there will be preference of folks between the two.
ma, me, mi, mo, mu
pa, pe, pi, po, pu
sa, se, si, so, su
...
Consider, how do you read "f=ma", or "e=mc^2"? Why don't those follow the same rules? They use the same symbols as our alphabets, after all?
Or consider "do re mi" is pronounced differently from "do re me". And, amusingly, most people will not read those correctly. This doesn't rob the names of the notes as meaningless. Nor does it mean that they are not taught correctly. But you learn to interact with the symbols. Not merely transcribe them between representations.
Is bad grammar one of the reasons, even though the title suggests there is just one?
"Since the 1990s, the phonological deficit hypothesis has been the dominant explanation favored by researchers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_deficit_hypothesi...
> I'm basically in 15 hour loops
When does...sleeping...happen?
> For decades, the common explanation for why children struggle to read has stayed remarkably consistent. Smart kids read well. Kids who don't simply aren't smart enough.
This strikes me as something that was debunked in the 60s. Ascribing reading ability to intelligence seems like the most fatalistic thought terminating idea one can have.
U is a vowel.