I remember my first music (note reading) lesson. We got a paper with sentences, and the teacher replaced each word with either 'titi' or 'ta' and we had to repeat it. Our homework for that week was an A4 paper full of words and sentences, and we had to replace them with 'titi' or 'ta' as made sense from context. I somehow managed to get a good grade, but it confused the hell out of me, and made me think of giving up music as too hard. I remember it bothering me the whole week.
The second lesson, the teacher says: 'Now we have to learn some hard words. The 'ti' is called a quarter note, and the ta is a half note'. Finally, the whole thing started to make sense to me. Then the teacher says: 'But don't try to understand that, these are very hard words for adults, just memorize them and do what makes sense from context.' Trough that lesson, the teacher kept stressing that same message: Too hard, adult words, do what makes sense instead and use the hard words only to impress the outsiders.
I've kept a deep distrust for teachers telling me to do what makes sense in context. I've always kept asking for the actual rules and correct words instead, however complicated they were. It happened a few times later in life too, like my economy teacher giving 'debit' and 'credit' guidelines based on vibes without telling they should be balanced, with subtraction being complicated math according to her.
My first piano teacher was very artsy and whimsical, she and I simply were never able to establish any connection as I have always been a very logical learner. I suffered under her for almost 10 years as a child while she tried to teach music to me in the way that made sense to her.
My latest piano teacher was a professor and specialised in the pedagogy of music so he was more than equipped to deal with an overthinking logical type music student like myself.
Learning music and an instrument can and should be quite intuitive. And as performing is quite expressive, music can attract people that stereotypical creative type who just wants to play and feel music. But the study of music theory and classical music are quite rigorous subjects and they can be attractive to logical thinkers who thrive learning all the nomenclature. But knowing the nomenclature is not strictly necessary to play music and so you have this disconnect between the very diverse spectrum of people drawn to music.
In fact, there is a certain inescapable intuitiveness to music and the professor taught me to really learn to via feeling and establish feedback loops that always come back to the sound and my own motor sensations (did you achieve the sound you want while playing freely?). You can't really logic things like that and if anything it's more like a sport than something you can science when every person's body and dimensions are different.
I am now having singing classes and singing is even more mindbending than piano has ever been
That resonates for me. I spend lot of time teaching volunteers. Early on, I encourage them to learn the skill from me, but also take any opportunity to have others explain and demonstrate the same thing to them. I tend to work from first principles, explaining how the pump functions and why that means water goes in here and out there, and what different configurations of valves are therefore valid and which ones will never do anything useful. Others often explain it in terms of which valves to turn in which order to achieve a given outcome.
Neither is right or wrong. Most people will be left pretty cold by one explanation while the other will land neatly into a hole in their brain shaped perfectly for it. Which one is which will be different for each person.
I think that there’s value in gearing educational settings towards having a plurality of instructors available on each subject and letting students gravitate towards the ones that work for them.
One of the hardest things about teaching others in my opinion is that to really teach effectively you have to be able to meet them where they are.
As in, you have to be able to have some understanding still of what being fresh and new to the subject is like, coupled with the ability to change how you teach something.
I wouldn’t say I’m exceptionally good at changing how I teach unless someone can give me a hint of how they learn best. (Unfortunately, this is one of those things people don’t always know well about themselves and can sometimes change based on context. ).
I try to always stay humble in that 1. I know I’m not the best at anything I’m teaching. 2. Usually if someone isn’t understanding, it’s 100% on how I’m communicating, and 3. Really it’s both of us learning - many insights can come from those new to material at times.
Those are abbreviated and perhaps not communicated in the best way.
But 100% a plurality of instructors, and techniques, is incredibly helpful.
I once heard, that a masters degree qualifies one to teach the subject matter. To do so, you had to organize the material in a way to accommodate students with different backgrounds, learning, and thinking process. In the process of doing so, you come to explore the limitations of your own understanding of the subject.
> I am now having singing classes and singing is even more mindbending than piano has ever been
The thing that drives me crazy about singing is that while I don't have a trained ear, much less perfect pitch, when I made a spectrogram of my voice I was more or less correct in terms of pitch. Apparently it's enough to do this for years to have some frequencies baked in.
As in without a reference you were still correct for pitch from muscle memory? I think I saw on HN that they no longer think perfect pitch is something you're born with and is essentially based on what I think you are saying. You have a few rock solid internal pitches and then you can do very fast recall. Although the people I know with perfect pitch hear everything as pitches - the sound of cars, footsteps the washing machine etc
> As in without a reference you were still correct for pitch from muscle memory?
Yes, exactly. If I try to sing a melody I'll be off by a few semitones, because well, no real musical training whatsoever, but I'll fall within the usual frequency buckets. Singing in a choir I always needed to rely on others to start, which is not ideal.
> Although the people I know with perfect pitch hear everything as pitches - the sound of cars, footsteps the washing machine etc
I've seen exactly the same thing in Latin, where instead of learning "nominative", "accusative" and "genitive" cases for nouns, pupils were told about "case 1", "case 2" and "case 3". First, this disconnects their knowledge from the previous centuries of knowledge about Latin grammar. Second, it relies on the assumption that long Latinate words must be difficult, whereas meaningless numbers must be easy. So silly.
My elementary school music teacher was very schoolmarmish and prim -- almost like Ana Gasteyer's Bobbi Mohan-Culp character -- and had training in opera performance. She also did the "ta"/"titi" thing, but backwards. She would, for example, teach us a ta/titi sequence -- writing the notes on the board, teaching us the names and shapes of the notes, having us sing/perform it several times -- and only then reveal the lyrics to be "Baa Baa Black Sheep, have you any wool?" Her years of musical training taught her that getting the details right early on was super important. I'm incredibly thankful for having had teachers like this.
It sounds like the teachers you've had who said "just do what makes sense" have punted on the act of teaching itself. They either don't know how to, or are unwilling to, do the hard work of providing detailed instruction and holding kids to a high standard of learning. That's just sad to see man.
I'm struggling to understand what the assignment was supposed to be teaching?
If it's possible can you share an example sentence and then the "correct' translation of that sentence with titi and ta?
I'm no professional, but I've played the piano an guitar since I was 13 and I still can't wrap my head around what you would even get out of that exercise.
I may have missed what you're asking about, but the ta/ti/tika quarter/eighth/sixteenth syllable system is a rhythm counting system to teach music, the Kodály Method[1]. This was coincidentally also what my first music teacher used but I didn't know the name until I was reminded of it even existing here and did a little digging.
I might still just be totally misreading things but I don't see how the assignment above is a valid, let alone a normal application of the Kodály Method?
Seems like the teacher really misunderstood what it was/meant for. I could totally be wrong here.
Translating sentences on paper (and again, how? why? by what metrics?) seems like the exact opposite of what the Kodály Method utilizes and its underpinning principles?
I understand the confusion and it's why I wasn't quite sure if I'd correctly identified what was happening. I took sentence and word as the music theory terms sentence[1] and motive[2]. Then translating the beats of an example into Kodály syllables seemed like a reasonable exercise that could be objectively evaluated.
I mean just saying that out loud I can exactly see how it works, pretty interesting. Like why do I naturally say Tika faster than ti and ti faster than ta?
The /t/ consonant in the method requires you to have your tongue touch the roof of your mouth, and the /a/ vowel requires you to have your jaw hang low. The /ti/ sound in the method has your jaw fixed in place whereas it has to move to produce the /ta:/ sound.
You're asking me to tell about a homework from 1988, in dutch, when I was 8 years old. I think the last sentence was 'honderdduizend apen hingen daar te gapen' being translated to 'titi titi ta ta. Titi titi ta ta'.
The weird thing is: I could do it, even if I had no idea what I was doing. There was some pronunciation that seemed natural. My answers were mostly right ( Or maybe I got a good grade just for turning something in?).
Also, the teacher was a really nice lady, she was good with the piano and knew music, and she did teach us what she was supposed to. I have fond memories for her lessons. She succeeded.
I just think, the first lesson being a bit if a sampler, she didn't want to scare kids away. Artsy people sometimes have learned that math must be hard. So she accidentally oversimplified for me. I have no idea if the other kids felt the same. She might even have self-corrected starting the third lesson.
> I think the last sentence was 'honderdduizend apen hingen daar te gapen' being translated to 'titi titi ta ta. Titi titi ta ta'.
Oh wow, interesting, so the exercise was really taking a Dutch language sentence and breaking it into musical syllables? I'm more confused than before because the example here has 6 words and ends up as 8 notes -- but that could just be something I don't follow since I don't know Dutch. Unless 'honderdduizend' ('hundred thousand' it seems) is a compound that makes sense to split into two?
I don’t speak dutch but a language descendant from it and I completely understand how it would be broken down that way.
Effectively I would pronounce honderdduizend as 4 quick syllables.
Again do not speak dutch and translate the same work into my languages pronunciation which I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t almost identical. “Honderd duisend” if you are interested.
Yeah that 'asking' sounded wrong. Sorry. Read it as 'dont quote me on this, long time ago, memory untrustworthy'.
As an adult, I can say today: It is indeed a rhythm exercise, with some syllables being longer than others. I just wish someone had told me this at the time.
I really wish the top comments on this article were not about the off topic and in my opinion unrelated process of reading music.
Musical notes deal with sounds and possibly with time where as words deal with abstract meaning. There is no such thing in written music. Each note corresponds to a sound wereas for words each letter is effectively meaningless on its own and at least for me the reading process is about my mind recognizing words and associating their consensus cultural meaning with the shape word I know. For me the sound of the word is irrelevant with respect to whether I know the word or not. In fact I remember when I was younger my vocabulary would often exceed my understanding of what words sound like for rarely used words that i knew the meaning of but seldom if ever heard spoken. So I could read the word but might not pronounce it right. Anyway for how my mind works memorizing words has been effective. I don't really understand the phonics people.
The pedagogy you describe has a name and it is called "Lying to Children" by the people who came up with this, and its based in Paulo Freire's work (Pedagogy of the Oppressed), hitting a peak around late 1990s. The same Marxist groups that brought wokeism to the masses.
This has largely taken over starting in the lax hiring standards that came about as a result of Sputnik late 60s. By 1978 most teaching books abandoned the First-principled approach favoring this approach instead.
The First-principled approach to teaching began with the Greeks/Rome (Trivium/Quadrivium); the process starts with an objective real system which you break observations down into core relationships, from such intuitive relations you then build up the model of relationships to predict future states within that same system, checking each time for correctness, and deviations to eliminate falsehoods/assumptions made.
The "Lying to Children" approach, is an abominable deviation of that process, or what many referred to without proper definition, as by-rote teaching, starts with an inherently flawed/fake system where you must learn to competency true and false things at the same time to progress to the next level of gnosis or mastery.
Upon each iteration in the path you are taught increasingly more useful versions of the ultimate model expected, but are subjected to psychological torture in the unlearning of false things which were learned to competency and will stonewall further progress; while relearning the true principles. Those who can put perceptual blinders on are able to pass this filter at the cost of intuition, as are those who tend towards lying/deceit. The process is by purposeful intent torturous, and intelligent people are most susceptible to this kind of torture (it is exactly that).
In Electronics, the water pipe analogy is one such example of this type of teaching method when the behavior of diffusion of charge is much more appropriate.
There are also induced failure points that operate on a lag, to plausibly prevent people from going into science backgrounds using this same methodology. Setting them up to fail through devious changes in grading and structure designed to burn the bridge (so you can't go backwards and are left stranded unable to move forward).
You are right to distrust teachers that do this. They are truly evil people (no hyperbole). Good people don't torture people and gaslight them into thinking its teaching. It doesn't matter if they didn't know the origin of the things they were taught, part of the responsibility for positions of such trust is to understand and comprehend what you do; and many just believe you aren't learning until you are struggling.
Evil people can seem nice, but what makes them truly evil is the wilful blindness towards the consequences of their evil actions; where its to the point where they repeat such actions unless stopped by external force.
Evil actions being defined as anything that does not result in the long-term beneficial growth of self or others (action or inaction).
They get to this point through repeated acts of self-violation until they no longer resist those evil choices (non-resistance), and then in fact accept it, subjorning themselves to it and becoming its plaything.
False justification for example is one such self-violation.
There are a lot of evil people out in the world today because society has followed Tolstoy's approach to non-resistance to evil in much of the policy.
These people think they are good, or at worst not bad, and you recognize them by that blindness, and inability to choose differently.
Torture is the imposition of psychological stress beyond a certain individual threshold. From that point, rational thought degrades, involuntary hypnosis occurs, eventually culminating in psychological break towards disassociation or a semi-lucid state of psychosis seeking annihilation (suicide or mass shooter types).
Wouldn't it be sad if the majority of intelligent people are actually killing themselves because of these things.
Most people today don't recognize torture because its become so sophisticated and their individual education of things have been deprived by past generations, purposefully so.
Torture includes elements, structures, and clustering, and if you'd like to know more about the process to recognize it you can read the following books (in order), most of this is common knowledge in certain fields (foundational back in the 1950s).
Robert Cialdini - Influence (psychological blindspots leveraged for clustering without distorted reflected appraisal)
Joost Meerloo - Rape of the Mind (1950s) - Overview and related factors
Robert Lifton - Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism - Case Studies of PoWs returning from Mao's China during Korean Conflict covers structuring and elements.
I got taught about lying to children at the same time that I learned about the orbitals of the electron and that Neil Bohr model of the atom wasn’t totally correct, by the least woke chemistry teacher I’ve probably ever known.
Even he would read this and think That you were suffering from a semi lucid state of psychosis and he would begin seeking an annihilation after reading this.
While yes, lying to children does induce some cognitive overhead cost—and I personally believe that the act of learning and the act of changing one’s mind from something already learned is in a way painful (in so much as the brain can feel pain since it doesn’t really have any nerve endings) because of the forming of new connections and the breaking of old—I fail to see how that has anything to do with wokeism, other than being “woke” inherently requiring the critical thinking capacity to make those changes in things that you’ve learned.
My pet theory is that conservatives are conservatives because that pain is unbearable for them and they just hate learning or relearning or changing their mind at all.
Which leads me to ask after this ramble of yours: do you suffer from this pain?
I'd like to note that nerve endings just send signal to the brain, where the experience of pain results from the processing of that signal. A nerve is neither necessary nor sufficient, e.g. phantom limb pain or heartbreak.
The willfully blind by themselves are helpless, hopeless people who are incapable of perceiving things which they have at one point chosen not to see.
The lack of reasoning faculties is self-inflicted, as are the consequences that eventually pile up (without them noticing).
This makes them particularly weak people who bring misfortune on others, who are especially prone to delusion, as well as other forms of mental illness (psychopath/schizophrenia-like tendencies).
When they gaslight strangers, because they disagree with what that person is saying, they demonstrate their lack of inherent moral character. Good people don't do this.
There is an old saying, that's understood by many as extremely accurate wisdom:
"What a person does in the small things that do not matter is what that person will do every time, in big things that do matter, when everything is on the line."
You communicated far more than you meant to say for the people who can read between the lines.
One can hardly call the circular subjective abuse of the contrast principle, requiring any form of critical thinking capacity (its fallacy). Critical theory while resembling critical thinking are two very different (mutually exclusive) things.
Just wanted to remind everyone, journalism like this is partially funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was just defunded by this administration this week. See their "Funders" section here: https://features.apmreports.org/about.html.
Reading TFA felt exhilarating. Like taking drugs on a thrill ride. No seriously. It's hard for me to explain, but as I read, I felt the device I was holding had turned into solid gold in my hand.
The scariest part for me:
> Cueing was appealing because they didn't know what else to do.
A whole pedagogy in the grip of learned helplessness, as if they all caught some insane mind virus, to the point they were virtually inoculated from the knowledge their methods could be considered harmful.
Think about it. When you multiply out the disadvantage to kids of a poor start in reading, the compound interest comes back as poor performance in other areas such as writing, maths, science, reasoning skills, technology use. Think it through and you realize it screws everything.
The real sci-fi question is, could it scale to bereave a whole society of its very cohesion?
I learned phonics and became an excellent reader without hesitation. Later, some morons in the education system created "better" reading techniques, f*cking up my younger brothers and sisters.
While the data on phonics suggests it works well, I feel like I may have benefited from an alternative method (my school taught phonics growing up).
I personally do not think I am all the special, but I from what I remember, I believe many of my issues with phonics were:
1. The inconsistency of the English language makes it so phonics is limited after a certain number of words, and then memorization and context must be used. For example, take words like cough, rough, through, though, etc. or words like read, lead, wound, etc. Not to mention all the silent letters we have too. If I am not mistaken, most languages do not have Spelling Bee contests because how clearly the language phonics map to spelling, e.g., German.
2. This is purely a hypothesis on my part, but I wonder if certain accents of English are better suited for phonics than other English accents? I grew up in the Southeast, USA. People slur words, drop off endings, contract words n >= 2 words, and even mispronounce words all. For example, the words "ten" and "tin" or "pen" and "pin" are not typically pronounced differently where I am from.
3. If you are like me and had speech problems, then phonics are substantially harder. It's hard to sound out the words when one's mouth cannot produce the proper sounds.
I do not doubt the other alternative methods are worse than phonics, and perhaps I am ignorant, but this debate also seems to be predominately an English only issue. Mandarin Chinese does not have phonics instruction to my knowledge, and they can read just fine. So, perhaps English is just a difficult language to read and pronounce correctly -- even for native speakers?
hirvi74says >"1. The inconsistency of the English language makes it so phonics is limited after a certain number of words, and then memorization and context must be used. For example, take words like cough, rough, through, though, etc. or words like read, lead, wound, etc. Not to mention all the silent letters we have too."<
In grade school English class, our teacher raised as examples "cough", "rough", "through", "though", etc.(i.e., all the "ough" words). She pointed out that sometimes words are inconsistent with phonics.
I became annoyed and complained about the inconsistency. Her response (to me and the class) was straightforward: phonics wasn't exact and some parts of speaking and reading must be memorized. But she also pointed out that everybody else had learned it as a child and that we would too, which was a pretty convincing argument. Within a few days the desire for a foolish consistency evaporated as we advanced through our reading assignments, slaughtering armies of text before us.
English words are composed of characters from a phonetic alphabetic. In Chinese each word is a unique character. So there is no phonics system for Chinese.
This is not true in contemporary Chinese. There are plenty of Chinese words that consist of multiple characters. There are also Chinese characters that have no meaning outside of a multicharacter word (e.g. the 葡 in 葡萄 ).
Not exactly, more or less to some extent without a 1:1 correspondence, more like a 1:100 or something like that technically, but practically it probably works out to roughly 1:1 to 1:2 correspondence on average?
I guess to try to echo the question: If a reader was reading along and just ran into "葡" in isolation in the text (eg, not adjacent to another character that it normally combines with) would they be able to confidently emit any sound that corresponds to what they are saying, or would it be perceived more like a punctuation error in English given that anglophones do very little to change the sound they are making as a result of punctuation (possibly just changing rhythm instead)?
These examples point to a further complication: there is no single pronunciation for the "ough" (cough versus through versus thorough, and then there's cases where the "ough" is not terminal, such as thought.)
I doubt that reading English can be taught without a dose of rote learning.
>English words are composed of characters from a phonetic alphabetic. In Chinese each word is a unique character. So there is no phonics system for Chinese.
"At least it's not as hard as learning Chinese" doesn't sound like a convincing argument against language reform to me.
> In Chinese each word is a unique character. So there is no phonics system for Chinese.
We know. Their point is that the fact that Chinese children succeed in learning to read (non-phonetic) Chinese well contradicts the core argument of TFA, which is that phonics is necessary to learn to read well.
I'm very pro-phonics, but this is nevertheless a compelling argument against it being necessary. If you know of another explanation for why Chinese reading education seems to work well despite the lack of phonics, please give it. (Or is it that learning to read Chinese actually is a big problem in China?)
> Or is it that learning to read Chinese actually is a big problem in China?
Historically it was. Reforming the writing system (potentially even ditching it entirely in favor of a Latin/etc derived script) to improve literacy rates was a major topic among Chinese intellectuals during the 20th century.
Some combination of character simplification, reading and writing the vernacular instead of "Classical Chinese", brute force, and modern technology has made this less acute. But it still is not unusual for even educated native Chinese speakers to simply not remember how to write some uncommon character. (You will see this in English occasionally too, of course. I have to think twice when I write rendezvous.)
Chinese education starts with phonics, as in pinyin (or in Taiwan, zhuyin). Similarly, in Japanese it starts with kana. The difference is that afterwards you have to learn to read a separate system (hanzi/kanji) after.
Korean fixed that by revamping the writing system…
The overwhelming majority of Chinese characters are composed of simpler characters. That helps a lot. You don't even have to be told that, you'll figure that out yourself fairly quickly. Being taught what the typical components are (there are several hundred) doesn't seem to be a shortcut, but you will need to roughly know them in order to use old-fashioned paper dictionaries.
Most characters have a sound part and a semantic part. The sound part is not very precise, but it helps. The semantic part can be quite abstract, such as the sign for mouth (a square or a squarish rectangle) for parts of speech (和 = and).
Like the others wrote, a phonetic system is used in the beginning to provide the pronunciation to the kids. The same system is usually used later for text input on computers or cell phones, possibly supplemented with support for drawing characters.
They have the additional problem that they might not speak Mandarin and the pronunciation support they are using is based on Mandarin.
It works much better than it has any right to, but it requires much more training to reach basic literacy than even an imperfect sound-based system like English. Weeks versus years. To reach proper literacy takes years and mountains of text in both cases.
Since English dictionaries are arranged in "alphabetical order" to make finding the word one wishes to know the definition easier, I'm not curious if the Chinese writing system has anything approaching an "alphabetical order", or any kind of canonical way to order strings of Chinese text. And relatedly, how do they find words in their dictionaries?
(this is normally something I would google but it doesn't sound like something I'd get a high signal to noise ratio on given the ambiguous terms at hand)
The alphabet is a marvelous invention. I seem to remember that Europeans in China (and places with a large Chinese diaspora) used alphabetical sorting of whatever romanization they favoured (different between English, French, Dutch). Much easier than radicals and stroke counting.
> Chinese reading education seems to work well despite the lack of phonics,
From what I remember from taking Mandarin in college, Chinese students learn to read much slower than speakers of languages with phonetic alphabets.
I did a quick Google search for the exact numbers and it looks like Chinese students are expected to recognize 3k characters by the end of 6th grade. While US students are expected to be able to read 20k words by that time and some sources I found said up to 40k.
Character aren’t words though, and many words are at least two characters. Heck, most given names are two characters. 3k characters covers most of the words frequently used in modern Chinese (the estimate ranges from 2K to 4K characters), the remaining 70k characters that you don’t learn by sixth grade aren’t as useful (well, 囧 can be used as an emoji in a pinch).
That true, but I definitely remember my Chinese teacher (born and studied in China, did grad school here) telling us that it takes much longer for Chinese students to learn to read.
Some more googling looking for something similar to compare is that Chinese students know enough characters to read simple newspaper articles at age 11 or so. While a 6 or 7 year old American student can read simple newspaper articles.
Most Chinese in urban schools are mostly literate by sixth grade, and can probably read simple articles by 7-8 years old. The average time to read is probably brought down by rural schools, people forget China still isn’t all rich cities with college-bound students in public schools past the last compulsory 9th grade.
It’s likely that the rural students are bringing the average down, but it seems less likely they could bring the average down so far given that only 1/3 of the country is rural.
Either way there seems to be a pretty strong consensus that one of the advantages of a phonetic alphabet is ease and time to learn.
Obviously a phonetic language has other disadvantages compared to a logographic language.
Kids going to trade school after 9th grade are fairly common in many lower tier cities, and many of the poorer provinces. Technically urban, but bringing the average down.
But ok, Chinese is semi-logographic/semi-phonetic (many words are made just by characters with the right sound) at this point, which is a confusing hot mess and requires more effort to be completely literate, but only a year or two of more effort compensated for by a more accelerated math in elementary school (well, at least for city kids).
I’m talking about kids between 6 and 11 years old so dropping out in 9th grade seems not completely relevant. But if we’re talking about subsegments of the population bringing down the average, removing a few low performing states from the US would drastically change the average here too.
>requires more effort to be completely literate, but only a year or two of more effort compensated for by a more accelerated math in elementary school
I’m not sure what you meant by compensated for. I’m discussing the differences between writing systems. Not which country has a better education system.
To be followed by a life of trying to remember the f**ing classical Chinese character that you read once 30 years ago, used twice and now can neither remember nor find in a dictionary.
I see this almost every time I meet with Chinese friends: they have forgotten one or more particular ideograms that have a particular meaning and simply cannot recover them w/o extensive discussion with their educated Chinese peers. They chalk it up to their faulty memory: I chalk it up to a faulty language.
While I must admit I would give a rat's ass (but not much more) to know any common logographic language today, I would never go to the trouble to learn one. The effort is simply too great, the payoff too limited, and there are other better ways to use the rest of my life.
US students are expected to be able to read 104 characters by the end of 6th grade. While Chinese students are expected to be able to read 20k words by that time.
Characters in Chinese can be combined to make more words, and you need around 9k words in English to read a novel and 2k characters in Chinese to read a novel.
It is wrong to compare number of characters in English to number of words in Chinese. The proper comparison would be words in English to words in Chinese. By 4th grade I knew enough English to proofread ycombinator posts. Of course, that is a low bar...
And I think you're off by an order of magnitude about vocabulary size. Chinese vocabulary size around 6th grade is more like 2K - 4k words tops, not 20K. See
I get that there are tradeoffs and that logographic languages have advantages and disadvantages.
In this case specifically though there seems to be a pretty strong consensus that one of the advantages of a phonetic alphabet is ease and time to learn.
In a completely phonetic language (which English is obviously not) once a kid learns the alphabet and around 50 phonemes you can represent with it, their auditory and reading vocabulary is roughly the same. So you can have 6 year olds with a reading vocabulary of 20k words.
It’s not that simple, but clearly the more phonetic a language is the easier it is to learn for someone who can already understand the spoken words.
Many Chinese characters include "phonic" components, and Chinese characters were historically learned using "rhyming" dictionaries. The systems are not totally equivalent but they're similar - the approach is not a pure "whole language" one.
> Mandarin Chinese does not have phonics instruction to my knowledge, and they can read just fine. So, perhaps English is just a difficult language to read and pronounce correctly -- even for native speakers?
I think your conclusion is right but that example is a bad one (though interesting). Chinese is not a phonetic language. Each symbol is a 'word', roughly. This means you can quite possibly read without knowing how it sounds. This is how the many Chinese languages co-exist - the written forms are roughly the same, it's just spoken with different sounds.
It's an interesting tangent on this topic because Chinese are starting to see a comparable literacy problem - inability to recall the written characters when hand-writing. This is because most writing these days is done by IMEs on computers and phones, where you actually DO input a phonetic latin 'word', and the IME turns it into the Chinese character you want.
I still read that as somewhat supporting your opinion - that purely phonetic languages are easier to learn, and that languages that are less phonetic (English) or completely unphonetic (Chinese) are harder. Whether that supports phonics or not? I'm not sure, personally i think it does, but your experience that it's still a difficult system is not wrong.
My daughter learned to read english before her 3rd birthday and French before her 5th. We started with sounds but not the phonics instruction that I got as a kid, just matching letters and letter combinations to sounds, and vice versa. But the way I read to her was far closer to whole-word instruction, and her friends who only learned via phonics can't spell to save their lives while she makes very few spelling mistakes. Because as you noted, english spelling is a mess.
When I was in elementary school, every kid who didn't form sounds like "normal" went to speech therapy until they did. By 6th grade none of my friends lisped or stuttered or spoke with excessive sibilance. S-backing was not a thing then (it seems half cultural/regional now and half unconscious/untrained/lazy but I have nothing but my experiences to base that on; it is not a conscious choice for anyone I've asked) but today, I hear all of those things so I have to assume that there is not very much speech therapy any more.
I want to believe that my kid is exceptional but based on grades in school and accomplishments since graduating, I'd say that she has a talent for languages and is solidly above average but not otherwise exceptional.
She has traveled a lot starting at about 6 months, and has been exposed to lots of languages and cultures. She has some Mandarin now, a little German and a lot of Japanese. So I definitely agree that her environment has supported her language acquisition.
When she was 8, she often read the same books that I read, mostly science fiction, some but not all YA. When she was 10 her class read The Oddysey in French. She was always at least a couple years ahead of her peers in reading level.
She does seem to have a talent for languages. Not many people pick up that many easily. I have even managed to forget a language I was fluent in (I was bilingual and I spoke Sinhala as well as I did English, and could read and write it to the level expected by schools at my age until I was six) as a child. It has a phonetic alphabet, BTW.
As far as reading goes she sounds broadly similar to us - including the taste for SF. Did you have problems deciding on whether books were sufficiently age appropriate or not? There were quite a few where I had to balance a book being good with whether it was suitable (mostly because of violence).
I didn't leave books out for her if I didn't want her to have the option to read them. She cared more about cruelty than violence at that time, and that hasn't changed much. She's had very little physical risk in her life and I think violence is not as real for her as cruelty. Still, she wasn't a big fan of detailed descriptions of violence or its aftermath.
We also talked about the books and I tried to give her a summary in advance, including the parts that I thought she might not handle well. She did skip some books based on my summaries.
IMO: a whole lot of this, in circles like ours, is Bloom's two sigma effect. (Individual tutorial methods routinely produce results similar to what you get at the top of a normal class).
The parenting/environmental effects fade a lot (but are still present) by adolescence.
Thanks, I did not know about that term, but it fits in with other things I have read and my own experience.
While the effects fade, the advantages gained thereby can last. Being ahead of age norm for reading allowed access to more books, and both learning opportunities. More for my kids who were home educated up to 16[1] so had more time to read stuff they chose, than for me. It also formed a liking for reading.
Parental influence can have a lasting impact. My older daughter is now an electronic engineer, which is the result of an interest that started with making circuits with me as a child.
[1] This makes sense in the British system where the usual age for finishing one set of exams (GCSEs) is 16 (which is the end of compulsory school age) and you then do more specialist exams (A levels in my kids case, there are qualifications too) after that.
> The inconsistency of the English language makes it so phonics is limited after a certain number of words, and then memorization and context must be used. For example, take words like cough, rough, through, though, etc. or words like read, lead, wound, etc.
True, but it's not actually a problem. Just sound out the words, and you'll infer from the context which word it actually is and "fix" it in your mind. People listening to you read aloud will also know what what the correct pronunciation is and will help you correct it.
I am not sure. It would not surprise me though. As an American, we are always striving to turn the most mundane activities into competitions for some reason...
For what it is worth, I also think British English is more consistent than American English in pronunciation.
For example, you all pronounce "Zebra" like "Zeh-bra" and
"Zeppelin" like "Zehp-pellin" if I am not mistaken.
American English, where I live, would say "Zee-bra" and 'Zehp-uh-lin." for no good reason. Fundamentally, I think that was also my issue with phonics. So many spoken words have more complex sounds replaced with shorter sounds like "uh", "un", "in", "an", "oh", etc..
Simple words like:
Definitely => "Def-in-ut-ly"
Interesting => "In-tra-sting"
etc..
> As mentioned in the article, I still occasionally use the technique if and when I come across an unknown word.
Don't get me wrong, I do too, but even as an adult, it's usually the words with French etymologies that burn me.
Trivial example would be "resume" (like applying for a job -- yes, Americans often drop the accent on the 'e'). No way sounding out the word would have mapped to "Rez-oo-may" without previous knowledge. Somehow 'Receipt' => "Re-seat", "Debt" => "Deht", "Motion" => "Mo-shun", and so on.
I think phonetics of germanic words: hunger, anger, hack, ball, etc. are far more consistent.
> Are 'spelling bee' contests only (or mainly) a USA thing?
The French "dictée" is similar, but has you write down a spoken (coherent text). One that usually gets weekly practiced (and graded...) in primary school, but there's also spelling-bee-like events, e.g., https://dicteepourtous.fr/
French pronunciation is mostly consistent (more so than English at least), but there's several complications:
- multiple ways to spell the same sound (so you just need to know for that word)
- often silent terminal consonants (but they must be present, because they are pronounced in some contexts)
- the pronounced syllables don't always match word boundaries ("liaison")
The last two points also explain why a coherent text is a more useful test than just single complex words.
> French pronunciation is mostly consistent (more so than English at least)
Most of English's inconsistencies stem from words absorbed from other languages, and far and away the largest helping of that was the French that British nobility picked up during the Norman invasion.
My understanding of French pronunciation primarily revolves around the idea that 80% of words end in three randomly selected vowels followed by 1-3 randomly selected maximally hard consonants such as j, x, z, k.. and that the sum total of those randomly selected letters always sound identical to the vowel portion of the word "œuf" which means "egg". Which is also basically like trying to say "eww" while you have an egg in your mouth.
No offense but this is a sophomoric take. I'd be willing to bet that more native English words have irregular spelling than norman/Latin/other imports. The same thing happened in French too. Often orthographic changes lags
pronouciation changes. The reason many English words have irregular spellig is because English has been a written language for a long time. That is why you have words like Knight, Knee, Enough, Eight, Cough, etc which are all native words. My understanding is the k in kn words used to be prounouced.
Knee is the same in German as it is in English. However, the Germans pronounce the K, e.g., "Kah-nee."
The word for "Knight" in German is "Ritter" if I am not mistaken? Though, I have no idea where the word Knight comes from. (Which I intend to look up after posting this).
In spanish we never did this, because even though there's exceptions to spelling rules, there aren't all that many. motivated elementary school children would just not miss barring lack of concentration.
> Mandarin Chinese does not have phonics instruction to my knowledge, and they can read just fine.
Learning Chinese with a phonetic alphabet (bopomofo) is pretty common as far as I know, maybe just in Taiwan though. I suppose China mostly uses pinyin for this now.
> Learning Chinese with a phonetic alphabet (bopomofo) is pretty common as far as I know, maybe just in Taiwan though. I suppose China mostly uses pinyin for this now.
I have also seen this in learning materials:
1. Putting the phonetic spelling (e.g. pinyin or bopomofo) in small print above the characters; a similar approach (furigana) is used for kanji in Japanese (in language textbooks and apps as well as books for beginning readers); there are special fonts as well as browser extensions, etc.; for Chinese/hanzi a font with phonetic superscripts would probably work well.
2. Phonetic sets; in addition to semantic elements/radicals, many characters also contain a phonetic element, which may not be exact (perhaps a bit like phonics in English) but studying groups of characters that share the same phonetic element can help with figuring out pronunciation or recognizing less familiar characters.
> I learned phonics and became an excellent reader without hesitation. Later, some morons in the education system created "better" reading techniques, f*cking up my younger brothers and sisters.
I, my siblings, and my kids all learned to read using whole words and we are all excellent readers.
Neither your family nor mine are statistically significant samples.
My experience of teaching my kids words before letters was that it was pretty easy.
On the other hand we all learned to read young, and at home, and with the assumption it was a fun thing to do, all of which makes it a very different experience to learning at school in classes.
Your description of learning using whole words is not contradictory to the article - TFA takes issue with cueing and whole language systems, which don’t teach words - they teach kids to guess or skip words.
I can see that being different from language to language, phonics is pretty complicated in English but in other languages with a much more direct relationship between the letters and the sounds its much easier. I learned to read in another language and I went from not being able to read to being able to read just about anything in a few weeks, because the phonics are much more consistent if I have heard a word and then I see it written I could easily connect the two without someone telling me.
I don't think the research is as clear cut as the article suggests. Firstly, the concept was created in the 60s and only became wide spread in the 80s. The study was conducted in the 1975.
This has two important implications:
- There were fewer people that were actually instructed in whole language and they skewed younger (and less practiced)
- The teaching profession had fewer years of as practitioners so methods resources were likely unrefined. Fewer books, instructional materials.
Also, there is always a bias to publish a scoop in acadamia, so unless there were multiple corroborating studies we should take it with a grain of salt.
Most importantly, I think that different kids learn differently. My son has been working on phonics for a long time and still struggles connecting sounds to words. In contrast, whole language approaches have been working better for him.
Phonics was a great way to learn. But, now I'm hooked on the bastards. You'd weep if you knew the stuff I've done in poorly lit truck stops for just a single line of phonics...
For any parents of small kids here, I have to mention the book Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. We went through it while my kid was in kindergarten, and after that, I absolutely believe what I've heard from parents who did it successfully a bit earlier. And it didn't prevent my kid from figuring out how to use context or recognize full words. Reading English is a lot, and kids are resourceful; if we teach the 'slow' but reliable way to read, they'll be happy to feel out shortcuts.
The toughest thing was getting a reliable bit of time each day to sit down and do it. Routine, cajoling, and rewards were all involved. So was keeping it lighthearted; the kid has to be on board! Each lesson has straightforward exercises then a brief story, very short at first, longer later in the book. We'd do the exercises and one read of the story, then kid would read the story to my partner. We started in September, and I remember by Halloween the kid was reading candy wrappers. After finishing it, the next big thing was finding stories the kid genuinely liked to keep it going. Continuing to read together after the lessons ended helped: for a while, kids will keep running into lots of new exceptions to the usual rules, etc.
English spelling and pronunciation are a lot, and the book is also, implicitly, a catalog of the tricks English plays on kids and other learners. Part of the book uses a semi-phonetic alphabet where e.g. ee and sh/ch/th have distinct glyphs, but it all still looks enough like English that the jump to regular writing later in the book is doable for the kid. Even with that alphabet, the book has to teach common words like "is" and "was" as exceptions (with s sounding like z). Decades later one can forget little kids deal with all this and eventually handle it like second nature.
The book's originator thought that you could teach math with a broadly similar approach--breaking things down into very small steps and practicing them in isolation then in larger tasks--and doing that was part of his career, but I haven't found similar teach-your-kid book for arithmetic/basic math. If such a book did exist I'd've given it a try!
It's a (paid) online platform that breaks down mathematics (from 4th grade to university level) down into very small steps/skills, makes you drill them periodically, and also integrate them in increasingly advanced skills. The platform tracks your successes and failures to give you just the right amount of training at just the right time (in theory). You can see the exact skills they train as these really huge interconnected graphs, all created manually.
I read their pedagogy https://www.mathacademy.com/pedagogy and it seems to line up a lot with that philosophy. To use their language, they emphasize "finely-scaffolded steps" and "developing automaticity".
I always love to see more projects or initiatives in this area. I also know of https://physicsgraph.com that was inspired by it, but for physics.
I don't know that my personal n=1 anecdote adds much to this discussion, but FWIW...
My mom taught me to read when I was young (pre kindergarten), but as far as I know she wasn't specifically trying to teach me to read. She just read to me a lot, where I could see the page she was reading from. Mostly she read me comic books. I loved the DC characters back then - Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Aquaman, Green Lantern, etc. and so she read me that stuff many many times. I mean, yeah, I had some of those "Little Golden Books" and stuff around as well, although I don't pointedly remember reading those the way I do the comic books. Anyway, she did all that and when I started kindergarten at 4 (due to being a summer baby) I was already reading. And then stayed well above my grade level on the reading tests all through school.
So I dunno. Maybe it was dumb luck that things worked out that way for me. Maybe there is a genetic element. Or maybe more than anything what mom conveyed to me was a passion for reading (she was a very avid reader herself). Maybe part of it was just that there were always plenty of books around the house and so reading felt like a very natural thing to do. Or maybe it was that whole Pizza Hut BOOK IT thing they had back in the day. Who knows?
In either case, I feel very fortunate in this regard, as reading has remained a big part of my life ever since, and still is to this day.
So the reason some kids seem to read with some instruction, even if it's not formal and super explicit, is that they have a good phonemic system. That is, they quickly understand that words are made up of smaller units (e.g. cat is /k/ + /a/ + /t/) and can manipulate them without much trouble. That ability is essential to map words efficiently in long term memory for effortlessly retrieval, which in turns creates a sight vocabulary (a large bank of words that are instantly recognized).
Kids with phonemic deficits, on the other hand, cannot efficiently develop a sight vocabulary. Even if they are taught phonics and can decode, that decoding is effortful and leaves little room for more complex tasks.
For what it's worth, a pivotal moment for keeping reading going after the lessons was when my partner picked up a comic book at a library event. For a few weeks after the end of the lessons, reading time had been traditional early readers and some of the books we'd previously read to them--even with us offering rewards, there had been ups and downs. As soon as kid started that comic, though, they were pushing right through our protests that it was bedtime, and chewing through the whole series. Luckily we managed to find another series to start before running out of the first one. As parents we can nudge or put stuff on the menu but but kid is pretty much in the driver's seat about what to read next.
In retrospect, of course! The kid just hadn't liked reading those books and things took off once we found stuff they liked. Best first readers are whatever your kid actually wants to read!
So direct instruction (the philosophy behind this book) has been shown to only have modest gains compared to the best interventions, which have more than double the effect size.
It works fine (not the best) for kids with no reading difficulties, but it completely lacks the understanding and the tasks that fix phonemic deficits, the actual source of most reading difficulties.
It's not entirely a bad book, but won't be of too much use for kids with reading difficulties. Since it's only a few bucks, it's not a bad investment. Just be aware of its limitations. If your kid is not developing fluent and effortless reading (not just decoding), you will need to use a method that is aware of how to fix phonemic deficits.
trane_project is selling a $20/mo subscription or $1000 perpetual license to their own reading program and folks should read this and their other comments aware of that context. It's disappointing to tell a personal story, come back, and see it was someone's jumping-off point for just slightly indirect self-promotion.
Sure, no problem in pointing it out. I did not hide the fact and I invite anyone to do their own research. The comments mostly draw from David Kilpatrick’s book “Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties”.
It’s a very academic book and I didn’t see anyone in the comments aware of orthographic mapping. The critique of direct instruction can also be found there. No intervention that does not train phonemic awareness to the advanced level had the massive results of those which do. That also applies to OG, which was mentioned in the thread.
Not selling anything yet, that page is a placeholder. But I will have a free and untimed version that should be enough to fix most reading difficulties caused by phonemic deficits.
Which I can do without worrying about cannibalizing my own business because I am not selling a reading app, but a complete path to mastery of reading and writing to college level and beyond. That hopefully helps clarify the difference in price.
Why? Obviously the person who replied to you has experience and a POV. I think that's a useful addition to the conversation.
Plus, I wouldn't have even thought to check out the profile if you hadn't mentioned it. It's not slightly indirect self-promotion, it's not self-promotion at all.
I saw a very similar timely appeal here on Hacker News a few years ago and taught my son with this book at the age of 4. It has become my go-to comparison when prompting chat bots on what I want in a teaching material for other subjects. I listened to the entire article posted here and it makes me wonder if schools are getting something as foundational as reading wrong how can we trust the attention to research on anything else they're teaching? Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to pull my kid out of school but I'll dig a little deeper into how well he's learning. For math, we've been doing the Beast Academy books. It has gone... Okay. I like that they approach problems from many different ways which simulate the many different ways math is hidden in our interactions with the world. For my younger son I've recently started Teaching Your Child... because of how well it went for his brother but for math I may try something else to have a new data point. Something that occurred to me listening to the article is I wonder if certain skills are learned much faster with one on one instruction like the book has you do. Our schools pretty much never teach that way out of efficiency, though home schools often do. It may not be true for most subjects though or home school students would be so far ahead by college and that's not the impression I have.
For math you'll want the Saxon Math books, but they have to be the old ones from before they were bought out and turned into yet another New Math or whatever they call it now.
Second this! My daughter stopped around lesson 53 when she was 4, but it stuck now at 6 years old she's able to read full books on her own, with her reading speed and ability increasingly exponentially.
TL;DR version of the article, and our experience with kids' reading, is that phonics is probably the best way to teach reading but people have tried many other crackpot techniques that don't work very well.
As an immigrant to the USA teaching in this country is a mess. Teachers apply a lot of semi scientific mumbo jumbo to justify a completely inadequate amount of work required from students to learn.
I know it's not popular to say it but my son learns anything I teach him, he might not enjoy the process very much but he never forgot anything I taught him because I make him work. His teachers don't make him do anything with the results you can imagine. If you point it out they say if they did parents would complain.
> I know it's not popular to say it but my son learns anything I teach him
1. Remember that you are looking at an experiment with n=1.
2. It sounds like you think the key to education is coercion. ("His teachers don't make him do anything...".) That's a grim world, too.
Also, I hope you are looking at your home country's educational system with clear eyes.
Not to say I disagree that the US educatonal system is a mess. If you stopped at your second sentence I would entirely agree.
As you went on, I started to wonder if you had an experience teaching your child something that was difficult for them. It's not just _forgetting_ that makes learning difficult.
> It sounds like you think the key to education is coercion. ("His teachers don't make him do anything...".) That's a grim world, too.
Of course education is coercion. Same way work is things you do for money. Education without coercion is just learning, at best.
Teachers are there because of the coercion they provide. Even in the US they coerce kids to at least sit in class, because if they didn't kids would just walk out and go learn how to properly light up a cigarette from some older kid.
if a kid is being lazy there's simply no way around "cohercion" as you put it. You know how I know he's being lazy? Because I used to do the same stuff for the same reasons, and my parents and teachers saw through it and didn't make excuses for me or any other kid.
We were expected to grow up and learn to do work even when we didn't want to.
When I was in kindergarten, we were read a book called The Little Old Man Who Could Not Read. The main character was a Mr. Magoo-type character, except merely illiterate instead of functionally blind. He was always making mistakes like this, for example buying wax paper instead of spaghetti because they both came in long boxes. Eventually his wife teaches him how to read and his next grocery trip has all the correct items.
As the husband of an Orton-Gillingham trained tutor , teachers and the industry supporting teachers , not OG ; are very much in the business of making money not making kids read . The entire economy around "services" like OT , Speech , etc is all about how to monetize it, not how do we do the most good for the children.
SLP here. I hear you. But the reality is greyer. Yes, it's easy for anyone and everyone to see the financial layer of developmental services. But virtually 100% of working SLPs care about getting clients to their goals, even if that client's access to services is determined by insurance.
Money is an inescapable reality for every service in society. But most clinics are busy, and so there isn't a real incentive to try to slow walk clients. Which would be radically corrupt on a number of levels. Even if some backroom financial functionary in a clinic were to have that thought on occasion. I've never heard it verbalized nor seen any evidence of it trickling down from management.
Moreover, most (but not all) clients will be perpetually slightly behind if they start behind. Even if they catch up at a faster rate, with the help of services. Thereby justifying services if the family wants them. But that's not the same as clinic level corruption. It's just a fact of cognitive development. But there's no better advertisement for a clinic or clinician than graduating a client.
Although I can't speak to reading in the following regard, I agree that there are sometimes lesser supported therapy methods for some delays. This is where the art of picking one's therapist is important, as they differ and what they use is within their discretion. As is the case across the rehab field.
Unfortunately "Every fruit has its seed (yes even seedless ones, in that circumstance the seed is the effort humans put into grafting it)" which is a saying that clarifies in all situations far beyond fruit, any replicating system that is of benefit to a third party must also wrap some portion of its benefit into self-replication that does not immediately benefit a third party.
Whether that takes the shape of money or some different shape, it remains the case that "free benefit" cannot exist, and that any beneficial system requires some kind of give to supplement the take that it offers.
Finding a way to establish that with balance is the challenge.
The three-cue system is what convinced me that, per Robert Conquest, American education is secretly controlled by a cabal of its enemies. I mean, if I were one of Bezmenov's supposed evil-genius agents of influence seeking to undermine and ruin Western civilization, introducing the way that illiterate people bluff their way through reading as the standard for reading education would definitely be in my toolkit of delightfully devilish methods of cultural sabotage.
My wife and I both acquired reading very early -- age three or so. So I don't remember the details of how I acquired it, only driving some of my teachers nuts once I actually did enter school, because I didn't follow the timetable they learned in their expensive university education of when and how kids are supposed to learn to read, do math, or anything else really. But I suspect that one thing you can do to help kids with their reading skills is to read to them, starting very early. My wife and I have similar experience of being read to by our moms, eventually seeing the ability to read as a "magic power"[0] of sorts, and becoming determined to learn this skill, so that we could unlock the tremendous power of books and writing for ourselves. Contrariwise, the kids I've known who struggled with reading early on (even my own sister when I was younger) tended to get bored quickly, give up, and want to do other things.
Reading is an intellectually demanding skill, much like computer programming except for degree -- there's a bit at the beginning that's really hard, because it's based on insights that you don't have yet, and you just kind of have to bro through it. Those who think it just "comes naturally" or whatever are just really, really well practiced at it. You gotta keep your eyes on the prize in order to stay determined to power through the hard bits. Inspiring kids like this begins at home, though school and even television programs like Reading Rainbow (when I was growing up) certainly help.
[0] When the Cherokee silversmith Sequoyah devised a writing system for his people, the Cherokee reacted at first with horror: written material, or "talking leaves", was the white man's evil magic! Once he walked them through how it worked, however, they embraced it and the Cherokee became more literate than the surrounding white population.
> That's how good readers instantly know the difference between "house" and "horse," for example.
I like how this sentence itself is an example where the MSV system falls flat: Neither graphic, nor syntactic nor semantic cues would help here to decide whether "house" or "horse" comes first in the sentence.
I was never "taught to read", one of my earliest memories was being gifted a old trunk filled with comic books from a cousin's return from Vietnam. Several hundred comics, many of them dating back to the early 60's, the time this occurred was 1969. Everything from all the DC/Marvel, Donald Duck, European comics, the oversized and banned horror comics with nudity, and of course a shit load of underground comics like the Freak Bros, and more.
When school started, kindergarten, I knew how to read. I had a kid's novel with me I was reading, something like "Mrs Frisby & the rats of NIMN".
I don't remember learning to read, or a time in my life where I couldn't read at least a bit. As best I can figure I began reading before my episodic memory fully developed.
I do wonder how I managed to learn anything just by reading on my own though. There were certainly words and concepts I didn't understand (I have a vivid memory of reading a childrens science book that explained the big bang, and misinterpreting it as 'the universe started when the sun exploded'. I noticed the logical inconsistency but didn't pursue it), but I can't think of any instances where those gaps in my knowledge were filled by someone else and I had an 'aha' moment of understanding. I guess we do a lot of learning without realising it.
I remember just looking at the pictures, and for some reason I really liked Spiderman. (There was a Spiderman cartoon in the late 60's.) I noticed that Spiderman's comics when they showed him in his ghetto apartment, it was always filled with books, with the titles readable. I could not read the titles, but figured if the people making the comics were putting all these books in Peter Parker's apartment, the books are probably useful for superheros. That idiot logic is what got me to start wanting to read, to know what Peter Parker was reading. I started, slowly, and taught myself with a goal.
I am joking with the terminology, but I don't believe B.S.'s claim that they were able to do human language learning without 'labelling'.
It's a valid way to learn a second language in the same script, see Lingua Latina for example, but how can you possibly learn a first language or a new script without being told the sounds characters make? You can learn to listen/comprehend and speak by in immersion like that, but not reading & writing.
I think he's implying that humans require available information from which to learn new things, and that borrowing a term from AI research is one valid (if backwards-sounding) way to describe that fact.
Tangentially related to this issue: I went back to university for a CS undergrad in my mid-20s after already having some experience writing code. One thing that really struck me while both TAing and informally supporting others in an intro programming class with somewhat subpar teaching was how many people went through the whole thing never grokking how the code was actually parsed by the computer. They would sort of learn how to solve problems, but many would still constantly get tripped up by things like confusing meaningful keywords and function names with arbitrary naming of variables and so on. At the beginning, the course just sort of jumped straight to showing finished code for simple problems, introducing python library functions, and so on — without ever really having students develop a low-level understanding of what was going on (by which I don't mean "what's the machine code this turns into", just "how is this code structured at the low level").
Curious about the controversy, reading this was only more confusing.
I learned to read by the phonics method, and the idea there are words whose meaning I don’t know. If you don’t know the meaning you try to intuit the meaning from it’s part of speech, context, and if you can’t figure it out, move on.
So I was surprised and confused reading this article to believe that readers were taught to skip the phonics and jump to some kind of gestalt of the word shape?
It should be no wonder that some people don’t like creative typography and layouts.
Yes, its called whole word learning. Its how I learned to read, and how my kids learned to read. its not a gestalt, its simply shape recognition. You learn letters and common letter combinations and how to work out words you do not know later instead of first. its not a very reliable process in English though! Are you sure of the correct pronunciation of a word you come across only in written form?
The advantage, in my experience is that you learn to read faster and its more fun. You start off with something like guessing game with flashcards and kids quickly learn a wide range of words.
The disadvantage maybe that it really needs one to one attention. Great for kids that learn to read from parents (like me and mine), but not going to work well in a classroom.
> skip the phonics and jump to some kind of gestalt of the word shape
I like that summary. It highlights something specific for me: this teaching method is essentially about word grifting, as in “trying to cheat the text out of a meaning without having paid its cost of reading”. With that mindset instilled early and decades ago, it’s no wonder AI text is so prevalent in schools and that such schisms exist between its adherents and detractors. I bet the students who were taught to grift reading don’t realize anyone who learned reading one of the hard ways can identify AI text from nuances invisible to them.
Google brought this thread to my attention and I can't help making a few observations.
Learning 7 languages made it clear to me that the ease of learning to read depends mainly on the consistency of the spelling system in which this happens.
The adoption of Pinyin in China is clear proof of that.
I found English spelling furthest removed from the alphabetic principle of representing speech sounds in a regular manner and hardest to cope with
http://englishspellingproblems.blogspot.co.uk.
I am certain that a few well-aimed changes could make learning to read English much easier http://improvingenglishspelling.blogspot.co.uk and used to advocate this, but at 80 have come to realise that the chances of it happening are slim, but think that it's important for more people, especially teachers, to understand what an exceptionally flawed spelling system English has and how it ended up like that
http://englishspellingproblems.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/histor...
See my other, more detailed, comment on this thread, but the reason for this is that phonics is part of the solution, but it's not what creates fluent readers.
Most phonics programs do not treat automaticity as the goal, so kids with effortful and slow decoding count as "reading". The science is very clear on what causes this lack of automaticity and what exercises best correct it, but most programs ignore it.
So kids with no deficits will develop mostly fine, but those with them will look to be "reading" but will have trouble once the material requires too much of them.
The UK phonics data shows mixed results with plateaus rather than "cratering" - the second link you shared actually indicates the issue is over-focusing on phonics alone rather than combining it with comprehension strategies.
My kids have been taught phonics here in the uk along with comprehension and it’s been great. I can clearly see how each has developed - and materials have things like basic comprehension of just picture stories to teach it without relying on reading for those who are struggling with the words.
Calling it a disaster seems like an exaggeration, the article literally says UK's PISA scores for reading have not changed. In fact, the experts cited in the article don't even seem to suggest moving away from phonics, but to give teachers more leeway adapt to what their students seem to respond to.
I think it makes learning to read easier because not 100% of their grade is based on how well they learned to read English, which is a terrible language for reading.
> > PISA score is a form of grading, is it not?
> No, it's an independent test.
I'm sorry. I'm not a native speaker. Does the word "grading" pertain to only tests that are a part of school curriculum? I thought it could mean assigning a score to any test, even independent, even not related to education at all.
> Correct. Students take the PISA in their native language.
Right. So assuming that scores of the students are averaged out together across all test takers in the country and some of them learned to read French rather than English they might skew the average. So comparing scores of Canada and UK for the purposes of comparing how well English learning goes in those two countries might not be valid approach.
We should be comparing UK with sub-population of Canadian students that took the test in English. Not sure if PISA provides such data.
I probably can't object to comparing UK and Ireland on that grounds. Or do some students take PISA tests in Irish there?
> give teachers more leeway adapt to what their students seem to respond to.
This always feels like one of those “of course, duh” things when the concept of adapting curriculum to students comes up, because it works so well. It’s a bummer that in the US at least, priority for funding that kind of education across public schools is a non-starter. If teachers are buying their own supplies and cramming 20-30 kids in a class, everyone gets the same educational slop and a masters in rote memorization.
The Department of Education and standardized testing are to thank for a lot of that.
It seems like the idea has gotten more controversial since a certain administration has considered getting rid of it but, since it's inception, it's not like US education has improved.
I have a 5 year old daughter who learnt to read through the phonics system. I was initially fairly skeptical but actually I think it's great. It's just explicitly teaching the pronunciation heuristics that we all learn implicitly.
They have a pretty good way of testing too - they show a list of 40 real words and made up words ("alien words") and the kids have to pronounce them. They only include words that closely follow the normal English pronunciation heuristics and are unambiguous. E.g. "glot" and "bime" would be ok but "sough" and "gow" would not.
> Critics say phonics training only helps children to do well in phonics tests – they learn how to pronounce words presented to them in a list rather than understand what they read – and does nothing to encourage a love of reading.
If this is the best criticism of it then.. that's pretty dumb. The entire point is to learn how to pronounce words. It isn't intended to teach them to understand words - they can already do that. And it isn't meant to instill a love of reading. That's basically innate.
I'm not too surprised it makes no difference to overall reading levels. It's not really that different to the previous method of teaching reading, and a very large component of reading ability is innate... But to say it's been a disaster is absolutely ridiculous.
It's definitely not innate. While phonics test scores are pretty high, PISA and KS 2 reading scores are down. The DfA on reading in 2021 is like, _solely_ about phonics. The 2023 update adds tons more guidance beyond phonics. Comparable countries Canada and Ireland are doing better, they didn't go all in on phonics. So, depends on what you mean by disaster, but IMO in the policy world, this counts.
Any time you research an educational innovation, part of the work is to measure to what extent the implementation is faithful to the intent. Education research is not like physics research.
I absolutely apply that understanding when I read research about major changes in the way reading is taught.
I actually think the only way to be confident is to do some kind of primary research yourself. Otherwise, tread lightly and skeptically.
I try to make sure there’s always age appropriate modern books around for kids to pick up and read. If they like one, and it’s a series, then I rapidly buy the remaining books in the series.
For anybody who's interested in spending an hour listening, this podcast (https://www.econtalk.org/read-like-a-champion-with-doug-lemo...) gives a very good, detailed look at what's wrong with current reading programs in the U.S. and how to do it better. Phonics, vocabulary and background knowledge.
As a chinese user. This story is somewhat confusing to me. Because in my language system. Pronounce is the mapping of some Character combination that express certain meaning. Pronounce may be hugely different or completely unrelated in different area. But meaning of word is the same. So you are forced to link some image (a fixed group of characters) to meaning (there is no other way anyway). Does the technics in this article still applies? Or it's just different in different language?
I think a roughly comparable procedure in Chinese might be to take in only a few radicals, and guess the likely meaning of a character based on the surrounding context, rather than fully recognising each character individually.
The theory is that skilled readers do this unconsciously, blending various factors and using shortcuts rather than fully comprehending each character / word. It sounds very plausible - how else would skilled readers get so fast?
But in experimental tests, apparently skilled readers are very good at fully comprehending individual characters / words, without any context available. So it seems that if you don’t learn to do that, you won’t become a skilled reader.
Weirdly enough, the elementary school here does taught both at same time. We have article reading in the test. Which don't really ask you recognize the characters down to the stroke. We also have "改錯字". Which roughly means "find the typo", but with a bit difference. The teacher may alter the character itself (add a stroke or remove a stroke) instead of replace it by some other characters. So you need to know how "exactly" should the character look like to pass the test.
It's pretty much impossible to find a school in the UK that doesn't use phonics. One of my sons learned to read mostly using phonics, whereas the other one I think learned through a mixture of phonics and whole word recognition (not necessarily taught by the school - he just seemed to remember and recognise words and not really need phonics so much).
It was interesting seeing how our particular school did teach reading using phonics. They used something called a 'Thrass chart'. It had 120 boxes, each one containing a letter or combination of letters that could make a particular sound and an example of a word containing that combination and sound. So, importantly, some combinations of letters appeared more than once on the chart.
It looks rather complicated when you first looked it at but obviously they introduced it all very gradually. So if somebody was stuck on a word, it would be 'Let's find those letters on the Thrass chart and see what sounds they could make'. I can't find a good image of it online, but you can see a slightly blurred one on this page: https://www.thrass.co.uk/
I am dyslectic (as my username suggest), and i was taught the method phonetics in school (in Sweden, not the us), and transitioned naturally to whole word (which i suspect is the intention in that method).
I initially struggled to pick up reading, as phonetics is a very difficult method if i cannot tell the letters apart half the time. Once my reading speed started to pick up, it was thanks to dismissing phonetics entirely and reading by whole word, but that leap took time.
Talking with others in adulthood, i seem to rely more on whole word than is typical. Others get tricked up by incorrect letters in words, yet i match the word anyway if it has the right shape. The below sentences read to me equally.
- I am unbothered by spelling mistakes to a much higher degree than others
- l ma unloethsred bs sqellnig mitsakes la a mucb hgiher degeee thna ahters
Another issue i encountered is finding reading fun. My parents read a lot for me to make me like stories (which is commonly given as advice to get children reading), but this backfired. My comprehension and appreciation of stories were years ahead of my capacity to read them. Being barely able to get thru "harry potter and the philosophers stone", but preferring "The Lord of the Rings".
I now work in a field where reading highly technical text is a major part of my day. Peculiarly, my lower reading speed from my inability to skip properly (something i struggle with because of aforementioned dyslexia) seems to raise my reading comprehension. I many times found details or explanations others don't because they skimmed over important words or phrasings in highly information-dense text.
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I really think foreign words should be read phonetically. Taking the first letter and guessing is an insane way to teach to kids to me. I could imagine they don't pick up new words since they learn to guess words they know instead. Using contexts may become important later as we learn to skim-read, but i don't think we should teach kids to guess anything as they first start to learn.
I don't have dyslexia and was taught to read by my parents by sounding out words using regular childrens' books before I started school (so I don't think it was a full-on phonics method, but it definitely wasn't even close to three-cueing either). Those two sentences aren't equal to me, but they're close enough I'm only mildly slowed down reading the second one. Correct letters in the wrong order, instead of also mixing in similar-looking letters, would also be a little easier than that example.
I have a dyslexic friend that's the same way. She's great at anagram puzzles. And apparently numbers are not an issue since she's a CFO of a successful company.
It's been touched on in many other comments, but I think that one of the key things that affects reading proficiency is practice time. This definitely includes being read to; parents spending time reading to their kids is often a large multiple of what the school environment provides. Nothing beats kids getting in those additional hours of practice at home.
I don't have strong opinions about different methods of teaching but an important principal is that education cannot be totally outsourced to the education system. To the best of their capability, parents make a large contribution. The best educational result is always a shared effort.
The experimental science behind this revolution in understanding the cognition of reading is pretty interesting. One of the things that is done is to switch the text on the screen while the subject is moving their eyes to see how badly it messes up the reading process. Here is an article that talks about this research in relation to the long accepted, but now discredited, idea that word shape is important in reading.
> the long accepted idea that lower case is easer to read than upper case
uh.. that sounds to me about as accepted as "cursive is easier to read than print".
Upper case is the canonical form of our alphabet (as written in Latin) while lower case is a newer addition (adapted from many greek letter shapes) that may be easier to write in rapid succession, but as such that also makes it one step towards cursive.
When I was a child in elementary school I was taught that "you all have to learn cursive because when you grow up that's what adults use, they don't use print any more". I remember thinking about that while driving with my parents, and asking them "if adults use cursive exclusively like my teacher says then why are all the road signs in print"?
I can levy that same query to your statement: if it is a long accepted idea that lower case is easier to read, then why are all of the road signs (which famously prioritize ease of reading) always written in all caps?
As someone living in a slavic country, i never understood the english/americans and their spelling bees, because 99% of the words in my language (slovene) can be spelled by phonetics (with some, but few exceptions), but english had a bunch of weird rules and extra letters, especially when you come to british (ahem "leicester"). Serbian for example is even more literal with "write how you say it and say it how you write it", and that includes "Britni Spirs" and "Arnold Švarceneger".
If you didn't know the spelling for "xylophone", you'd assume it's "zylophone", but for some reason there's an 'x' there. Waiting in line? Well, you have to "queue" but not "cue". Sure, historic reasons, like with "ye olde pub" not having a "yee" there... but it's a pain to learn, especially for children who are not that exposed to englsh texts (but mostly cartoons, especially in my time, where dubbing was almost non-existant). Same for french (ahem "jouaient").
On the other hand, we have some messed up rules too... slovenia was a part of yugoslavia, but we don't have the leter "ć", while most yugoslav countries do. We also have a rule that we write words (especially names) from non-latin alphabets phonetically (president of china is "Ši Džinping"), with the exception of serbian cyrilic. So, let's say you have someone with a surname (anglicized to) Petrovich ("son of Peter"). If the person is from croatia, his surname is writen in latin alphabet as "Petrović" (note the "ć"), and since it' a latin alphabet, we write it "Petrović", as the original (same for names with "x", "y", "z", "q"" that we also don't natively use). If it's someome from russa etc. (cyrillic) or any other non-latin-alphabet using country, he'd be "Petrovič" (since we don't have the letter "ć" we'd transcribe to "č". But if he's a serb (cyrillic Петровић), he'd be "Petrović" (with a "ć" again).
This seems so weird. When I think about how I learned to read, in the 1970s, it was (as best I can remember) first learning the letters and the sounds they make. Then starting to read words by "sounding them out." I never remember learning about "context" or "what word would make sense here" or "what do the pictures show." Pictures were just there to make the pages more fun to look at for a 7 year old.
Of course after some exposure and repetition you start to recognize whole words at a glance. That's just natural, but I never remember learning to read by memorizing whole words.
This should be obvious, but a surprisingly large number of people don't get it. They don't see "running" as the logical next step after "walking", but rather as an alternative to it. "Why are you teaching my child to walk, when you could teach him/her to run instead?"
They imagine that the fastest way to get to the advanced lessons is to skip the beginner lessons. Yeah, it's a good way to get fast to the Lesson 1 in the Advanced textbook... and to remain stuck there forever, because you don't know the prerequisites.
The article describes what happens when the people who don't get it are setting the rules for others to follow.
Someone noticed that the advanced readers read fast (correct), sometimes entire sentences at once (kinda correct), and concluded that the proper way to teach children is to insist that they do it from the start (utterly insanely wrong). You should increase your reading speed naturally, as you get lots and lots of practice; not because you skip letters - that's actually when we should tell the kids to slow down and read it again.
Or maybe, listen out, not everyone is stupid and the reality is just really complicated?
As an anecdote, my daughter was learning reading in her native language in school starting with letters, then syllables and had a very hard time moving past that with a lot of support from teachers and family.
She started learning to read in English almost 5 years later by reading the whole words from the start and outperformed her reading and comprehension speed to her native language very quickly.
There are huge number of variables in play and common sense frequently doesn't work.
Don't know why this has to constantly be mentioned, but people who read this website, and their children, are not representative of the general population.
It is well known that some kids will learn to read no matter how they are taught. Most kids will not.
Yeah, people are different. I guess there may be some kids for whom the slow reading does not work for some reason, and who benefit from reading the whole words. But in my experience, most kids start making mistakes when they try to read too fast.
Perhaps the method was helpful to some children, and the mistake was to prescribe it to everyone.
In the 90s I was taught to read via phonics. Context was mentioned further down the road as a tool to reach for when one understands all but one word in a sentence, in which case context can be used to infer the meaning of the mystery word sometimes (but not always).
I can’t imagine not having a functional knowledge of phonics. That must make long unfamiliar words daunting and reading overall more scary than it needs to be.
>first learning the letters and the sounds they make. Then starting to read words by "sounding them out."
This is called "phonics" and was universal until recently. The 1980s had commercials advertising "Hooked on Phonics works for me." - Hooked on Phonics being a books on tape program to help children read.
That's how writing used to work for the longest time. Each letter has a sound, and you write down the letters that match the sounds you make when pronouncing the word. Two people might not spell a word the same, so the only viable way to learn would be what is now apparently called phonics.
We only really started to standardize spelling in the 1500s. Which I guess means that by the 1800s English spelling and pronunciation had drifted far enough apart that phonics was a concept worth putting in words.
In most languages with alphabets the pronunciation of letters is consistent enough that the issue doesn't seem to come up a lot. Phonics is just the obvious way to do it in those cases
> in the 1970s, it was (as best I can remember) first learning the letters and the sounds they make. Then starting to read words by "sounding them out."
USSR, 70s, the same, my older cousin, 5th grader a the time, taught me to read that way before my first grade. (It was pretty normal to learn to read before starting the school. The writing though was taught at school.)
Germany, 2010s: We learned the letters with pictures of animals, that started with that letter. Also complicated words were initially replaced with inline pictures.
That's because the Russian alphabet is phonetic (in one direction). So you just need to learn the sounds corresponding to the letters and a handful of rules used to combine them. After that, you can sound out the words aloud, and then it's just a matter of practice.
English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach doesn't quite work well.
But at the same time, English teachers don't want to go the full Chinese route. Because if learning letter combinations is somehow "colonizing" ( https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers... ), grinding through thousands of words to memorize their pronunciation is probably something like torture and genocide.
> English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach doesn't quite work well.
For each letter you can find a way it is pronounced most frequently, and then take a subset of English consisting of words that follow those rules completely. (For example, the word "cat" is pronounced as a concatenation of the most frequent way to read "c", the most frequent way to read "a", and the most frequent way to read "t".) You learn to read these words. Later you start adding exceptions, for example you teach how to read "ch", and then you add the new words that follow the new rules. Etc, one rule at a time. (You leave the worst exceptions for later grades.)
>> This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do
If you feel "colonized" by reality, I guess you can rebel, but you shouldn't expect reality to reward you for doing so.
> English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach doesn't quite work well.
I presume you mean it's not particularly 1-to-1 spelling <—> phonetic.
It is highly phonetic, but it does have alternate mappings between individual or adjacent letters and sounds. And silent letters or syllables.
But alternate rules are rarely random. There are usually many words represented by each rule. And those words often have similar overall spellings and phoneme patterns.
The Russian alphabet is not phonetic. а can be pronounced а, и, ы; е can be pronounced и, ё, э, and so on, and most consonants can be pronounced in two ways depending on the vowel that follows, or the presence of ь. You need to know where the tonic accent lies in every word to be able to pronounce it, because the position of a vowel w.r.t. the accent modifies its pronunciation.
It is more phonetic than English or French, but less than Belorussian or Finnish or Spanish.
> English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach doesn't quite work well.
English pronunciation <-> spelling is actually pretty predictable as long as you aren't considering letters/phonemes in isolation.
1. recognize whether it's a compound word or a word with affixes, and if so break it down (e.g. shep-herd)
2. recognize the "origin" of the word - at a minimum, "native" (German/Norse) vs "foreign" (Greek/Latin/French mostly, though others come up) is usually obvious, though sometimes it becomes necessary to be more specific or even care about when it was borrowed.
3. recognize the stress pattern in the word, and how that will affect possible vowel sounds
4. recognize the letter pattern or sound pattern (depending on which you're starting with)
These are not independent recognitions; often one or two is enough to imply everything you'd need to know about the others (and this in fact reinforces the pattern recognition humans are so good at).
An informative example is "arch". "ar" fixes the pronunciation of the "a", and "r" is not ambiguous (ever, for rhotic accents; after syllable division for non-rhotic accents). The "ch" is pronounced "tsh" for most words (whether German or French), but when it is of Greek origin (or at least came via Greek) it is pronounced "k". Usually such words are compounds with other visible Greek components.
> English pronunciation <-> spelling is actually pretty predictable as long as you aren't considering letters/phonemes in isolation.
Yeah, and you also learn the etymology of each word. With plenty of exceptions.
I learned English mostly as a written language, by reading books. And for _years_ after moving to the US, I had a problem with pronouncing words that I knew perfectly well how to spell.
E.g. I was confused when a doctor told me that I had "neumonia", even though I knew the word "pneumonia" perfectly well. Or that "gearbox" is not pronounced "jearbox".
> but when it is of Greek origin (or at least came via Greek) it is pronounced "k"
Or Latin. I volunteer to teach English to refugees, so my rule of thumb: if a word is similar to a Russian/Ukrainian word then it's pronounced with a "k" sound. But there's also a bunch of French words where "ch" is pronounced as "sh".
But really, the main rule is to just memorize what the pronunciation is.
Now that you mention it, yes we did learn some combination sounds, and rules about when letters are hard, soft, or silent etc. And exceptions, such as "ph" sounding like "f" but those came later. The first books were like "Dick and Jane" with very simple words.
Not really? The accent source is typical for any pair of languages: different sets of sounds. E.g. Russian doesn't quite have sounds for "th", "w" ("William"), "a" (as in "apple"), etc.
In Russian, unstressed vowels are reduced so they are pronounced ambiguously. And when you try to write them down, you need to choose the correct letter for the full-length vowel. There are also double consonants that often are not pronounced differently.
On the other hand, if you just sound out the words syllable by syllable with full-length vowels, they will be completely understandable. You'll just sound a bit over-formal and/or robotic.
There were several attempts at spelling reforms, but only the first one (in 1917) stuck.
it would mean that each letter has one and only one sound, but multiple letters can share the same sound. or if it is the reverse direction for each sound you only have one letter, but multiple sounds can share the same letter. which one is true for russian i don't know.
i learned to read the cyrilic letters, but i didn't learn russian (i did try though) but with that knowledge i could read cyrilic texts aloud to someone who understands the language, assuming i learned all letters correctly and the first case is true.
in the second case i could write down anything i hear. much harder, but as a traveler that would actually be useful. be able to write down names and addresses i hear when asking someone for directions for example. i did learn to write (well, type) korean that way, but of course i had to ask a local to proofread what i wrote since i would not be able to spot mistakes.
The strategies and outcome for the three-cue system reminds me of how LLMs autocompletes, and even hallucinates.
Maybe for some, vibe reading is good enough. But given our culture wars where people of different beliefs cannot talk to each other without flamewars on social media platforms where people read and write, I think the big societal risk here is that people will infer the meaning they are biased towards, and not actually communicating with each other.
I didn't read the whole article yet (lol) but I am not sure what the author's issue is. She seems to take issue with memorizing words. That's how I think I read. I recognize the shape of the whole word, instantly, unconsciously. I don't sound out the word or pay attention to the letters. I don't see why memorizing words is a bad strategy. Many English words are not spelled regularly or phonetically so phonics reading strategies are not necessarily a good route? What else is there besides associating each word with an meaining in memory. It seems less direct to associate a word with a sound and then associate that sound with a meaning. When I am reading I never consider the sounds of parts of words or of letters to get the meaning of the whole word. Rather I associate each word with an idea visually and then my brain makes it available to my consciousness as that idea spoken in my internal reading voice, or less often as a visual experience. For example if I read "red" I hear "red" and see red in my mind's eye and mind's ear.
You're making the same mistake as the researchers who invented "three cueing". They asked themselves "what do I do when I read?" and tried to reverse-engineer a teaching method. Well, turns out that approach doesn't work very well. Part of this may be that "how you think you read" isn't actually how you read. There's plenty of experimental evidence that adept adult readers do use letters as cues rather than "holistically recognizing the word". You could be an outlier but I doubt it.
Anyway, empirically, it's quite clear that phonics works and the "whole language" approach (which "three cueing" is an example of) doesn't. One of the main reasons teachers in the US continue to avoid phonics is that they don't like teaching it.
I absolutely suspect that most adult readers myself included use letters as clues for recognizing the shape of the word. What I dispute is that reading necessarily goes letters->sound recognition->meaning / understanding.
I suspect for myself and many others it goes letters->word shape recognition->understanding ->then last part is sound in my mind's ear.
Infact when I am writing and reading I find myself thinking about the shapes of printed words. I don't even consider what they sound like except maybe in retrospect.
Maybe I am an outlier.
To me it makes logical sense. When I read a word I see the word in my mind's eye (eg m i n d) and hear the word after an after effect.
Printed text is a visual item. Meaning need not have a sound associated with it. It makes sense to go directly from vision to recognition of meaning. I don't need to know what words sound like to understand their meaning. As a kid I took Latin and Ancient greek. Honestly I don't think anyone knows the precise phonetics as they were spoken at the time of these ancient languages and yet that is no impediment to understanding the meaning of word by reading the written word with your eyes. There is no need for phonics in reading. It's based on the misunderstanding that the sound is the unique vehicle of meaning when it need not be.
Summary: The current system of 3 cues (pictures, context, syntax) is ineffective because kids don't actually read the words. SIPPS is a better way.
> Around the same time, Goldberg was trained in a program that uses a different strategy for teaching children how to read words. The program is called "Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words," or SIPPS.24 It's a phonics program that teaches children how to sound out words and uses what are known as "decodable books." Most words in the books have spelling patterns that kids have been taught in their phonics lessons.
As a father trying to get my kindergartner to read and also someone working in ML, it's amazing to me how this mirrors my life experience and ml concepts.
When I was a kid, there was a big effort to experiment on our grade using a concept called whole language, as compared to phonics for reading. I am a whole language person and I've learned to read and retain pretty quickly.
Anyways, this totally mirrors the concept of tokenization. Phonics vs whole languge is suspiciously similar to letter, word, and subword tokenization. One wonders if we as human do a proxy for BPE in our brains when we learn to read.
I never heard about any other language culture encouraging children to guess words. They have natural tendency to do so, which pretty much anyone understands, is counterproductive to reading and must be suppressed. The most common "in the moment" instruction for a kid learning to read, when they try and fail is "Don't make stuff up! Read!" (In their respective language of course). Encouraging kid to guess what's on paper seems absolutely idiotic.
Is Ken Goodman the Andre Wakefield of education, just without the ulterior motiv?
Observational: watch kids, come up with correlations in behavior, then with controls identify causation.
Cognitive: watch kids, but pay attention to details and pair them with models of relevant psychological/cognitive models. Ideally, the models help explain the details, or the details help update the models.
Cognitive models have much more explanatory and prediction power. But are not much help, no help, or misleading, wherever there are no good models yet.
Given cognition is nowhere near a complete model, more a (not entirely consistent) patchwork of a great variety of models, both approaches remain important.
So in this case, both can corroborate their findings because both demonstrate success in learning to read?
Since you said both look at controls to assess that they're better than random ?
But from the article, it seems to imply there hasn't been controls applied to the three cues system. Therefore it would have always remained just some children become good readers with this methods, so it probably works.
And what I'm not able to gather is, how much better are the controls applied by the cognitive one?
> how much better are the controls applied by the cognitive one?
Good question!
Psychology is so complex, my guess is there isn't a clear difference between the two types of studies, but lots of variation in individual paper quality for both.
I found this article painful to read, not because reading it was difficult, but because of how deeply flawed it is. It correctly identifies one system of teaching reading as flawed (to put it mildly), but then is an advertisement for another slightly less flawed system by advocating for phonetics. The problem with phonetics is that it is unreliable when applied to the English language. The following video shows the problem:
English does not follow the alphabetic principle, so any ability to sound out words is vestigial. It might work for a number of words, but then you will hit one where it does not work. I remember as a child, trying to sound out words as I was told to do, and getting them wrong. I eventually realized that the word pronunciations had to be memorized. I did not understand why until I was an adult. The reason is that English writing does not follow the alphabetic principle unlike many other languages which do. This is why schools in English speaking countries have spelling bees, while countries where languages that follow the alphabetic principle do not. Just about all of the students in the latter countries will always get the spelling of words in their local language correct, 100% of the time, such that there will be no winner and thus there is no point to a spelling bee.
Look at the actual sounds used in American English:
Let’s not forget foreign loanwords, which might or might not be pronounced using the native foreign pronunciation. With only 26 letters, how are people supposed to ever be able to sound out words correctly? The only way is to memorize what is right in advance, which is the only way poor Ricky Ricardo ever learned how to pronounce the -ough words in English. It is also how my younger self learned to read. The article suggests this is called the “whole word” approach, and despite what the article claims, that is the only sane way to learn to read.
As someone who learned a number of words by “sounding them out”, prior to realizing sounding them out does not work, I can recall humiliation after evoking laughter when adults heard me pronounce words such as rendezvous and polygamy, which I pronounced as /rɛndɛzəvus/ and /poligami/. You can hear just how wrong these pronunciations are by copy and pasting the IPA into this site:
In a number of cases, I learned words twice. Once via “sounding out” and another via hearing it said. I had no idea that the two were the same word and thought that they were distinct words. I only ever realized they were not after hearing someone read the word, expecting to hear the former and instead hearing the latter, which in a number of cases, took several years to happen.
The phonetics approach relies on children doing recitations of cherrypicked texts to give the illusion of reading, but reading involves not just recitation but comprehension. In a language that follows the alphabetic principle, a child could trivially recite a graduate level text, but would not understand any of it. That is easily determined by asking questions about the text. However, since cherrypicked children‘s texts are used by phonetics based learning, people assume they recitation equals understanding, when that is not necessarily true. The children will only understand it when the words are words that they learned orally a priori.
That said, the phonetic approach could be less flawed if they taught children to anticipate every possible variation of pronunciation, which would at least help them identify words that they have previously heard. However, that would require admitting that children cannot know the words if they had not previously learned them. That would be a fantastic admission as it would avoid making life difficult for children (and it would have prevented my embarrassment over mispronouncing words such as rendezvous and polygamy), but it would not allow for the smoke and mirrors demonstrations that proponents of the phonetics approach use to advocate for it, which is to get children that could not read well previously to recite cherry-picked children’s texts, under the false premise that recitation equals understanding.
Isn’t there a bootstrapping thing going on here, though?
The only way to memorize all those random-ish pronunciations is with a lot of practice, and the best way to do that is with a lot of reading, so you have rich context and meaning to draw on to help you memorize stuff.
But if you can’t read, how do you even get started with that practice? Maybe there are better ways, but in English, phonics seems like a pretty decent way to get started with simple children’s books.
The “whole word” approach had been used to successfully teach children in the past without phonetics and it worked. This avoids the downsides of phonetics. In any case, my earliest memories of learning English involved the “whole word” approach where my mother had taken me to the library to read books with such profound literary prose as “This is Spot. See Spot run.” after I had learned the alphabet. There was substantial repetition before I learned. It worked for me as far as bootstrapping went.
All of the phonetics material included in my elementary school’s curriculum had been detrimental overall in hindsight. There were many times teachers would tell me to sound words out, I would do it wrong and I was considered the one at fault. If I asked how to sound out words correctly, I would get a non-answer, such as “you just do it”. That is a form of sadism that no child should have to endure.
Thanks to the inclusion of elements of phonetics into elementary school’s English curricula, I remember one time being asked to identify the syllables in words. I asked what a syllable was. I would be told it was the smallest subdivision of a word and be given an example. Then I would identify that I could say a vowel from it (not knowing that was a vowel) so by the definition, the example was not a syllable and just told I was wrong. At no point was how anything actually worked explained. Of course, this would be touched on as if it were important, but then would not be used for anything in the rest of the year, which illustrated how useless knowing this was for English. I would not learn what a syllable was until college when I studied Latin, where it actually matters somewhat due to the stress accent that English also has in some form, but goes untaught in school. :/
Maybe reading English should be initially taught using Shavian alphabet and transition to Latin alphabet later in life, or not at all, using AI for conversation between Latin and Shavian characters?
Good thing I learned to read (phonics) before that nut showed up.
> Picture Power!
This whole word nonsense must have been the motivation for icons promulgated by Steve Jobs, which have infected everything. The latest diseased device I bought was a new scanner, which has a touch screen overflowing with icons. Naturally, the icons are unique and invented by arteests imagining they are Susan Kare. It's all WTF do these things do, which you can only hope to discern by touching them and hoping the scanner does not go into paper-shredding mode.
I'll keep the self-promotion to a minimum, but I have been spending lots of time reading on the science consensus on how children actually become fluent readers as part of my upcoming product Pictures Are For Babies (https://picturesareforbabies.com), a literacy program that uses a deliberate practice engine I created to teach literacy from A-B-C to post-secondary level.
Phonics is all the rage, and I was planning to make it central to my pedagogy, but it turns out the answer is a bit more complicated, especially if you want to work with children with reading difficulties.
Phonics is part of the answer, but it's only the first step. Introducing children to the explicit mapping of graphemes to phonemes (letter to sounds) teaches decoding, but skilled reading is not decoding.
Actual reading is developed through a process called orthographic mapping. The result of this process is storing the grapheme to phoneme mappings in long-term memory for immediate retrieval. The words stored in this way form a sight vocabulary that spans tens of thousands of words in fluent readers.
When taught only phonics, kids run the risk of plateauing in later grades. It's not evident at first because the material they are given is simple and deals with concrete subjects (e.g. "Mike got a bunny for his birthday"). Later material uses many more words that don't follow phonics "rules" and deal with abstract material. Under these circumstances, decoding is too slow and effortful and leaves little remaining capacity to deal with harder tasks like comprehension.
The main cause of issues in developing this sight vocabulary is phonological deficits, not IQ, motivation, intelligence, visual processing, or attention like one might imagine. Kids with these deficits have trouble understanding that words are made up of smaller sound units and cannot work with them. Because of that, they cannot store the mapping efficiently and their vocabulary and fluency is limited.
Thankfully, the best interventions that fix these deficits are not too complicated and can correct the issues with as little as a dozen of hours of correct instruction. The main drawback is that finding and targeting those deficits is time-consuming for the instructors, but my program deals with that through the practice engine, which automates all that work.
The bad news is that most teachers are not aware of this and are simply being moved to phonics, which will not work for all children unless those phonemics deficits are identified and remediated. Worse news is that most commercial products that claim to be evidence-based or backed by the "science of reading" still use phonics and make no mention of orthographic mapping, the actual process that produces fluent readers. Again, phonics instruction is part of the answer, but nowhere near the entire story.
You can look at my pedagogy document for more info. Although it's meant to be about my product, it still contains a primer of the actual research on how full literacy (not just reading, but writing as well) is developed: https://picturesareforbabies.com/home/pedagogy/
Wow this cue method was confusing to me. It's like saying the most efficient way to drive a car is to press the pedal, while turning a crank, while also tooting a horn.
No. The most efficient way is to just drive the car with the pedal. Likewise, efficiently being able to identify words is, surprise surprise, the most efficient way to then read a series of words (sentence).
In an alternate universe, the Ottomans sailed the Atlantic first and now we are all speaking Turkish, a very regular language with few exceptions to anything.
I mean, I love English, but the learning curve is crazy, though nowhere near as crazy as Chinese would be.
Did we collectively forget that most written languages directly encode the sounds of the spoken language?
Your brain tokenizes sounds into words. A beginner reader has to parse text into sounds and then into the token. An advanced reader can skip the middle step and parse text into tokens. But you still have to know how to parse text into sounds, there's no way around it.
It'd be like giving someone a French texbook, only instruct them in English, don't even mention the different sounds, and somehow expect them to learn conversational spoken French. It's nonsense.
Three Cue-ing, the flawed idea is three-cueing (looking for context clues to figure out words you don't know). I didn't read the rest of the article out of infuriation with the number of times they alluded to and discredited the technique before naming it.
It gets better once they go into it but you’re right, I was also infuriated! The first 10 or so paragraphs read like tabloid click bait. I recommend reading the whole thing though, it actually gets compelling.
Example: “skin” has multiple sounds to help decipher the word as spelled: “sss”, “sk”, “ih”, “nnn”, “iinn”.
Identifying some of those sounds in order helps a reader to sound out the word “skin”. After doing this a few times in a context that helps the reader confirm the meaning of the word they’ve just sounded out they’ll learn it outright.
From that point forward they can recognize “skin” on sight without requiring any context.
Whatever the culture and resources of the parents, the buck stops at home.
Gaining the ability to read begins from birth, and by the time that kids are school age they should be clamoring for books if the parents did their job.
After time-worn basic reading instruction in first grade, it's a matter of parents enforcing reading-time at home for school mandated reading. Then providing access to the reading material that the child desires for their free reading. Whatever it is. Book-bound comic strips are an early popular grade-level choice, and are fantastic. If a child is behind, then go simpler. Everything else is a band-aid or less practical if not detrimental in comparison. Some kids need services if they have deficits, but that doesn't imply that the standard practice is flawed. All top readers came out of this type of early progression. So have most middling readers, often just separated by the amount of time they've chosen to put in. Or were compelled to put in.
I think that we can demand that our education systems teach our kids to read and do math.
Many parents are not academic and can’t do a good job in passing on academic skills no matter how hard they might try. Many other parents would prefer to teach their kids different things about how to live a life.
I grew up on a farm, and the start of my journey into tech was fixing machinery and building things outside with my father. With my kids I want to create a similar experience so they feel like they have the power to take things apart, fix them and make whatever they want. I don’t want to jam them up all evening reading and doing times tables.
That sounds sort of noble, perhaps, but that's not how it works. Ignoring the fact that there is more than enough time in childhood for what you propose, reading, and much else.
Cognitive development is a process, of which language development and reading are a major subset. That development is always in-process.
The longer that one waits to start children down the path of language development skills, the lesser the chance that they will be able to fully develop their potential for that skill.
For example if you speak to a child less than you should or could, that child's language and overall cognitive development will be significantly disadvantaged when compared to a child with similar potential but much more attentive parents.
Think of a disability where one hears less language, and then research developmental outcomes for that group.
The same carries over to reading skill. The earlier that you start, and the more that they get, both listening and eventually reading themselves, the much higher likelihood that they will become an advanced reader.
You aren't jamming them up. You are giving them an immense lifelong gift. In addition to attending to a significant cognitive need.
And again, plenty of children raised with reading are also commonly taught be adept at technical and manual skills. Most people would choose a smarter mechanic, who among other things has the proficiency to read complex documentation.
Kids want to be read stories at night. Its a major developmental need. You should read stories to your kids. Then, when they are ready, you should buy them simple books like comics. Then age appropriate books as they are ready. Content doesn't matter so much. It's mostly the volume of reading that matters. Every little bit helps.
You are not “jamming” up your kid by reading to them. Reading to them is probably one of the most important things you can do to begin their journey towards literacy, and during it.
Connecting the words they hear as you read to what they see on the page is an important early step. You don’t need any academic training - just read to them.
> Many other parents would prefer to teach their kids different things about how to live a life.
Reading and writing are probably among the most important skills you can teach your child in order for them to fully participate in modern societies.
There’s a difference between reading to your kids and “enforcing reading-time at home for school mandated reading”.
I absolutely agree that reading and writing are critical skills. In fact, I think they’re so critical that we should demand that professional educators teach children how to do it.
children should have lots of opportunities to read, at home too. but i think the scientific consensus is that required homework is not as beneficial as once thought.
Those teachers couldn't be more wrong. Though, to clarify I am referring to reading and the exposure to it. We'd need someone who is informed on the developmental process of math skill to comment on "times tables".
> We'd need someone who is informed on the developmental process of math skill to comment on "times tables".
(I feel somewhat qualified...)
It is a mistake to make the kids memorize the times tables before they intuitively understand that multiplication is a repeated addition (or visually, that multiplication is a rectangle). The right moment to memorize comes a few weeks or months after they can calculate the result without memorizing. I think it is safer to wait, because many parents would be tempted to make it prematurely, in order "not to waste time".
Generally: understanding first, memorizing later. If you memorize first... many kids won't even try to understand, because "they already know it". The problem is, if you remember without understanding, there is nothing to correct you if you make a mistake. An incorrectly remembered fact feels exactly the same way as a correctly remembered fact, and you have no alternative way to check.
Also, memorizing instead of understanding is a strategy that works well in short term and terribly in long term, because memorizing a small thing for a few days is easy, but then you forget it (kids famously lose a lot of what they learned at school over summer holidays), and when the memorized things accumulate, it becomes too much and you start confusing them. Actual understanding takes more time, but it can survive the summer holidays, and already understanding many things makes understanding an additional thing easier.
(But when the day comes to memorize the times tables, spaced repetition is your friend.)
montessori does advanced math in kindergarten (advanced compared to regular kindergarten). i haven't heard anything about that leading to problems when those kids go to regular primary schools after that.
My parents read to me when I was very young, but never tried to teach me to read. So all I knew of reading was that it was something my parents could do. I learned to read in first grade, at school. I found it compelling and did it on my own at home without much prompting or "enforcing."
That didn't really change until High School, when I found most of the standard reading assignments in English class to be tedious and hopelessly old-fashioned. If I'd also had trouble reading from a technical standpoint at that time, I have no idea how I would have gotten through it.
By contrast, my parents were high school dropouts. When I was little, my mum would read to me, with her finger following the text. I somehow got the idea, and started to sound out the words with her. By kindergarten, I was reading at a Grade 2 level. I think there are as many paths to reading as there are kids.
The cueing theory seems misguided, in teaching kids to regard pictures as the source of information. I'd say that teaching kids to read requires a mix of activities, with a heavy dose of phonics, but also activities that create a joy of reading, by showing interesting people and stories. I can't see how cueing helps.
Cueing reminds me of some of the stranger ideas in math pedagogy in elementary schools, notably that rather than learning algorithms for arithmetic operations, kids should invent their own, and maybe have several, which they choose from in a specific problem. Of course, some students have much more difficulty than others, but there really are some basic ideas they must master in order to be competent at arithmetic. Allowing a kid to amass a forest of partially working techniques and then have to hack through it to solve any problem seems ridiculous to me, much like putting a student driver in a car, with no training, and telling them to try various things to see how to drive to a given point without getting killed.
> Allowing a kid to amass a forest of partially working techniques and then have to hack through it to solve any problem seems ridiculous to me, much like putting a student driver in a car, with no training, and telling them to try various things to see how to drive to a given point without getting killed.
Trying to invent ways to do math operations is not a bad idea per se... it's just that at some moment you should teach them the universal and efficient algorithm instead.
It's like, if you are learning to program, and try your own ways to design the code, and then someone teaches you the design patterns. I don't believe that you were harmed by trying to program your own way first. You will probably appreciate the design patterns more, and maybe understand them on a deeper level, now that you have a first-hand experience of the problem they were designed to solve. I even suspect that without this extra experience, people would be more likely to over-engineer their code, e.g. to use a complicated design pattern where a simple function call would suffice.
Similarly, after trying a few ad-hoc ways to add numbers, you will appreciate the standard "put them in a right-aligned column, proceed from right to left" algorithm more. But you will also notice that you can add 199 and 601 without putting them in a column first.
The crime of these approaches was failing to teach the kids the standard solutions. Experimenting for a while is itself OK.
We did everything we could to encourage reading with our kids (reading to them, book fairs, bookshelves full of kid friendly books, etc).
1 kid has grown into an avid reader, the other two (twins) have never embraced it. It's easy (and often appropriate) to blame the parents, but sometimes it's on the student to actually want to do it.
It makes me sad and I would love to change it. Having video games come into the environment (not my choice) certainly did not help.
I know it's poor form to complain about downvotes, but I'd like to understand what was disagreeable about what I said (for my own edification). My point was simply that nature vs. nurture is a thing (nature wins, but nurture shapes).
The source linked under each graph says "No significant change in fourth-grade reading scores across student groups compared to 2015" and "No change in score gaps among selected racial/ethnic groups in reading at grade 4 compared to 2015".
If OP thinks removing a certain demographic changes the results they should state what demographic that is.
The article isn't using the graphs to talk about a difference between 2015 and 2017, but about the overall level, so it would indeed be surprising if there had been a large change between those years.
But there are several demographic variables that show substantial differences between groups (and sometimes over longer timescales within a group), so I think it would be more enlightening to look at all of them, rather than letting someone pick their preferred comparison and then trying to argue with that.
I feel this way about most teaching research, but it's likely a sign that I'm starting to get old. Many instructors at my local university have shifted to the "flipped classroom" approach, and the students just don't feel as confident at the conclusion of a class (this is my highly subjective take). I feel like we have too many methods that try to sneak around the hard parts, or the parts that people might initially find boring, as well as eliminated much of the independent struggle to learn. Educators are more likely to choose this path because it avoids having to deal with the pain of that initial start (it's probably often done unconsciously). Of course, happier students also signals to our brains that we are more successful at the same time. A vicious cycle.
For me: I've found that constantly moving towards more difficult things that you aren't quite prepared for is the most effective route. The foundational work I require to accomplish the task is the first thing that gets solidified for me, even if, in my opinion, I'm awful at it when I start. This is one of my criticisms of the modern educational institution and their focus on grades: it discourages this sort of exploration, since it will negatively impact your future (especially if you are the only one doing it). I've always thought that if you are getting an A+ on everything you do, you're wasting most of your time.
Avoiding frustration in learning is like avoiding resistance in weight lifting: it certaining makes it easier, at the cost of entirely eliminating the benefit.
Frustration is what a learning brain feels like.
I remember my first music (note reading) lesson. We got a paper with sentences, and the teacher replaced each word with either 'titi' or 'ta' and we had to repeat it. Our homework for that week was an A4 paper full of words and sentences, and we had to replace them with 'titi' or 'ta' as made sense from context. I somehow managed to get a good grade, but it confused the hell out of me, and made me think of giving up music as too hard. I remember it bothering me the whole week.
The second lesson, the teacher says: 'Now we have to learn some hard words. The 'ti' is called a quarter note, and the ta is a half note'. Finally, the whole thing started to make sense to me. Then the teacher says: 'But don't try to understand that, these are very hard words for adults, just memorize them and do what makes sense from context.' Trough that lesson, the teacher kept stressing that same message: Too hard, adult words, do what makes sense instead and use the hard words only to impress the outsiders.
I've kept a deep distrust for teachers telling me to do what makes sense in context. I've always kept asking for the actual rules and correct words instead, however complicated they were. It happened a few times later in life too, like my economy teacher giving 'debit' and 'credit' guidelines based on vibes without telling they should be balanced, with subtraction being complicated math according to her.
My first piano teacher was very artsy and whimsical, she and I simply were never able to establish any connection as I have always been a very logical learner. I suffered under her for almost 10 years as a child while she tried to teach music to me in the way that made sense to her.
My latest piano teacher was a professor and specialised in the pedagogy of music so he was more than equipped to deal with an overthinking logical type music student like myself.
Learning music and an instrument can and should be quite intuitive. And as performing is quite expressive, music can attract people that stereotypical creative type who just wants to play and feel music. But the study of music theory and classical music are quite rigorous subjects and they can be attractive to logical thinkers who thrive learning all the nomenclature. But knowing the nomenclature is not strictly necessary to play music and so you have this disconnect between the very diverse spectrum of people drawn to music.
In fact, there is a certain inescapable intuitiveness to music and the professor taught me to really learn to via feeling and establish feedback loops that always come back to the sound and my own motor sensations (did you achieve the sound you want while playing freely?). You can't really logic things like that and if anything it's more like a sport than something you can science when every person's body and dimensions are different.
I am now having singing classes and singing is even more mindbending than piano has ever been
That resonates for me. I spend lot of time teaching volunteers. Early on, I encourage them to learn the skill from me, but also take any opportunity to have others explain and demonstrate the same thing to them. I tend to work from first principles, explaining how the pump functions and why that means water goes in here and out there, and what different configurations of valves are therefore valid and which ones will never do anything useful. Others often explain it in terms of which valves to turn in which order to achieve a given outcome.
Neither is right or wrong. Most people will be left pretty cold by one explanation while the other will land neatly into a hole in their brain shaped perfectly for it. Which one is which will be different for each person.
I think that there’s value in gearing educational settings towards having a plurality of instructors available on each subject and letting students gravitate towards the ones that work for them.
One of the hardest things about teaching others in my opinion is that to really teach effectively you have to be able to meet them where they are.
As in, you have to be able to have some understanding still of what being fresh and new to the subject is like, coupled with the ability to change how you teach something.
I wouldn’t say I’m exceptionally good at changing how I teach unless someone can give me a hint of how they learn best. (Unfortunately, this is one of those things people don’t always know well about themselves and can sometimes change based on context. ).
I try to always stay humble in that 1. I know I’m not the best at anything I’m teaching. 2. Usually if someone isn’t understanding, it’s 100% on how I’m communicating, and 3. Really it’s both of us learning - many insights can come from those new to material at times.
Those are abbreviated and perhaps not communicated in the best way.
But 100% a plurality of instructors, and techniques, is incredibly helpful.
I once heard, that a masters degree qualifies one to teach the subject matter. To do so, you had to organize the material in a way to accommodate students with different backgrounds, learning, and thinking process. In the process of doing so, you come to explore the limitations of your own understanding of the subject.
> I am now having singing classes and singing is even more mindbending than piano has ever been
The thing that drives me crazy about singing is that while I don't have a trained ear, much less perfect pitch, when I made a spectrogram of my voice I was more or less correct in terms of pitch. Apparently it's enough to do this for years to have some frequencies baked in.
As in without a reference you were still correct for pitch from muscle memory? I think I saw on HN that they no longer think perfect pitch is something you're born with and is essentially based on what I think you are saying. You have a few rock solid internal pitches and then you can do very fast recall. Although the people I know with perfect pitch hear everything as pitches - the sound of cars, footsteps the washing machine etc
> As in without a reference you were still correct for pitch from muscle memory?
Yes, exactly. If I try to sing a melody I'll be off by a few semitones, because well, no real musical training whatsoever, but I'll fall within the usual frequency buckets. Singing in a choir I always needed to rely on others to start, which is not ideal.
> Although the people I know with perfect pitch hear everything as pitches - the sound of cars, footsteps the washing machine etc
That sounds like hell.
I've seen exactly the same thing in Latin, where instead of learning "nominative", "accusative" and "genitive" cases for nouns, pupils were told about "case 1", "case 2" and "case 3". First, this disconnects their knowledge from the previous centuries of knowledge about Latin grammar. Second, it relies on the assumption that long Latinate words must be difficult, whereas meaningless numbers must be easy. So silly.
My elementary school music teacher was very schoolmarmish and prim -- almost like Ana Gasteyer's Bobbi Mohan-Culp character -- and had training in opera performance. She also did the "ta"/"titi" thing, but backwards. She would, for example, teach us a ta/titi sequence -- writing the notes on the board, teaching us the names and shapes of the notes, having us sing/perform it several times -- and only then reveal the lyrics to be "Baa Baa Black Sheep, have you any wool?" Her years of musical training taught her that getting the details right early on was super important. I'm incredibly thankful for having had teachers like this.
It sounds like the teachers you've had who said "just do what makes sense" have punted on the act of teaching itself. They either don't know how to, or are unwilling to, do the hard work of providing detailed instruction and holding kids to a high standard of learning. That's just sad to see man.
I'm struggling to understand what the assignment was supposed to be teaching?
If it's possible can you share an example sentence and then the "correct' translation of that sentence with titi and ta?
I'm no professional, but I've played the piano an guitar since I was 13 and I still can't wrap my head around what you would even get out of that exercise.
But maybe the issue is with me lol?
I may have missed what you're asking about, but the ta/ti/tika quarter/eighth/sixteenth syllable system is a rhythm counting system to teach music, the Kodály Method[1]. This was coincidentally also what my first music teacher used but I didn't know the name until I was reminded of it even existing here and did a little digging.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kod%C3%A1ly_method
I might still just be totally misreading things but I don't see how the assignment above is a valid, let alone a normal application of the Kodály Method?
Seems like the teacher really misunderstood what it was/meant for. I could totally be wrong here.
Translating sentences on paper (and again, how? why? by what metrics?) seems like the exact opposite of what the Kodály Method utilizes and its underpinning principles?
I understand the confusion and it's why I wasn't quite sure if I'd correctly identified what was happening. I took sentence and word as the music theory terms sentence[1] and motive[2]. Then translating the beats of an example into Kodály syllables seemed like a reasonable exercise that could be objectively evaluated.
[1] https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/mt21c/SentenceStructure.h...
[2] https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/mt21c/MotiveSection.html
I mean just saying that out loud I can exactly see how it works, pretty interesting. Like why do I naturally say Tika faster than ti and ti faster than ta?
The /t/ consonant in the method requires you to have your tongue touch the roof of your mouth, and the /a/ vowel requires you to have your jaw hang low. The /ti/ sound in the method has your jaw fixed in place whereas it has to move to produce the /ta:/ sound.
You're asking me to tell about a homework from 1988, in dutch, when I was 8 years old. I think the last sentence was 'honderdduizend apen hingen daar te gapen' being translated to 'titi titi ta ta. Titi titi ta ta'.
The weird thing is: I could do it, even if I had no idea what I was doing. There was some pronunciation that seemed natural. My answers were mostly right ( Or maybe I got a good grade just for turning something in?).
Also, the teacher was a really nice lady, she was good with the piano and knew music, and she did teach us what she was supposed to. I have fond memories for her lessons. She succeeded.
I just think, the first lesson being a bit if a sampler, she didn't want to scare kids away. Artsy people sometimes have learned that math must be hard. So she accidentally oversimplified for me. I have no idea if the other kids felt the same. She might even have self-corrected starting the third lesson.
> I think the last sentence was 'honderdduizend apen hingen daar te gapen' being translated to 'titi titi ta ta. Titi titi ta ta'.
Oh wow, interesting, so the exercise was really taking a Dutch language sentence and breaking it into musical syllables? I'm more confused than before because the example here has 6 words and ends up as 8 notes -- but that could just be something I don't follow since I don't know Dutch. Unless 'honderdduizend' ('hundred thousand' it seems) is a compound that makes sense to split into two?
I don’t speak dutch but a language descendant from it and I completely understand how it would be broken down that way.
Effectively I would pronounce honderdduizend as 4 quick syllables.
Again do not speak dutch and translate the same work into my languages pronunciation which I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t almost identical. “Honderd duisend” if you are interested.
>You're asking me to tell about a homework from 1988, in dutch, when I was 8 years old
Well asking certainly, but I'm not demanding? I don't know, seems like a very weird application. I certainly don't know ANY dutch, which doesn't help.
Is it just a "rhythm" mapping exercise based on the syllables? I probably read the first post a little bit to literally.
Yeah that 'asking' sounded wrong. Sorry. Read it as 'dont quote me on this, long time ago, memory untrustworthy'.
As an adult, I can say today: It is indeed a rhythm exercise, with some syllables being longer than others. I just wish someone had told me this at the time.
I really wish the top comments on this article were not about the off topic and in my opinion unrelated process of reading music.
Musical notes deal with sounds and possibly with time where as words deal with abstract meaning. There is no such thing in written music. Each note corresponds to a sound wereas for words each letter is effectively meaningless on its own and at least for me the reading process is about my mind recognizing words and associating their consensus cultural meaning with the shape word I know. For me the sound of the word is irrelevant with respect to whether I know the word or not. In fact I remember when I was younger my vocabulary would often exceed my understanding of what words sound like for rarely used words that i knew the meaning of but seldom if ever heard spoken. So I could read the word but might not pronounce it right. Anyway for how my mind works memorizing words has been effective. I don't really understand the phonics people.
I fear this is an analogy for what's happening with LLMs and context engineering.
I had basically the same thought: This sounds a lot like how they describe LLMs working!
My orchestra teacher would just throw us in the deep end of things.
I never felt overwhelmed with it. Compared to other people with gentler teachers, I think I learned more.
The pedagogy you describe has a name and it is called "Lying to Children" by the people who came up with this, and its based in Paulo Freire's work (Pedagogy of the Oppressed), hitting a peak around late 1990s. The same Marxist groups that brought wokeism to the masses.
This has largely taken over starting in the lax hiring standards that came about as a result of Sputnik late 60s. By 1978 most teaching books abandoned the First-principled approach favoring this approach instead.
The First-principled approach to teaching began with the Greeks/Rome (Trivium/Quadrivium); the process starts with an objective real system which you break observations down into core relationships, from such intuitive relations you then build up the model of relationships to predict future states within that same system, checking each time for correctness, and deviations to eliminate falsehoods/assumptions made.
The "Lying to Children" approach, is an abominable deviation of that process, or what many referred to without proper definition, as by-rote teaching, starts with an inherently flawed/fake system where you must learn to competency true and false things at the same time to progress to the next level of gnosis or mastery.
Upon each iteration in the path you are taught increasingly more useful versions of the ultimate model expected, but are subjected to psychological torture in the unlearning of false things which were learned to competency and will stonewall further progress; while relearning the true principles. Those who can put perceptual blinders on are able to pass this filter at the cost of intuition, as are those who tend towards lying/deceit. The process is by purposeful intent torturous, and intelligent people are most susceptible to this kind of torture (it is exactly that).
In Electronics, the water pipe analogy is one such example of this type of teaching method when the behavior of diffusion of charge is much more appropriate.
There are also induced failure points that operate on a lag, to plausibly prevent people from going into science backgrounds using this same methodology. Setting them up to fail through devious changes in grading and structure designed to burn the bridge (so you can't go backwards and are left stranded unable to move forward).
You are right to distrust teachers that do this. They are truly evil people (no hyperbole). Good people don't torture people and gaslight them into thinking its teaching. It doesn't matter if they didn't know the origin of the things they were taught, part of the responsibility for positions of such trust is to understand and comprehend what you do; and many just believe you aren't learning until you are struggling.
Evil people can seem nice, but what makes them truly evil is the wilful blindness towards the consequences of their evil actions; where its to the point where they repeat such actions unless stopped by external force.
Evil actions being defined as anything that does not result in the long-term beneficial growth of self or others (action or inaction).
They get to this point through repeated acts of self-violation until they no longer resist those evil choices (non-resistance), and then in fact accept it, subjorning themselves to it and becoming its plaything.
False justification for example is one such self-violation.
There are a lot of evil people out in the world today because society has followed Tolstoy's approach to non-resistance to evil in much of the policy.
These people think they are good, or at worst not bad, and you recognize them by that blindness, and inability to choose differently.
Torture is the imposition of psychological stress beyond a certain individual threshold. From that point, rational thought degrades, involuntary hypnosis occurs, eventually culminating in psychological break towards disassociation or a semi-lucid state of psychosis seeking annihilation (suicide or mass shooter types).
Wouldn't it be sad if the majority of intelligent people are actually killing themselves because of these things.
Most people today don't recognize torture because its become so sophisticated and their individual education of things have been deprived by past generations, purposefully so.
Torture includes elements, structures, and clustering, and if you'd like to know more about the process to recognize it you can read the following books (in order), most of this is common knowledge in certain fields (foundational back in the 1950s).
Robert Cialdini - Influence (psychological blindspots leveraged for clustering without distorted reflected appraisal)
Joost Meerloo - Rape of the Mind (1950s) - Overview and related factors
Robert Lifton - Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism - Case Studies of PoWs returning from Mao's China during Korean Conflict covers structuring and elements.
I got taught about lying to children at the same time that I learned about the orbitals of the electron and that Neil Bohr model of the atom wasn’t totally correct, by the least woke chemistry teacher I’ve probably ever known.
Even he would read this and think That you were suffering from a semi lucid state of psychosis and he would begin seeking an annihilation after reading this.
While yes, lying to children does induce some cognitive overhead cost—and I personally believe that the act of learning and the act of changing one’s mind from something already learned is in a way painful (in so much as the brain can feel pain since it doesn’t really have any nerve endings) because of the forming of new connections and the breaking of old—I fail to see how that has anything to do with wokeism, other than being “woke” inherently requiring the critical thinking capacity to make those changes in things that you’ve learned.
My pet theory is that conservatives are conservatives because that pain is unbearable for them and they just hate learning or relearning or changing their mind at all.
Which leads me to ask after this ramble of yours: do you suffer from this pain?
I'd like to note that nerve endings just send signal to the brain, where the experience of pain results from the processing of that signal. A nerve is neither necessary nor sufficient, e.g. phantom limb pain or heartbreak.
The willfully blind by themselves are helpless, hopeless people who are incapable of perceiving things which they have at one point chosen not to see.
The lack of reasoning faculties is self-inflicted, as are the consequences that eventually pile up (without them noticing).
This makes them particularly weak people who bring misfortune on others, who are especially prone to delusion, as well as other forms of mental illness (psychopath/schizophrenia-like tendencies).
When they gaslight strangers, because they disagree with what that person is saying, they demonstrate their lack of inherent moral character. Good people don't do this.
There is an old saying, that's understood by many as extremely accurate wisdom: "What a person does in the small things that do not matter is what that person will do every time, in big things that do matter, when everything is on the line."
You communicated far more than you meant to say for the people who can read between the lines.
One can hardly call the circular subjective abuse of the contrast principle, requiring any form of critical thinking capacity (its fallacy). Critical theory while resembling critical thinking are two very different (mutually exclusive) things.
Just wanted to remind everyone, journalism like this is partially funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was just defunded by this administration this week. See their "Funders" section here: https://features.apmreports.org/about.html.
Reading TFA felt exhilarating. Like taking drugs on a thrill ride. No seriously. It's hard for me to explain, but as I read, I felt the device I was holding had turned into solid gold in my hand.
The scariest part for me:
> Cueing was appealing because they didn't know what else to do.
A whole pedagogy in the grip of learned helplessness, as if they all caught some insane mind virus, to the point they were virtually inoculated from the knowledge their methods could be considered harmful.
Think about it. When you multiply out the disadvantage to kids of a poor start in reading, the compound interest comes back as poor performance in other areas such as writing, maths, science, reasoning skills, technology use. Think it through and you realize it screws everything.
The real sci-fi question is, could it scale to bereave a whole society of its very cohesion?
I learned phonics and became an excellent reader without hesitation. Later, some morons in the education system created "better" reading techniques, f*cking up my younger brothers and sisters.
Glad to see a return to phonics.
While the data on phonics suggests it works well, I feel like I may have benefited from an alternative method (my school taught phonics growing up).
I personally do not think I am all the special, but I from what I remember, I believe many of my issues with phonics were:
1. The inconsistency of the English language makes it so phonics is limited after a certain number of words, and then memorization and context must be used. For example, take words like cough, rough, through, though, etc. or words like read, lead, wound, etc. Not to mention all the silent letters we have too. If I am not mistaken, most languages do not have Spelling Bee contests because how clearly the language phonics map to spelling, e.g., German.
2. This is purely a hypothesis on my part, but I wonder if certain accents of English are better suited for phonics than other English accents? I grew up in the Southeast, USA. People slur words, drop off endings, contract words n >= 2 words, and even mispronounce words all. For example, the words "ten" and "tin" or "pen" and "pin" are not typically pronounced differently where I am from.
3. If you are like me and had speech problems, then phonics are substantially harder. It's hard to sound out the words when one's mouth cannot produce the proper sounds.
I do not doubt the other alternative methods are worse than phonics, and perhaps I am ignorant, but this debate also seems to be predominately an English only issue. Mandarin Chinese does not have phonics instruction to my knowledge, and they can read just fine. So, perhaps English is just a difficult language to read and pronounce correctly -- even for native speakers?
hirvi74says >"1. The inconsistency of the English language makes it so phonics is limited after a certain number of words, and then memorization and context must be used. For example, take words like cough, rough, through, though, etc. or words like read, lead, wound, etc. Not to mention all the silent letters we have too."<
In grade school English class, our teacher raised as examples "cough", "rough", "through", "though", etc.(i.e., all the "ough" words). She pointed out that sometimes words are inconsistent with phonics.
I became annoyed and complained about the inconsistency. Her response (to me and the class) was straightforward: phonics wasn't exact and some parts of speaking and reading must be memorized. But she also pointed out that everybody else had learned it as a child and that we would too, which was a pretty convincing argument. Within a few days the desire for a foolish consistency evaporated as we advanced through our reading assignments, slaughtering armies of text before us.
English words are composed of characters from a phonetic alphabetic. In Chinese each word is a unique character. So there is no phonics system for Chinese.
> In Chinese each word is a unique character.
This is not true in contemporary Chinese. There are plenty of Chinese words that consist of multiple characters. There are also Chinese characters that have no meaning outside of a multicharacter word (e.g. the 葡 in 葡萄 ).
But do these characters correspond to sounds?
Not exactly, more or less to some extent without a 1:1 correspondence, more like a 1:100 or something like that technically, but practically it probably works out to roughly 1:1 to 1:2 correspondence on average?
I guess to try to echo the question: If a reader was reading along and just ran into "葡" in isolation in the text (eg, not adjacent to another character that it normally combines with) would they be able to confidently emit any sound that corresponds to what they are saying, or would it be perceived more like a punctuation error in English given that anglophones do very little to change the sound they are making as a result of punctuation (possibly just changing rhythm instead)?
Yes, because "葡" only has one pronunciation.
But there are other characters like "行" that have multiple pronunciations that vary depending on the word they appear in.
> But she also pointed out that everybody else had learned it as a child and that we would too, which was a pretty convincing argument.
This is some next-level teaching skills. Thank you for sharing it in particular :)
These examples point to a further complication: there is no single pronunciation for the "ough" (cough versus through versus thorough, and then there's cases where the "ough" is not terminal, such as thought.)
I doubt that reading English can be taught without a dose of rote learning.
>English words are composed of characters from a phonetic alphabetic. In Chinese each word is a unique character. So there is no phonics system for Chinese.
"At least it's not as hard as learning Chinese" doesn't sound like a convincing argument against language reform to me.
> In Chinese each word is a unique character. So there is no phonics system for Chinese.
We know. Their point is that the fact that Chinese children succeed in learning to read (non-phonetic) Chinese well contradicts the core argument of TFA, which is that phonics is necessary to learn to read well.
I'm very pro-phonics, but this is nevertheless a compelling argument against it being necessary. If you know of another explanation for why Chinese reading education seems to work well despite the lack of phonics, please give it. (Or is it that learning to read Chinese actually is a big problem in China?)
> Or is it that learning to read Chinese actually is a big problem in China?
Historically it was. Reforming the writing system (potentially even ditching it entirely in favor of a Latin/etc derived script) to improve literacy rates was a major topic among Chinese intellectuals during the 20th century.
Some combination of character simplification, reading and writing the vernacular instead of "Classical Chinese", brute force, and modern technology has made this less acute. But it still is not unusual for even educated native Chinese speakers to simply not remember how to write some uncommon character. (You will see this in English occasionally too, of course. I have to think twice when I write rendezvous.)
Chinese education starts with phonics, as in pinyin (or in Taiwan, zhuyin). Similarly, in Japanese it starts with kana. The difference is that afterwards you have to learn to read a separate system (hanzi/kanji) after.
Korean fixed that by revamping the writing system…
The overwhelming majority of Chinese characters are composed of simpler characters. That helps a lot. You don't even have to be told that, you'll figure that out yourself fairly quickly. Being taught what the typical components are (there are several hundred) doesn't seem to be a shortcut, but you will need to roughly know them in order to use old-fashioned paper dictionaries.
Most characters have a sound part and a semantic part. The sound part is not very precise, but it helps. The semantic part can be quite abstract, such as the sign for mouth (a square or a squarish rectangle) for parts of speech (和 = and).
Like the others wrote, a phonetic system is used in the beginning to provide the pronunciation to the kids. The same system is usually used later for text input on computers or cell phones, possibly supplemented with support for drawing characters.
They have the additional problem that they might not speak Mandarin and the pronunciation support they are using is based on Mandarin.
It works much better than it has any right to, but it requires much more training to reach basic literacy than even an imperfect sound-based system like English. Weeks versus years. To reach proper literacy takes years and mountains of text in both cases.
> old-fashioned paper dictionaries
Since English dictionaries are arranged in "alphabetical order" to make finding the word one wishes to know the definition easier, I'm not curious if the Chinese writing system has anything approaching an "alphabetical order", or any kind of canonical way to order strings of Chinese text. And relatedly, how do they find words in their dictionaries?
(this is normally something I would google but it doesn't sound like something I'd get a high signal to noise ratio on given the ambiguous terms at hand)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collation#Radical-and-stroke_s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radicals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_Dictionary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zihui
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Shuowen_Jiezi_radicals
The alphabet is a marvelous invention. I seem to remember that Europeans in China (and places with a large Chinese diaspora) used alphabetical sorting of whatever romanization they favoured (different between English, French, Dutch). Much easier than radicals and stroke counting.
> Chinese reading education seems to work well despite the lack of phonics,
From what I remember from taking Mandarin in college, Chinese students learn to read much slower than speakers of languages with phonetic alphabets.
I did a quick Google search for the exact numbers and it looks like Chinese students are expected to recognize 3k characters by the end of 6th grade. While US students are expected to be able to read 20k words by that time and some sources I found said up to 40k.
Character aren’t words though, and many words are at least two characters. Heck, most given names are two characters. 3k characters covers most of the words frequently used in modern Chinese (the estimate ranges from 2K to 4K characters), the remaining 70k characters that you don’t learn by sixth grade aren’t as useful (well, 囧 can be used as an emoji in a pinch).
That true, but I definitely remember my Chinese teacher (born and studied in China, did grad school here) telling us that it takes much longer for Chinese students to learn to read.
Some more googling looking for something similar to compare is that Chinese students know enough characters to read simple newspaper articles at age 11 or so. While a 6 or 7 year old American student can read simple newspaper articles.
Most Chinese in urban schools are mostly literate by sixth grade, and can probably read simple articles by 7-8 years old. The average time to read is probably brought down by rural schools, people forget China still isn’t all rich cities with college-bound students in public schools past the last compulsory 9th grade.
It’s likely that the rural students are bringing the average down, but it seems less likely they could bring the average down so far given that only 1/3 of the country is rural.
Either way there seems to be a pretty strong consensus that one of the advantages of a phonetic alphabet is ease and time to learn.
Obviously a phonetic language has other disadvantages compared to a logographic language.
Kids going to trade school after 9th grade are fairly common in many lower tier cities, and many of the poorer provinces. Technically urban, but bringing the average down.
But ok, Chinese is semi-logographic/semi-phonetic (many words are made just by characters with the right sound) at this point, which is a confusing hot mess and requires more effort to be completely literate, but only a year or two of more effort compensated for by a more accelerated math in elementary school (well, at least for city kids).
I’m talking about kids between 6 and 11 years old so dropping out in 9th grade seems not completely relevant. But if we’re talking about subsegments of the population bringing down the average, removing a few low performing states from the US would drastically change the average here too.
>requires more effort to be completely literate, but only a year or two of more effort compensated for by a more accelerated math in elementary school
I’m not sure what you meant by compensated for. I’m discussing the differences between writing systems. Not which country has a better education system.
To be followed by a life of trying to remember the f**ing classical Chinese character that you read once 30 years ago, used twice and now can neither remember nor find in a dictionary.
I see this almost every time I meet with Chinese friends: they have forgotten one or more particular ideograms that have a particular meaning and simply cannot recover them w/o extensive discussion with their educated Chinese peers. They chalk it up to their faulty memory: I chalk it up to a faulty language.
sachertorte (well, "sarchertech") says "Obviously a phonetic language has other disadvantages compared to a logographic language."
Apparently not enough to be mentioned on this thread!8-))
Here's an interesting Reddit thread that discusses modern languages on a scale ranging from purely phonetic to purely logographic:
https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/bv7r1p/wh...
While I must admit I would give a rat's ass (but not much more) to know any common logographic language today, I would never go to the trouble to learn one. The effort is simply too great, the payoff too limited, and there are other better ways to use the rest of my life.
US students are expected to be able to read 104 characters by the end of 6th grade. While Chinese students are expected to be able to read 20k words by that time.
Characters in Chinese can be combined to make more words, and you need around 9k words in English to read a novel and 2k characters in Chinese to read a novel.
It is wrong to compare number of characters in English to number of words in Chinese. The proper comparison would be words in English to words in Chinese. By 4th grade I knew enough English to proofread ycombinator posts. Of course, that is a low bar...
And I think you're off by an order of magnitude about vocabulary size. Chinese vocabulary size around 6th grade is more like 2K - 4k words tops, not 20K. See
https://www.guavarama.com/2015/02/06/chinese-characters-by-g...
I get that there are tradeoffs and that logographic languages have advantages and disadvantages.
In this case specifically though there seems to be a pretty strong consensus that one of the advantages of a phonetic alphabet is ease and time to learn.
In a completely phonetic language (which English is obviously not) once a kid learns the alphabet and around 50 phonemes you can represent with it, their auditory and reading vocabulary is roughly the same. So you can have 6 year olds with a reading vocabulary of 20k words.
It’s not that simple, but clearly the more phonetic a language is the easier it is to learn for someone who can already understand the spoken words.
> So there is no phonics system for Chinese.
Many Chinese characters include "phonic" components, and Chinese characters were historically learned using "rhyming" dictionaries. The systems are not totally equivalent but they're similar - the approach is not a pure "whole language" one.
> Mandarin Chinese does not have phonics instruction to my knowledge, and they can read just fine. So, perhaps English is just a difficult language to read and pronounce correctly -- even for native speakers?
I think your conclusion is right but that example is a bad one (though interesting). Chinese is not a phonetic language. Each symbol is a 'word', roughly. This means you can quite possibly read without knowing how it sounds. This is how the many Chinese languages co-exist - the written forms are roughly the same, it's just spoken with different sounds.
It's an interesting tangent on this topic because Chinese are starting to see a comparable literacy problem - inability to recall the written characters when hand-writing. This is because most writing these days is done by IMEs on computers and phones, where you actually DO input a phonetic latin 'word', and the IME turns it into the Chinese character you want.
I still read that as somewhat supporting your opinion - that purely phonetic languages are easier to learn, and that languages that are less phonetic (English) or completely unphonetic (Chinese) are harder. Whether that supports phonics or not? I'm not sure, personally i think it does, but your experience that it's still a difficult system is not wrong.
My daughter learned to read english before her 3rd birthday and French before her 5th. We started with sounds but not the phonics instruction that I got as a kid, just matching letters and letter combinations to sounds, and vice versa. But the way I read to her was far closer to whole-word instruction, and her friends who only learned via phonics can't spell to save their lives while she makes very few spelling mistakes. Because as you noted, english spelling is a mess.
When I was in elementary school, every kid who didn't form sounds like "normal" went to speech therapy until they did. By 6th grade none of my friends lisped or stuttered or spoke with excessive sibilance. S-backing was not a thing then (it seems half cultural/regional now and half unconscious/untrained/lazy but I have nothing but my experiences to base that on; it is not a conscious choice for anyone I've asked) but today, I hear all of those things so I have to assume that there is not very much speech therapy any more.
Anyone who learned to read before their third birthday is exceptional and not an example from which we can draw inferences.
But good on her! My son is similarly talented with language and it’s a beautiful thing to watch.
I am not sure the child is exceptional so much as the environment. It depends on what you mean by being able to read. What level of reading?
I want to believe that my kid is exceptional but based on grades in school and accomplishments since graduating, I'd say that she has a talent for languages and is solidly above average but not otherwise exceptional.
She has traveled a lot starting at about 6 months, and has been exposed to lots of languages and cultures. She has some Mandarin now, a little German and a lot of Japanese. So I definitely agree that her environment has supported her language acquisition.
When she was 8, she often read the same books that I read, mostly science fiction, some but not all YA. When she was 10 her class read The Oddysey in French. She was always at least a couple years ahead of her peers in reading level.
She does seem to have a talent for languages. Not many people pick up that many easily. I have even managed to forget a language I was fluent in (I was bilingual and I spoke Sinhala as well as I did English, and could read and write it to the level expected by schools at my age until I was six) as a child. It has a phonetic alphabet, BTW.
As far as reading goes she sounds broadly similar to us - including the taste for SF. Did you have problems deciding on whether books were sufficiently age appropriate or not? There were quite a few where I had to balance a book being good with whether it was suitable (mostly because of violence).
I didn't leave books out for her if I didn't want her to have the option to read them. She cared more about cruelty than violence at that time, and that hasn't changed much. She's had very little physical risk in her life and I think violence is not as real for her as cruelty. Still, she wasn't a big fan of detailed descriptions of violence or its aftermath.
We also talked about the books and I tried to give her a summary in advance, including the parts that I thought she might not handle well. She did skip some books based on my summaries.
IMO: a whole lot of this, in circles like ours, is Bloom's two sigma effect. (Individual tutorial methods routinely produce results similar to what you get at the top of a normal class).
The parenting/environmental effects fade a lot (but are still present) by adolescence.
Thanks, I did not know about that term, but it fits in with other things I have read and my own experience.
While the effects fade, the advantages gained thereby can last. Being ahead of age norm for reading allowed access to more books, and both learning opportunities. More for my kids who were home educated up to 16[1] so had more time to read stuff they chose, than for me. It also formed a liking for reading.
Parental influence can have a lasting impact. My older daughter is now an electronic engineer, which is the result of an interest that started with making circuits with me as a child.
[1] This makes sense in the British system where the usual age for finishing one set of exams (GCSEs) is 16 (which is the end of compulsory school age) and you then do more specialist exams (A levels in my kids case, there are qualifications too) after that.
> The inconsistency of the English language makes it so phonics is limited after a certain number of words, and then memorization and context must be used. For example, take words like cough, rough, through, though, etc. or words like read, lead, wound, etc.
True, but it's not actually a problem. Just sound out the words, and you'll infer from the context which word it actually is and "fix" it in your mind. People listening to you read aloud will also know what what the correct pronunciation is and will help you correct it.
Are 'spelling bee' contests only (or mainly) a USA thing?
My first experience of the idea was in US films and TV programs. I never came across it at school in England.
FWIW, my reading lessons (both at school in the early '70s), and at home at the same time used a form of phonics.
Although I never knew that term until over 30 years later. We simply knew it as breaking the word apart in to pronounceable pieces.
As mentioned in the article, I still occasionally use the technique if and when I come across an unknown word.
I am not sure. It would not surprise me though. As an American, we are always striving to turn the most mundane activities into competitions for some reason...
For what it is worth, I also think British English is more consistent than American English in pronunciation.
For example, you all pronounce "Zebra" like "Zeh-bra" and "Zeppelin" like "Zehp-pellin" if I am not mistaken.
American English, where I live, would say "Zee-bra" and 'Zehp-uh-lin." for no good reason. Fundamentally, I think that was also my issue with phonics. So many spoken words have more complex sounds replaced with shorter sounds like "uh", "un", "in", "an", "oh", etc..
Simple words like:
Definitely => "Def-in-ut-ly"
Interesting => "In-tra-sting"
etc..
> As mentioned in the article, I still occasionally use the technique if and when I come across an unknown word.
Don't get me wrong, I do too, but even as an adult, it's usually the words with French etymologies that burn me.
Trivial example would be "resume" (like applying for a job -- yes, Americans often drop the accent on the 'e'). No way sounding out the word would have mapped to "Rez-oo-may" without previous knowledge. Somehow 'Receipt' => "Re-seat", "Debt" => "Deht", "Motion" => "Mo-shun", and so on.
I think phonetics of germanic words: hunger, anger, hack, ball, etc. are far more consistent.
> Are 'spelling bee' contests only (or mainly) a USA thing?
The French "dictée" is similar, but has you write down a spoken (coherent text). One that usually gets weekly practiced (and graded...) in primary school, but there's also spelling-bee-like events, e.g., https://dicteepourtous.fr/
French pronunciation is mostly consistent (more so than English at least), but there's several complications:
- multiple ways to spell the same sound (so you just need to know for that word)
- often silent terminal consonants (but they must be present, because they are pronounced in some contexts)
- the pronounced syllables don't always match word boundaries ("liaison")
The last two points also explain why a coherent text is a more useful test than just single complex words.
> French pronunciation is mostly consistent (more so than English at least)
Most of English's inconsistencies stem from words absorbed from other languages, and far and away the largest helping of that was the French that British nobility picked up during the Norman invasion.
My understanding of French pronunciation primarily revolves around the idea that 80% of words end in three randomly selected vowels followed by 1-3 randomly selected maximally hard consonants such as j, x, z, k.. and that the sum total of those randomly selected letters always sound identical to the vowel portion of the word "œuf" which means "egg". Which is also basically like trying to say "eww" while you have an egg in your mouth.
To further this, a perfect example are some of the culinary words vs. the animal words in English.
Pork, Beef, Poultry, Venison, etc. are thought to have French etymologies.
Pig, Cow, Chicken, etc. are thought to have Germanic etymologies.
It's because the French speaking nobility ate the meat, and the lower-class old English speakers raised the animals.
No offense but this is a sophomoric take. I'd be willing to bet that more native English words have irregular spelling than norman/Latin/other imports. The same thing happened in French too. Often orthographic changes lags pronouciation changes. The reason many English words have irregular spellig is because English has been a written language for a long time. That is why you have words like Knight, Knee, Enough, Eight, Cough, etc which are all native words. My understanding is the k in kn words used to be prounouced.
Knee is the same in German as it is in English. However, the Germans pronounce the K, e.g., "Kah-nee."
The word for "Knight" in German is "Ritter" if I am not mistaken? Though, I have no idea where the word Knight comes from. (Which I intend to look up after posting this).
In spanish we never did this, because even though there's exceptions to spelling rules, there aren't all that many. motivated elementary school children would just not miss barring lack of concentration.
> Mandarin Chinese does not have phonics instruction to my knowledge, and they can read just fine.
Learning Chinese with a phonetic alphabet (bopomofo) is pretty common as far as I know, maybe just in Taiwan though. I suppose China mostly uses pinyin for this now.
> Learning Chinese with a phonetic alphabet (bopomofo) is pretty common as far as I know, maybe just in Taiwan though. I suppose China mostly uses pinyin for this now.
I have also seen this in learning materials:
1. Putting the phonetic spelling (e.g. pinyin or bopomofo) in small print above the characters; a similar approach (furigana) is used for kanji in Japanese (in language textbooks and apps as well as books for beginning readers); there are special fonts as well as browser extensions, etc.; for Chinese/hanzi a font with phonetic superscripts would probably work well.
2. Phonetic sets; in addition to semantic elements/radicals, many characters also contain a phonetic element, which may not be exact (perhaps a bit like phonics in English) but studying groups of characters that share the same phonetic element can help with figuring out pronunciation or recognizing less familiar characters.
> I learned phonics and became an excellent reader without hesitation. Later, some morons in the education system created "better" reading techniques, f*cking up my younger brothers and sisters.
I, my siblings, and my kids all learned to read using whole words and we are all excellent readers.
Neither your family nor mine are statistically significant samples.
My experience of teaching my kids words before letters was that it was pretty easy.
On the other hand we all learned to read young, and at home, and with the assumption it was a fun thing to do, all of which makes it a very different experience to learning at school in classes.
Your description of learning using whole words is not contradictory to the article - TFA takes issue with cueing and whole language systems, which don’t teach words - they teach kids to guess or skip words.
I can see that being different from language to language, phonics is pretty complicated in English but in other languages with a much more direct relationship between the letters and the sounds its much easier. I learned to read in another language and I went from not being able to read to being able to read just about anything in a few weeks, because the phonics are much more consistent if I have heard a word and then I see it written I could easily connect the two without someone telling me.
I don't think the research is as clear cut as the article suggests. Firstly, the concept was created in the 60s and only became wide spread in the 80s. The study was conducted in the 1975.
This has two important implications:
- There were fewer people that were actually instructed in whole language and they skewed younger (and less practiced)
- The teaching profession had fewer years of as practitioners so methods resources were likely unrefined. Fewer books, instructional materials.
Also, there is always a bias to publish a scoop in acadamia, so unless there were multiple corroborating studies we should take it with a grain of salt.
Most importantly, I think that different kids learn differently. My son has been working on phonics for a long time and still struggles connecting sounds to words. In contrast, whole language approaches have been working better for him.
Phonics was a great way to learn. But, now I'm hooked on the bastards. You'd weep if you knew the stuff I've done in poorly lit truck stops for just a single line of phonics...
For any parents of small kids here, I have to mention the book Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. We went through it while my kid was in kindergarten, and after that, I absolutely believe what I've heard from parents who did it successfully a bit earlier. And it didn't prevent my kid from figuring out how to use context or recognize full words. Reading English is a lot, and kids are resourceful; if we teach the 'slow' but reliable way to read, they'll be happy to feel out shortcuts.
The toughest thing was getting a reliable bit of time each day to sit down and do it. Routine, cajoling, and rewards were all involved. So was keeping it lighthearted; the kid has to be on board! Each lesson has straightforward exercises then a brief story, very short at first, longer later in the book. We'd do the exercises and one read of the story, then kid would read the story to my partner. We started in September, and I remember by Halloween the kid was reading candy wrappers. After finishing it, the next big thing was finding stories the kid genuinely liked to keep it going. Continuing to read together after the lessons ended helped: for a while, kids will keep running into lots of new exceptions to the usual rules, etc.
English spelling and pronunciation are a lot, and the book is also, implicitly, a catalog of the tricks English plays on kids and other learners. Part of the book uses a semi-phonetic alphabet where e.g. ee and sh/ch/th have distinct glyphs, but it all still looks enough like English that the jump to regular writing later in the book is doable for the kid. Even with that alphabet, the book has to teach common words like "is" and "was" as exceptions (with s sounding like z). Decades later one can forget little kids deal with all this and eventually handle it like second nature.
The book's originator thought that you could teach math with a broadly similar approach--breaking things down into very small steps and practicing them in isolation then in larger tasks--and doing that was part of his career, but I haven't found similar teach-your-kid book for arithmetic/basic math. If such a book did exist I'd've given it a try!
It's not a book, but you might find this interesting: https://mathacademy.com
It's a (paid) online platform that breaks down mathematics (from 4th grade to university level) down into very small steps/skills, makes you drill them periodically, and also integrate them in increasingly advanced skills. The platform tracks your successes and failures to give you just the right amount of training at just the right time (in theory). You can see the exact skills they train as these really huge interconnected graphs, all created manually.
I read their pedagogy https://www.mathacademy.com/pedagogy and it seems to line up a lot with that philosophy. To use their language, they emphasize "finely-scaffolded steps" and "developing automaticity".
I always love to see more projects or initiatives in this area. I also know of https://physicsgraph.com that was inspired by it, but for physics.
I don't know that my personal n=1 anecdote adds much to this discussion, but FWIW...
My mom taught me to read when I was young (pre kindergarten), but as far as I know she wasn't specifically trying to teach me to read. She just read to me a lot, where I could see the page she was reading from. Mostly she read me comic books. I loved the DC characters back then - Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Aquaman, Green Lantern, etc. and so she read me that stuff many many times. I mean, yeah, I had some of those "Little Golden Books" and stuff around as well, although I don't pointedly remember reading those the way I do the comic books. Anyway, she did all that and when I started kindergarten at 4 (due to being a summer baby) I was already reading. And then stayed well above my grade level on the reading tests all through school.
So I dunno. Maybe it was dumb luck that things worked out that way for me. Maybe there is a genetic element. Or maybe more than anything what mom conveyed to me was a passion for reading (she was a very avid reader herself). Maybe part of it was just that there were always plenty of books around the house and so reading felt like a very natural thing to do. Or maybe it was that whole Pizza Hut BOOK IT thing they had back in the day. Who knows?
In either case, I feel very fortunate in this regard, as reading has remained a big part of my life ever since, and still is to this day.
So the reason some kids seem to read with some instruction, even if it's not formal and super explicit, is that they have a good phonemic system. That is, they quickly understand that words are made up of smaller units (e.g. cat is /k/ + /a/ + /t/) and can manipulate them without much trouble. That ability is essential to map words efficiently in long term memory for effortlessly retrieval, which in turns creates a sight vocabulary (a large bank of words that are instantly recognized).
Kids with phonemic deficits, on the other hand, cannot efficiently develop a sight vocabulary. Even if they are taught phonics and can decode, that decoding is effortful and leaves little room for more complex tasks.
For what it's worth, a pivotal moment for keeping reading going after the lessons was when my partner picked up a comic book at a library event. For a few weeks after the end of the lessons, reading time had been traditional early readers and some of the books we'd previously read to them--even with us offering rewards, there had been ups and downs. As soon as kid started that comic, though, they were pushing right through our protests that it was bedtime, and chewing through the whole series. Luckily we managed to find another series to start before running out of the first one. As parents we can nudge or put stuff on the menu but but kid is pretty much in the driver's seat about what to read next.
In retrospect, of course! The kid just hadn't liked reading those books and things took off once we found stuff they liked. Best first readers are whatever your kid actually wants to read!
So direct instruction (the philosophy behind this book) has been shown to only have modest gains compared to the best interventions, which have more than double the effect size.
It works fine (not the best) for kids with no reading difficulties, but it completely lacks the understanding and the tasks that fix phonemic deficits, the actual source of most reading difficulties.
It's not entirely a bad book, but won't be of too much use for kids with reading difficulties. Since it's only a few bucks, it's not a bad investment. Just be aware of its limitations. If your kid is not developing fluent and effortless reading (not just decoding), you will need to use a method that is aware of how to fix phonemic deficits.
See my other comments in this page for more.
trane_project is selling a $20/mo subscription or $1000 perpetual license to their own reading program and folks should read this and their other comments aware of that context. It's disappointing to tell a personal story, come back, and see it was someone's jumping-off point for just slightly indirect self-promotion.
Sure, no problem in pointing it out. I did not hide the fact and I invite anyone to do their own research. The comments mostly draw from David Kilpatrick’s book “Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties”.
It’s a very academic book and I didn’t see anyone in the comments aware of orthographic mapping. The critique of direct instruction can also be found there. No intervention that does not train phonemic awareness to the advanced level had the massive results of those which do. That also applies to OG, which was mentioned in the thread.
Not selling anything yet, that page is a placeholder. But I will have a free and untimed version that should be enough to fix most reading difficulties caused by phonemic deficits.
Which I can do without worrying about cannibalizing my own business because I am not selling a reading app, but a complete path to mastery of reading and writing to college level and beyond. That hopefully helps clarify the difference in price.
Why? Obviously the person who replied to you has experience and a POV. I think that's a useful addition to the conversation.
Plus, I wouldn't have even thought to check out the profile if you hadn't mentioned it. It's not slightly indirect self-promotion, it's not self-promotion at all.
I saw a very similar timely appeal here on Hacker News a few years ago and taught my son with this book at the age of 4. It has become my go-to comparison when prompting chat bots on what I want in a teaching material for other subjects. I listened to the entire article posted here and it makes me wonder if schools are getting something as foundational as reading wrong how can we trust the attention to research on anything else they're teaching? Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to pull my kid out of school but I'll dig a little deeper into how well he's learning. For math, we've been doing the Beast Academy books. It has gone... Okay. I like that they approach problems from many different ways which simulate the many different ways math is hidden in our interactions with the world. For my younger son I've recently started Teaching Your Child... because of how well it went for his brother but for math I may try something else to have a new data point. Something that occurred to me listening to the article is I wonder if certain skills are learned much faster with one on one instruction like the book has you do. Our schools pretty much never teach that way out of efficiency, though home schools often do. It may not be true for most subjects though or home school students would be so far ahead by college and that's not the impression I have.
> Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to pull my kid out of school
Why not? I did and it has worked out really well. One is an adult, the other is nearly and adult so its pretty much all done now.
I certainly think its an option worth considering
What was the alternative you went with?
For math you'll want the Saxon Math books, but they have to be the old ones from before they were bought out and turned into yet another New Math or whatever they call it now.
Second this! My daughter stopped around lesson 53 when she was 4, but it stuck now at 6 years old she's able to read full books on her own, with her reading speed and ability increasingly exponentially.
TL;DR version of the article, and our experience with kids' reading, is that phonics is probably the best way to teach reading but people have tried many other crackpot techniques that don't work very well.
As an immigrant to the USA teaching in this country is a mess. Teachers apply a lot of semi scientific mumbo jumbo to justify a completely inadequate amount of work required from students to learn.
I know it's not popular to say it but my son learns anything I teach him, he might not enjoy the process very much but he never forgot anything I taught him because I make him work. His teachers don't make him do anything with the results you can imagine. If you point it out they say if they did parents would complain.
> I know it's not popular to say it but my son learns anything I teach him
1. Remember that you are looking at an experiment with n=1.
2. It sounds like you think the key to education is coercion. ("His teachers don't make him do anything...".) That's a grim world, too.
Also, I hope you are looking at your home country's educational system with clear eyes.
Not to say I disagree that the US educatonal system is a mess. If you stopped at your second sentence I would entirely agree.
As you went on, I started to wonder if you had an experience teaching your child something that was difficult for them. It's not just _forgetting_ that makes learning difficult.
> It sounds like you think the key to education is coercion. ("His teachers don't make him do anything...".) That's a grim world, too.
Of course education is coercion. Same way work is things you do for money. Education without coercion is just learning, at best.
Teachers are there because of the coercion they provide. Even in the US they coerce kids to at least sit in class, because if they didn't kids would just walk out and go learn how to properly light up a cigarette from some older kid.
if a kid is being lazy there's simply no way around "cohercion" as you put it. You know how I know he's being lazy? Because I used to do the same stuff for the same reasons, and my parents and teachers saw through it and didn't make excuses for me or any other kid.
We were expected to grow up and learn to do work even when we didn't want to.
I remember being at a point where I could read but it took effort, so I would just vibe it.
It wasn't coercion that got me to be less lazy, it was the time when I put clearly labelled sugar on my food instead of salt.
When I was in kindergarten, we were read a book called The Little Old Man Who Could Not Read. The main character was a Mr. Magoo-type character, except merely illiterate instead of functionally blind. He was always making mistakes like this, for example buying wax paper instead of spaghetti because they both came in long boxes. Eventually his wife teaches him how to read and his next grocery trip has all the correct items.
As the husband of an Orton-Gillingham trained tutor , teachers and the industry supporting teachers , not OG ; are very much in the business of making money not making kids read . The entire economy around "services" like OT , Speech , etc is all about how to monetize it, not how do we do the most good for the children.
SLP here. I hear you. But the reality is greyer. Yes, it's easy for anyone and everyone to see the financial layer of developmental services. But virtually 100% of working SLPs care about getting clients to their goals, even if that client's access to services is determined by insurance.
Money is an inescapable reality for every service in society. But most clinics are busy, and so there isn't a real incentive to try to slow walk clients. Which would be radically corrupt on a number of levels. Even if some backroom financial functionary in a clinic were to have that thought on occasion. I've never heard it verbalized nor seen any evidence of it trickling down from management.
Moreover, most (but not all) clients will be perpetually slightly behind if they start behind. Even if they catch up at a faster rate, with the help of services. Thereby justifying services if the family wants them. But that's not the same as clinic level corruption. It's just a fact of cognitive development. But there's no better advertisement for a clinic or clinician than graduating a client.
Although I can't speak to reading in the following regard, I agree that there are sometimes lesser supported therapy methods for some delays. This is where the art of picking one's therapist is important, as they differ and what they use is within their discretion. As is the case across the rehab field.
> Money is an inescapable reality for every service in society.
Yes
That is a problem
Unfortunately "Every fruit has its seed (yes even seedless ones, in that circumstance the seed is the effort humans put into grafting it)" which is a saying that clarifies in all situations far beyond fruit, any replicating system that is of benefit to a third party must also wrap some portion of its benefit into self-replication that does not immediately benefit a third party.
Whether that takes the shape of money or some different shape, it remains the case that "free benefit" cannot exist, and that any beneficial system requires some kind of give to supplement the take that it offers.
Finding a way to establish that with balance is the challenge.
A system can do something without any of its members directly intending it. Quite common, actually.
The GGP's claim was quite a bit stronger than that, though.
"Can do something" is carrying a lot of weight here. I explained how it is in practice.
The three-cue system is what convinced me that, per Robert Conquest, American education is secretly controlled by a cabal of its enemies. I mean, if I were one of Bezmenov's supposed evil-genius agents of influence seeking to undermine and ruin Western civilization, introducing the way that illiterate people bluff their way through reading as the standard for reading education would definitely be in my toolkit of delightfully devilish methods of cultural sabotage.
My wife and I both acquired reading very early -- age three or so. So I don't remember the details of how I acquired it, only driving some of my teachers nuts once I actually did enter school, because I didn't follow the timetable they learned in their expensive university education of when and how kids are supposed to learn to read, do math, or anything else really. But I suspect that one thing you can do to help kids with their reading skills is to read to them, starting very early. My wife and I have similar experience of being read to by our moms, eventually seeing the ability to read as a "magic power"[0] of sorts, and becoming determined to learn this skill, so that we could unlock the tremendous power of books and writing for ourselves. Contrariwise, the kids I've known who struggled with reading early on (even my own sister when I was younger) tended to get bored quickly, give up, and want to do other things.
Reading is an intellectually demanding skill, much like computer programming except for degree -- there's a bit at the beginning that's really hard, because it's based on insights that you don't have yet, and you just kind of have to bro through it. Those who think it just "comes naturally" or whatever are just really, really well practiced at it. You gotta keep your eyes on the prize in order to stay determined to power through the hard bits. Inspiring kids like this begins at home, though school and even television programs like Reading Rainbow (when I was growing up) certainly help.
[0] When the Cherokee silversmith Sequoyah devised a writing system for his people, the Cherokee reacted at first with horror: written material, or "talking leaves", was the white man's evil magic! Once he walked them through how it worked, however, they embraced it and the Cherokee became more literate than the surrounding white population.
> That's how good readers instantly know the difference between "house" and "horse," for example.
I like how this sentence itself is an example where the MSV system falls flat: Neither graphic, nor syntactic nor semantic cues would help here to decide whether "house" or "horse" comes first in the sentence.
yeah, it seems it is not good for dealing with abstractness
It's just not good. It's bad.
I was never "taught to read", one of my earliest memories was being gifted a old trunk filled with comic books from a cousin's return from Vietnam. Several hundred comics, many of them dating back to the early 60's, the time this occurred was 1969. Everything from all the DC/Marvel, Donald Duck, European comics, the oversized and banned horror comics with nudity, and of course a shit load of underground comics like the Freak Bros, and more.
When school started, kindergarten, I knew how to read. I had a kid's novel with me I was reading, something like "Mrs Frisby & the rats of NIMN".
I don't remember learning to read, or a time in my life where I couldn't read at least a bit. As best I can figure I began reading before my episodic memory fully developed.
I do wonder how I managed to learn anything just by reading on my own though. There were certainly words and concepts I didn't understand (I have a vivid memory of reading a childrens science book that explained the big bang, and misinterpreting it as 'the universe started when the sun exploded'. I noticed the logical inconsistency but didn't pursue it), but I can't think of any instances where those gaps in my knowledge were filled by someone else and I had an 'aha' moment of understanding. I guess we do a lot of learning without realising it.
You claim you just inferred sounds from letter shapes and started putting it together yourself, with no training data?
I remember just looking at the pictures, and for some reason I really liked Spiderman. (There was a Spiderman cartoon in the late 60's.) I noticed that Spiderman's comics when they showed him in his ghetto apartment, it was always filled with books, with the titles readable. I could not read the titles, but figured if the people making the comics were putting all these books in Peter Parker's apartment, the books are probably useful for superheros. That idiot logic is what got me to start wanting to read, to know what Peter Parker was reading. I started, slowly, and taught myself with a goal.
Are you implying that people use “training data” to learn things
I am joking with the terminology, but I don't believe B.S.'s claim that they were able to do human language learning without 'labelling'.
It's a valid way to learn a second language in the same script, see Lingua Latina for example, but how can you possibly learn a first language or a new script without being told the sounds characters make? You can learn to listen/comprehend and speak by in immersion like that, but not reading & writing.
I think he's implying that humans require available information from which to learn new things, and that borrowing a term from AI research is one valid (if backwards-sounding) way to describe that fact.
Tangentially related to this issue: I went back to university for a CS undergrad in my mid-20s after already having some experience writing code. One thing that really struck me while both TAing and informally supporting others in an intro programming class with somewhat subpar teaching was how many people went through the whole thing never grokking how the code was actually parsed by the computer. They would sort of learn how to solve problems, but many would still constantly get tripped up by things like confusing meaningful keywords and function names with arbitrary naming of variables and so on. At the beginning, the course just sort of jumped straight to showing finished code for simple problems, introducing python library functions, and so on — without ever really having students develop a low-level understanding of what was going on (by which I don't mean "what's the machine code this turns into", just "how is this code structured at the low level").
Curious about the controversy, reading this was only more confusing.
I learned to read by the phonics method, and the idea there are words whose meaning I don’t know. If you don’t know the meaning you try to intuit the meaning from it’s part of speech, context, and if you can’t figure it out, move on.
So I was surprised and confused reading this article to believe that readers were taught to skip the phonics and jump to some kind of gestalt of the word shape?
It should be no wonder that some people don’t like creative typography and layouts.
Yes, its called whole word learning. Its how I learned to read, and how my kids learned to read. its not a gestalt, its simply shape recognition. You learn letters and common letter combinations and how to work out words you do not know later instead of first. its not a very reliable process in English though! Are you sure of the correct pronunciation of a word you come across only in written form?
The advantage, in my experience is that you learn to read faster and its more fun. You start off with something like guessing game with flashcards and kids quickly learn a wide range of words.
The disadvantage maybe that it really needs one to one attention. Great for kids that learn to read from parents (like me and mine), but not going to work well in a classroom.
> skip the phonics and jump to some kind of gestalt of the word shape
I like that summary. It highlights something specific for me: this teaching method is essentially about word grifting, as in “trying to cheat the text out of a meaning without having paid its cost of reading”. With that mindset instilled early and decades ago, it’s no wonder AI text is so prevalent in schools and that such schisms exist between its adherents and detractors. I bet the students who were taught to grift reading don’t realize anyone who learned reading one of the hard ways can identify AI text from nuances invisible to them.
Google brought this thread to my attention and I can't help making a few observations. Learning 7 languages made it clear to me that the ease of learning to read depends mainly on the consistency of the spelling system in which this happens. The adoption of Pinyin in China is clear proof of that. I found English spelling furthest removed from the alphabetic principle of representing speech sounds in a regular manner and hardest to cope with http://englishspellingproblems.blogspot.co.uk. I am certain that a few well-aimed changes could make learning to read English much easier http://improvingenglishspelling.blogspot.co.uk and used to advocate this, but at 80 have come to realise that the chances of it happening are slim, but think that it's important for more people, especially teachers, to understand what an exceptionally flawed spelling system English has and how it ended up like that http://englishspellingproblems.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/histor...
APM keeps pushing phonics, but the UK tried it and it's been a disaster: reading ability craters after a couple years. It's not the solution.
https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.10...
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p...
See my other, more detailed, comment on this thread, but the reason for this is that phonics is part of the solution, but it's not what creates fluent readers.
Most phonics programs do not treat automaticity as the goal, so kids with effortful and slow decoding count as "reading". The science is very clear on what causes this lack of automaticity and what exercises best correct it, but most programs ignore it.
So kids with no deficits will develop mostly fine, but those with them will look to be "reading" but will have trouble once the material requires too much of them.
The UK phonics data shows mixed results with plateaus rather than "cratering" - the second link you shared actually indicates the issue is over-focusing on phonics alone rather than combining it with comprehension strategies.
My kids have been taught phonics here in the uk along with comprehension and it’s been great. I can clearly see how each has developed - and materials have things like basic comprehension of just picture stories to teach it without relying on reading for those who are struggling with the words.
Calling it a disaster seems like an exaggeration, the article literally says UK's PISA scores for reading have not changed. In fact, the experts cited in the article don't even seem to suggest moving away from phonics, but to give teachers more leeway adapt to what their students seem to respond to.
Well, it's an old article. Comparable countries Canada and Ireland with more holistic approaches (including phonics) have way better PISA scores.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/656dc3321104c...
Isn't Canada multilingual?
Do you think that makes reading pedagogy harder or easier?
I think it makes learning to read easier because not 100% of their grade is based on how well they learned to read English, which is a terrible language for reading.
Grades have nothing to do with PISA scores.
PISA score is a form of grading, is it not?
I'm sure it doesn't just compare English proficiency between countries because some countries don't speak English at all and still get PISA score.
> PISA score is a form of grading, is it not?
No, it's an independent test. You can completely "fail" the PISA and it'll have no impact on your matriculation.
> I'm sure it doesn't just compare English proficiency between countries because some countries don't speak English at all and still get PISA score.
Correct. Students take the PISA in their native language. Only the most sparsely populated provinces in Canada did worse [0] than the UK [1] in 2018.
[0]: https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/what-int...
[1]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5f20293fd3bf7...
> > PISA score is a form of grading, is it not? > No, it's an independent test.
I'm sorry. I'm not a native speaker. Does the word "grading" pertain to only tests that are a part of school curriculum? I thought it could mean assigning a score to any test, even independent, even not related to education at all.
> Correct. Students take the PISA in their native language.
Right. So assuming that scores of the students are averaged out together across all test takers in the country and some of them learned to read French rather than English they might skew the average. So comparing scores of Canada and UK for the purposes of comparing how well English learning goes in those two countries might not be valid approach.
We should be comparing UK with sub-population of Canadian students that took the test in English. Not sure if PISA provides such data.
I probably can't object to comparing UK and Ireland on that grounds. Or do some students take PISA tests in Irish there?
The first link I posted does what you're asking; the only non English province is Quebec.
> give teachers more leeway adapt to what their students seem to respond to.
This always feels like one of those “of course, duh” things when the concept of adapting curriculum to students comes up, because it works so well. It’s a bummer that in the US at least, priority for funding that kind of education across public schools is a non-starter. If teachers are buying their own supplies and cramming 20-30 kids in a class, everyone gets the same educational slop and a masters in rote memorization.
The Department of Education and standardized testing are to thank for a lot of that.
It seems like the idea has gotten more controversial since a certain administration has considered getting rid of it but, since it's inception, it's not like US education has improved.
I have a 5 year old daughter who learnt to read through the phonics system. I was initially fairly skeptical but actually I think it's great. It's just explicitly teaching the pronunciation heuristics that we all learn implicitly.
They have a pretty good way of testing too - they show a list of 40 real words and made up words ("alien words") and the kids have to pronounce them. They only include words that closely follow the normal English pronunciation heuristics and are unambiguous. E.g. "glot" and "bime" would be ok but "sough" and "gow" would not.
> Critics say phonics training only helps children to do well in phonics tests – they learn how to pronounce words presented to them in a list rather than understand what they read – and does nothing to encourage a love of reading.
If this is the best criticism of it then.. that's pretty dumb. The entire point is to learn how to pronounce words. It isn't intended to teach them to understand words - they can already do that. And it isn't meant to instill a love of reading. That's basically innate.
I'm not too surprised it makes no difference to overall reading levels. It's not really that different to the previous method of teaching reading, and a very large component of reading ability is innate... But to say it's been a disaster is absolutely ridiculous.
It's definitely not innate. While phonics test scores are pretty high, PISA and KS 2 reading scores are down. The DfA on reading in 2021 is like, _solely_ about phonics. The 2023 update adds tons more guidance beyond phonics. Comparable countries Canada and Ireland are doing better, they didn't go all in on phonics. So, depends on what you mean by disaster, but IMO in the policy world, this counts.
Education is a system that resists change.
Any time you research an educational innovation, part of the work is to measure to what extent the implementation is faithful to the intent. Education research is not like physics research.
I absolutely apply that understanding when I read research about major changes in the way reading is taught.
I actually think the only way to be confident is to do some kind of primary research yourself. Otherwise, tread lightly and skeptically.
But actually, you should read this...
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jan/opinion-phonics-teaching...
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sold-a-story/id1649580...
A link to the multi episode podcast this article is the basis of. Incredible reporting
I try to make sure there’s always age appropriate modern books around for kids to pick up and read. If they like one, and it’s a series, then I rapidly buy the remaining books in the series.
For anybody who's interested in spending an hour listening, this podcast (https://www.econtalk.org/read-like-a-champion-with-doug-lemo...) gives a very good, detailed look at what's wrong with current reading programs in the U.S. and how to do it better. Phonics, vocabulary and background knowledge.
As a chinese user. This story is somewhat confusing to me. Because in my language system. Pronounce is the mapping of some Character combination that express certain meaning. Pronounce may be hugely different or completely unrelated in different area. But meaning of word is the same. So you are forced to link some image (a fixed group of characters) to meaning (there is no other way anyway). Does the technics in this article still applies? Or it's just different in different language?
I think a roughly comparable procedure in Chinese might be to take in only a few radicals, and guess the likely meaning of a character based on the surrounding context, rather than fully recognising each character individually.
The theory is that skilled readers do this unconsciously, blending various factors and using shortcuts rather than fully comprehending each character / word. It sounds very plausible - how else would skilled readers get so fast?
But in experimental tests, apparently skilled readers are very good at fully comprehending individual characters / words, without any context available. So it seems that if you don’t learn to do that, you won’t become a skilled reader.
> fully recognising each character individually.
> comprehending individual characters / words,
Weirdly enough, the elementary school here does taught both at same time. We have article reading in the test. Which don't really ask you recognize the characters down to the stroke. We also have "改錯字". Which roughly means "find the typo", but with a bit difference. The teacher may alter the character itself (add a stroke or remove a stroke) instead of replace it by some other characters. So you need to know how "exactly" should the character look like to pass the test.
It's pretty much impossible to find a school in the UK that doesn't use phonics. One of my sons learned to read mostly using phonics, whereas the other one I think learned through a mixture of phonics and whole word recognition (not necessarily taught by the school - he just seemed to remember and recognise words and not really need phonics so much).
It was interesting seeing how our particular school did teach reading using phonics. They used something called a 'Thrass chart'. It had 120 boxes, each one containing a letter or combination of letters that could make a particular sound and an example of a word containing that combination and sound. So, importantly, some combinations of letters appeared more than once on the chart.
It looks rather complicated when you first looked it at but obviously they introduced it all very gradually. So if somebody was stuck on a word, it would be 'Let's find those letters on the Thrass chart and see what sounds they could make'. I can't find a good image of it online, but you can see a slightly blurred one on this page: https://www.thrass.co.uk/
I am dyslectic (as my username suggest), and i was taught the method phonetics in school (in Sweden, not the us), and transitioned naturally to whole word (which i suspect is the intention in that method).
I initially struggled to pick up reading, as phonetics is a very difficult method if i cannot tell the letters apart half the time. Once my reading speed started to pick up, it was thanks to dismissing phonetics entirely and reading by whole word, but that leap took time.
Talking with others in adulthood, i seem to rely more on whole word than is typical. Others get tricked up by incorrect letters in words, yet i match the word anyway if it has the right shape. The below sentences read to me equally.
- I am unbothered by spelling mistakes to a much higher degree than others
- l ma unloethsred bs sqellnig mitsakes la a mucb hgiher degeee thna ahters
Another issue i encountered is finding reading fun. My parents read a lot for me to make me like stories (which is commonly given as advice to get children reading), but this backfired. My comprehension and appreciation of stories were years ahead of my capacity to read them. Being barely able to get thru "harry potter and the philosophers stone", but preferring "The Lord of the Rings".
I now work in a field where reading highly technical text is a major part of my day. Peculiarly, my lower reading speed from my inability to skip properly (something i struggle with because of aforementioned dyslexia) seems to raise my reading comprehension. I many times found details or explanations others don't because they skimmed over important words or phrasings in highly information-dense text.
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I really think foreign words should be read phonetically. Taking the first letter and guessing is an insane way to teach to kids to me. I could imagine they don't pick up new words since they learn to guess words they know instead. Using contexts may become important later as we learn to skim-read, but i don't think we should teach kids to guess anything as they first start to learn.
I don't have dyslexia and was taught to read by my parents by sounding out words using regular childrens' books before I started school (so I don't think it was a full-on phonics method, but it definitely wasn't even close to three-cueing either). Those two sentences aren't equal to me, but they're close enough I'm only mildly slowed down reading the second one. Correct letters in the wrong order, instead of also mixing in similar-looking letters, would also be a little easier than that example.
>The below sentences read to me equally.
I have a dyslexic friend that's the same way. She's great at anagram puzzles. And apparently numbers are not an issue since she's a CFO of a successful company.
It's been touched on in many other comments, but I think that one of the key things that affects reading proficiency is practice time. This definitely includes being read to; parents spending time reading to their kids is often a large multiple of what the school environment provides. Nothing beats kids getting in those additional hours of practice at home.
I don't have strong opinions about different methods of teaching but an important principal is that education cannot be totally outsourced to the education system. To the best of their capability, parents make a large contribution. The best educational result is always a shared effort.
The experimental science behind this revolution in understanding the cognition of reading is pretty interesting. One of the things that is done is to switch the text on the screen while the subject is moving their eyes to see how badly it messes up the reading process. Here is an article that talks about this research in relation to the long accepted, but now discredited, idea that word shape is important in reading.
* https://learn.microsoft.com/en-ca/typography/develop/word-re...
BTW, this in turn suggests that the long accepted idea that lower case is easer to read than upper case is also wrong.
> the long accepted idea that lower case is easer to read than upper case
uh.. that sounds to me about as accepted as "cursive is easier to read than print".
Upper case is the canonical form of our alphabet (as written in Latin) while lower case is a newer addition (adapted from many greek letter shapes) that may be easier to write in rapid succession, but as such that also makes it one step towards cursive.
When I was a child in elementary school I was taught that "you all have to learn cursive because when you grow up that's what adults use, they don't use print any more". I remember thinking about that while driving with my parents, and asking them "if adults use cursive exclusively like my teacher says then why are all the road signs in print"?
I can levy that same query to your statement: if it is a long accepted idea that lower case is easier to read, then why are all of the road signs (which famously prioritize ease of reading) always written in all caps?
As someone living in a slavic country, i never understood the english/americans and their spelling bees, because 99% of the words in my language (slovene) can be spelled by phonetics (with some, but few exceptions), but english had a bunch of weird rules and extra letters, especially when you come to british (ahem "leicester"). Serbian for example is even more literal with "write how you say it and say it how you write it", and that includes "Britni Spirs" and "Arnold Švarceneger".
If you didn't know the spelling for "xylophone", you'd assume it's "zylophone", but for some reason there's an 'x' there. Waiting in line? Well, you have to "queue" but not "cue". Sure, historic reasons, like with "ye olde pub" not having a "yee" there... but it's a pain to learn, especially for children who are not that exposed to englsh texts (but mostly cartoons, especially in my time, where dubbing was almost non-existant). Same for french (ahem "jouaient").
On the other hand, we have some messed up rules too... slovenia was a part of yugoslavia, but we don't have the leter "ć", while most yugoslav countries do. We also have a rule that we write words (especially names) from non-latin alphabets phonetically (president of china is "Ši Džinping"), with the exception of serbian cyrilic. So, let's say you have someone with a surname (anglicized to) Petrovich ("son of Peter"). If the person is from croatia, his surname is writen in latin alphabet as "Petrović" (note the "ć"), and since it' a latin alphabet, we write it "Petrović", as the original (same for names with "x", "y", "z", "q"" that we also don't natively use). If it's someome from russa etc. (cyrillic) or any other non-latin-alphabet using country, he'd be "Petrovič" (since we don't have the letter "ć" we'd transcribe to "č". But if he's a serb (cyrillic Петровић), he'd be "Petrović" (with a "ć" again).
So yeah...
My languge of choice will be Perl, it's simpler.
This seems so weird. When I think about how I learned to read, in the 1970s, it was (as best I can remember) first learning the letters and the sounds they make. Then starting to read words by "sounding them out." I never remember learning about "context" or "what word would make sense here" or "what do the pictures show." Pictures were just there to make the pages more fun to look at for a 7 year old.
Of course after some exposure and repetition you start to recognize whole words at a glance. That's just natural, but I never remember learning to read by memorizing whole words.
You learn to walk before you learn to run.
This should be obvious, but a surprisingly large number of people don't get it. They don't see "running" as the logical next step after "walking", but rather as an alternative to it. "Why are you teaching my child to walk, when you could teach him/her to run instead?"
They imagine that the fastest way to get to the advanced lessons is to skip the beginner lessons. Yeah, it's a good way to get fast to the Lesson 1 in the Advanced textbook... and to remain stuck there forever, because you don't know the prerequisites.
The article describes what happens when the people who don't get it are setting the rules for others to follow.
Someone noticed that the advanced readers read fast (correct), sometimes entire sentences at once (kinda correct), and concluded that the proper way to teach children is to insist that they do it from the start (utterly insanely wrong). You should increase your reading speed naturally, as you get lots and lots of practice; not because you skip letters - that's actually when we should tell the kids to slow down and read it again.
Or maybe, listen out, not everyone is stupid and the reality is just really complicated?
As an anecdote, my daughter was learning reading in her native language in school starting with letters, then syllables and had a very hard time moving past that with a lot of support from teachers and family.
She started learning to read in English almost 5 years later by reading the whole words from the start and outperformed her reading and comprehension speed to her native language very quickly.
There are huge number of variables in play and common sense frequently doesn't work.
Don't know why this has to constantly be mentioned, but people who read this website, and their children, are not representative of the general population.
It is well known that some kids will learn to read no matter how they are taught. Most kids will not.
A small portion of people are different, but we should start with the simple way first.
And while context can get one ahead early, you don’t want to be like the adult who couldn’t actually read.
Yeah, people are different. I guess there may be some kids for whom the slow reading does not work for some reason, and who benefit from reading the whole words. But in my experience, most kids start making mistakes when they try to read too fast.
Perhaps the method was helpful to some children, and the mistake was to prescribe it to everyone.
In the 90s I was taught to read via phonics. Context was mentioned further down the road as a tool to reach for when one understands all but one word in a sentence, in which case context can be used to infer the meaning of the mystery word sometimes (but not always).
I can’t imagine not having a functional knowledge of phonics. That must make long unfamiliar words daunting and reading overall more scary than it needs to be.
>first learning the letters and the sounds they make. Then starting to read words by "sounding them out."
This is called "phonics" and was universal until recently. The 1980s had commercials advertising "Hooked on Phonics works for me." - Hooked on Phonics being a books on tape program to help children read.
TFA says phonics was popularized in the 1800s.
That's how writing used to work for the longest time. Each letter has a sound, and you write down the letters that match the sounds you make when pronouncing the word. Two people might not spell a word the same, so the only viable way to learn would be what is now apparently called phonics.
We only really started to standardize spelling in the 1500s. Which I guess means that by the 1800s English spelling and pronunciation had drifted far enough apart that phonics was a concept worth putting in words.
In most languages with alphabets the pronunciation of letters is consistent enough that the issue doesn't seem to come up a lot. Phonics is just the obvious way to do it in those cases
Arabic is very phonic. I found it pleasurable to learn a little of it. Like a lisp after using c++!
But you have to guess every vowel, correct?
> in the 1970s, it was (as best I can remember) first learning the letters and the sounds they make. Then starting to read words by "sounding them out."
USSR, 70s, the same, my older cousin, 5th grader a the time, taught me to read that way before my first grade. (It was pretty normal to learn to read before starting the school. The writing though was taught at school.)
Germany, 2010s: We learned the letters with pictures of animals, that started with that letter. Also complicated words were initially replaced with inline pictures.
That's because the Russian alphabet is phonetic (in one direction). So you just need to learn the sounds corresponding to the letters and a handful of rules used to combine them. After that, you can sound out the words aloud, and then it's just a matter of practice.
English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach doesn't quite work well.
But at the same time, English teachers don't want to go the full Chinese route. Because if learning letter combinations is somehow "colonizing" ( https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers... ), grinding through thousands of words to memorize their pronunciation is probably something like torture and genocide.
> English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach doesn't quite work well.
For each letter you can find a way it is pronounced most frequently, and then take a subset of English consisting of words that follow those rules completely. (For example, the word "cat" is pronounced as a concatenation of the most frequent way to read "c", the most frequent way to read "a", and the most frequent way to read "t".) You learn to read these words. Later you start adding exceptions, for example you teach how to read "ch", and then you add the new words that follow the new rules. Etc, one rule at a time. (You leave the worst exceptions for later grades.)
>> This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do
If you feel "colonized" by reality, I guess you can rebel, but you shouldn't expect reality to reward you for doing so.
> English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach doesn't quite work well.
I presume you mean it's not particularly 1-to-1 spelling <—> phonetic.
It is highly phonetic, but it does have alternate mappings between individual or adjacent letters and sounds. And silent letters or syllables.
But alternate rules are rarely random. There are usually many words represented by each rule. And those words often have similar overall spellings and phoneme patterns.
The Russian alphabet is not phonetic. а can be pronounced а, и, ы; е can be pronounced и, ё, э, and so on, and most consonants can be pronounced in two ways depending on the vowel that follows, or the presence of ь. You need to know where the tonic accent lies in every word to be able to pronounce it, because the position of a vowel w.r.t. the accent modifies its pronunciation. It is more phonetic than English or French, but less than Belorussian or Finnish or Spanish.
> English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach doesn't quite work well.
English pronunciation <-> spelling is actually pretty predictable as long as you aren't considering letters/phonemes in isolation.
1. recognize whether it's a compound word or a word with affixes, and if so break it down (e.g. shep-herd)
2. recognize the "origin" of the word - at a minimum, "native" (German/Norse) vs "foreign" (Greek/Latin/French mostly, though others come up) is usually obvious, though sometimes it becomes necessary to be more specific or even care about when it was borrowed.
3. recognize the stress pattern in the word, and how that will affect possible vowel sounds
4. recognize the letter pattern or sound pattern (depending on which you're starting with)
These are not independent recognitions; often one or two is enough to imply everything you'd need to know about the others (and this in fact reinforces the pattern recognition humans are so good at).
An informative example is "arch". "ar" fixes the pronunciation of the "a", and "r" is not ambiguous (ever, for rhotic accents; after syllable division for non-rhotic accents). The "ch" is pronounced "tsh" for most words (whether German or French), but when it is of Greek origin (or at least came via Greek) it is pronounced "k". Usually such words are compounds with other visible Greek components.
> English pronunciation <-> spelling is actually pretty predictable as long as you aren't considering letters/phonemes in isolation.
Yeah, and you also learn the etymology of each word. With plenty of exceptions.
I learned English mostly as a written language, by reading books. And for _years_ after moving to the US, I had a problem with pronouncing words that I knew perfectly well how to spell.
E.g. I was confused when a doctor told me that I had "neumonia", even though I knew the word "pneumonia" perfectly well. Or that "gearbox" is not pronounced "jearbox".
> but when it is of Greek origin (or at least came via Greek) it is pronounced "k"
Or Latin. I volunteer to teach English to refugees, so my rule of thumb: if a word is similar to a Russian/Ukrainian word then it's pronounced with a "k" sound. But there's also a bunch of French words where "ch" is pronounced as "sh".
But really, the main rule is to just memorize what the pronunciation is.
Now that you mention it, yes we did learn some combination sounds, and rules about when letters are hard, soft, or silent etc. And exceptions, such as "ph" sounding like "f" but those came later. The first books were like "Dick and Jane" with very simple words.
>English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach doesn't quite work well.
That seems to be one of the main components of Russian accent in ESL.
Not really? The accent source is typical for any pair of languages: different sets of sounds. E.g. Russian doesn't quite have sounds for "th", "w" ("William"), "a" (as in "apple"), etc.
What do you mean by "in one direction"?
In Russian, unstressed vowels are reduced so they are pronounced ambiguously. And when you try to write them down, you need to choose the correct letter for the full-length vowel. There are also double consonants that often are not pronounced differently.
On the other hand, if you just sound out the words syllable by syllable with full-length vowels, they will be completely understandable. You'll just sound a bit over-formal and/or robotic.
There were several attempts at spelling reforms, but only the first one (in 1917) stuck.
it would mean that each letter has one and only one sound, but multiple letters can share the same sound. or if it is the reverse direction for each sound you only have one letter, but multiple sounds can share the same letter. which one is true for russian i don't know.
i learned to read the cyrilic letters, but i didn't learn russian (i did try though) but with that knowledge i could read cyrilic texts aloud to someone who understands the language, assuming i learned all letters correctly and the first case is true.
in the second case i could write down anything i hear. much harder, but as a traveler that would actually be useful. be able to write down names and addresses i hear when asking someone for directions for example. i did learn to write (well, type) korean that way, but of course i had to ask a local to proofread what i wrote since i would not be able to spot mistakes.
The strategies and outcome for the three-cue system reminds me of how LLMs autocompletes, and even hallucinates.
Maybe for some, vibe reading is good enough. But given our culture wars where people of different beliefs cannot talk to each other without flamewars on social media platforms where people read and write, I think the big societal risk here is that people will infer the meaning they are biased towards, and not actually communicating with each other.
(2019), and previously on HN (with plenty of comments) a few times: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=apmreports.org
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
How a flawed idea is teaching kids to be poor readers (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41344613 - Aug 2024 (119 comments)
Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35599181 - April 2023 (508 comments)
Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34011841 - Dec 2022 (1 comment)
How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23981447 - July 2020 (225 comments)
I didn't read the whole article yet (lol) but I am not sure what the author's issue is. She seems to take issue with memorizing words. That's how I think I read. I recognize the shape of the whole word, instantly, unconsciously. I don't sound out the word or pay attention to the letters. I don't see why memorizing words is a bad strategy. Many English words are not spelled regularly or phonetically so phonics reading strategies are not necessarily a good route? What else is there besides associating each word with an meaining in memory. It seems less direct to associate a word with a sound and then associate that sound with a meaning. When I am reading I never consider the sounds of parts of words or of letters to get the meaning of the whole word. Rather I associate each word with an idea visually and then my brain makes it available to my consciousness as that idea spoken in my internal reading voice, or less often as a visual experience. For example if I read "red" I hear "red" and see red in my mind's eye and mind's ear.
You're making the same mistake as the researchers who invented "three cueing". They asked themselves "what do I do when I read?" and tried to reverse-engineer a teaching method. Well, turns out that approach doesn't work very well. Part of this may be that "how you think you read" isn't actually how you read. There's plenty of experimental evidence that adept adult readers do use letters as cues rather than "holistically recognizing the word". You could be an outlier but I doubt it.
Anyway, empirically, it's quite clear that phonics works and the "whole language" approach (which "three cueing" is an example of) doesn't. One of the main reasons teachers in the US continue to avoid phonics is that they don't like teaching it.
I absolutely suspect that most adult readers myself included use letters as clues for recognizing the shape of the word. What I dispute is that reading necessarily goes letters->sound recognition->meaning / understanding.
I suspect for myself and many others it goes letters->word shape recognition->understanding ->then last part is sound in my mind's ear.
Infact when I am writing and reading I find myself thinking about the shapes of printed words. I don't even consider what they sound like except maybe in retrospect.
Maybe I am an outlier.
To me it makes logical sense. When I read a word I see the word in my mind's eye (eg m i n d) and hear the word after an after effect.
Printed text is a visual item. Meaning need not have a sound associated with it. It makes sense to go directly from vision to recognition of meaning. I don't need to know what words sound like to understand their meaning. As a kid I took Latin and Ancient greek. Honestly I don't think anyone knows the precise phonetics as they were spoken at the time of these ancient languages and yet that is no impediment to understanding the meaning of word by reading the written word with your eyes. There is no need for phonics in reading. It's based on the misunderstanding that the sound is the unique vehicle of meaning when it need not be.
Summary: The current system of 3 cues (pictures, context, syntax) is ineffective because kids don't actually read the words. SIPPS is a better way.
> Around the same time, Goldberg was trained in a program that uses a different strategy for teaching children how to read words. The program is called "Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words," or SIPPS.24 It's a phonics program that teaches children how to sound out words and uses what are known as "decodable books." Most words in the books have spelling patterns that kids have been taught in their phonics lessons.
Evidence-based education > recurring failures.
Trying what doesn't work and expecting a different result is either madness or stupidity.
As a father trying to get my kindergartner to read and also someone working in ML, it's amazing to me how this mirrors my life experience and ml concepts.
When I was a kid, there was a big effort to experiment on our grade using a concept called whole language, as compared to phonics for reading. I am a whole language person and I've learned to read and retain pretty quickly.
Anyways, this totally mirrors the concept of tokenization. Phonics vs whole languge is suspiciously similar to letter, word, and subword tokenization. One wonders if we as human do a proxy for BPE in our brains when we learn to read.
To this day I'm an absolutely shitty speller.
Meta-reading! I couldn’t stop inspecting my own reading mechanism while reading through the article.
Isn't this purely English problem?
I never heard about any other language culture encouraging children to guess words. They have natural tendency to do so, which pretty much anyone understands, is counterproductive to reading and must be suppressed. The most common "in the moment" instruction for a kid learning to read, when they try and fail is "Don't make stuff up! Read!" (In their respective language of course). Encouraging kid to guess what's on paper seems absolutely idiotic.
Is Ken Goodman the Andre Wakefield of education, just without the ulterior motiv?
It sucks that instead of fixing the spelling you add workaround everywhere else.
I'm curious what's the difference between "observational science" and "cognitive science"?
I assume it means the former is just one person theorizing from his personal experience as a teacher? That's what we call "observational science"?
Where as the cognitive labs, they tried to setup some experiments and did some double blind? Or was it more looking at brain activation?
Observational: watch kids, come up with correlations in behavior, then with controls identify causation.
Cognitive: watch kids, but pay attention to details and pair them with models of relevant psychological/cognitive models. Ideally, the models help explain the details, or the details help update the models.
Cognitive models have much more explanatory and prediction power. But are not much help, no help, or misleading, wherever there are no good models yet.
Given cognition is nowhere near a complete model, more a (not entirely consistent) patchwork of a great variety of models, both approaches remain important.
So in this case, both can corroborate their findings because both demonstrate success in learning to read?
Since you said both look at controls to assess that they're better than random ?
But from the article, it seems to imply there hasn't been controls applied to the three cues system. Therefore it would have always remained just some children become good readers with this methods, so it probably works.
And what I'm not able to gather is, how much better are the controls applied by the cognitive one?
> how much better are the controls applied by the cognitive one?
Good question!
Psychology is so complex, my guess is there isn't a clear difference between the two types of studies, but lots of variation in individual paper quality for both.
I found this article painful to read, not because reading it was difficult, but because of how deeply flawed it is. It correctly identifies one system of teaching reading as flawed (to put it mildly), but then is an advertisement for another slightly less flawed system by advocating for phonetics. The problem with phonetics is that it is unreliable when applied to the English language. The following video shows the problem:
https://youtu.be/uZV40f0cXF4
English does not follow the alphabetic principle, so any ability to sound out words is vestigial. It might work for a number of words, but then you will hit one where it does not work. I remember as a child, trying to sound out words as I was told to do, and getting them wrong. I eventually realized that the word pronunciations had to be memorized. I did not understand why until I was an adult. The reason is that English writing does not follow the alphabetic principle unlike many other languages which do. This is why schools in English speaking countries have spelling bees, while countries where languages that follow the alphabetic principle do not. Just about all of the students in the latter countries will always get the spelling of words in their local language correct, 100% of the time, such that there will be no winner and thus there is no point to a spelling bee.
Look at the actual sounds used in American English:
https://americanipachart.com/
There are 39. Just for fun, British Received Pronunciation has 44:
https://englishwithlucy.com/phonemic-chart/
Let’s not forget foreign loanwords, which might or might not be pronounced using the native foreign pronunciation. With only 26 letters, how are people supposed to ever be able to sound out words correctly? The only way is to memorize what is right in advance, which is the only way poor Ricky Ricardo ever learned how to pronounce the -ough words in English. It is also how my younger self learned to read. The article suggests this is called the “whole word” approach, and despite what the article claims, that is the only sane way to learn to read.
As someone who learned a number of words by “sounding them out”, prior to realizing sounding them out does not work, I can recall humiliation after evoking laughter when adults heard me pronounce words such as rendezvous and polygamy, which I pronounced as /rɛndɛzəvus/ and /poligami/. You can hear just how wrong these pronunciations are by copy and pasting the IPA into this site:
https://ipa-reader.com/
In a number of cases, I learned words twice. Once via “sounding out” and another via hearing it said. I had no idea that the two were the same word and thought that they were distinct words. I only ever realized they were not after hearing someone read the word, expecting to hear the former and instead hearing the latter, which in a number of cases, took several years to happen.
The phonetics approach relies on children doing recitations of cherrypicked texts to give the illusion of reading, but reading involves not just recitation but comprehension. In a language that follows the alphabetic principle, a child could trivially recite a graduate level text, but would not understand any of it. That is easily determined by asking questions about the text. However, since cherrypicked children‘s texts are used by phonetics based learning, people assume they recitation equals understanding, when that is not necessarily true. The children will only understand it when the words are words that they learned orally a priori.
That said, the phonetic approach could be less flawed if they taught children to anticipate every possible variation of pronunciation, which would at least help them identify words that they have previously heard. However, that would require admitting that children cannot know the words if they had not previously learned them. That would be a fantastic admission as it would avoid making life difficult for children (and it would have prevented my embarrassment over mispronouncing words such as rendezvous and polygamy), but it would not allow for the smoke and mirrors demonstrations that proponents of the phonetics approach use to advocate for it, which is to get children that could not read well previously to recite cherry-picked children’s texts, under the false premise that recitation equals understanding.
Isn’t there a bootstrapping thing going on here, though?
The only way to memorize all those random-ish pronunciations is with a lot of practice, and the best way to do that is with a lot of reading, so you have rich context and meaning to draw on to help you memorize stuff.
But if you can’t read, how do you even get started with that practice? Maybe there are better ways, but in English, phonics seems like a pretty decent way to get started with simple children’s books.
The “whole word” approach had been used to successfully teach children in the past without phonetics and it worked. This avoids the downsides of phonetics. In any case, my earliest memories of learning English involved the “whole word” approach where my mother had taken me to the library to read books with such profound literary prose as “This is Spot. See Spot run.” after I had learned the alphabet. There was substantial repetition before I learned. It worked for me as far as bootstrapping went.
All of the phonetics material included in my elementary school’s curriculum had been detrimental overall in hindsight. There were many times teachers would tell me to sound words out, I would do it wrong and I was considered the one at fault. If I asked how to sound out words correctly, I would get a non-answer, such as “you just do it”. That is a form of sadism that no child should have to endure.
Thanks to the inclusion of elements of phonetics into elementary school’s English curricula, I remember one time being asked to identify the syllables in words. I asked what a syllable was. I would be told it was the smallest subdivision of a word and be given an example. Then I would identify that I could say a vowel from it (not knowing that was a vowel) so by the definition, the example was not a syllable and just told I was wrong. At no point was how anything actually worked explained. Of course, this would be touched on as if it were important, but then would not be used for anything in the rest of the year, which illustrated how useless knowing this was for English. I would not learn what a syllable was until college when I studied Latin, where it actually matters somewhat due to the stress accent that English also has in some form, but goes untaught in school. :/
Maybe reading English should be initially taught using Shavian alphabet and transition to Latin alphabet later in life, or not at all, using AI for conversation between Latin and Shavian characters?
So the system is working as intended then.
> The theory was first proposed in 1967
Good thing I learned to read (phonics) before that nut showed up.
> Picture Power!
This whole word nonsense must have been the motivation for icons promulgated by Steve Jobs, which have infected everything. The latest diseased device I bought was a new scanner, which has a touch screen overflowing with icons. Naturally, the icons are unique and invented by arteests imagining they are Susan Kare. It's all WTF do these things do, which you can only hope to discern by touching them and hoping the scanner does not go into paper-shredding mode.
I'll keep the self-promotion to a minimum, but I have been spending lots of time reading on the science consensus on how children actually become fluent readers as part of my upcoming product Pictures Are For Babies (https://picturesareforbabies.com), a literacy program that uses a deliberate practice engine I created to teach literacy from A-B-C to post-secondary level.
Phonics is all the rage, and I was planning to make it central to my pedagogy, but it turns out the answer is a bit more complicated, especially if you want to work with children with reading difficulties.
Phonics is part of the answer, but it's only the first step. Introducing children to the explicit mapping of graphemes to phonemes (letter to sounds) teaches decoding, but skilled reading is not decoding.
Actual reading is developed through a process called orthographic mapping. The result of this process is storing the grapheme to phoneme mappings in long-term memory for immediate retrieval. The words stored in this way form a sight vocabulary that spans tens of thousands of words in fluent readers.
When taught only phonics, kids run the risk of plateauing in later grades. It's not evident at first because the material they are given is simple and deals with concrete subjects (e.g. "Mike got a bunny for his birthday"). Later material uses many more words that don't follow phonics "rules" and deal with abstract material. Under these circumstances, decoding is too slow and effortful and leaves little remaining capacity to deal with harder tasks like comprehension.
The main cause of issues in developing this sight vocabulary is phonological deficits, not IQ, motivation, intelligence, visual processing, or attention like one might imagine. Kids with these deficits have trouble understanding that words are made up of smaller sound units and cannot work with them. Because of that, they cannot store the mapping efficiently and their vocabulary and fluency is limited.
Thankfully, the best interventions that fix these deficits are not too complicated and can correct the issues with as little as a dozen of hours of correct instruction. The main drawback is that finding and targeting those deficits is time-consuming for the instructors, but my program deals with that through the practice engine, which automates all that work.
The bad news is that most teachers are not aware of this and are simply being moved to phonics, which will not work for all children unless those phonemics deficits are identified and remediated. Worse news is that most commercial products that claim to be evidence-based or backed by the "science of reading" still use phonics and make no mention of orthographic mapping, the actual process that produces fluent readers. Again, phonics instruction is part of the answer, but nowhere near the entire story.
You can look at my pedagogy document for more info. Although it's meant to be about my product, it still contains a primer of the actual research on how full literacy (not just reading, but writing as well) is developed: https://picturesareforbabies.com/home/pedagogy/
> I'll keep the self-promotion to a minimum
I don't believe you'll.
Wow this cue method was confusing to me. It's like saying the most efficient way to drive a car is to press the pedal, while turning a crank, while also tooting a horn.
No. The most efficient way is to just drive the car with the pedal. Likewise, efficiently being able to identify words is, surprise surprise, the most efficient way to then read a series of words (sentence).
In an alternate universe, the Ottomans sailed the Atlantic first and now we are all speaking Turkish, a very regular language with few exceptions to anything.
I mean, I love English, but the learning curve is crazy, though nowhere near as crazy as Chinese would be.
Did we collectively forget that most written languages directly encode the sounds of the spoken language?
Your brain tokenizes sounds into words. A beginner reader has to parse text into sounds and then into the token. An advanced reader can skip the middle step and parse text into tokens. But you still have to know how to parse text into sounds, there's no way around it.
It'd be like giving someone a French texbook, only instruct them in English, don't even mention the different sounds, and somehow expect them to learn conversational spoken French. It's nonsense.
Three Cue-ing, the flawed idea is three-cueing (looking for context clues to figure out words you don't know). I didn't read the rest of the article out of infuriation with the number of times they alluded to and discredited the technique before naming it.
It gets better once they go into it but you’re right, I was also infuriated! The first 10 or so paragraphs read like tabloid click bait. I recommend reading the whole thing though, it actually gets compelling.
what's the tl;dr on a better way to learn to read?
Sound words out at the smallest level. Practice.
Example: “skin” has multiple sounds to help decipher the word as spelled: “sss”, “sk”, “ih”, “nnn”, “iinn”.
Identifying some of those sounds in order helps a reader to sound out the word “skin”. After doing this a few times in a context that helps the reader confirm the meaning of the word they’ve just sounded out they’ll learn it outright.
From that point forward they can recognize “skin” on sight without requiring any context.
Interesting... I was expecting an article about teaching kids to read to have ... text ... in it.
https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
Thanks! I've put that URL at the top, and put the submitted URL (https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/) in the text up there.
Whatever the culture and resources of the parents, the buck stops at home.
Gaining the ability to read begins from birth, and by the time that kids are school age they should be clamoring for books if the parents did their job.
After time-worn basic reading instruction in first grade, it's a matter of parents enforcing reading-time at home for school mandated reading. Then providing access to the reading material that the child desires for their free reading. Whatever it is. Book-bound comic strips are an early popular grade-level choice, and are fantastic. If a child is behind, then go simpler. Everything else is a band-aid or less practical if not detrimental in comparison. Some kids need services if they have deficits, but that doesn't imply that the standard practice is flawed. All top readers came out of this type of early progression. So have most middling readers, often just separated by the amount of time they've chosen to put in. Or were compelled to put in.
I think that we can demand that our education systems teach our kids to read and do math.
Many parents are not academic and can’t do a good job in passing on academic skills no matter how hard they might try. Many other parents would prefer to teach their kids different things about how to live a life.
I grew up on a farm, and the start of my journey into tech was fixing machinery and building things outside with my father. With my kids I want to create a similar experience so they feel like they have the power to take things apart, fix them and make whatever they want. I don’t want to jam them up all evening reading and doing times tables.
That sounds sort of noble, perhaps, but that's not how it works. Ignoring the fact that there is more than enough time in childhood for what you propose, reading, and much else.
Cognitive development is a process, of which language development and reading are a major subset. That development is always in-process.
The longer that one waits to start children down the path of language development skills, the lesser the chance that they will be able to fully develop their potential for that skill.
For example if you speak to a child less than you should or could, that child's language and overall cognitive development will be significantly disadvantaged when compared to a child with similar potential but much more attentive parents.
Think of a disability where one hears less language, and then research developmental outcomes for that group.
The same carries over to reading skill. The earlier that you start, and the more that they get, both listening and eventually reading themselves, the much higher likelihood that they will become an advanced reader.
You aren't jamming them up. You are giving them an immense lifelong gift. In addition to attending to a significant cognitive need.
And again, plenty of children raised with reading are also commonly taught be adept at technical and manual skills. Most people would choose a smarter mechanic, who among other things has the proficiency to read complex documentation.
Kids want to be read stories at night. Its a major developmental need. You should read stories to your kids. Then, when they are ready, you should buy them simple books like comics. Then age appropriate books as they are ready. Content doesn't matter so much. It's mostly the volume of reading that matters. Every little bit helps.
You are not “jamming” up your kid by reading to them. Reading to them is probably one of the most important things you can do to begin their journey towards literacy, and during it.
Connecting the words they hear as you read to what they see on the page is an important early step. You don’t need any academic training - just read to them.
> Many other parents would prefer to teach their kids different things about how to live a life.
Reading and writing are probably among the most important skills you can teach your child in order for them to fully participate in modern societies.
There’s a difference between reading to your kids and “enforcing reading-time at home for school mandated reading”.
I absolutely agree that reading and writing are critical skills. In fact, I think they’re so critical that we should demand that professional educators teach children how to do it.
They are so critical I would not solely trust someone else to do it, unless you are supremely confident in their ability.
children should have lots of opportunities to read, at home too. but i think the scientific consensus is that required homework is not as beneficial as once thought.
> I think that we can demand that our education systems teach our kids to read and do math.
I've heard many anecdotes of teachers discouraging teaching kids those things at home ahead of the curriculum.
Those teachers couldn't be more wrong. Though, to clarify I am referring to reading and the exposure to it. We'd need someone who is informed on the developmental process of math skill to comment on "times tables".
> We'd need someone who is informed on the developmental process of math skill to comment on "times tables".
(I feel somewhat qualified...)
It is a mistake to make the kids memorize the times tables before they intuitively understand that multiplication is a repeated addition (or visually, that multiplication is a rectangle). The right moment to memorize comes a few weeks or months after they can calculate the result without memorizing. I think it is safer to wait, because many parents would be tempted to make it prematurely, in order "not to waste time".
Generally: understanding first, memorizing later. If you memorize first... many kids won't even try to understand, because "they already know it". The problem is, if you remember without understanding, there is nothing to correct you if you make a mistake. An incorrectly remembered fact feels exactly the same way as a correctly remembered fact, and you have no alternative way to check.
Also, memorizing instead of understanding is a strategy that works well in short term and terribly in long term, because memorizing a small thing for a few days is easy, but then you forget it (kids famously lose a lot of what they learned at school over summer holidays), and when the memorized things accumulate, it becomes too much and you start confusing them. Actual understanding takes more time, but it can survive the summer holidays, and already understanding many things makes understanding an additional thing easier.
(But when the day comes to memorize the times tables, spaced repetition is your friend.)
I'm guessing the advice stems from school being boring already and being ahead of your class makes it even more boring.
Though reading should be something teachers are equipped to handle very wide range of competency.
montessori does advanced math in kindergarten (advanced compared to regular kindergarten). i haven't heard anything about that leading to problems when those kids go to regular primary schools after that.
>I've heard many anecdotes of teachers discouraging teaching kids those things at home ahead of the curriculum.
That's a good indication of a bad teacher and a broken education system.
My parents read to me when I was very young, but never tried to teach me to read. So all I knew of reading was that it was something my parents could do. I learned to read in first grade, at school. I found it compelling and did it on my own at home without much prompting or "enforcing."
That didn't really change until High School, when I found most of the standard reading assignments in English class to be tedious and hopelessly old-fashioned. If I'd also had trouble reading from a technical standpoint at that time, I have no idea how I would have gotten through it.
By contrast, my parents were high school dropouts. When I was little, my mum would read to me, with her finger following the text. I somehow got the idea, and started to sound out the words with her. By kindergarten, I was reading at a Grade 2 level. I think there are as many paths to reading as there are kids.
The cueing theory seems misguided, in teaching kids to regard pictures as the source of information. I'd say that teaching kids to read requires a mix of activities, with a heavy dose of phonics, but also activities that create a joy of reading, by showing interesting people and stories. I can't see how cueing helps.
Cueing reminds me of some of the stranger ideas in math pedagogy in elementary schools, notably that rather than learning algorithms for arithmetic operations, kids should invent their own, and maybe have several, which they choose from in a specific problem. Of course, some students have much more difficulty than others, but there really are some basic ideas they must master in order to be competent at arithmetic. Allowing a kid to amass a forest of partially working techniques and then have to hack through it to solve any problem seems ridiculous to me, much like putting a student driver in a car, with no training, and telling them to try various things to see how to drive to a given point without getting killed.
> Allowing a kid to amass a forest of partially working techniques and then have to hack through it to solve any problem seems ridiculous to me, much like putting a student driver in a car, with no training, and telling them to try various things to see how to drive to a given point without getting killed.
Trying to invent ways to do math operations is not a bad idea per se... it's just that at some moment you should teach them the universal and efficient algorithm instead.
It's like, if you are learning to program, and try your own ways to design the code, and then someone teaches you the design patterns. I don't believe that you were harmed by trying to program your own way first. You will probably appreciate the design patterns more, and maybe understand them on a deeper level, now that you have a first-hand experience of the problem they were designed to solve. I even suspect that without this extra experience, people would be more likely to over-engineer their code, e.g. to use a complicated design pattern where a simple function call would suffice.
Similarly, after trying a few ad-hoc ways to add numbers, you will appreciate the standard "put them in a right-aligned column, proceed from right to left" algorithm more. But you will also notice that you can add 199 and 601 without putting them in a column first.
The crime of these approaches was failing to teach the kids the standard solutions. Experimenting for a while is itself OK.
We did everything we could to encourage reading with our kids (reading to them, book fairs, bookshelves full of kid friendly books, etc).
1 kid has grown into an avid reader, the other two (twins) have never embraced it. It's easy (and often appropriate) to blame the parents, but sometimes it's on the student to actually want to do it.
It makes me sad and I would love to change it. Having video games come into the environment (not my choice) certainly did not help.
I know it's poor form to complain about downvotes, but I'd like to understand what was disagreeable about what I said (for my own edification). My point was simply that nature vs. nurture is a thing (nature wins, but nurture shapes).
Right, so having bad or incapable parents is just a reason to what, toss those kids off a cliff?
How dare you hold people to such high expectations for the development of the lives that they bring into the world.
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What demographic? Do you have a link to or some additional information about the data source? Or are you just speculating?
The source is linked under each graph in the article.
The source linked under each graph says "No significant change in fourth-grade reading scores across student groups compared to 2015" and "No change in score gaps among selected racial/ethnic groups in reading at grade 4 compared to 2015".
If OP thinks removing a certain demographic changes the results they should state what demographic that is.
The article isn't using the graphs to talk about a difference between 2015 and 2017, but about the overall level, so it would indeed be surprising if there had been a large change between those years.
But there are several demographic variables that show substantial differences between groups (and sometimes over longer timescales within a group), so I think it would be more enlightening to look at all of them, rather than letting someone pick their preferred comparison and then trying to argue with that.
I feel this way about most teaching research, but it's likely a sign that I'm starting to get old. Many instructors at my local university have shifted to the "flipped classroom" approach, and the students just don't feel as confident at the conclusion of a class (this is my highly subjective take). I feel like we have too many methods that try to sneak around the hard parts, or the parts that people might initially find boring, as well as eliminated much of the independent struggle to learn. Educators are more likely to choose this path because it avoids having to deal with the pain of that initial start (it's probably often done unconsciously). Of course, happier students also signals to our brains that we are more successful at the same time. A vicious cycle.
For me: I've found that constantly moving towards more difficult things that you aren't quite prepared for is the most effective route. The foundational work I require to accomplish the task is the first thing that gets solidified for me, even if, in my opinion, I'm awful at it when I start. This is one of my criticisms of the modern educational institution and their focus on grades: it discourages this sort of exploration, since it will negatively impact your future (especially if you are the only one doing it). I've always thought that if you are getting an A+ on everything you do, you're wasting most of your time.
/{End of Rant}
Avoiding frustration in learning is like avoiding resistance in weight lifting: it certaining makes it easier, at the cost of entirely eliminating the benefit. Frustration is what a learning brain feels like.