How a flawed idea is teaching kids to be poor readers

This is how I felt when I first tried to figure out what common core math was, after I kept hearing about it. It sounded like the people who made it were trying to create a process around what I would do in my head to try and solve a problem when I didn’t have paper or a calculator handy.

What common core, and this reading approach, seem to miss is that those are things that come after learning the foundations and rules.

I was taught with phonics, but 99% of words I read today are simply seen and recognized. Much like the 3 queuing method tries to create a process around. However, I think that is something that naturally develops through repetition. When someone reads the word “horse” and “house” enough times, the need to sound it out or read each letter goes away, but that’s not the starting point.

As much as I like to think I can determine a word’s meaning through context, when put to the test, I often miss the mark. Reading on an e-reader lowers the barrier to looking up unfamiliar words and I find myself doing it more often. I find my assumption based on context can often be less than correct. Maybe I’m close, but there is more nuance to the actual definition. Sometimes I’m completely wrong and the whole meaning of the paragraph changes. Not to mention, if I look a word up to learn the actual meaning, it might be something I can introduce into my own speech and writing without sounding foolish.

I relied on context a lot growing up, because I was too lazy to look things up. These days, with it being so easy, I don’t know why kids wouldn’t be encouraged to look up words they don’t know. I think my vocabulary would be much better had I grown up learning the words I didn’t know, instead of simply bypassing them.

I think the backlash against phonics is because English just has too many exceptions which makes it frustrating, but it's still important to teach simple phonics (common uses of short and long vowel sounds). Beyond that, any rigid approach is bound to fail because kids just need to get used to the general guidelines of English spelling and learn the exceptions one by one, through guided read-along practice. But the process of making educated guesses on how to say a word based on spelling is part of the learning process.

Maybe the only way to be good at reading for basic proficiency is to just reading more? Not sure why there are so many theories and practices. I have two anecdotes. Not that they count, but in case other people had similar experiences: One is that I didn't know how to read when I entered my first grade. For the entire first grade, I read only my textbook, which was too simple to help me read other books. And then in the summer time after my first grade, I picked up a book for fairy tales of animals, and I read along. I didn't look up a dictionary, I skipped the words that I didn't understand. And miraculously reading was never a problem for me any more. I repeated the pattern when I started to learn English. In English it was a graded reading by National Geographic, if I recall correctly, and later popular fictions by Sidney Sheldon. And then Japanese and then Spanish. I repeated the same pattern. In Japanese I started with 多読, and for Spanish La Alchimista, and Si Hubiera un Mañana after some graded readers. The reading just naturally became easier over time.

Another anecdote was that even the most struggled students in my classes, throughout my middle school and high school, had no problem reading popular fictions. And by struggle I mean they would fail pretty much every subject and could barely graduate high school. However, there were a few extremely popular novels when I grew up, and everyone talked about them. So, every student read them. The novels were written in pretty elegant language with lots of sophisticated words, yet my classmates had no problem understanding them.

> Skilled readers don't scan words and sample from the graphic cues in an incidental way; instead, they very quickly recognize a word as a sequence of letters

I'm really confused by this. Yes, this is what skilled readers do once they are skilled. But when any kid is starting out, they are by definition a poor (brand new) reader. Of course they will not recognize a word as a sequence of letters! So how does this "new research" help?

Retraining as a math teacher here, so I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how kids learn stuff at the moment.

At one point in the article it states that indeed the trio of semantic/syntactic/graphophonic cues are used by readers. The article kind of dances around the point that even if these cues tend to be used by competent readers, it doesn't mean that training them directly is how novice readers need to learn.

I'm really coming round to this belief that there is no substitute for the "rote" drilling of basic skills.

I had a heck of a time reading as a kid. I was taught just to sound every single word out and reading a chapter book took me literally forever. Beyond the time factor, my comprehension was terrible because in taking the time to sound every single word out I would lose track of the overall meaning of the sentence and often need to start over. I would say I was a very poor reader into high school.

Honestly the thing that really helped was just spending so much time on computers. Eventually something in my brain clicked and started memorizing shapes of the top of words. My eyes scan the top of the letters. I only fall through to looking at the individual letters when what I read didn't make sense. I can read pretty reasonably fast now.

I read this or similar article like a year ago.

I am an avid reader and I did not realize until I read about it that someone could struggle with reading because it is so effortless for me.

It is my story “don’t take others experiences for granted “, I have a bit more empathy for people knowing that.

How can we expect kids to learn to read a language that's taken an alphabet and created a poor woman's logogram out of it?

wi hæv ɔl ðə tulz wi nid tə tɝn ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ ˈɪntu ə ˈlæŋɡwɪdʒ wʌn kæn rid wɪðˈaʊt ˈnidɪŋ fɔr jɪrz ˈtutərɪŋ. jɛt wi doʊnt bɪˈkəz ɪd bi tu mʌtʃ wɝk.

Interesting article. I’m from Germany and I learned to read with the phonetics and sounding out words approach. My kids as well. It’s the first time I heard about this style of teaching how to read. My first reaction while reading was: “and how do some kids manage to read at all with only this system?” It’s very late into the article where they mention that first some kids will learn how to read no matter what and second that the problem is a mixed message as schools do teach phonetics but that the mean approach taught when seeing unknown words is to use a simpler system. I myself never look at queues or pictures when reading unknown texts. While learning English I read English books and used the context approach. But I had to first learn a lot of vocabulary to even start that.

Alternative alphabets have been kicking around for ages as a way to make it easier to learn English; mainly because our existing alphabet is inconsistent and doesn't have a 1-to-1 correspondence of letters to sounds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet

Sequoyah famously brought the Cherokee from 0% to 90% literacy in a decade after he invented a syllabic writing system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah#Teaching_the_syllabar...

Literacy could be much easier if we switched orthography and now with technology everything can be auto-transliterated.

If you want to know about this in podcast form: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

Takes more time than reading the article, but the podcast has IMO a nice pace of leaving you curious and giving you info. It includes opinions from teachers, parents, etc.

Opposition to phonics is political and I'm not sure how it got that way, but it does make the curriculum more resistant to change than most curricula (which are already fairly resistant).

It's really common for me to encounter adults doing things like reading sentences haltingly, substituting in a completely wrong word with the same first letter now and then, or just giving up on a sentence, and these are just the ones with English as a first language.

Test yourself: what did you do when you encountered the words casphetato brolganic alvolamina sooveg in this sentence? A fluent English reader will just read them; I made them plausible and decodable, not like zprxapsi mnoqlkzb which I pulled out of a random number generator and a fluent reader may well do a double take at.

Relevant:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-rise-...

One of the key things any parent should be doing is making sure their children are exposed to books from a very young age. And please make sure you take the time to read with your child.

(2019)

I wonder whether "many teachers and parents don't know there's anything wrong with it" is still true now.

Well there's two tests to figure out if a kid is a fast enough reader:

1) Have them read subtitles out loud (from a different language so they can't rely on audio).

2) Have them skimp through the text and provide a summary afterwards.

I'm not very sure however how to GET there apart from the boring "read a lot". And reading a lot in today's video-infested age is simply, not realistic. When I grew up in communist Romania there was virtually no video content so much like a century before, the only form of ENTERTAINMENT was reading books. I read them because I was motivated by pleasure. Hated school-mandated readings, never did them or just cheated if no alternative but I did read a fuckton on my own volition because I repeat, that was the most powerful form of entertainment available.

If I were brought up today surrounded by video content everywhere: addictive shorts, game tutorials, movies... I'm not at all sure I would have cared much for reading.

It is what it is and we can't turn back time and expect today's kids to be as proficient readers as a gentleman of the 19th century, they just don't have the motivation anymore.

This "whole word" nonsense has reached new levels of absurdity with people trying to replace words with icons at every opportunity.

The gawddamned icons on a car's instrument panels are a classic example of the suckiness of this approach. My old car says "hot" "cold" "defrost" on the controls. The new ones each invent their own incomprehensible icons.

Most pictoglyphic written languages have evolved towards phonetics. Including Mayan, Egyptian, and western writing.

The article isn't completely coherent, because it disapproves of "memorizing a bunch of words" while at the same time approving of storing words in memory for instant recognition.

...Is it really saying that to only memorize a bunch of words is insufficient, compared to memorizing lots? Is that the point being made there? Wasn't clear.

Teaching reading without phonetics. The "new math". "Science" without the scientific method. History rewritten to match modern sensibilities.

There is a lot of evidence that the educational establishment is full of idiots. Alternatively, for the conspiracy theory that it is trying to create compliant peasants rather than educated citizens.

This is why I think public education is idiotic. Why don’t parents take personal responsibility for educating kids?

My mom taught me how to read when I was 3. She sat there with the book and helped me through it. Heck I even remember my dad teaching me about the word “the”. I thought it was so funny that it was pronounced “thuh”.

Thanks to my parents I had zero problems with reading.

I think the only way to truly solve these problems is to teach parents the importance of loving kids!