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How I Taught My Kid to Read

theatlantic.com

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Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#51

Post by pushpop »

spraak wrote: post #44
pushpop wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does innovation in general bother you? Only when I have numerous first hand accounts of where it doesn’t work. Just as I have from my extended family, most of who are teachers and all of who state that kids who have been taught outside of the standard educational system are always behind kids who were not. This is often even true for kids who have received additional tuition outside of school where their tutors hav…

> most of who are teachers and all of who state that kids who have been taught outside of the standard educational system are always behind kids who were not. Would you admit that your perspective then is heavily biased? I don't claim to be unbiased, but I myself come from a family of educators, and I chose a different direction (see also John Gatto). That is, I'm very unsurprised that traditional educators would thi…

Just out of interest, which country are you based? I wonder if the reason perspective is so polarised from mine is because our education systems also vastly differ.

From the perspective of the UK, most of what you said is completely untrue.

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#52

Post by mafro »

benj111 wrote: post #45
burfog wrote: post #15

You teach Russian or Spanish with phonics. You teach Chinese with whole-word. English needs a bit of both, since it is mostly phonetic. An on-demand approach to phonics works very well. The rules and exceptions are pointed out as mistakes are made. This avoids the boredom of drilling endless phonics rules and the long-term difficulty of whole-word. A common mistake with phonics is the accidental association of specif…

I don't get your examples. babe, boob, Bob, bib, bub, bye, boo, bah all have the same B sound. It isn't like 'ate' and 'apple'. Or are you saying they will literally think B is 'buh'? But then any one of those examples will disabuse them of that idea???

The point is giving examples of "b" with each vowel, so the child does not associate "b" with any particular sound.

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#53

Post by yoz-y »

lonelappde wrote: post #4

For the child of average intelligence or higher, simply spending time reading aloud while the child looks and listens and eventuate tries to lead is sufficient to teach how to read. It takes hundreds of hours, but it's not rocket surgery.

I learnt to read by peeking over the shoulder of my older brother when he was learning. I guess just being around people that read things aloud is fine.

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#54

Post by mapcars »

helloguillecl wrote: post #43
burfog wrote: post #15

You teach Russian or Spanish with phonics. You teach Chinese with whole-word. English needs a bit of both, since it is mostly phonetic. An on-demand approach to phonics works very well. The rules and exceptions are pointed out as mistakes are made. This avoids the boredom of drilling endless phonics rules and the long-term difficulty of whole-word. A common mistake with phonics is the accidental association of specif…

As a native Spanish-speaker I'm astonished to learn that phonics is not the only way to teach reading in English. It makes sense, since phonics are way more difficult to follow in English than in Spanish (written Spanish maps 1-to-1 to the phonetics)

I know a little Spanish still I would argue about 1-to-1: at least you do not pronounce `h` and there are two different ways to pronounce `g`.

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#55

Post by watwut »

adrianN wrote: post #39
watwut wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the teacher to have ability to wait or push as needed, the teacher must have quite a lot of autonomy. And a system that rewards teachers for doing own decisions instead of following prescribed methodology.

Good teachers with autonomy get better results than good teachers without autonomy, but bad teachers with autonomy get worse results than without autonomy.

It is impossible for teacher "to wait or push as needed" without having enough autonomy.

If you give teachers no autonomy, you will turn teachers who want to wait or push based on situation to the ones who don't. Or they will simply leave.

Just like with any other job, you either command details or you have people doing own decisions. Cant have both.

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#56

Post by pxndx »

mapcars wrote: post #54
helloguillecl wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a native Spanish-speaker I'm astonished to learn that phonics is not the only way to teach reading in English. It makes sense, since phonics are way more difficult to follow in English than in Spanish (written Spanish maps 1-to-1 to the phonetics)

I know a little Spanish still I would argue about 1-to-1: at least you do not pronounce `h` and there are two different ways to pronounce `g`.

Yes, there are variations on sounds, but none of the through/enough bullshit english has.

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#57

Post by tomp »

freediver wrote: post #31
a-saleh wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't envy native english readers, as my teacher said, "I wouldn't be surprised if one day English write Manchester and read Liverpool". I am not sure of all Slavic languages work best with phonics, but one I learned seems it does. Like if you just read the sound of each letter fast after the other, you are 80% saying the word :)

Serbian is a slavic language with 100% letter for letter pronunciation. You can probably learn to read in Serbian in 30 mins and impress your friends. Understanding it is another matter :)

No, you still actually need to properly learn the language. Just reading the letters out loud will make you miss the word accents/stress, at the very least you'll sounds wrong, at worst you'll mix up words.

Russian is even harder, as accent can change the sound a letter makes - e.g. unstressed "o" is pronounced as "a".

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#58

Post by wisty »

Phonics will always be unpopular with teachers for at least 3 reasons.

1. Teachers are typically from good middle-class backgrounds, and will naturally assume children will just learn to read because their parents basically tutored them for hundreds or thousands of hours and they just magically taught themselves.

2. It's hard for an individual practitioner to have any idea whether their methods are wonderful or absolute garbage. Look at how long it took doctors to figure out hand-washing - now think about how hard it is for a teacher with 20 students (all of various ability levels) to know whether their methods have any real impact. The kids grow up and are reading better after a year, it must be the teacher, their method must be good.

3. Boring stuff is boring for teachers. How are they meant to be entertained in class if it's just mindless drill and kill routines?

So you've got "professionals" with no idea what actually works, some weird notion that reading is easy (because they're good at it) and a choice between boring methods that some researcher claims works, and interesting methods that some other (not so nerdy) researcher also claims works (and they use bigger words that are harder to understand when they explain their ideas).

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#59

Post by tomp »

pushpop wrote: post #51
spraak wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most of who are teachers and all of who state that kids who have been taught outside of the standard educational system are always behind kids who were not. Would you admit that your perspective then is heavily biased? I don't claim to be unbiased, but I myself come from a family of educators, and I chose a different direction (see also John Gatto). That is, I'm very unsurprised that traditional educators would thi…

Just out of interest, which country are you based? I wonder if the reason perspective is so polarised from mine is because our education systems also vastly differ. From the perspective of the UK, most of what you said is completely untrue.

I live in the UK. Everybody complains about the public ("state" or whatever) schools. I'd never enroll my kids in public schools here (pre-university), only in private schools, if I had the means. Continental Europe is much better IMO/E.

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#60

Post by Mordisquitos »

benj111 wrote: post #45
burfog wrote: post #15

You teach Russian or Spanish with phonics. You teach Chinese with whole-word. English needs a bit of both, since it is mostly phonetic. An on-demand approach to phonics works very well. The rules and exceptions are pointed out as mistakes are made. This avoids the boredom of drilling endless phonics rules and the long-term difficulty of whole-word. A common mistake with phonics is the accidental association of specif…

I don't get your examples. babe, boob, Bob, bib, bub, bye, boo, bah all have the same B sound. It isn't like 'ate' and 'apple'. Or are you saying they will literally think B is 'buh'? But then any one of those examples will disabuse them of that idea???

>Or are you saying they will literally think B is 'buh'? But then any one of those examples will disabuse them of that idea?

Unfortunately, the fact that English has any number of vowel sounds depending on accent, dialect and even formal register makes it less intuitive to teach consonant sounds based on syllables. Even worse is the fact that consonants themselves may express different sounds in ways that would seem arbitrary to a child (e.g. "Ti" in "tiger" vs "attention").

In contrast, Spanish has a closed set of five vowel sounds, so every consonant can be exhaustively expressed in five digraphs/syllables: Ba, Be, Bi, Bo, Bu – and that's the way children are usually taught. Things can get a bit more complicated when spelling particular sounds (e.g. the hard "G": Ga, Gue, Gui, Go, Gu) but the rules are always followed consistently.

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