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How I Taught My Kid to Read

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Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#101

Post by DonaldFisk »

sandworm101 wrote: post #85
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…

>> It is common, particularly in New England, to drop or add an "R". The dropping and adding of consonants is one of the defining aspects of many accents. It isn't really incorrect, just a mode of speech. Texas: "Readin." Canada/Nebraska: "Reading." UK: "Reading-g." (Really. Every BBC presenter does the double-G ing on everything-g.)

> UK: "Reading-g." (Really. Every BBC presenter does the double-G ing on everything-g.)

I've listened for this, and can't hear it. Are you saying that after the final ŋ, you hear a g sound? Or that you think the ŋ sound is lengthened?

Every text on English phonetics gives ri:dɪŋ as the RP pronunciation. Here's a transcript containing words ending in "ing": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation#Spoken_...

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#102

Post by maw »

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`.

Also 'x' is a little weird. Depending on the dialect and the word, it's pronounced roughly like English 'x', 's', 'sh', and a guttural 'h'.

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#103

Post by jacobolus »

saint_fiasco wrote: post #96
jacobolus wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t have to be perfect. If kids don’t understand every word or every abstract theme of a book that’s okay. If kids aren’t maximally challenged by every sentence, or if the teacher interjects a definition of a word they already knew for the benefit of less prepared students, that’s also okay. Kids who are a bit ahead or a bit behind will still generally stay engaged if the story is interesting.

The smarter students can just tune out, read ahead, and enjoy the book. That's not too bad. The other way around is much worse. The slower students get frustrated as they fall further and further behind until they feel it's impossible to catch up and give up. Unfortunately most teachers teach at the level of the more advanced students, not at the level of the slower students. I don't know if they mean to do this, it…

How much experience do you have watching primary school classrooms, library read-alouds, etc.?

I’m talking about e.g. 5–8 year-old students, listening to books that even the best prepared in the class would struggle to read on their own, but even the least prepared have little trouble listening to someone else read.

I feel like we must be talking about different activities here. Children are very engaged listening to a good reader reading a good story. Listening to stories does not cause any substantial proportion of them to “fall further behind” or to “give up”.

> Unfortunately most teachers teach at the level of the more advanced students

This was almost never my own experience as a student in ~17 years of formal education. YMMV.

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#104

Post by mac01021 »

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…

What words do New Englanders add and remove Rs in?

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#105

Post by maw »

swsieber wrote: post #92
mapcars wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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`.

From what i understand the 'g' pronunciation is entirely dependent on the vowel following in, in a completely regular manner. So still a lot better than English.

Mostly true. At the end of a word it's pronounced as though it were followed by an 'e' or an 'i'.

I used to work with a guy named Gerardo Ochoa. His username was gochoa, but when addressing him in person we'd sometimes call him "jochoa." (Not his real name or username, but what I'm describing is true in its essence.)

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#106

Post by tomatocracy »

saint_fiasco wrote: post #86
jacobolus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time spent listening to hard books is for most children also more marginally useful than time spent trying to learn to read very simple books independently, especially at the earliest ages. Kids who grow up in supportive and highly literate households are going to learn to read sooner or later, without needing any excessive focus on drills. There’s nothing inherently wrong with spending some amount of time on phonics…

"just within reach of the audience" is very hard when there are 20+ children in a class who have very little in common except age. If the children were carefully separated by ability it might work.

I'd argue they don't have age in common either in the first years of school - at the beginning of formal schooling in the UK in September, the difference between the youngest child in the class who might only just have had their 4th birthday in late August and the oldest who might have had their 5th birthday in early September just before starting school means that one is almost 25% older than the other. That's huge.

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#107

Post by Vrondi »

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…

You are betraying your ignorance of linguistics and dialect by viewing regional accents as defects requiring speech therapy. If children are taught to read by instructors who share their accent, such things are not even noticed at all. The child smoothly learns to read well. They do not sound like a flattened-accent Mid-west TV announcer, but they learn to read quite well.

"Linking R" and "Instrusive R" in New England or exaggerated dipthonged vowels in the Southern Mountain dialect are equally "correct" to anything anywhere else in the country. Any educator who claims otherwise is simply displaying a deep ignorance of language, phonetics, and dialect.

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#108

Post by Vrondi »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #101
sandworm101 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It is common, particularly in New England, to drop or add an "R". The dropping and adding of consonants is one of the defining aspects of many accents. It isn't really incorrect, just a mode of speech. Texas: "Readin." Canada/Nebraska: "Reading." UK: "Reading-g." (Really. Every BBC presenter does the double-G ing on everything-g.)

> UK: "Reading-g." (Really. Every BBC presenter does the double-G ing on everything-g.) I've listened for this, and can't hear it. Are you saying that after the final ŋ, you hear a g sound? Or that you think the ŋ sound is lengthened? Every text on English phonetics gives ri:dɪŋ as the RP pronunciation. Here's a transcript containing words ending in "ing": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation#Spoken_.…

Maybe they mean that the the ŋ sound is hard and sharply cut off?

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#109

Post by Vrondi »

JTon wrote: post #90
sandworm101 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It is common, particularly in New England, to drop or add an "R". The dropping and adding of consonants is one of the defining aspects of many accents. It isn't really incorrect, just a mode of speech. Texas: "Readin." Canada/Nebraska: "Reading." UK: "Reading-g." (Really. Every BBC presenter does the double-G ing on everything-g.)

> UK: "Reading-g." (Really. Every BBC presenter does the double-G ing on everything-g.) I had a hard time believing this one. It's subtle to my ears, but I'm a believer now. For those who are curious, check out the clip below [1]. You'll hear "hunting" & "willing" shortly after the linked time [1] https://youtu.be/kngB7PzsDzM?t=48

Nope, there is no second "g" sound in the clip you linked.

Re: How I Taught My Kid to Read

#110

Post by dcolkitt »

technothrasher wrote: post #61

Did my daughter, as the child of two hyper-literate people with doctorates, have some kind of leg up? I doubt it. Some kids pick up reading with minimal guidance as early as 3; she wasn’t one of them, nor had she given indication of any impending breakthrough. Besides, Engelmann’s book is designed for kids of average intelligence and has worked with legions of them over the decades. In a word, yes, she likely had a l…

> Secondly, intelligence has nothing to do with it. Dyslexia is caused by many factors, but general intelligence really isn't one of them.

I'd say that's an overstatement and not congruent with existing research in developmental psychology.

To preface it's important to distinguish between two reading skills. "Decoding" is the ability to parse the symbols into words. "Comprehension" is the ability to understand the content after its decoded.

Among children aged 7-8, there's a 40% correlation between general intelligence and "decoding". With comprehension there's an astounding 62% correlation with intelligence. Those are about the highest correlations you'll see anywhere in social science.

Reading skills become progressively more loaded on comprehension relative to decoding, as students progress into higher grades. Therefore you see the general phenomenon that reading ability at younger ages is only moderately correlated with intelligence, whereas for teenagers and adults its extremely correlated.

[1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1da5/7f319c9f6976b6b9501be1...

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