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The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

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Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#51

Post by LeonB »

butteredpopcorn wrote: post #26
teilo wrote: post #12

I came from a big family, and I have 6 children. I have taught all my children to read using McGuffey. I helped many of my siblings learn to read. Much of the discussion around phonics is missing the point. It is a caricature to say that "phonetic" reading is completely phonetic to the exclusion of sight reading. This is binary thinking. Nobody teaches it that way. The goal is not and never was to read phonetically e…

Thanks for your thoughts and observations. I may be one of these “simply sight readers”. I supposedly taught myself to read at an alarmingly, insufferably young age. I have no memory of learning to read whatsoever, only the before and the after. We had a complete set of McGuffey readers lying around (thanks for mentioning these, brought back memories!) but by the time I was looking at them I could already sight read…

Some kids have a great grasp on diction, go on to be early readers, and basically teach themselves to read. Any approach will work with them because they “just get it”. These are the kids who have an articulate voice even when 2 years old.

When trying to prove any technique, a teacher will grab one of these kids and show off how good they are and say it’s due to (insert any technique here).

I had one kid like this. As parents we patted ourselves on the back and thought we’d done something right.

My other kid is more typical or below typical and the style of learning makes a huge difference. Without that high articulation, they need a lot of work to understand phonics. Any system that leaves this out will only work for the kids who would’ve mastered reading anyway.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#52

Post by csa »

fiblye wrote: post #20

That chart for reading proficiency among 12th graders is rather... shocking. Is there similar data for other countries available? It'd be interesting to know if this is an issue unique to America (among developed nations), shared among English-speaking countries, or if it's a problem equally distributed across the world.

Ehhh... it uses some terms of art that might be slightly misleading to those not familiar with the field.

The chart specifically lists “proficient” and “advanced” at 12th grade. What do those words mean?

https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/reading/achieveall.asp...

For “proficient”, the “inferences” and “interpretative statements” components will rule out most readers.

For reference, these are some of the skills that higher level SAT and GRE reading questions attempt to evaluate.

The way one could (somewhat crudely) relabel that data is “what percentage of 12 graders could plausibly read college-level texts”. Interestingly, the college attendance numbers match these percentages fairly closely.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#53

Post by SPascareli13 »

ianbicking wrote: post #43

I sometimes wonder if we need a better phonics. Doing it by letters feels crude, it requires a big gestalt moment when the kid puts the sounds together, and overemphasizes our very malleable vowels. Something based more on syllables would seem better to me. Consider a simple work like “back”: kids sound out buh-ah-kuh which is a completely crazy version of the real word. You can’t say a B without a vowel, but instead…

Some languages are more based on syllables than English, like Portuguese for example.

When I was first learning English, being a portuguese speaker, I thought it would be easy to learn english, I just had to know the english syllables and translate words syllable by syllable. To my dismay, not only that doesn't work, english barely has a concept of syllables that makes any sense.

So I wonder if languages that are have more phonetic writing like Korean for example, have better readers than other languages.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#54

Post by thaumasiotes »

wisty wrote: post #44

A lot of education experts (teachers, and worse, education academics and bureaucrats) are intelligent, white, upper-middle class people who are interested in academic stuff. They remember how BORING it was to be forced to memorise times tables and phonics in primary school like the low socio-economic kids. Their parents had taught them to read and do basic arithmetic long before the rest of the class, and they might…

I feel like a step got skipped here.

1. Covering the times tables in school is pointless when you already know the times tables because you learned them at home.

2. Therefore, people shouldn't learn the times tables?

Saying something shouldn't be taught is a completely different idea from saying that schools shouldn't teach it because incoming students are expected to have learned it already.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#55

Post by teilo »

butteredpopcorn wrote: post #26
teilo wrote: post #12

I came from a big family, and I have 6 children. I have taught all my children to read using McGuffey. I helped many of my siblings learn to read. Much of the discussion around phonics is missing the point. It is a caricature to say that "phonetic" reading is completely phonetic to the exclusion of sight reading. This is binary thinking. Nobody teaches it that way. The goal is not and never was to read phonetically e…

Thanks for your thoughts and observations. I may be one of these “simply sight readers”. I supposedly taught myself to read at an alarmingly, insufferably young age. I have no memory of learning to read whatsoever, only the before and the after. We had a complete set of McGuffey readers lying around (thanks for mentioning these, brought back memories!) but by the time I was looking at them I could already sight read…

Network effects work for some children, but not for all children. And it's not just a matter of birth order. Children are simply different.

Not all children learn the same way. Some are more visual. Some are more abstract thinkers. Some want to rush ahead and learn more from context, and you have to push them to slow down and pay attention to what they are reading or they make serious mistakes. Some naturally take to phonics. Others don't. But I would argue that the ones who became excellent readers without any formal phonics training have an intrinsic understanding of phonics in the same way that some people have an intrinsic understanding of mathematics.

I would venture to bet that even though you were not taught phonics and taught yourself to read at an early age, that today you are perfectly capable of sounding out a word you have never seen before.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#56

Post by thaumasiotes »

jdm2212 wrote: post #38
voldacar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's staggering to me that something so simple and obvious even needs to have a specific name like "phonics". That's just called reading lol. It's so bizarre how these people get put in positions of power over our educational system

According to my parents (who were actually alive then), there was a backlash against more traditional educational approaches (particularly anything involving memorization) in the '60s. Education reoriented towards teaching students to be creative and think critically rather than accept received wisdom. Whole language caught on as part of that -- teach kids to _think_ rather than just follow an algorithm. Unfortunatel…

> the crap they made me do in math class ("write a paragraph reflecting on what you learned about multiplication")

Shockingly, this has come back into style. My brother's high school math classes have been of this type for the past couple of years.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#57

Post by dmoy »

mxcrossb wrote: post #49
SamReidHughes wrote: post #30

Having been taught with phonics, or at least having seen my classmates taught this way, I'd never imagined the world could be this fucked up. If you're going to teach this way, why not throw out the language and write with Chinese characters? The Japanese have a whole set of phonic letters that they use to teach kids. If a kid can't sound out supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, fire his teachers. "Sound out." Now the…

Even if phonics are not used when reading, they still have an advantage for writing. Rarely in my adult life have I found myself sounding out a word in a book unless it is deliberately ridiculous (as your example). But I definitely sound out words when trying to spell a word.

I still occasionally sound out words (incorrectly) when I stumble on a word that I finally realize I've gotten wrong in my head. Like I'll know the word, know what it means, but have imagined the wrong pronunciation in my head, only to have it suddenly dawn on me that "Hey, that synonym for this word you know that sounds a bit different, what if it's aactually the same word". Then I'll go look it up in a dictionary, realize I still don't know pronunciation guides, type it into Google or whatever to get audio, and confirm, yup, I'm a dumbass I've been thinking those are two different words for decades.

This happens to me about once every other month. Millions of words, I don't expect it'll ever stop happening.

Bonus points when the word is like only 6-7 characters long, feel extra dumb those months :P

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#58

Post by gamedori »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #24
jdm2212 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdata: As long as I knew her, my ex had the difficulties described in the article. She blamed how she was taught to read in school -- specifically not having been taught phonics. I figured that was nonsense, and blamed a peculiar-to-her learning disability. At some point I read Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" (which is 20+ years old at this point!), which describes all the research on learning to read... a…

While phonics certainly are important to reading comprehension, IMHO a teaching technique which the article does not address is described in: Reasons to Teach Word Stems and Roots[0] 0 - https://mrsrenz.com/reasons-to-teach-word-stems-and-roots/

That is a useful system for middle readers with limited volcabulary to jump into high school / professional reading, but not so good for very early readers. Note how all the grecoroman stems are defined in terms of germanic words, which are phonetic.

The article is concerned with students who find words like "rabbit" challenging, not with students figuring out "neologism".

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#59

Post by jcranmer »

WalterBright wrote: post #8

Phonetic spelling is probably the greatest invention in written languages since paper. I am constantly amazed that teachers on the front lines fail to recognize this. I'm saddened that UI designers keep replacing phonetically spelled words with icons and emojis.

> Phonetic spelling is probably the greatest invention in written languages since paper.

Paper dates to about 100 AD. The Greek alphabet, which is the first full alphabet (that records both vowels and consonants), dates to about 800 BC. Therefore, phonetic spelling predates paper by at least 900 years. Possibly older, if you want to count later cuneiform (which is mostly a syllabary) or Egyptian or Phoenician (abjads, lacking vowels) as phonetic spelling.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#60

Post by pdonis »

knolax wrote: post #17

The flawed idea in question are the following strategies: > memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don't know Personally I think the phonics vs. sight words debate in English pedagogy misses the point entirely. The problem is that English divides words sentences into "words" and not morphemes. This way words like 'disambiguation' or 'boustrophedon' appear as a hard to parse blob regardles…

Word roots are the key strategy for the next step after phonics: figuring out the meaning of what you're reading. But in order to do that, you first have to have the skill of matching what's written on the page with the speech system in your brain, and that's what phonics is for. You learn to speak by making sounds; phonics matches what's written on the page with the sounds you learned to speak. Just as children can speak words whose meanings they don't yet understand, they can read words whose meanings they don't yet understand.

From the article, it seems like the original author of the MSV system got this backwards: he thought the understanding had to come first. It doesn't. The understanding builds on the phonetic foundation in reading just as it does in speaking.

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