Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

apmreports.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 168 posts

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#71

Post by rossriley »

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…

Modern phonics teaching introduces digraphs and trigraphs at an early stage of the process, so children learn to recognise these. My partner is a specialist phonics teacher and places a dot underneath each digraph, trigraph or individual letter sound so that they can quickly recognise the components.

So boil will have a dot under b, one under o-i and one under the l.

They can then spot that oi is a digraph; in the early stages they do this by saying out loud, an o and a i make 'oy'

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#72

Post by musicale »

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…

The vast majority (some 80%) of Chinese characters are phonetic-semantic compounds, that is they contain both sound elements and meaning elements.

So it's actually very useful to study phonetic groups in when learning Chinese characters!! Even when there are tone or vowel shifts, the phonetic groups can really help you match a character to its sound.

It's kind of like the situation where English spelling usually diverges from an exact phonetic representation, but it still provides an approximation of the actual pronunciation of the word which is enormously helpful in matching it to its spoken form.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#73

Post by DecoPerson »

wallace_f wrote: post #33
jumelles wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "fail" mean? What would happen to the children who attend a school that has "failed"?

Same thing that happens with everything else. They patronize a different service provider.

In support of this comment:

In Australia, I saw a number of students transferred into the public school I attended because of poor results at other schools. They would be taken out of class when we were doing something beyond their level, so they could spend 1-on-1 time with a tutor who was trained in catching students up to their expected level. Some students, when transferred from another school, would repeat a year if necessary.

I've heard of multiple occurrences where an Australian public or private school was been investigated for poor results, and during these times parents were encouraged to transfer their children to other schools as the reduced demand would give the school staff room to improve.

(Tangent: I repeated year 4 (9-10yo) because my Mum thought I was "too small" and would be bullied. This led to me being bored by the materials. I thank the spare time this awarded me to why I discovered my Dad's computer, Macromedia Flash, and ActionScript 2.0. Starting programming at such a young age, especially in a C-style language, gave me a massive advantage in my programming career and perhaps life in general.)

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#74

Post by AdieuToLogic »

vackosar wrote: post #70
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason for this debate is that different IQ levels need different techniques. "IQ levels" are almost impossible to measure objectively, excluding medically identified learning disabilities. Reading comprehension difficulties are less a function of fluid intelligence (commonly called "IQ"), and more so environmentally induced. Examples of this are, but not limited to: - Instability at home - Lack of parental inv…

Even if they are environmentally caused, isn't it still better to personalize to the kids ability at the time of teaching? That is every now and then remix the students into groups for which you would have some optimized strategies to teach?

My response was to directly address the concept of intrinsic low verses high IQ dogma.

As far as optimizing teaching techniques, I can only say I believe there is not an easy answer for that. People are different, kids do not operate as adults would, group dynamics sometimes benefit with change and other times not, and I would be hard pressed to think that personalizing to the extent possible would be a bad thing.

In short, IMHO there is no universally applicable solution to the teaching problem domain. Which is likely why so many of us hold teachers in high regard and remember them so well.

EDIT: preposition and indefinite article use.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#75

Post by jnwatson »

ajuc wrote: post #67

It's very funny looking at this discussion from a mostly-phonetic writing system POV. In Polish the system is regular (even the exceptions) and nobody considers trying to teach kids not to exploit that. You just remember how each letter sounds and then the dozen of so special combinations (which are still mostly regular). And you can read. Yes you learn to read slow at first, and then you develop fast reading by your…

That we have spelling tests and spelling contests through secondary school is indicative that it takes roughly forever.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#77

Post by benj111 »

dmoy wrote: post #57
mxcrossb wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a actually the same word ". Then I'll go look it up in a dictionary…

Ha Ha yes.

I find this with a lot of niche things I only ever read about, open source names seem to be the worst.

Gnome is allegedly pronounced with a hard G. I've never heard that said in the wild. And I have no idea how anyone else pronounces XFCE.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#79

Post by ajuc »

jnwatson wrote: post #75
ajuc wrote: post #67

It's very funny looking at this discussion from a mostly-phonetic writing system POV. In Polish the system is regular (even the exceptions) and nobody considers trying to teach kids not to exploit that. You just remember how each letter sounds and then the dozen of so special combinations (which are still mostly regular). And you can read. Yes you learn to read slow at first, and then you develop fast reading by your…

That we have spelling tests and spelling contests through secondary school is indicative that it takes roughly forever.

That's only about writing, not reading. And it's exactly because our system is only simple one-way (letters->sounds), but not the other way (1 sound can be represented with many letter combinations so you have to learn rules and exceptions to write correctly).

You never ask kids "read this word" or "how is this word pronounced" because that's always obvious.

I would prefer if we fixed our system the other way as well, it wouldn't take much, we can start by removing rz, ch and ó and replacing them as needed with ż/sz, h, and u. Suddenly we have like 1 year at school free to teach other actually useful stuff :)

It's not like it's impossible - we already had orthography reform in early 20th century and another minor one in 90s.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#80

Post by thundergolfer »

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…

I just read Why Knowledge Matters by E. D Hirsch Jr and in that book he does contend that this sort of thing happened around the 60s in the USA and also prominently analyses France’s adoption of similar practices in around 1980-90 that had the same negative effects on math and literacy.
Post reply on HN