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

81–90 of 168 posts

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#81

Post by musicale »

rossdavidh wrote: post #2

So, it all makes sense, but by this theory, it seems like the english words "through" and "tough" and "benign" should be really hard to learn, compared to "true" and "stuff" and wine". Also, English ought to be harder to learn to read than, say, German or Spanish. But I don't know of any evidence that English-speaking countries have lower literacy than Spanish- or German-speaking countries. I don't mean that phonics…

English spelling is so dreadful that we actually have spelling competitions for students up to the 7th and 8th grades! For example, the US has a National Spelling Bee where (I believe) the winner receives personal congratulations from the president.

Dyslexia (or at least diagnosed dyslexia) is also much more common in the English-speaking world than in countries with more phonetic writing systems.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#83

Post by benj111 »

voldacar wrote: post #34

>For example, a child who says "horse" when the word was "house" is probably relying too much on visual, or graphic, cues. A teacher in this case would encourage the child to pay more attention to what word would make sense in the sentence. WTF? Wouldn't you just tell the child to slow down, look at the letters that make up the word, and speak the word out loud? This makes zero sense whatsoever

This doesn't seem that unreasonable.

I remember getting my bs and ds mixed up, that isnt going to be helped by spelling out the word.

Then theres the fact that English isn't a 100% phonic language. Spelling out 'knife' isn't going to get you to the correct pronunciation.

I could see this being applied to a slightly older child that has already learnt the sounds and is starting to recognise them as whole words. It seems to me that it's formalising what readers already do. You barely read each word, just scanning, inserting the word that fits in context. If there was a one page essay on houses, I doubt more than half (?) of people would notice the 'horse' in the middle of it.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#84

Post by ascorbic »

rossriley wrote: post #71
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 ea…

They also learn "split digraphs" like "a_e", so they know the different between e.g. "fat" and "fate". I was amazed by how quickly my kids picked this stuff up when they started school (at 5). They were both reading and writing full sentences before the end of the first term. Phonics is a great system.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#85

Post by wvenable »

I haven't noticed this so much with reading, but it seems like the same misguided strategy is also being used for math. Instead of teaching the fundamentals (like algorithms for long division) and instead they teach all the mental tricks for doing quick math.

This should be especially concerning for software developers -- it seems they no longer teach (at an early age) the very things that made me like math and eventually computers.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#87

Post by DanBC »

MaximumYComb wrote: post #21
eljefe900 wrote: post #19

This article buries the lead. TLDR: Phonics works, Current strategies don’t. What actually works is the shortest part of the article. It’s infatuation with what doesn’t work puts what does work more than halfway into the article. I would have appreciated the article to be structured as “Phonics works, MSV Doesn’t and here’s why they’re different”

I wasn't aware of the methods used in the US. Here in Australia, we have phonics at my daughters' school and she's coming along really well. My 6.5-year-old daughter is able to read basically anything I put in front of her by sounding through words.

But make sure she has an age appropriate dictionary so that she can learn what the words mean, as well as being able to sound them out.

I love phonics. It's powerful. But sometimes children are so confident at sounding out words that we miss the fact they don't always understand those words.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#88

Post by calf »

DanBC wrote: post #86
calf wrote: post #68

I'm a little confused, was Shakespeare taught phonics?

What do you think literacy rates were in 1550 - 1600?

Was Albert Einstein or Richard Feynman taught phonics? Obviously we don't have to be restricted to a specific era as long as it is pre-phonics.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#89

Post by DanBC »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #78

So what is a good phonics system for my child? Advice?

In England you can try Jolly Phonics, or books by Ruth Miskin.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jolly-Phonics-Activity-Books-1-7/dp...

Ruth Miskin (Amazon haven't arranged this page well) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ruth-Miskin/e/B0034N7454

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#90

Post by calf »

juped wrote: post #82
calf wrote: post #68

I'm a little confused, was Shakespeare taught phonics?

In Shakespeare's day, words didn't even have consistent spellings. Of course he wrote and read phonetically.

But English is phonetic (but is it, compared to German or Japanese?) which is conflation with phonics.

The article did not clearly explain what cognitive science has to do with phonics, which AFAIT is a heuristic system for Western languages. So when I studied Chinese as a child, how did I learn to write Chinese, nonphonetically, without confusing horses and ponies? A heuristic is an optimization but not fundamental but the article clearly asserts that phonics is fundamental to language in that if you don't use phonics you get illiterate students... I think there's some conceptual conflation or some middle case being ignored by the author: A) Is [formal instruction in] phonics necessary? v.s. B) Is 3-Cue harmful? These are not proper opposites.

Here's a provocative claim made in a more sciencey article I just found:

"The linguist David Crystal (2003) estimates that the phonics can explain only about 50 percent of English spellings."

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/03/27/case-why...]

And further down:

"As the linguists Venezky (1967) and Carol Chomsky (1970) explained, English prioritizes the consistent spelling of morphemes over the consistent spellings of phonemes."

Post reply on HN