My brother in law was taught to sight-read (recognize words on sight and not to analyze phonemes) and he always struggled and regretted it!!! Phonics is the #1 advantage of ALL western languages. The idea that teachers would not leverage the #1 advantage of the entire language just shows how foolish our teacher education system can be! Don't let teachers screw up your kids with educational FADs! We didn't! We taught…
The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading
121–130 of 168 posts
Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading
#1221. no concept of reading, context is not helpful
2. start to read, use context to cover any weaknesses and gaps
3. become fluent reader, no longer need context to cover weaknesses and gaps.
As an experienced educator, I would say there is no process of learning (anything) that doesn't follow this path, whether using context is formally taught or not.
It's an important part of teaching to understand where weaknesses are being papered over and support fixing that. It may be that one teaching method or another makes certain weaknesses easier to identify or fix, but in the end, enough dedicated practice is going to sort out these weaknesses either way.
The article presents this as though context is bad - but you need context to bridge from the start to the end of the process.
The article repeatedly says "poor reader" when it is really talking about a stage of learning to read (the anecdotes describe people stuck on this stage).
In my opinion: This is a really dangerous way of representing the problem of educating people, which denies agency to learners.
Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading
#123I 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…
Reading the article, the thought I kept having was: "But I do all of these!". It seems to me we should be teaching all of these tools. It makes no sense to give people just one. Some tools work better in some situations, and some tools work better for some people. Phonetic reading is very useful when learning many foriegn langues. Contextual reading is always useful for learning new vocabulary and knowing when to loo…
Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading
#124It'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…
Now imagine having a language like Estonian (or Finnish) as your first language, basically every letter has one sound corresponding to it, the length of any vowel is signified by how many there are and stress is always on the first syllable.. Exceptions are incredibly rare, one can count them on a single hand. The concept of a spelling bee made literally 0 sense to me until I had to actually learn English.
That's an English spelling bee.
Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading
#125I'd say the pathway to fluent reading is: 1. no concept of reading, context is not helpful 2. start to read, use context to cover any weaknesses and gaps 3. become fluent reader, no longer need context to cover weaknesses and gaps. As an experienced educator, I would say there is no process of learning (anything) that doesn't follow this path, whether using context is formally taught or not. It's an important part of…
Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading
#126Teaching kids to read in polish goes like this: letters -> syllables -> words -> sentences (with an overlap of the steps).
Known words and sentences are used throughout the process to illustrate the things you are learning at the moment and sort of tease what you will be able to do when you master current step.
I imagine in language where same letters can have so many different sounds the concept of syllables should be even more useful.
Teaching kids to read sentences before they can recognize what sound which letter bunches mean seems like telling kid to swim before he learns to float or tread water.
Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> You never ask kids "read this word" or "how is this word pronounced" because that's always obvious. Except when it isn't. Colonel? Yacht? Victuals? Boatswain? Of course, we shouldn't forget Mark Twain's proposal: https://www.plainlanguage.gov/resources/humor/spelling-in-th...
We have tons of Latin, Greek, German, French, Italian, English loan words but we transcribe them consistently with the rest of the language: inżynier, wiktuały, donżon, jacht, komputer, opcja, pałac, skwer, hipermarket.
Kids don't need to know which language it came from, the pronunciation rules are the same.
You might say English is late-binding and Polish is early-binding language when it comes to phonetics - we decide how the word is pronounced and change the spelling when we adopt a word to out language, you do it each time you use the word :)
Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You never ask kids "read this word" or "how is this word pronounced" because that's always obvious. Except when it isn't. Colonel? Yacht? Victuals? Boatswain? Of course, we shouldn't forget Mark Twain's proposal: https://www.plainlanguage.gov/resources/humor/spelling-in-th...
> Except when it isn't. Colonel? Yacht? Victuals? Boatswain? None of those are Polish words.
Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading
#129I'd say the pathway to fluent reading is: 1. no concept of reading, context is not helpful 2. start to read, use context to cover any weaknesses and gaps 3. become fluent reader, no longer need context to cover weaknesses and gaps. As an experienced educator, I would say there is no process of learning (anything) that doesn't follow this path, whether using context is formally taught or not. It's an important part of…
Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading
#130Such a long article on reading and teaching and no mention of syllables. Is this completley unrecognized concept in eanglish reading teaching? Teaching kids to read in polish goes like this: letters -> syllables -> words -> sentences (with an overlap of the steps). Known words and sentences are used throughout the process to illustrate the things you are learning at the moment and sort of tease what you will be able…
I remember in grade 3 having a teacher give a lesson on syllables. We would clap along with each syllable in the word. She asked me to do this for "Fire". I clapped twice, as there is clearly an audible Fy-er" two syllables in Canadian English. She told me I was wrong, clapped once, and said "Fire" quickly. She "knew" that a word with "consonant - vowel - consonant - vowel" pattern makes a single syllable. Never mind that my ears, and the rest of the students' ears, can hear that she's wrong.
The end result was her confusing the class about what syllables are. I remember the lesson well, because what I really learned was that teachers mean well but aren't always right.