The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading • Hacker News Board

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#131

Post by ajuc » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 1:51 PM UTC

Avamander wrote: post #113

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…

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.

In Polish stress is always on the second-last syllable and all sounds have the same length, there's no concept of long sounds ;)

But we do have 3 sounds with multiple letters possible (ó/u, ch/h, rz/ż or sz) so we have something like a spelling bee in schools, just the other way - teacher reads a story and kids have to write it down correctly.

It's so damn close to a fully phonetic system that it frustrates me we didn't go the last few miles and made it fully phonetic when the last reform happened ;)

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#132

Post by pts_ » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 1:55 PM UTC

The Indian private school educational system does teach phonics which might be why lots of Indian origin kids ace the spelling bee in the US.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#133

Post by scotty79 » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 1:56 PM UTC

learnstats2 wrote: post #122

I'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…

> 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.

That's completely not how you learn to read.

Step 2. is start to learn what sounds to make when you are seeing given combination of letters. And then learn gradually how to make the sounds faster and for longer sequences of letters. Until you reach step 3 where you can blurt a word or even few at a time as one or few sounds at good pace.

At no point the context comes into play. It usually is even harmful because it makes you make stuff up instead of reading. Often wrong, occasionally correct which seems even more harmful.

Context is important only after you read completely fluently and begin to read new domain of knowledg with completely unknow vocabulary. Then you can get some words meaning from context. Although you should always check if you guessed correctly.

If you would like to know more about how most people in the world learn to read please find out how kids learn to read in other languages than english. English is a bit quirky but in no way unique. What's unique is english approach to reading teaching. I don't think anywhere else kids are encouraged to make stuff up as they go.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#134

Post by scotty79 » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 2:10 PM UTC

mabbo wrote: post #130

scotty79 wrote: post #126

Such 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…

The danger here is that many of the patterns that go from letters -> syllables are completely messed up in English. (Come to think of it, the entire darned language can be like that). 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…

I don't mean syllables as in precise definition (they are kind of fuzzy as your expeirience shows) or especially not counting them or learning which you should put the accent on.

I'm talking about the fact that if you know how fi-(i)re sounds, you can guess how hi-(i)re sounds or even ty-(y)re or de-si-(i)re.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#135

Post by warabe » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 2:19 PM UTC

Thank you for sharing this. It was such a good read.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#136

Post by danaris » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 2:57 PM UTC

CarVac wrote: post #124

Avamander wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Imagine a spelling bee of all the European languages where you have to determine what language a word is and then spell it... That's an English spelling bee.

That's actually very much what spelling (or pronunciation, going the other way) is like in English, because there are rules for spelling English words—it's just that there are several sets depending on which language we mugged the word from.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#137

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 3:22 PM UTC

williamDafoe wrote: post #25

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…

My oldest was in the vanguard of phonics in our local schools in the UK. His spelling is terrible because he spells things phonetically, which simply doesn't work in English.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#138

Post by LocalH » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 3:28 PM UTC

wahern wrote: post #42

LocalH wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody gives a shit about things like that. They're too busy worried about left vs right politics, or religion vs secular belief, or any host of other relatively unimportant issues, to even notice this happens. I'd imagine this is worse in the US as well, given the large cultural adversity to intelligence in the first place.

A couple decades ago phonics was a huge issue in the culture wars. For people of a certain age and political bent phonics represents a dumbing-down of early education; a concession to lower-class kids and especially of minorities. As I recall (as an adolescent observer) the debate overlapped with the controversy regarding ebonics, with which phonics might be somewhat conflated in people's minds. If there's an analog…

To me it speaks to this desire people have to have input in a field that they don't know or understand. Somehow, when it comes to education, people feel like they have a right to decide how their kids are taught, even though they know nothing about efficient and non-damaging teaching methods. They don't like change as well, many of them probably say "that's how I learned to read, so it's good enough for everyone".

I used to be naive and think that everything should go to popular vote. Now I realize how infeasible and futile that would be. It would end up being an unmitigated disaster as people fight over everything instead of just a few hot-button issues.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#139

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 3:31 PM UTC

benj111 wrote: post #77

dmoy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nginx I still pronounce as "en-jinks" to myself and have to be guarded to remember to say "engine-ex".

MySQL had never been "my see-kwull" to me but always "my ess-queue-ell".

Then there's Linux ...

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#140

Post by dqv » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 3:38 PM UTC

scotty79 wrote: post #134

mabbo wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The danger here is that many of the patterns that go from letters -> syllables are completely messed up in English. (Come to think of it, the entire darned language can be like that). 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…

I don't mean syllables as in precise definition (they are kind of fuzzy as your expeirience shows) or especially not counting them or learning which you should put the accent on. I'm talking about the fact that if you know how fi-(i)re sounds, you can guess how hi-(i)re sounds or even ty-(y)re or de-si-(i)re.

That's more or less what phonics is. It's discussed in the article. There's a combination of learning how sounds map to letters/letter combinations and then learning how they are used in real words (with spelling tests). The teacher shows the letter combinations first and the students sound them out. Then the reverse happens: the teacher sounds out the letters and the students have to write down every letter combination that corresponds with that sound. Then there is a spelling test that uses the sounds with a lot of edge cases where patterns/guessing won't work. They would also have students read aloud to make sure they were moving along smoothly.