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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

#141

Post by jfk13 »

ajuc wrote: post #127
jfk13 wrote: post #96

Earlier 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...

Sorry I misunderstood the previous post I thought it disagreed with me about Polish. We do have spelling tests in Polish too, but only one way not both ways like in English. 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 wh…

Ah - looking back up the thread, I can see it's not always clear which language was in focus. The mention of "spelling tests and spelling contests through secondary school" immediately made me think of the American tradition of "spelling bees", so I missed that you were referring to Polish... sorry!

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#142

Post by wbl »

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.

Not just European: a few Hebrew words and the rare Inuit loanword can also make it.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#143

Post by benj111 »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #139
benj111 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

"en-jinks"

That's how I thought it was pronounced too. NginX could maybe have provided a hint...

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#144

Post by dpark »

shkkmo wrote: post #112
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…

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…

> Contextual reading is always useful for learning new vocabulary and knowing when to look up a new word or skip and back-fill meaning as you get more context.

If you don’t have phonics down well, you cannot actually learn new words from context. If you cannot “sound out” the unknown word in your head, then no amount of context is going to allow you to actually learn the new word.

Context is a great tool for understanding what a new word means. It is useless for telling you what a new word actually says.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#145

Post by VintageCool »

calf wrote: post #95
DanBC wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why pointing to literally geniuses helps us understand how to teach a population how to read. For some people it doesn't matter what method you use. They'll have been taught at home and they will have self-taught the rest. But, again, what were literacy rates like in 1890 or 1960?

The point is that people before phonics were capable of becoming literate without phonics. The article is saying that phonics is necessary , which is stronger than saying phonics improves literacy rates. If phonics were necessary then people pre-phonics would not have written English literature of all sorts. That is the argument. In other words: > For some people it doesn't matter what method you use This is a theory…

The point of the article is not that teaching phonics is necessary but that the three-cueing system is detrimental to children learning to read. Phonics is a better system.

The article makes the explicit point that significant percentages of children can learn to read despite being sabotaged by a bad learning system. (In part because some students figured out how to spell words out phonetically in their own.)

The formal phonics system might be recent, but the phonetic nature of our writing system is ancient.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#146

Post by pdonis »

knolax wrote: post #99
pdonis wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure sounds are needed to link to the language system in the brain. I remember as a child that there were certain words that I never bothered assigning sounds to until long after I internalized them. Even if sound is needed, I don't understand why the author couldn't just assign the sound of the letters in a word being read out in order for words she didn't know. I'm sure we all do that for certai n bash comm…

> I'm not sure sounds are needed to link to the language system in the brain.

In the sense that, for example, deaf people can still learn speech, just not with sounds, this is of course true. But I'm talking about the case of a child with normal hearing and speech, where meanings are linked to spoken and heard sounds when they learn to speak.

> there were certain words that I never bothered assigning sounds to until long after I internalized them

Words that you read, or words that you spoke? I'm going to assume the former since speaking a word is assigning a sound to it. If you don't assign sounds to words that you read, how would you speak them? If somebody asked you to repeat what you just read, what would you say?

> Even if sound is needed, I don't understand why the author couldn't just assign the sound of the letters in a word being read out in order for words she didn't know.

That's what phonics is: you learn to sound out words you don't know letter by letter. Gradually you build up skill to the point where you can effortlessly translate written words to sounds, or more precisely to the structures in your brain that you previously linked to spoken or heard sounds when you learned to speak.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#147

Post by eukaryote31 »

voldacar wrote: post #36
jdm2212 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup! And that sane approach (look at the letters that make up the word, and speak the word out loud) is phonics.

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

English is NOT an easy language to "just read". Compared to many other languages, it is very very hard to tell how a word should be pronounced from its spelling owing to the sheer irregularity. Just because you, as an adult who has spent decades reading English, find it easy doesn't make it easy for children.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#148

Post by simtel20 »

shkkmo wrote: post #112
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…

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…

I had a friend who went back to grad school in the late 90s. She decided to become a teacher and got into teachers college at Columbia. Within a month, her English literature degree got her focusing on teaching English to grade school, and somehow almost every conversation we had at the time segued into how stupid phonics were and how whole reading and love of reading was clearly superior and... Well it resembled talking to a cult convert.

It seemed that exclusively at TC in NYC phonics were roundly rejected, and whole reading was the only acceptable approach for future teachers to learn about (vs. friends who attended Hunter/CUNY, and NYU grad schools for education where this exclusivity wasn't taught). I'd love to know that they've stopped this harmful practice at Columbia TC considering how prestigious it is.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#150

Post by rory096 »

calf wrote: post #88
DanBC wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Phonics dates to at least 1570: https://books.google.com/books/about/A_Methode_Or_Comfortabl...
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