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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

#151
post #146
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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?

I didn't speak them. I didn't need to. If I actually needed to read it then obviously I would've given it a closer look and derive some sounds for it, but it wasn't necessary in order to internalize the word and use it when articulating my thoughts in my mind.

> That's what phonics is: you learn to sound out words you don't know letter by letter.

I'm talking about reading the letters out like an initialism, so assigning the sound "en-em-see-el-ai" to "nmcli". Even without any training in phonics the author must've at least known the names if the letters?

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#152
post #151
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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? I didn't speak them. I didn't need to. If I actually needed to read it then obviously I would've given it a closer look and derive some sounds for it, but it wasn't necessary in order to internalize the word and use it when articulating my thoughts in my mind. > That's…

> I didn't speak them. I didn't need to.

In other words, you weren't using those words to communicate anything to anyone else, just for your own internal thinking. Fair enough.

> Even without any training in phonics the author must've at least known the names if the letters?

A child might know the names of the letters but not know that sounding out words letter by letter is a good idea. The article discusses in some detail that apparently the strategy of sounding out unknown words letter by letter does not occur to children who aren't taught it; instead they use other much less effective strategies that do occur to them.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#153
post #101

>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

> look at the letters that make up the word, and speak the word out loud This is harder than it appears. "House": [h] [ɒ] [ʊ] [s] [iː] (or whatever pronunciation they teach in phonics) ... [hɒʊsiː] isn't an English word. Or maybe it is, but you don't not it yet, because you're just beginning to learn to read and there are many words you don't know. But probably it's some word that sounds similar. "Horsie" [hɔɹsi]? Pr…

“Magic E” and “silent E” are nearly the first non-phonetic spellings that children learn in Britain, while they are learning the alphabet. And diphthongs come right after. “House” is a word they learn pretty quickly.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#154

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.

> His spelling is terrible

There's a fix for that... MS Word and browsers :)

Word's little red underline dramatically improved my spelling. Words that I would habitually misspell would annoy me with that little red underline. I'd concentrate on the word and the correct spelling and eventually I stopped misspelling it.

My favorite example... their... almost always I'd write "thier" (the few times I'd write "their" I'd doubt myself and switch it to "thier"). Nowadays I almost never misspell it (it also helps me sometimes to think "the IR").

Without Word's instant spell checking I'd still be a bad speller who'd spend too long running the spellchecker.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#155

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…

I... don't agree.

Context is noticeably awkward when you get it wrong, and I'd say the article appears to have identified this as a problem and presents it as "this is a problem therefore it must be fixed". But, most of the time, there is not that awkwardness: context is extremely helpful to learners - of any subject.

It also appears that you are describing how to learn to read in an alphabetic system - so it's not immediately obvious that what you have said could apply to "most people in the world".

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#156
post #152
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? I didn't speak them. I didn't need to. If I actually needed to read it then obviously I would've given it a closer look and derive some sounds for it, but it wasn't necessary in order to internalize the word and use it when articulating my thoughts in my mind. > That's…

> I didn't speak them. I didn't need to. In other words, you weren't using those words to communicate anything to anyone else, just for your own internal thinking. Fair enough. > Even without any training in phonics the author must've at least known the names if the letters? A child might know the names of the letters but not know that sounding out words letter by letter is a good idea. The article discusses in some…

> A child might know the names of the letters but not know that sounding out words letter by letter is a good idea. The article discusses in some detail that apparently the strategy of sounding out unknown words letter by letter does not occur to children who aren't taught it; instead they use other much less effective strategies that do occur to them.

Oh ok I see. That makes sense.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#157
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 ...

Welcome to the enjinks club :).

The reverse is also happening to me - it has become very hard to see furniture advertised as latex, and read lay-tax, not la-tech.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#158

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 dive…

A funny story about that. When I was a kid, I had two different words in my head: one which was pronounced "muh-sheen", and another which I found in The Way Things Work, that was spelled 'm-a-c-h-i-n-e' and pronounced "match-ayn" (rhymes with chime). That's what I got from sounding out the word. I had two parallel concepts in my head growing up, one rather technically oriented that involved inclined planes and levers, the other being machines like toasters, or whatever was on This Old House, probably. This ended when one day, I read something else that used the word and realized, rather excitedly, that there was no such thing as a match-ayn.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#159
post #153
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> look at the letters that make up the word, and speak the word out loud This is harder than it appears. "House": [h] [ɒ] [ʊ] [s] [iː] (or whatever pronunciation they teach in phonics) ... [hɒʊsiː] isn't an English word. Or maybe it is, but you don't not it yet, because you're just beginning to learn to read and there are many words you don't know. But probably it's some word that sounds similar. "Horsie" [hɔɹsi]? Pr…

“Magic E” and “silent E” are nearly the first non-phonetic spellings that children learn in Britain, while they are learning the alphabet. And diphthongs come right after. “House” is a word they learn pretty quickly.

Sure, for each individual case they can learn some rule or exception for that specific word. But it takes some time to learn them all. "Check whether what you just read makes sense in context" is a general rule that can be applied to discover mistakes.

I wasn't suggesting that "house" vs "horse" is a particularly difficult distinction, but rather that just looking at the letters is not enough. Kids really do need those additional rules, and until they've learned them, some kind of error correction is necessary.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#160
post #46
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe there are some languages that are not phonetic, you cannot read them by sound out the parts of the word.

Can you name one that does not have a phonetic system as well? Note that Japanese has kana, and Chinese has pinyin and bopomofo/zhuyin. Other than that... ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics? Please let me know if you are aware of more.

Chinese didn't always have pinyin... and Japanese didn't always have kana (it used to be spelled exclusively with Chinese characters, though some characters were used phonetically, and kana resulted from the simplification of these characters).
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