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Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

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Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

#21

Post by noirscape »

What intrigues me here is if the same might have gone wrong with teaching people secondary languages. It's often seen as this big barrier to overcome, but you look at tools like Duolingo and they do this same "whole language" method instead of teaching people the phonics and letting them use that to fill out and learn how to read a foreign language using their skills to put words together, and instead they fall back to the same "guessing game". Especially when you get to languages with different alphabets, this jump can be very sudden and harsh to overcome.

When it comes to secondary languages we jump very quickly from teaching people "this is an alphabet" to "this is how to use words and sentences in that language". That might make sense if you're using a language that uses more or less the same alphabet (nobody who has English as their primary language is going to struggle that much with the German ß once you tell them it's just pronounced like "ss" when you transliterate it), but when you get to languages where the alphabet and how its pronounced differ significantly from your primary languages that barrier can be hard to overcome. The same can also be said for grammatical rules, especially if they're different compared to yours.

I had ancient Greek in high school and I distinctly recall finding it much more difficult than Latin specifically because the alphabet was so completely different. I did eventually learn how to read it, but the alphabet took me a year to get a grip on, and that's an alphabet with not even that many extra/fewer characters compared to the alphabet used in my primary language.

Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

#22

Post by mandmandam »

oxfordmale wrote: post #17
lr4444lr wrote: post #2

As someone who's both worked as a teacher and as a software engineer, my feeling is that what happened in reading education is roughly what engineers' jobs would be forced by their CTOs to use software methodologies and languages that came from their university professors who've never really spend much time (at least not in well over a decade if at all) doing actual salaried software development where code had to be…

Phonics-centric reading is the next big scandal waiting to happen. Teaching reading in England may have been less successful since adapting the synthetic phonics approach rather than more. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p... The number of downvotes shows that it may still take a few years for people to understand that phonics is not the be all end all solution that it is currently made out…

Is "synthetic phonics" not a rather narrow subset of "phonics-centric reading"?

In any case, the issue in the linked article seems to be a classic case of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

Which is to say, phonics is very important, and a great tool in a balanced approach to learning to read for fun and profit... However, it's not so great to focus on phonics as a lonely and narrow target in a national reading programme, or to justify Departmental failures.

Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

#23

Post by camelite »

oxfordmale wrote: post #17
lr4444lr wrote: post #2

As someone who's both worked as a teacher and as a software engineer, my feeling is that what happened in reading education is roughly what engineers' jobs would be forced by their CTOs to use software methodologies and languages that came from their university professors who've never really spend much time (at least not in well over a decade if at all) doing actual salaried software development where code had to be…

Phonics-centric reading is the next big scandal waiting to happen. Teaching reading in England may have been less successful since adapting the synthetic phonics approach rather than more. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p... The number of downvotes shows that it may still take a few years for people to understand that phonics is not the be all end all solution that it is currently made out…

https://www.pedagogynongrata.com/a-response-to

Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

#24

Post by nicolas_t »

kleiba wrote: post #4

I seriously doubt that 75% of fourth graders read as bad as the examples at the beginning. But what troubles me more is that people go to universities to study education, and yet after all these years, they still seem to have no clue about how to teach a diverse group of young kids. Yet, they're often very confident in their teaching methods. I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understan…

> I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories. As in, not just armchair theorizing, but more like A/B testing. I know, it's a hard problem, but so are many science problems, and Rome doesn't have to be build in one day. But where is the progress?

My father's job was to visit primary school teachers to evaluate them, give them advice and organize teacher's continuous education. That was in France, so it's most likely a different system than the US. He regularly bemoaned that education was way too politicised, any new minister of education would try to make their mark by grabbing a new fad with no regards to the scientific validity behind that fad and would ask people like my father to organise classes for primary school teachers who would then be told to follow that fad.

This happened for reading methods (luckily the whole language phenomenon known as "méthode globale" didn't last very long in France), the debate on constructivism, etc...

Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

#25

Post by camelite »

mandmandam wrote: post #22
oxfordmale wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phonics-centric reading is the next big scandal waiting to happen. Teaching reading in England may have been less successful since adapting the synthetic phonics approach rather than more. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p... The number of downvotes shows that it may still take a few years for people to understand that phonics is not the be all end all solution that it is currently made out…

Is "synthetic phonics" not a rather narrow subset of "phonics-centric reading"? In any case, the issue in the linked article seems to be a classic case of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Which is to say, phonics is very important, and a great tool in a balanced approach to learning to read for fun and profit... However, it's not so great to focus on phonics as a lone…

The unstated goal of the phonics test with the nonsense words is to make it impossible for teachers to cheat by having students rote-learn a bunch of high-frequency words. They can only pass by actually learning the grapheme-phoneme correspondances. It's a good thing.

Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

#26

Post by AnimalMuppet »

analog31 wrote: post #20
lr4444lr wrote: post #2

As someone who's both worked as a teacher and as a software engineer, my feeling is that what happened in reading education is roughly what engineers' jobs would be forced by their CTOs to use software methodologies and languages that came from their university professors who've never really spend much time (at least not in well over a decade if at all) doing actual salaried software development where code had to be…

Both of my parents learned to read at home, in poverty. Both had educated parents, who had been displaced by the events of the era. I learned to read at home. Both of my kids, likewise. It didn't even remotely occur to anybody in the family that learning to read was special, or that there might even be any way to teach it other than phonics. English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right? Moreover, learning to read…

> ... we also felt that letting our kids learn to read at school was leaving too much to chance.

That's both the quietest and the most brutal condemnation of the public education system that I've ever heard.

Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

#27

Post by jrochkind1 »

analog31 wrote: post #20
lr4444lr wrote: post #2

As someone who's both worked as a teacher and as a software engineer, my feeling is that what happened in reading education is roughly what engineers' jobs would be forced by their CTOs to use software methodologies and languages that came from their university professors who've never really spend much time (at least not in well over a decade if at all) doing actual salaried software development where code had to be…

Both of my parents learned to read at home, in poverty. Both had educated parents, who had been displaced by the events of the era. I learned to read at home. Both of my kids, likewise. It didn't even remotely occur to anybody in the family that learning to read was special, or that there might even be any way to teach it other than phonics. English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right? Moreover, learning to read…

On the other hand, I did not learn to read at home, I learned to read in school, in the early 80s, starting with basic alphabet in kindergarden (not before), and serious reading in first grade, which was standard then -- and by third grade was a huge nerd spending many hours a week reading recreationally, and reading "adult" novels like George Orwell.

Your story is a good reminder that there may be more than one way to do it, I often think the way I learned to read (in school, in first grade) is clearly the right way to do it, since it had such good results. (In particular, i still think that earlier than kindergarden is too early for reading).

On the other hand, the thing we had in common was the family culture of reading, everyone in my family were big readers. And my parents read to me a lot before I could read.

Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

#28

Post by mikeryan »

isaacfrond wrote: post #15

Can anybody give the tl;dr. What did go wrong? (I consider myself an excellent reader, but unfortunately, there is no article...)

There was some bad science that pushed teachers (really administrators) away from teaching phonics as part of the reading curriculum.

I have a daughter in third grade who struggled a little with reading (horrible timing too COVID hit at the end of kindergarten so she lost about a third of that year)

She fortunately goes to an independent school who, as a result of some of this reporting quickly turned back on “phonics” teaching for reading but I’m not sure the rest of the schools have pivoted as quickly.

Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

#29

Post by michaelt »

kleiba wrote: post #4

I seriously doubt that 75% of fourth graders read as bad as the examples at the beginning. But what troubles me more is that people go to universities to study education, and yet after all these years, they still seem to have no clue about how to teach a diverse group of young kids. Yet, they're often very confident in their teaching methods. I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understan…

> I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understanding that there is not much of a scientific method applied to teaching theories.

My impression from [1] is that a great many studies, reviews and independent reports about teaching children to read.

Of course, no matter how careful your study is, the results will be controversial when parents find they don't understand their child's school work any more.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonics

Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

#30

Post by mattmcknight »

oxfordmale wrote: post #17
lr4444lr wrote: post #2

As someone who's both worked as a teacher and as a software engineer, my feeling is that what happened in reading education is roughly what engineers' jobs would be forced by their CTOs to use software methodologies and languages that came from their university professors who've never really spend much time (at least not in well over a decade if at all) doing actual salaried software development where code had to be…

Phonics-centric reading is the next big scandal waiting to happen. Teaching reading in England may have been less successful since adapting the synthetic phonics approach rather than more. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p... The number of downvotes shows that it may still take a few years for people to understand that phonics is not the be all end all solution that it is currently made out…

No way. That is absolute bullshit. You can tell, because they cite exactly zero studies showing some other way is better. They are looking at scores over time with no control, which can be decreasing for any other reason.

Phonics based reading instruction is response to the massive scandal that already happened in the US where they tried the whole language approach, balanced instruction, three cueing, and the like with no evidence of positive impacts on literacy. Even the founder of the three cueing method accepted it is a failure. Teachers and education researchers with new books to sell don't want to accept that the boring way works better, especially for students with less support at home (where parents often use phonics to teach kids at age 2 or 3). Someone like Lucy Calkins is potentially responsible for 25% of the illiteracy in the US.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-no...

https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/is-this-the-end-of-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/education/learning/school...

https://localnewsmatters.org/2022/03/13/richmond-school-find...

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