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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

#171

Post by michael_j_ward »

phoe-krk wrote: post #149
analog31 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right? No, it doesn't - if it used IPA, it maybe would, but English has very inconsistent pronunciation for otherwise similar words written in Latin alphabet, a matter that many English native speakers seem to overlook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw

It's an alphabetic writing system where the letters largely correspond to sounds, in contrast to logographic writing system where the symbol corresponds to the entire word (like Chinese or Japan).

Yes, there are special rules and outliers that you need to learn in English, but it seems absurd to not classify it as phonetic because it's not purely phonetic. This is doubly so when discussing phonetic vs whole-word learning systems, as is the topic with "Sold a Story".

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

#172

Post by phoe-krk »

tines wrote: post #159
phoe-krk wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right? No, it doesn't - if it used IPA, it maybe would, but English has very inconsistent pronunciation for otherwise similar words written in Latin alphabet, a matter that many English native speakers seem to overlook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw

For an alphabet to be phonetic, it doesn't really matter how complex the rules are for the alphabet, just that the letters carry only phonetic meaning and no semantic meaning, right?

What phonetic meaning does the letter "h" carry when writing English? Especially with words like "honest" and "while". If adding a single letter at the end of a word changes the pronunciation of everything before it, it's not unlike adding a single stroke to a radical that changes the pronunciation of the whole kanji.

In other words, if you need to read the whole word in order to know how to pronounce it (and there are plenty of English examples in the aforelinked video), then, by definition, you're not doing anything remotely phonetic.

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

#173

Post by [deleted] »

jerry1979 wrote: post #150
allknowingfrog wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was exactly my experience. I had to pass a review board before I began my senior year, and it was essentially an "ideological indoctrination" examination. I said what they wanted to hear. What else was I going to go with the 3 years of education that I had already purchased? I was fortunate to study at a college that emphasized field-based experience, because it was the only degree-related value that I left with…

What's the easiest way for me to learn about this ideology? Is there a test prep or similar?

[deleted]

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

#174

Post by vehemenz »

anon291 wrote: post #151
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…

I am shocked this comment exists, when the counter-example is literally written into it. English uses the latin alphabet which is a phonetic alphabet. It's why english readers can also 'read' Spanish without understanding any of the words. Anyone who says otherwise should be promptly ignored.

To be fair, English pronunciation is not as regular as Spanish. Spanish is a purely phonetic language, while English is phonetic but irregular.

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

#175

Post by nkrisc »

phoe-krk wrote: post #149
analog31 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right? No, it doesn't - if it used IPA, it maybe would, but English has very inconsistent pronunciation for otherwise similar words written in Latin alphabet, a matter that many English native speakers seem to overlook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw

English does use a phonetic script. The letters represent phonemes and carry no semantic meaning on their own, as opposed to an ideographic or logographic script. That fact that one symbol can possibly represent multiple phonemes doesn't make it not a phonetic script.

There's no debate about it, unless you want to debate what makes a script "phonetic" in the first place.

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

#176

Post by passion__desire »

Dnguyen wrote: post #166

This is just my personal experience. My first son was able to read when he was 2.5 yo. I read Dr. Suess to him every night since he was 1 yo. At first I would read and let him finish the last word in the sentence, the rhyming part. One day I asked him to try reading the whole sentence and he did. I thought maybe I read to him so much that he memorized it, as I was starting to memorized some of the books. I switch to…

> Another thing I think help was that we put him to sleep with a radio station playing classical music since he was born, maybe even before that.

Trevor Noah talking about how he learnt German.

https://youtu.be/2PWSJH02krs?t=56

So I started learning. I learned in different ways, you know - to watch German movies, play German speeches on my iPod when I sleep. Your brain remembers things you don't even know. It's beautiful.

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

#178

Post by tgv »

cratermoon wrote: post #92
tgv wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Psychology works just fine in marketing, advertising, politics, Does it really? I think there isn't even good data on the effectiveness of marketing and advertising, let alone on the correctness of psychological theories used. Marketing and advertising run on common sense and FOMO.

> I think there isn't even good data on the effectiveness of marketing and advertising Thinking that is a kind of proof that marketing and advertising work - to get people to believe they aren't being profoundly influenced by marketing and advertising.

I happened to work in academic cog/neuro-sci research, and have ended up programming for a company that's doing some form of market research, but I haven't seen that data. Sure, advertising works, but how, and to what extent? There's a bunch of competing frameworks, each with their own research school, but it's more marketing than science. 20 to 30 dissimilar points on a 2D grid with a linear regression line, that's their evidence.

Marketeers are an easy target, though. They can't afford to ignore it, so they buy into some of those theories. And drop them just as easily. But they have to pretend it works.

If you've got good data on marketing effectiveness, I'd like to see it.

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

#179

Post by troupe »

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…

> Lucky? Yes, but we also felt that letting our kids learn to read at school was leaving too much to chance.

Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Your preparation gave your kids an opportunity they wouldn't have had otherwise.

There is quite a push to make parents feel that they are unable to teach their kids and that it needs to be left to "professionals." When COVID sent kids home and gave parents a view into what was actually being learned in the classrooms, I think many discovered that they as parents have quite a bit more skill in teaching their kids than they had realized.

I'm not trying to bash the public school system, but the kids that get the best education are the ones where the parents see the school system as an institution they are partnering with to educate their child instead of the place that is responsible for the education.

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

#180

Post by mbrudd »

nateburke wrote: post #130

No one is talking about the impact of kids seeing parents read on phones instead kids seeing parents read on books. When kids see a parent reading a book there's no doubt as to what they're doing. They are reading. OTOH, even if a parent is reading the most wholesome text on the most wholesome app, the fact that they are doing it on a phone admits some possibility of confusion in the eyes of the child observing. Ther…

100%! We read to our kids a TON from the day they were born -- no tricks or gimmicks, we just read to them. A lot. And they've always seen us reading actual books. YMMV, but our kids learned to read early and well and they both still enjoy reading. A lot.
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