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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

#191

Post by MisterTea »

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

You answered a rhetorical question.

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

#192

Post by oxfordmale »

nkrisc wrote: post #175
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

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.

English is not phonetic. We do not always say a word the same way we spell it, unlike for example Spanish.

According to your definition all spoken languages are phonetic.

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

#193

Post by camgunz »

spaceprison wrote: post #147
camgunz wrote: post #58

All the teachers I know are pretty irritated by Sold a Story, mostly their criticisms are: - if you just teach phonics you aren't actually helping kids to read (they've tried) because reading is more than just sounds - Sold a Story omits basically any nuance for shock facts I also think it's important to point out that APM Reports isn't an independent journalistic outfit. They accept grants for specific research. In…

Of course 'phonics only' wouldn't work, but this 'guess your way to reading' type of instruction was used with two of my three kids and I can tell you it was a joke. It wasn't until we actively intervened and started teaching phonics at home with our middle son and moving our daughter to a private school that taught phonics as a core function of their reading curriculum did they start to actually read. I haven't list…

Yeah I mean, other commenters have noted that it takes a while for curricula to change, but yeah I bet that's what was going on and that sounds like bad instruction.

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

#194

Post by vehemenz »

gavinmckenzie wrote: post #37

My daughter went through a Montessori education from 18 months old through grade 8. As part of her Montessori experience, starting at age three, she began to learn to write. They trace "sandpaper" letters with their fingers; moving their fingers along the strokes of letters pre-printed on cardboard in a rough texture. From there they learn to write the letters and words, speaking the words aloud. Thus the focus is on…

I never gave it much thought, but I am currently teaching my 3-year-old to write letters first because I think the recognition and muscle memory with the letters would help with stringing the letters together later.

It might be pedagogically novel, but I'm confident lots of people learn this way, at least for alphabet-based languages.

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

#195

Post by michael_j_ward »

phoe-krk wrote: post #172
tines wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Pointing out a few outliers in such a large system like the English Language and using them to justify reclassifying the entire thing is braindead.

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

#196

Post by oxfordmale »

michael_j_ward wrote: post #171
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

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 lear…

Japanese is phonetic, unlike English. In Japanese spelling is phonetic and pronunciation is consistent. Words sound like they look and look like they sound. Even someone who’s never studied Japanese before could read a text written in romaji and be understood without trouble (unlike someone studying French, for example).

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

#197

Post by phoe-krk »

nkrisc wrote: post #175
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

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.

>English does use a phonetic script. (...) That fact that one symbol can possibly represent multiple phonemes doesn't make it not a phonetic script.

The fact that English uses Latin letters for writing doesn't mean that it uses any other properties of Latin script. Compare English-the-language to Latin-the-language; the latter is highly phonetic whereas English is not.

Or, in other words, in English individual letters neither represent phonemes nor carry meaning; it's only clumps of letters, or individual words, that have both meaning and pronunciation assigned to them. Unlike in Latin.

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

#198

Post by nkrisc »

oxfordmale wrote: post #192
nkrisc wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

English is not phonetic. We do not always say a word the same way we spell it, unlike for example Spanish. According to your definition all spoken languages are phonetic.

> > English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right?

> No, it doesn't

Yes, it does.

This isn't about the language, it's about the script. English is written with a phonetic script.

> According to your definition all spoken languages are phonetic.

I said nothing about spoken languages in my comment.

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

#199

Post by HeckFeck »

jononomo wrote: post #51
soneca wrote: post #40

Can someone please summarize what is this wrong methodology about?

It became fashionable in early childhood education circles to teach children to read by looking at the accompanying pictures in the book instead of by deciphering the letters and sounding out the word. This led to many parents thinking that their kids must have dyslexia because they weren't learning to read. You should listen to the podcast -- it is fascinating. I listened to the entire series three times because I c…

> It blew my mind that some people think that reading is not about deciphering letters and sounding out words, and that these are the people in charge of teaching kids how to read.

Indeed. We can debate the merits of letters vs ideograms as much as we like, but English is not Chinese. Reading an alphabet is a phonetic exercise, even with all the exceptions in spoken English.

And yes, the 'dyslexia epidemic' is harrowing. Sure video-everywhere is part to blame, but how many readers and writers are we down due to children being given a label that says 'you will never spell' early in life. Even if well-intentioned the label is detrimental to your relationship with words.

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

#200

Post by phoe-krk »

nkrisc wrote: post #198
oxfordmale wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is not phonetic. We do not always say a word the same way we spell it, unlike for example Spanish. According to your definition all spoken languages are phonetic.

> > English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right? > No, it doesn't Yes, it does. This isn't about the language, it's about the script. English is written with a phonetic script. > According to your definition all spoken languages are phonetic. I said nothing about spoken languages in my comment.

The fact that it uses Latin letters doesn't make it phonetic if the same letter consistently resolves to different phonemes or lack thereof, depending on its context.
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