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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

#201

Post by Taywee »

doubled112 wrote: post #167
joelfried wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tried that with our first and it didn't work. Some children require more direct support. Knowing what works for those who need it is pretty huge.

I'm in this boat. Every kid is different. My oldest was reading little books by 3. It was zero effort other than reading to him. Suddenly he just took over and didn't need mom and dad to read to him anymore. He's 8 now and can plow through the Harry Potter series in a week. Some days I think he might read better than I do at 31. My youngest is 5 and still struggling. He never really liked to be read to. As soon as he…

Basically the same here. Oldest was reading proficiently way before preschool, my youngest is 7 and still struggling to pick out up. He's really smart, and we read to him and with him plenty, but it just doesn't click for him like my oldest. He can do math no problem and he loves science and learning in general, but reading and writing are just specifically hard.

It's weird how different things can be for kids even in the same family and environment.

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

#202

Post by phoe-krk »

MisterTea wrote: post #191
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

You answered a rhetorical question.

Yep. Might have forgotten to add an implicit /s at the end of the original question.

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

#203

Post by nkrisc »

phoe-krk wrote: post #197
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 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 letter…

> 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.

It has nothing to do with the spoken language at all. Written English uses a script that has symbols which represent individual phonemes. English uses a phonetic script. Yes, spoken English has diverged from written English. The script is still phonetic.

What the symbols look like is beside the point.

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

#204

Post by analog31 »

tivert wrote: post #140
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…

> 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 at home was just part of our culture. When kids were deemed "ready," they learned to read. It wasn't a special thing. > I think my parents learned from whatever material they could…

Yes. It was called Mcguffey's First Eclectic Reader. After that, the kids books at the public library, which we picked out ourselves.

Still in print almost 200 years later.

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

#205

Post by milesskorpen »

Khaine wrote: post #181

Again from the podcast: Hanford: So much of this research isn’t new. And this idea that readers use context, multiple sources of information to solve words, identify words as they’re reading, that was really taken on by researchers back in the 70s and 80s, as an interesting question. Like, is that what we do? And they showed quite definitively that that wasn’t the case. I mean, were you sort of aware of that research…

Yes, early elementary reading education should include phonics. Calkins would agree - her first reading curriculum (which is relatively new compared to her writing work) tells schools using the program to supplement it with a phonics curriculum; That wasn't her specialty (just like she doesn't cover math and history). Reducing all reading instruction to phonics is wildly reductive, and her program does a good job at the non-phonics components (and possibly phonics too now? I believe they've added a lot more of that to the base curriculum with the recent revisions, but no personal experience).

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

#206

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

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…

I'm Greek. When teaching a kid to read English using phonics, how do you explain that "tough" and "rough" are written the same, but sound different than "though" and "borough", and that "doe" and "low" rhyme with each other and both the latter, but neither of the former?

And how do you explain "Loughborough"? Why not "Lowborrow", as in "low" and "borrow"?

Don't kids ask those things when you teach them to read with phonics?

I got similar questions for the French, btw. "Oiseaux"? Really, French?

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

#207

Post by mlyle »

tivert wrote: post #140
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…

> 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 at home was just part of our culture. When kids were deemed "ready," they learned to read. It wasn't a special thing. > I think my parents learned from whatever material they could…

Not OP, and it definitely isn't an 18th century reader... But "Bob Books" are a homeschool mainstay and a big part of how my kids developed initial reading skills.

https://bobbooks.com/

They were very interested in books / reading and were pretty motivated to practice the books and flash cards.

We also used the free version of starfall.com occasionally.

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

#208

Post by HeckFeck »

I have a young cousin, he's recently had his sixth birthday. Reading is completely novel for him. He loves it. Even though he doesn't fully understand the words, he will point to letters and sound them, then he will read the full word aloud. It is an almost majestic thing to witness; he is so pleased with himself when he gets the words right. He was reading everything he could find that had letters in my house.

Let's put him down for a future bookworm? Anecdote as it may be, it is evidence that phonics is the natural way to go. I don't think he'd have the same joy if I pointed to the words and said 'that shape means blue' or whatever.

Discovering the underlying logic then making it your own is what makes learning anything a pleasure. Indeed, how many of us on this forum would enjoy learning to program were it taught the same way?

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

#209

Post by davemp »

anon291 wrote: post #156
rahimnathwani wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you just teach phonics you aren't actually helping kids to read (they've tried) because reading is more than just sounds Of course, decoding isn't sufficient on its own (I can 'read' Portuguese without understanding it). But for a child who has oral fluency in a phonetic language, decoding is the main thing they need to learn, to allow them to bootstrap additional reading skills.

I have heard many teachers make this same criticism and it's so odd to me. Little children learn to read first by literally reading out loud. It's only later that 'silent' reading develops, and for most of us (I'd venture), we silently read by internally 'hearing' the audio version. At least I do (I'm listening to myself narrate this comment as I type it out silently). How else can you learn to read if not sounding o…

> . . . and for most of us (I'd venture), we silently read by internally 'hearing' the audio version.

Not until I read this sentence! Feels a bit like "breathing manually".

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

#210

Post by phoe-krk »

michael_j_ward wrote: post #195
phoe-krk wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If that is the case, how would you describe the act of comparing English to languages which actually have consistent letter-phoneme pronunciation throughout the language (starting with e.g. the same number of available letters and phonemes and a 1:1 mapping between them)?
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