Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by vehemenz » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 3:27 PM UTC

edtechdev wrote: post #124

Educational researcher here. There's no such thing as a "science of reading." It's part of the highly politicized "reading wars" (see also the "math wars" which has been going on for decades). It's no coincidence that Republicans are pushing phonics as the end all be all solution to teaching reading, and you can cherry pick educational research studies that support or disconfirm various teaching strategies. Phonics h…

I notice that the study you cite is measuring effectiveness in reading interventions. Obviously, that's where the data is coming from because we don't carefully track readers who learn successfully at a much earlier age.

However, I wonder if the ideal pedagogy would be different for younger students (maybe pre-K to 1st) who have less knowledge and smaller vocabularies? It's a bit tricky because a lot of the students who need intervention probably need remedial instruction in other areas too, but some of them may have been good students who struggled with reading.

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

#212

Post by Taywee » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 3:27 PM UTC

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…

English is highly non-phonemic. It's not absurd. If you considered English phonetic, you'd have to consider almost every modern language writing system phonetic. The distinction wouldn't mean much.

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

#213

Post by ch4s3 » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 3:28 PM UTC

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…

Literally no one is suggesting phonics only, that’s just the language decoding step. The problem is that the “whole language” approach has been shown not to work at all, and we regularly see 4th graders who are functionally illiterate.

If your teacher friends are mad, maybe it’s because they’re being called out for using a shitty method that’s ruin the lives of poor children.

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

#214

Post by mlyle » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 3:28 PM UTC

phoe-krk wrote: post #200

nkrisc wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > 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.

You may argue it's not a very good phonetic script, with all of the special cases present... But letters mostly represent sounds, unlike written languages where characters represent concepts.

A computer program written with knowledge of a few dozen of the common special cases would pronounce >90% of English words correctly and be close on most of the rest, "cupboard" notwithstanding. Indeed, look at how well 80's-era speech to text did with this exact approach.

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

#215

Post by nkrisc » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 3:30 PM UTC

phoe-krk wrote: post #200

nkrisc wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > 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.

It's phonetic because the graphemes (whatever they look like) represent phonemes.

If English doesn't use a phonetic writing system, then what kind does it use? Ideographic? Syllabic?

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

#216

Post by cjohnson318 » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 3:33 PM UTC

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…

> Um, again, you’re asking me to go back and figure out what was in my mind at one point or another.

Yeah dude, people expect you to be able to explain your reasoning. Even reasoning that you did in the past(!) which is pretty much all of it.

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

#217

Post by kelseyfrog » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 3:35 PM UTC

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…

I can also personally vouch for Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. It accelerated my ability to teach my kiddo to read by doing exactly what I wasn't an expert in - designing a reading pedagogy. We worked though the book in pandemic kindergarten and I can't help but attribute his current reading success to the work we did back then. It was a silver lining in a time of uncertainty and the memories I have of us working through the book together are memories I'll cherish for the rest of my life.

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

#218

Post by cjohnson318 » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 3:35 PM UTC

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #206

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…

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 p…

From what I recall, you hear "because that's the way it is" a lot.

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

#219

Post by lisper » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 3:36 PM UTC

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…

> English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right?

Yes, that's why "right", "write" and "rite" all sound different.

Oh, wait...

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

#220

Post by 4bpp » Mon, Apr 17, 2023, 3:38 PM UTC

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…

I would be a bit cautious about taking teachers' word for what works and what doesn't work. Every critical piece on reading instruction on the US seems to make it pretty clear that teachers have a strong emotional and political attachment to the "whole language" method that might cloud their judgement and motivate their reasoning. See for instance the opening quote of an older article in Time (https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers...):

> The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw [a phonics-based curriculum] out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says.