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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

#221

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

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

“Oiseaux” is perfectly regular and involves no exceptions to the baseline rules of French pronunciation, though, AFAIK; if it were pronounced any way other than it is, it would warrant a question...

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

#222

Post by polotics »

milesskorpen wrote: post #205
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…

I think we should all stop using the term "phonics".

If you read the whole article I think you will agree that what you call "phonics" is actually just "reading"...

All of the rest, the context, cues, word-recognition, is something on top of seeing the letters, knowing the sound the make individually, knowing the sound they make when put in sequence. Good readers still see all the letters, don't work on guessing context, looking for cues, or seeing words as unified pictures.

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

#223

Post by setgree »

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…

> These people belong in gaol.

Luckily in the US, being very wrong about something, even when it's very consequential, is not illegal. We'd have a much less entrepreneurial society, and a lot less open, free debate, if it were.

Lucy Calkins did not force people to follow her methods, she persuaded them through teaching and advocacy.

FWIW I think a lot of affected students would have a reasonable civil case against Teacher's College, and other places where teachers were taught this nonsense, for harms done. If medical doctors were routinely taught something wrong and contrary to the published research at medical schools, we'd probably be thinking about a similar suit. But we don't generally put teachers and doctors in the same bucket; for one thing, teachers don't take a hippocratic oath.

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

#224

Post by throwaway8503 »

Hot take, but: the same issue is present in math, with the aggressive deprioritization of rote learning of arithmetic. People need a foundation upon which to build higher concepts; knowing your times tables is necessary to grasp division algorithms.

The emphasis (in reading, and math) on the wider concepts rather than the boring learning is a problem.

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

#225

Post by nice2meetu »

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 were told it was better to let the teachers teach otherwise kids learn bad habits or don’t engage.

That being said our eldest went to school at 4 1/2 in Australia and they had to learn 100 words in their first year (phonics), and we were a little worried that it seemed so intense, though she ended up learning 200 or so and went on to become a voracious reader. But then we moved to the US and our youngest started school at 5 1/2 and had to learn 20 words in her first year and is now 7 and can barely read. In hindsight it does seem so late, and I agree there is so much of the world and learning and curiosity they miss out on by not being able to read.

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

#226

Post by tgv »

nmca wrote: post #101
tgv wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Psychology is already quite lousy as a science, which has hardly made progress in 100 years, but educational sciences bungle somewhere below even social psychology. There's no reproducability, there's no idea of how the learning process works, let alone how to organize a curriculum. They've got no idea what they're doing, yet populate the school boards and ministeries, and mandate methods and topics. We should take t…

Just to steelman for a second but educational research is obviously quite hard (long horizons, large costs including opportunity costs, vulnerable groups necessitating careful ethical standards and consideration). I'd still give the folks involved a D-, but the average evidence being weaker than Psych is to be expected given equal investment.

But then there's no worth in that research (apart from trying to find a way to more reliable theories). Bad research should be ignored, not taken as "evidence based".

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

#227

Post by nice2meetu »

tivert wrote: post #152
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.

>> We didn't teach our kids to read. We just read to them. A lot. Every day. >> By the time they were in kindergarten they could read on their own. > 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. Yeah, I think the GP is making the same error has the "whole language" approach people--making the faulty assumption that…

That time my daughter proudly announced “look Daddy, I can read this book with my eyes closed”

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

#228

Post by humean_being »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #93
humean_being wrote: post #66

This is horrifying. If I understood this correctly, they are being taught effectively *next token prediction* instead of reading. The only children that will learn to read will probably be in spite of this system.

Well, I was taught using phonics, and then I wrote a paper that basically applied the idea to LLMs for constrained text generation. I'd say mission accomplished.

This is a chance, stay with me here, that humans and LLMs learn differently.

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

#229

Post by oxfordmale »

nkrisc wrote: post #215
phoe-krk wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

English is an alphabetic language not a phonetic one.

In a phonetic language, you can pronounce a word just based on its written representation.

Just compare current and paste tense of read. It is spelled the same but pronounced differently.

You can argue it is an phonetically inconsistent language. However, you will find most of inconsistencies occur in the most frequently used words, making it hard for a beginner.

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