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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

#291

Post by pitaj »

kleiba wrote: post #4

I seriously doubt that 75% of fourth graders read as bad as the examples at the beginning. But what troubles me more is that people go to universities to study education, and yet after all these years, they still seem to have no clue about how to teach a diverse group of young kids. Yet, they're often very confident in their teaching methods. I'm not very familiar with the field, unfortunately, but it is my understan…

Just to comment on the specific issue at hand:

The science of how kids learn to read (at least for English an phonetic languages like it) is pretty much settled. But how curricula are built on the theory is another question.

And studies show that the "cueing" approach is not effective or even counter-productive. Yet how those curricula are laid out with "leveled books" allows children to appear like they know how to read at advancing levels. Actually they're just memorizing and using context clues to "read", without being able to read the words in isolation.

That's what makes the "whole language" approach so insidious: it can be years before parents and teachers recognize that the kids can't really read. And in some cases, breaking the bad habits of guessing and using context instead of decoding makes it take even longer to properly teach the kids to read.

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

#292

Post by phoe-krk »

jcranmer wrote: post #278
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…

The phonetic value of [h] is /h/. In English spelling, many phonetic units are digraphs, not monographs (unsurprising when you consider that English has ~40 phonemes but only 26 letters in its alphabet). The core phonetic rules of English are actually quite simple: * Map consonant digraphs to phonemes where appropriate (e.g., [ch] goes to /tʃ/, [ph] goes to /f/). * Map remaining consonants to a single phoneme, althou…

Still complex compared to Polish, which has a ratio of letters-to-phonemes much closer to 1 (five digraphs in total). While it's a hard language to learn overall, its orthography is one of the parts that are pretty simple compared to English. Only three homophone pairs are present throughout the language (H/CH, Ż/RZ, Ó/U); voicing and devoicing is a thing (PRZ... almost always sounds like PSZ...); Ą and Ę have a rule where they are fully nasalized depending on context; palatalization is everywhere, and it's probably the most complex part. Foreign words are very often polonized ("onomatopeja" from your example).

Maybe I'm biased as a Polish native but I do not think the above is comparable to the mess of exceptions that is English.

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

#293

Post by scythe »

makeitdouble wrote: post #264
numeromancer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This instruction book was authored by Siegfried Engelmann, who, among others, developed Direct Instruction. In the late 60s/early 70s there was a thorough comparison of various teaching methods called Project Follow-through; Direct Instruction did far better than all of the other methods. The results of this study were devoutly ignored by the educational establishment, and often denigrated as being "authoritarian". E…

From the his wikipedia page [0], he seems to have spent at most 4 years actually teaching (from "early 1960s" to 1964), was a marketing guy among other things before that, and spent a long career writing eductation books and articles and seminars after that. You have valid point on his work being assessed and valorized in studies, but parent's point also stands stronger in my mind. The ratio of actual experience in t…

What you wrote about the Wikipedia page is not consistent with what I read on the Wikipedia page:

>While working as a marketing director in the early 1960s, Engelmann became interested with how children learn.

>[...]

>In 1964, he left his job in advertising and became a research associate

>[...]

>In 1970, he moved from the University of Illinois to the University of Oregon in Eugene, becoming a Professor in the University's College of Education.[2][3]

He was never a public school teacher, although he may have taught students as a research associate. He was apparently teaching as a hobbyist, including homeschooling.

The kerfuffle about whether he was "actually teaching", however, actually misses the point. While you can, at least in principle, understand the experience of a student by experimenting on students, you will never understand the experience of a teacher by experimenting on students. Whatever method you come up with or promote must ultimately be implemented by real flesh-and-blood humans working under real constraints (including the limits of their own abilities and emotions) with realistic organizational and community dynamics. This is what I interpreted the original complaint about researchers versus engineers as analogized to software development to mean.

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

#294

Post by taeric »

phoe-krk wrote: post #250
nkrisc wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't know what kind it uses, but it's not phonetic, because the graphemes do not represent phonemes, despite your claims. If English was truly phonetic, to name a few examples again: the pronunciation of "are" would most likely be a prefix of "area", since the graphemes for "are" are present in "area"; "read" and "read" would be read the same, since the graphemes for "read" and "read" are identical; the words "fre…

If it was not phonetic, what "idea" would the letter "r" represent? That it can represent different phonetics depending on other rules doesn't change that it represents phonetics.

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

#295

Post by euroderf »

A book I bought (its name escapes me ATM) said, make word-only flash cards (no pix needed) of things your kid can directly relate to. Like body parts. Then colors and numbers.

It seemed to work. We could play a "body parts game" where I shuffle the deck and we go thru it one at a time: he points to the part I name... and gradually he took over reading them.

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

#296

Post by droopyEyelids »

denton-scratch wrote: post #135
gumby wrote: post #6

Ironically a story about reading is provided as a series of podcasts. At least there are transcripts, but the info density is extremely low.

Yeah, I just read the "transcripts". I guess I missed a lot, because I suspect they're not transcripts, but single-sentence summaries. I think presenting content as podcasts is lazy (and rude). To consume podcast content, I have to sit through the whole thing, because I can't skim or skip ahead. Of course, it saves the author's time - it's quicker for them to speak it than to write it; so they're trading their time f…

It's not an exaggeration to say that most episodes of the podcast could be summarized with a single sentence.

The proper summary is simply that "Phonics is a vital tool to teach many kids to read."

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

#297

Post by generalizations »

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…

Simple explanation is that the spelling rules are a combination of several older languages, saxon and french included. So a lot of the trick is to just recognize which language the word construction originated in.

English is phonetic; but it's also bimodal.

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

#298

Post by potta_coffee »

sdwr wrote: post #254
troupe wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 int…

Yeah, I see this helpless, "leave it to the experts" attitude in a few places, and absolutely hate it.

It's one of the attitudes being pushed in the education system itself. After a couple of generations, "expertism" has embedded deeply into the American mindset. It's very dangerous to live in a culture where we don't question experts.

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

#299

Post by gumby »

denton-scratch wrote: post #135
gumby wrote: post #6

Ironically a story about reading is provided as a series of podcasts. At least there are transcripts, but the info density is extremely low.

Yeah, I just read the "transcripts". I guess I missed a lot, because I suspect they're not transcripts, but single-sentence summaries. I think presenting content as podcasts is lazy (and rude). To consume podcast content, I have to sit through the whole thing, because I can't skim or skip ahead. Of course, it saves the author's time - it's quicker for them to speak it than to write it; so they're trading their time f…

Exactly me. Podcasts in particular are terrible because they are rarely edited at all.

If you listen to someone like Terry Gross there's an enormous amount of editing involved to make it sound like a natural conversation. Podcast world is the opposite.

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

#300

Post by danielmarkbruce »

obscurette wrote: post #289

Teacher, educator and father of three kids here. I strongly disagree that "there is not enough evidence based science in teaching" etc. If there is something really to highlight what's wrong with education systems all over the world, it's too much "evidence based science". Every educational psychologist and his dog has a novel theory how learning works, how something should be taught and have a ton of evidence why. A…

You are saying "the evidence is bullshit", right?
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