The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading • Hacker News Board

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#41

Post by madamelic » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 4:42 AM UTC

butteredpopcorn wrote: post #26

teilo wrote: post #12

I came from a big family, and I have 6 children. I have taught all my children to read using McGuffey. I helped many of my siblings learn to read. Much of the discussion around phonics is missing the point. It is a caricature to say that "phonetic" reading is completely phonetic to the exclusion of sight reading. This is binary thinking. Nobody teaches it that way. The goal is not and never was to read phonetically e…

Thanks for your thoughts and observations. I may be one of these “simply sight readers”. I supposedly taught myself to read at an alarmingly, insufferably young age. I have no memory of learning to read whatsoever, only the before and the after. We had a complete set of McGuffey readers lying around (thanks for mentioning these, brought back memories!) but by the time I was looking at them I could already sight read…

Not the person you replied to, but I can confirm network effects works.

My little sister is the baby of the family out of 4 and is excellent at everything to do with words. My mom's favorite story is when my sister was very young (I think 3 or 4) asked if the woods near our house had brambles.

No one had ever said that word to her... she read it from a book and figured out what it was by herself.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#42

Post by wahern » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 4:46 AM UTC

LocalH wrote: post #23

Marsymars wrote: post #16

Reading is both one of the great pleasures in my life, and an invaluable tool for acquiring new knowledge. It horrifies me to think that millions could be denied those pleasures and tools because of easily-remedied educational failures.

Nobody gives a shit about things like that. They're too busy worried about left vs right politics, or religion vs secular belief, or any host of other relatively unimportant issues, to even notice this happens. I'd imagine this is worse in the US as well, given the large cultural adversity to intelligence in the first place.

A couple decades ago phonics was a huge issue in the culture wars. For people of a certain age and political bent phonics represents a dumbing-down of early education; a concession to lower-class kids and especially of minorities. As I recall (as an adolescent observer) the debate overlapped with the controversy regarding ebonics, with which phonics might be somewhat conflated in people's minds.

If there's an analog today it's Common Core, or something related to Common Core. It doesn't lend itself as well to us vs them politics, though, as it's mostly a constellation of issues about which everybody has something negative to say. And I think that's true more generally--K-12 education is a quintessential political talking point. Everybody has strong opinions, they're just all largely the same uninformed opinions. It takes effort to keep people split along party lines, so you don't see the same persistent talking points across the years. Take vouchers--briefly a strongly divisive issue along party lines, but now a very muddy topic. People still have strong opinions, there's just no simple narrative for the media to play on.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#43

Post by ianbicking » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 4:47 AM UTC

I sometimes wonder if we need a better phonics. Doing it by letters feels crude, it requires a big gestalt moment when the kid puts the sounds together, and overemphasizes our very malleable vowels.

Something based more on syllables would seem better to me. Consider a simple work like “back”: kids sound out buh-ah-kuh which is a completely crazy version of the real word. You can’t say a B without a vowel, but instead of using the actual vowel (a) consonants usually get an “uh” added to them.

Learning syllables means learning maybe 5-10 times as many sounds, but then it’s also easy to add “ing” and “sh” and all the many combinations of letters that can’t be individually decoded.

The second problem is the kid has to pick out those letter combinations even though words are just a stream of letters. I wonder if it would be supportive to write the words in multiple colors to show the internal structure?

I feel like this must all exist already in some curriculum...?

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#44

Post by wisty » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 4:50 AM UTC

A lot of education experts (teachers, and worse, education academics and bureaucrats) are intelligent, white, upper-middle class people who are interested in academic stuff.

They remember how BORING it was to be forced to memorise times tables and phonics in primary school like the low socio-economic kids. Their parents had taught them to read and do basic arithmetic long before the rest of the class, and they might have benefited a bit of acceleration, so surely making the whole class skip the boring stuff would benefit everyone?

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#45

Post by mxcrossb » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 4:50 AM UTC

rossdavidh wrote: post #2

So, it all makes sense, but by this theory, it seems like the english words "through" and "tough" and "benign" should be really hard to learn, compared to "true" and "stuff" and wine". Also, English ought to be harder to learn to read than, say, German or Spanish. But I don't know of any evidence that English-speaking countries have lower literacy than Spanish- or German-speaking countries. I don't mean that phonics…

In the article they mention an experiment where they showed readers words in and out of context, to determine whether cues are important. It seems they could repeat this with phonetically simple and phonetically difficult words, and see if there is a difference.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#46

Post by csa » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 4:51 AM UTC

tylorr wrote: post #37

voldacar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's staggering to me that something so simple and obvious even needs to have a specific name like "phonics". That's just called reading lol. It's so bizarre how these people get put in positions of power over our educational system

I believe there are some languages that are not phonetic, you cannot read them by sound out the parts of the word.

Can you name one that does not have a phonetic system as well?

Note that Japanese has kana, and Chinese has pinyin and bopomofo/zhuyin.

Other than that... ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics?

Please let me know if you are aware of more.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#47

Post by teilo » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 4:52 AM UTC

ianbicking wrote: post #43

I sometimes wonder if we need a better phonics. Doing it by letters feels crude, it requires a big gestalt moment when the kid puts the sounds together, and overemphasizes our very malleable vowels. Something based more on syllables would seem better to me. Consider a simple work like “back”: kids sound out buh-ah-kuh which is a completely crazy version of the real word. You can’t say a B without a vowel, but instead…

This is already being done. In fact, that's central to almost any phonics course. Phonics isn't about letters in isolation. It's about letters in context. You start with the basic sounds, and quickly move onto letter pairings / groupings and how they effect the sound.

To use your example, the -ack suffix is shown with a whole bunch of words on a single card to make the idea plain: back, sack, pack, black, tack, etc.

So what you suggest is quite common in home and private school curriculums.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#48

Post by xnyan » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 4:53 AM UTC

wallace_f wrote: post #33

jumelles wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "fail" mean? What would happen to the children who attend a school that has "failed"?

Same thing that happens with everything else. They patronize a different service provider.

In America that idea is absolutely pointless. For almost all children, local property taxes are the source source of education funding. A local school board administers this money and has a huge amount of discretion in spending it with practically no oversight. They were responsible for hiring the previous school administration and will also hire the next,

If you have any idea of how to get out of this situation I'd be thrilled to hear it.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#49

Post by mxcrossb » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 4:54 AM UTC

SamReidHughes wrote: post #30

Having been taught with phonics, or at least having seen my classmates taught this way, I'd never imagined the world could be this fucked up. If you're going to teach this way, why not throw out the language and write with Chinese characters? The Japanese have a whole set of phonic letters that they use to teach kids. If a kid can't sound out supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, fire his teachers. "Sound out." Now the…

Even if phonics are not used when reading, they still have an advantage for writing. Rarely in my adult life have I found myself sounding out a word in a book unless it is deliberately ridiculous (as your example). But I definitely sound out words when trying to spell a word.

Re: The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

#50

Post by voldacar » Sun, Aug 25, 2019, 5:00 AM UTC

csa wrote: post #46

tylorr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe there are some languages that are not phonetic, you cannot read them by sound out the parts of the word.

Can you name one that does not have a phonetic system as well? Note that Japanese has kana, and Chinese has pinyin and bopomofo/zhuyin. Other than that... ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics? Please let me know if you are aware of more.

I'm not the parent, but the ancient sumerian cuneiform script comes to mind.

Egyptian hieroglyphics did have a set of phonetic glyphs as well as the more complex logographic ones