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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

#441

Post by watwut »

javajosh wrote: post #243
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So many examples of bad definitions: German[1] electron charge[2] music notation[3]! But in the end, I think we have to largely give up the struggle against bad notation, of which spelling is just a part. If it really bothers us we can create our own notations and methods to translate between the old and new, but then you get splitting and fracturing. You can't play together. But if you invent such a notation, and ma…

English has essentially random grammar with some half working rationalizations slapped on it. German grammer has at least logic to it.

The articles (definite, indefinite) , prepositions and phrasal verbs are pure hell to learn.

And I don't undesirable what you mean by music notation and piano. The system is quite easy.

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

#442

Post by camgunz »

ch4s3 wrote: post #213
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.

> Literally no one is suggesting phonics only, that’s just the language decoding step

Well, part of the problem is that it's unclear what people are suggesting. Until pretty recently there was a big gap between "phonics works pretty well" and "here's how you build a phonics curriculum". Teachers actually need that gap to be closed. What happens in practice is someone hears this podcast, and shows up at meetings demanding that teachers teach phonics and the science of reading without knowing what any of it is.

> The problem is that the “whole language” approach has been shown not to work at all

This is a big exaggeration. Phonics works better but whole language works OK.

> regularly see 4th graders who are functionally illiterate.

We'll see how well phonics does. My guess is that reading is pretty hard and phonics will help, but we'll still see poor literacy rates. The UK has been doing synthetic phonics and it's not been going great [0], for instance.

> 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.

Let's be a little more civil than this.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p...

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

#443

Post by lazyasciiart »

phoe-krk wrote: post #292
jcranmer wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A phonetic script is one where the symbols represent sounds. The Latin alphabet is a phonetic script. In contrast, consider the shared numeric system used in both English and Polish. How do you pronounce "1"? What about "10" or "11" - does using the same symbol in all three numbers give you any hint about whether they sound the same? What if I'm saying the numbers in French?

The answer is of course, no, those symbols don't have an associated sound. They have an associated meaning and there are many spoken words for that meaning.

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

#444

Post by fikama »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #80

I just listened to this podcast a few weeks ago. What really struck me was just how obviously wrong the Guided Reading curriculum and three cueing theory was even just on its face, and how many people went along with replacing phonics with Guided Reading despite that. For example, the podcast recounts a Guided Reading lesson where the teacher covers up the words the kids are supposed to be reading with a piece of tap…

Your example sentence was incredibly hard to read for me. To be fair English isn't my primary language. But still, I think it could be that different people read in different ways, so some depend more on context than others, etc.

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

#445

Post by warner25 »

camgunz wrote: post #440
warner25 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that many teachers also (1) don't want to feel like parents can just casually do their job pretty well, like their years of education and certification aren't necessary, and / or (2) deal with an above-average number of parents who think their kids are above-average, so develop some skepticism over time. We just sent our kids to school knowing how to read without telling anyone and let their teachers tell u…

Teaching is pretty hard. It's a lot easier if you have only 1 kid, you control their home life also, they have a similar culture and background as you do, you can give them your (relatively) undivided attention all day, and you don't need to get them to pass a standardized test. Elementary school teachers have > 30 kids, new batch every year, from all walks of life, they can't control their home life, and they have t…

Oh, I agree. My wife taught in public high schools for a couple years in an economically struggling city. It was so hard (and paid so poorly, especially per hour of labor) that she quit after those two years and is still traumatized by it a decade later.

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

#446

Post by DonaldFisk »

housecarpenter wrote: post #235
megmogandog wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a small point, and I might be mistaken on terminology, but isn't English one of the least phonetic alphabets? afaik most other languages have much more consistent pronunciation, and one of the biggest complaints of English language learners (and precocious kids) is not being able to know how a word is pronounced based on its spelling.

The writing system of English is far more phonetic than logographic writing systems such as that of Chinese. That's the relevant difference here. It is true that English's writing system is one of the least phonetic alphabets , but alphabets are always, by definition, quite phonetic. Most writing systems are alphabetic and not logographic, so if you rank them all ordinally, English is going to have a similar rank to…

You have to distinguish different types of phoneticity. Can you pronounce what you read vs. spell what you hear? Can you pronounce an unfamiliar character?

With very few exceptions, Chinese characters are always pronounced the same way in the various Chinese languages (but not in Japanese), regardless of context, but if you're unfamiliar with a character, you'll have at best only a vague idea how to pronounce it. If you hear a Chinese syllable, you'll have several characters to choose from, and can only disambiguate them from context.

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

#447

Post by DonaldFisk »

oxfordmale wrote: post #17
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…

Phonics-centric reading is the next big scandal waiting to happen. Teaching reading in England may have been less successful since adapting the synthetic phonics approach rather than more. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p... The number of downvotes shows that it may still take a few years for people to understand that phonics is not the be all end all solution that it is currently made out…

It's been successful in Scotland: https://www.pearson.com/uk/educators/schools/making-an-impac...

This article compares Scotland with England: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/jan/19/phonics-ch...

One thing I've never seen addressed is the difference in accents between Scotland on the one hand, and England and Wales on the other. Scottish pronunciation of Standard English is in general closer to English spelling (e.g. "good" and "food" rhyme, and "r" is always pronounced).

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

#448

Post by milesskorpen »

polotics wrote: post #222
milesskorpen wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cont…

I don't think that's actually the case. When I'm reading, I'm reading sentences or paragraphs at a time (not letters at a time), regularly making significant guesses on word sound and meaning based on context clues. I think this is true of most adept readers. Clearly understanding individual letters is part of that, but would not agree that "phonics" == "reading"

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

#449

Post by ch4s3 »

camgunz wrote: post #442
ch4s3 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Literally no one is suggesting phonics only, that’s just the language decoding step Well, part of the problem is that it's unclear what people are suggesting. Until pretty recently there was a big gap between "phonics works pretty well" and "here's how you build a phonics curriculum". Teachers actually need that gap to be closed. What happens in practice is someone hears this podcast, and shows up at meetings deman…

> Phonics works better but whole language works OK.

The evidence suggest that whole language fails totally for low SES students.

Again, phonics is just about decoding language. Comprehension require a lot of vocabulary exposure, cultural competency, and other adjacent things that help build a mental schema of the language. The study the Guardian is citing says exactly this.

It's important to understand that the Guardian is engaged in a political debate around phonics and is criticizing it for "encourage a love of reading," which is not the point of teaching the decoding step to begin with. The Guardian article grossly misrepresents the actual study, which says in its conclusion that NO study in the UK met the evidentiary requirements for their inclusion criteria but other studies from the broader Anglosphere suggest that phonics is important in learning to read

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

#450

Post by germinalphrase »

nemo44x wrote: post #342
Auracle wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it’s worth, that doesn’t sound typical to me. I’d say pre-school, it’s it’s done at all, is done at the age of 4 - maybe 3 if you’re doing it super early. I’ve never heard of “K4” and “K5,” and most kids start kindergarten at age 5 and only do one year of it. Where do you live?

I did a lookup and a lot of places refer to what called “K4” as “Pre-k”. Where I grew up I had preschool and then K4 and then K5. My son started preschool at 2.5. I guess anywhere between 2.5 and 3 is typical here. Then pre-k at 4.

Where is "here"? In the upper midwest, "Pre-K"/"4K" is age four. Kindergarten is age 5. There is not typically anything earlier than that, and parents are on the hook to find their own daycare if not home with the child.
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