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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

#461

Post by anon291 »

com2kid wrote: post #456
anon291 wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I learned I didn't know how to pronounce a lot of words Taking words on a page and reading them out loud is a fundamental aspect of reading. The way you've written it here, you were not fully able to read until the fifth grade. That is ... problematic. From my perspective, the problem is this. Phonetic reading naturally encompasses whole word reading, because a child who starts reading with phonics, eventually read…

> This would be problematic if you were learning any new language for example. But it is a benefit when it comes to technical papers, chemical names, and foreign loan words. > This is not exceptional for an adult. Really? I've met plenty of functioning adults who say they sound out words in their head when reading. Go to any one of the many online threads about reading methods and you'll come across plenty of people…

> But it is a benefit when it comes to technical papers, chemical names, and foreign loan words.

Realistically, if I read technical papers and see a word I don't need to pronounce, I just refer to it in my mind as whatever it's written as. I learned phonics as a kid, yet have no trouble simply ignoring the pronunciation. Yet... since I do know phonics, I could pronounce the word, which is a strict superset of abilities compared to the whole word method. Which is my point... Phonics is strictly superior. There is nothing a whole word approach can do that a phonics student cannot, but there are things a phonics user can do a whole worder cannot.

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

#462

Post by anon291 »

com2kid wrote: post #457
camgunz wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I was well into middle school before I learned I didn't know how to pronounce a lot of words, but by 5th grade I was reading at a college level. > The way you've written it here, you were not fully able to read until the fifth grade. That is ... problematic. I don't really think that's what they're saying here. They wrote "by 5th grade I was reading at a college level". They have the classic "I read a lot so I rea…

> They have the classic "I read a lot so I read words I don't know how to pronounce" issue. I read a lot of fantasy literature as a kid, and I'll argue that not needing to bother with pronunciation is a huge boon when trying to go through a particular style of fantasy novel!

This is not the gotcha you think it is. Once a child masters reading to themselves silently, phonics or not, the ability to read fantasy novels is immediate. I'm curious how you see a teacher even evaluating a whole word based approach. If the child is unable to enunciate the word they're reading, all you can say is that the child claims to read the word and understand it.

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

#463

Post by nemo44x »

germinalphrase wrote: post #450
nemo44x wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

NYC has “3K for all”. All kids get free 3K now. Many surrounding areas (like in NJ) have new programs for this with coverage expanding.

Where I live it’s private. So parents send their kids to pre-school at 2.5-3. But by 4 the public schools will take them in.

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

#464

Post by [deleted] »

carlosjobim wrote: post #460
bell-cot wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not trusting authority figures tends to be extremely laborious, give little benefit, and gets you socially marked as an oddball. Trusting authority figures generally is easy and works out well. 'Till it doesn't. But that's an unknown ways into the future, and you'll have plenty of social acceptance & sympathy for your "perfectly reasonable" misfortune.

Not trusting authority figures is the #1 advice for success in life, and has been since the invention of "authorities". The goal of "authorities" are always to harm you as an individual and the more you follow them, the more harmed you will be. There is really no limit to how bad they are willing to make your short existence on earth, including - but not limited to - putting you in a muddy trench to be slaughtered by…

[deleted]

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

#465

Post by germinalphrase »

nemo44x wrote: post #463
germinalphrase wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

NYC has “3K for all”. All kids get free 3K now. Many surrounding areas (like in NJ) have new programs for this with coverage expanding. Where I live it’s private. So parents send their kids to pre-school at 2.5-3. But by 4 the public schools will take them in.

That’s interesting. Thanks.

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

#466

Post by OkayPhysicist »

mcv wrote: post #125

I can't help but think of my youngest son. He's been having language development problems his whole life; barely spoke at 3. He got help, and he quickly become a very adept speaker, using complex sentence structures, though he does have a bit of a speech impediment. I already expected him to have trouble learning to read, and he did. It was hard, he hated it, and we received a lot of help with it. One thing that stru…

> Though I do wonder if "sounding out" words might be a less effective strategy in English than it would be in some other languages...

Sure, a language like Turkish (29 characters, 29 sounds) will be more phonetic, but English's eccentricities are overstated, with most boiling down to "unstressed vowels get shortened, shwa-ed, or skipped". Once you clear the first 50 or so words by frequency, it gets pretty sound-it-out for a good long time before you start hitting weird loan words.

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

#467

Post by OkayPhysicist »

Muromec wrote: post #69
isaacfrond wrote: post #15

Can anybody give the tl;dr. What did go wrong? (I consider myself an excellent reader, but unfortunately, there is no article...)

English doesn't have consistent rule-based writing spelling, so kids have to essentially memorize all word spellings. Since some kids suck at this game, there have to be compensation strategy to fill in the blanks. At some point it went too far and the last resort compensation strategy became the main method children are taugh (tough? tof? damn this language, it makes no sense) to read.

To be fair, English is much more consistent in the letters->sounds direction than it is in the sounds->letters direction. While being able to say a word in English hardly indicates a spelling due to there being several ways to represent the same sound, the opposite direction works pretty well, since there isn't a ton of ambiguity about what sound a given letter/digraph makes. The "exceptions" to that rule tend to be cases where we weaken (shorten/shwa/skip) unstressed vowels.

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

#468

Post by tourmalinetaco »

nice2meetu wrote: post #225
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…

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 s…

20 words in their first year? That’s insane. Granted I haven’t been in the US system for 20 odd years, but I believe we easily learned 100-150 in our first year here.

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

#469

Post by Vanderson »

tdekken wrote: post #256
Vanderson wrote: post #9

Here's a video of Siegfried Engelmann, who is mentioned in this article, demonstrating how he had taught inner city grade school age kids that were considered "unteachable" (I can't recall the exact label I was told) doing algebra... live. (about 20 min in) I think they are about 4th or 5th grade. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9SjFsimywA Many people didn't like the strict requirement of his reading methods, from w…

Hi Vanderson, I am surprised to hear mention of Engelmann here on HN :). I would love to connect and learn more about how you discovered DI. FWIW, I am a former principal engineer at a FAANG company turned educational researcher / edtech founder. I am working to revive Engelmann's Theory of Instruction and democratize access to the explicit, systematic teaching of the skills of reading (e.g., phonological awareness,…

I have a friend who I met in college who got his PhD working under Zig, which is how people who knew Engelmann called him. And this friend gave me a copy of his book "How to teach your child to read in 100 lessons" and I used it to teach my own kids.

I think you have an up hill battle with getting traction with DI, but if you succeed that would be a great benefit to many people. (my perception)

What is the protocol on this site for starting conversations "offline"?

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

#470

Post by bradknowles »

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…

My grandfather sold World Book encyclopedias. He ended up being a regional manager for Fields Enterprises, for World Book. We always had recent editions of the encyclopedia around the house.

That plus my Dad's SF book collection were the primary influencers of my early reading education.

By sixth grade, I was reading at a college level, and the teachers had no idea what to do with me.

I'm only a single person, but I think for some of us, this immersion method works well. When the kid has a question, teach them to look up the answers themselves. Also make them provide references for the answers they provide later, so that you can be reasonably sure they're not lying.

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