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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

#481

Post by camgunz »

elzbardico wrote: post #238
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…

For a long time I've held the unpopular opinion that most elementary teachers are utterly incompetent, and that as an academic field, Education is becoming more and more bullshit. I will be down-voted to hell because of this, and yet, the reality always seems to agree with my world-view.

I don't mean to come off as a grumpy Xennial, but the more I interact with people in professional roles (attorneys, doctors, nurses, teachers, managers) the more I'm convince the majority of people are just incompetent. Sometimes I try and reframe this into "you have unreasonably high expectations maybe because of some personality/upbringing weirdness", but, ongoing battle haha.

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

#482

Post by camgunz »

ch4s3 wrote: post #449
camgunz wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Guard…

>> Phonics works better but whole language works OK.

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

Again "fails totally" is wrong, but also low SES students are a difficult group for complicated reasons, none of which teachers control.

> 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.

Totally agree, my beef is that most of the legislation and parental demands around phonics and SOR force teachers to use phonics in situations where they know it won't work, or actively isn't working.

> 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,"

I mean maybe, but go beyond it and look at the stuff they cite: the report and the PISA study. Teachers aren't just responsible for getting students to sound out words correctly, they need to take illiterate children and make them functioning members of advanced societies. The report has lots of data on how the focus on phonics undermines this long term goal.

The quote from the DoE is:

"Since the introduction of the phonics screening check in 2012, the percentage of Year 1 pupils meeting the expected standard in reading has risen from 58% to 82%, with 92% of children achieving this standard by Year 2."

That's good! But it's entirely unresponsive to the argument the report makes, which is that while phonics works for getting students to sound stuff out, their reading scores in subsequent years drop dramatically. It's Table 1 in their report.

> 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

I don't think this is what it says, but either way it's pretty common for academic papers to list ways their conclusions could be wrong. This is a sign of a good paper, not a bad one.

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

#483

Post by camgunz »

anon291 wrote: post #461
com2kid wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 abiliti…

It's strictly superior from a "can you pronounce words" standpoint, but not necessarily in terms of a "long-term reader" standpoint. As another "whole words" person who pronounced the 'b' in 'subtle' until he was in like 5th/6th grade, I can tell you I was reading and comprehending things that my peers in the "gifted" program were not and could not, and that continued... probably to the present day but definitely through my school age years.

And there's evidence that the focus on phonics essentially kills a love of reading and has a deleterious effect on long-term reading skills [0].

[0]: https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.10...

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

#484

Post by polotics »

milesskorpen wrote: post #448
polotics wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Did you read the article? Tests have been made that show all readers look at individual letters, subconsciously.

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

#485

Post by robertlagrant »

onionisafruit wrote: post #104
robertlagrant wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this comment should be removed, as it ranks below 7 on the Rob-Grant scale.

You made me google rob-grant scale only to come back here and notice your handle. Good job, Rob.

Now it needs to be a real scale.

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

#486

Post by gladiatr72 »

bluGill wrote: post #308
DocTomoe wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this an anglosaxon thing? Here in Germany, I have never heard of anyone telling a child they had to "learn x words". We teach letters and common diphthongs, and then make the kids understand that these glyphs can form words with meanings. When I look at my father's schoolbooks, that already was the common way to teach reading in the 1950s.

Probably - English doesn't have good rules of spelling, so phonetics is not a good approach to learning to read. There are often several different phonetic ways you could spell a world, only one of which is right (to, too, two). In reverse there are often several different phonetic ways to pronounce a written word. As someone with Dysgraphia I often wished we reformed English to be more phonetic (I'm not sure if it w…

Um. You have not read any pre-19th century English-language literature, have you? If you think there are no good rules, expose yourself to how the language was written before there were _any_ such rules. Finnigin's Wake, anything by Cotton Mathers and the like.

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

#487

Post by gladiatr72 »

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…

Because then you would have a baked-in dialectic that no system can explain.

Check out the book, Finnigan's Wake, by James Joyce for an example.

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

#488

Post by gladiatr72 »

pianoben wrote: post #385
javajosh wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Western music notation originated in religious vocal scores, at a time when church music was largely homophonic (just one melody). As melody is linear through time, using the horizontal axis to denote time makes a lot of sense - just like we do with the written word. Of course Gradually tastes changed and Church music became polyphonic - adding a second (and third, fourth, fifth, etc) vocal line was a natural adaptat…

I remember some of seeing some of those scores. Fascinating notation systems, but they required a great deal of front matter to comprehend the intent of the notation.

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

#489

Post by tgv »

cratermoon wrote: post #368
tgv wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I happened to work in academic cog/neuro-sci research, and have ended up programming for a company that's doing some form of market research, but I haven't seen that data. Sure, advertising works, but how, and to what extent? There's a bunch of competing frameworks, each with their own research school, but it's more marketing than science. 20 to 30 dissimilar points on a 2D grid with a linear regression line, that's…

The original assertion was that psychology works just fine in marketing and advertising, and you asked "does it really?" Here you say, "Sure, advertising works". While quantitative data on how it works and how effective it is might be lacking, the point is that it does work. The remaining questions are of the "more study is needed to draw any conclusions" kinds of objections that the tobacco industry used to obfuscat…

Advertising isn't psychology, and certainly not evidence that a certain theory is correct.

> the point is that it does work

The point was: psychology is not a good science, and educational science is worse. How come these people run schools?

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

#490

Post by gladiatr72 »

nkrisc wrote: post #473
oxfordmale wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.teflcourse.net/blog/english-as-a-non-phonetic-la...

The issue in this thread is confusion between two separate ideas: "English is a phonetic langauge" and "English uses a phonetic script". The former point can be debated. The latter, not. The English script is phonetic. Graphemes represent phonemes. The English script (its writing system), which is based on the Latin alphabet (the graphic symbols) is phonetic because the symbols represent sounds and have no intrinsic…

There were blog posts that surfaced in the '10s trying to make a case for official inclusion of emoji into the written language. Thankfully that concept got little traction.
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