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Analysis points to a unexpected cause of reading difficulties

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Re: Analysis points to a unexpected cause of reading difficulties

#51

Post by gus_massa »

tuukkah wrote: post #7
gus_massa wrote: post #3

It would be nice to replicate in other languages. In Spanish and German, reading is almost phonetic, unlike English. Anyway, from my experience with my daughter, the step from single letters to silabes is difficult.

You should think "the step from single sounds to syllables", and the way to do that is to begin with the easy syllables like "tu", "mi", "el" (not unlike the multiplication or addition tables) before moving to longer ones. [And note that M alone is not "em", it has to be "m" when learning to read - a common pedagogical mistake! M + I makes "mi" not "emi", so M must be "m".] At least that's how children are taught in…

I agree. My older daughter was learning to read before school, and we started with the usual here in Argentina:

  ma, me, mi, mo, mu
  pa, pe, pi, po, pu
  sa, se, si, so, su
  ...
after a few more rows, we expected her to generalize because she is very smart, but it's harder than what we expected and we have to told her all the 21x5 cases. (The first cases were harder, and the lasts got easier.). I don't remember about the longer silabes like "pra", "bla", ... and there are weird words like "consternado" but I guess it was not obvious.

Re: Analysis points to a unexpected cause of reading difficulties

#52

Post by taeric »

gus_massa wrote: post #50
taeric wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the intro of the page you link: "The orthographic depth of an alphabetic orthography indicates the degree to which a written language deviates from simple one-to-one letter–phoneme correspondence." So, sure, if you want to discuss about how English orthography is deep, go for it. I won't even really disagree. Quite the contrary. The opening claim was that it wasn't phonetic, though. That is a different thing. It…

[Opening claimer here. Interesting discussion!] Probably I missed the exact names, I guess I should have used "deep" vs "shallow", instead of "phonetic" vs "not phonetic". The problem is that there are so many rules that it looks like each word has a special rule. I agree that Spanish also have subtle rules, we have some unusual cases here in Buenos Aires, in es-ar-bue the last "d" in "ciudad" is very faint and we sa…

Exactly. Apologies if I made it sound like you didn't have a point. I have a pet peeve against the folks that think we don't have a phonetic alphabet. A combination of words that is largely nonsensical. Alphabets are pretty much definitionally phonetic.

This got particularly bad when we realized that our kid's school was not teaching phonetics, but that the special tutor we hired was running a basic phonetics routine. And that that is really just 44 flashcards for them to work through.

To your point, Spanish generally has 24 phonemes. This is why they can map it to the 26 letters much more straight forwardly. Though, I'm a touch surprised it can map to German so easily, they have more phonemes than English, if I'm not mistaken.

All of that is to say, I'm glad you found the discussion interesting! Apologies if my pet peeve came on too strong. :D

I am curious, btw, I don't understand what you mean about "yesterday" sounding like either "today" or "Friday" The "day" on both of those sounds the same to me?

Re: Analysis points to a unexpected cause of reading difficulties

#53

Post by gus_massa »

taeric wrote: post #52
gus_massa wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Opening claimer here. Interesting discussion!] Probably I missed the exact names, I guess I should have used "deep" vs "shallow", instead of "phonetic" vs "not phonetic". The problem is that there are so many rules that it looks like each word has a special rule. I agree that Spanish also have subtle rules, we have some unusual cases here in Buenos Aires, in es-ar-bue the last "d" in "ciudad" is very faint and we sa…

Exactly. Apologies if I made it sound like you didn't have a point. I have a pet peeve against the folks that think we don't have a phonetic alphabet. A combination of words that is largely nonsensical. Alphabets are pretty much definitionally phonetic. This got particularly bad when we realized that our kid's school was not teaching phonetics, but that the special tutor we hired was running a basic phonetics routine…

> To your point, Spanish generally has 24 phonemes. This is why they can map it to the 26 letters much more straight forwardly.

We are also cheating with "ñ" :)

> Though, I'm a touch surprised it can map to German so easily, they have more phonemes than English, if I'm not mistaken.

I'm probably collapsing "ch", "sh", "tsch", "x" and a few more shushy sounds.

I'm ignoring the difference of the German "b" and "w".

I somewhat intentionally forgot "ä", "ö", "ü". (We have an "ü", but the use is very different, it's related to the weird cases of the "g" in Spanish.)

I missed "ß", but that's easy to add to the napkin.

> I am curious, btw, I don't understand what you mean about "yesterday" sounding like either "today" or "Friday" The "day" on both of those sounds the same to me?

Using the "Dora the Explorer" encoding method, I pronounce

today -> too-deh-ee

Friday -> frah-ee-dee (a surprising "ah" in "fri", but a mute "a" in "day")

yesterday -> it depends if you are talking or singing :)

Anyway, my English pronunciation is so bad that I never would confuse "then" and "than", but it looks like it's a common error in some native speakers.

Re: Analysis points to a unexpected cause of reading difficulties

#54

Post by taeric »

gus_massa wrote: post #53
taeric wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Apologies if I made it sound like you didn't have a point. I have a pet peeve against the folks that think we don't have a phonetic alphabet. A combination of words that is largely nonsensical. Alphabets are pretty much definitionally phonetic. This got particularly bad when we realized that our kid's school was not teaching phonetics, but that the special tutor we hired was running a basic phonetics routine…

> To your point, Spanish generally has 24 phonemes. This is why they can map it to the 26 letters much more straight forwardly. We are also cheating with "ñ" :) > Though, I'm a touch surprised it can map to German so easily, they have more phonemes than English, if I'm not mistaken. I'm probably collapsing "ch", "sh", "tsch", "x" and a few more shushy sounds. I'm ignoring the difference of the German "b" and "w". I s…

Ah, I think I see. You actually pronounce the "y" in those words? I'm not familiar with any dialects where that is common. I could see it, though. In general, I would expect the pronunciation for all of those is the same. They are all words with the root "day".

Copying from Merriam-Webster for them:

  Today: tə-ˈdā  
  Friday: frī-dā
  Yesterday:  ˈye-stər-dā
The page for Friday does have "-dē" listed, as well. Which maybe is what you are referencing?

Regardless, fun reading. And please don't take this as a criticism of your pronunciation!

Re: Analysis points to a unexpected cause of reading difficulties

#55

Post by tuukkah »

arjie wrote: post #43
tuukkah wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Practical pedagogy is called didactics and primary school teachers (should) learn a lot of it: after all, a child's brain is still quite undeveloped and you cannot teach them like you would teach a peer or yourself. E.g. you cannot teach grammar rules but you can teach a foreign language through singing, learning games etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didactic_method These approaches work for most children most of…

Knowing the keyword is quite useful. Thank you. Do you know of a teacher handbook like what I mentioned?

I don't know if there's a book literally like that, because the topic spans multiple university degrees and you should have the theoretical background to recognize situation X as well as to apply intervention Y. Even small children's brains are very complex and yet they lack the self-awareness, reflection and communication skills that would help the teacher in "debugging" the (potentially entangled) issues.

I had a look around for resources in English and this site seems highly valuable in math and in general: https://www.understood.org/en/topics/math

Re: Analysis points to a unexpected cause of reading difficulties

#57

Post by tuukkah »

gus_massa wrote: post #51
tuukkah wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should think "the step from single sounds to syllables", and the way to do that is to begin with the easy syllables like "tu", "mi", "el" (not unlike the multiplication or addition tables) before moving to longer ones. [And note that M alone is not "em", it has to be "m" when learning to read - a common pedagogical mistake! M + I makes "mi" not "emi", so M must be "m".] At least that's how children are taught in…

I agree. My older daughter was learning to read before school, and we started with the usual here in Argentina: ma, me, mi, mo, mu pa, pe, pi, po, pu sa, se, si, so, su ... after a few more rows, we expected her to generalize because she is very smart, but it's harder than what we expected and we have to told her all the 21x5 cases. (The first cases were harder, and the lasts got easier.). I don't remember about the…

Yes, I think it will be somewhat random how many cases each child needs to be taught before they generalize. One thing I forgot to mention is that for polysyllabic words, they use a learning aid here: in the beginning, the syllable boundaries are marked with dashes in all text and in the second year, only in longer words. I don't know if it works in Spanish too, something like this: "A-yer ce-na-mos cons-ter-na-dos." Again, I think it's unnecessary for some children but helps others to keep learning while gaining more experience with the syllables.

Re: Analysis points to a unexpected cause of reading difficulties

#58

Post by tuukkah »

arjie wrote: post #37
mjburgess wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teaching requires simulating the thought process and emotional state of learners. And then modelling the appropriate thought process to them, repairing their misunderstanding, and managing their cognitive load and other emotions. Outside of relatively narrow domains, I'm not sure a runbook makes any sense here. People are not, in this sense, machines.

Thank you for responding. My experience is different. A friend of mine shared an anecdote of his daughter not differentiating between two of something and three of something. Her grandfather, visiting from far away, is a child psychologist and after a short while with her and the right methods she reliably did so. The methods themselves weren't magic or highly tuned. They were actually a selection from a recipe book…

Another useful keyword might be "patterns": https://teachingpatterns.org/ https://learning-patterns.com/ https://www.jeckstein.com/pedagogical-patterns/

Re: Analysis points to a unexpected cause of reading difficulties

#59

Post by arjie »

tuukkah wrote: post #55
arjie wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowing the keyword is quite useful. Thank you. Do you know of a teacher handbook like what I mentioned?

I don't know if there's a book literally like that, because the topic spans multiple university degrees and you should have the theoretical background to recognize situation X as well as to apply intervention Y. Even small children's brains are very complex and yet they lack the self-awareness, reflection and communication skills that would help the teacher in "debugging" the (potentially entangled) issues. I had a l…

Thank you!

Re: Analysis points to a unexpected cause of reading difficulties

#60

Post by gus_massa »

taeric wrote: post #54
gus_massa wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To your point, Spanish generally has 24 phonemes. This is why they can map it to the 26 letters much more straight forwardly. We are also cheating with "ñ" :) > Though, I'm a touch surprised it can map to German so easily, they have more phonemes than English, if I'm not mistaken. I'm probably collapsing "ch", "sh", "tsch", "x" and a few more shushy sounds. I'm ignoring the difference of the German "b" and "w". I s…

Ah, I think I see. You actually pronounce the "y" in those words? I'm not familiar with any dialects where that is common. I could see it, though. In general, I would expect the pronunciation for all of those is the same. They are all words with the root "day". Copying from Merriam-Webster for them: Today: tə-ˈdā Friday: frī-dā Yesterday: ˈye-stər-dā The page for Friday does have "-dē" listed, as well. Which maybe is…

From https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/today it looks like it's like

  today -> too-deh-I
where the last "I" is like the "i" in "ship" and not like the "ee" in "sheep". I agree that it's not a very strong "ee" sound.
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