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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

#501

Post by Ajedi32 »

polotics wrote: post #484
milesskorpen wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a lttile mroe colmceptiad tahn taht toguhh. Yes, iuiivadndl ltteres do metatr, but good rdreeas aern't mtenally snidunog out eervy wrod tehy raed. Raehtr, thier eeys tkae in eevry leettr at ocne and teihr brinas intntalsy renzgioce the wrod. Taht's why you can prlaboby slitl raed tihs ppaaagrrh eevn thgouh the mdidle leetrts in ervey wrod are scerbmald.

(It's a little more complicated than that though. Yes, individual letters do matter, but good readers aren't mentally sounding out every word they read. Rather, their eyes take in every letter at once and their brains instantly recognize the word. That's why you can probably still read this paragraph even though the middle letters in every word are scrambled.)

Phonics is important for being able to read words your brain isn't already familiar with, which is especially critical during the learning process when "words your brain isn't already familiar with" is like 95% of words. Context clues can help there too, but those aren't nearly as easy or accurate as just sounding out the word.

Fun anecdote: I recently had a chance to re-experience that learning process myself after listening to a long fantasy book series on Audible with lots of made-up terms (names, cities, magic items, etc), then going on a fan forum later and seeing those same words spelled out for the first time ever. Phonics was invaluable to me in puzzling out which words corresponded to which terms I was familiar with from listening to the series.

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

#502

Post by kthejoker2 »

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…

Just wanted to +1 Teach Your achild ... taught all my 4 kids over the summer after they turned 4 with minimal fuss.

Definitely a top 10 all time purchase.

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

#503

Post by tdekken »

Vanderson wrote: post #469
tdekken wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Thanks so much for your response Vanderson! I wish I had known about How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Lessons when I was teaching my daughter. I definitely fumbled my way through it :).

> 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)

I completely agree and it really isn't too surprising that DI never took off in schools. FWIW, I am looking to revive the underlying pedagogy (e.g., teaching sequences for non-comparatives, joining forms, etc.) rather than DI proper.

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

Interesting question that I never stopped to consider :). I have met dozens of people through HN, and it seems congruent with the hacker ethic ("throughout writings about hackers and their work processes, a common value of community and collaboration is present"), but ::shrugs::.

Thanks again for sharing your DI story.

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

#504

Post by ch4s3 »

camgunz wrote: post #482
ch4s3 wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

I think maybe we're talking past each other a bit here. First I agree that phonics alone is insufficient and in and of itself does not lead to reading comprehension. I think the evidence is clear there. It also seems clear from the report that England is wielding it like a hammer.

> 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.

Yeah, my issue was that the Guardian piece was cherry picking from the report to make it seem like phonics was useless and not based in evidence. Whereas the report makes it clear that phonics is in fact excellent as a first step, but must be followed by broader instruction in language/culture/literature/etc.

> 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.

I was paraphrasing pretty directly from the conclusion section. My point being that the Guardian was making stronger claims than the research supports, or rather the existing research wasn't great and the report acknowledges that but the Guardian obscures it.

I think overall England has probably gone in the wrong direction and treats phonics like the proverbial hammer. In particular there seems to also be a weird trend there in abandoning instruction in the cultural competency required to comprehend most extant English language writing. My concern is that here in the US, teaching has to its detriment abandoned phonics in favor of a whole language model which has proven terrible at teaching kids to decode language.

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

#505

Post by michaelcampbell »

oxfordmale wrote: post #95
michaelcampbell wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it suggests phonics is only effective for a subgroup of pupils If that subgroup is 90+%, is it worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater? (I don't know the % here, I'm making one up as a thought experiment.)

As the petition calls for, it should be left to the teachers to decide. Even if the succes rate is 90%, are you happy to throw the remaining 10% under the reading bus ?

I'm not sure why you think this is a one or the other solution.

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

#506

Post by camgunz »

mattmcknight wrote: post #495
camgunz wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't say "only teach phonics", they say "always teach phonics no matter what even if it fails a significant number of students". It's an issue of forcing teachers to do things they know won't work or aren't working. I'm not saying there aren't bad teachers, and I agree that's a problem and that the solution (get good people to be teachers and give them the autonomy to be good) depends on addressing it. But usin…

> It's an issue of forcing teachers to do things they know won't work or aren't working. So many teachers at this point have been falsely taught that phonics doesn't work, that many skip thinking they are doing the right thing. We need them to try to teach phonics. Yes, there are some students it won't work for, such as those with hearing problems. However, those students should be in specialized programs already. Fo…

> So many teachers at this point have been falsely taught that phonics doesn't work, that many skip thinking they are doing the right thing.

Maybe. There's a lot of guessing about what teachers are doing in this thread; I'd be interested in a survey of what they're actually doing.

> For everyone without hearing problems, we need them to try.

Maybe. The UK has been going hard on phonics and while scores went way up for the next couple years, the effects on the years afterwards were real bad.

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

#508

Post by gladiatr72 »

bluGill wrote: post #493
gladiatr72 wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The added rules were just memorize the one correct way to spell. Previously it's was phonetic, and everyone used different spellings. Of course it looks less phonetic if you are unaware of how phonics change. (U and V switched roles as one example)

Previously it was dialectic. To say that different spellings were used by different people dramatically understates the situation. You can find an author using different spelling to express the same word in different contexts in the same volume, because, well, that's the way it was spoken.

I find (some) writings from that era to be fascinating insights into how the language actually sounded during the time the piece was written but the idea of returning to a system (non-system?) of spelling makes my head hurt. At this point, I can read an book or document written (in English) by an Australian, US Southerner, US Baltimore or Indian writer without needing to decode the writer's dialect. Sure, some of that comes out despite using a fixed spelling system, but that gives the text.. I guess I might describe it as _texture_ or _personality_ without detracting from the ideas, stories or info conveyed.

I think 'ou' is still in play in British English (colour, odour, etc) but was removed from the US standard (i think) sometime in the 1970s. It certainly wasn't minor in my 2nd grade teacher's pov when I spelled it `colour` (1978..I had some old comic books at home--I blame them) but from what I understand, such changes were made after a great deal of debate which included discussions on whether the obfuscation of _existing_ text is offset by decreased obfuscation in future writing. I think, rightfully (if you're into that sort of thing), they got it right. I do not miss `colour` but whether or not it is there does not impact my understanding of the sentence.

If there was a credible effort to revert or deprecate spelling, I would be concerned about knowledge and information dissemination reverting to the old pre-reformation model of jealously guarded silos of information/education.

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

#509

Post by camgunz »

ch4s3 wrote: post #504
camgunz wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 th…

I think maybe we're talking past each other a bit here. First I agree that phonics alone is insufficient and in and of itself does not lead to reading comprehension. I think the evidence is clear there. It also seems clear from the report that England is wielding it like a hammer. > 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 gett…

Yeah I think this is mostly fair. I had to read it multiple times to form a reasonable opinion because it's written in this disjointed style.

I think we agree broadly. The US slept on phonics for some regrettable reasons, we're probably gonna swing super hard the other way and over correct, and we'll deal with the fallout from that in a few years haha.

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

#510

Post by bluGill »

gladiatr72 wrote: post #508
bluGill wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The added rules were just memorize the one correct way to spell. Previously it's was phonetic, and everyone used different spellings. Of course it looks less phonetic if you are unaware of how phonics change. (U and V switched roles as one example)

Previously it was dialectic. To say that different spellings were used by different people dramatically understates the situation. You can find an author using different spelling to express the same word in different contexts in the same volume, because, well, that's the way it was spoken. I find (some) writings from that era to be fascinating insights into how the language actually sounded during the time the piece…

You need to learn something other than English! Spanish has easy spelling rules because it is one sound = one letter. (except for ll - and they consider that a separate letter). It is easy to spell in Spanish because each letter maps to exactly one sound, and each sound maps to exactly one letter.

We can reform English spelling to be the same - but it would require adding about 20 more letters. (I understand languages like French and Polish solve this by having rules of how every letter combination sounds, but I don't know enough of them to explain how it works - but they might be useful inspiration if you don't want to add letters). There should be exactly one way to spell a word, and it should be obvious what that way is by how the word is pronounced.

Of course we also need to reform English so that we all pronounce words the same (goodbye and good riddance to all the funky accents - they sound cool but they hinder communication), and a lot of other related reforms that will never happen.

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