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

Well, yeah, teachers have been bamboozled.

For clarity, the Ancient Greek alphabet was thought to me using a cue based method exclusively because well, it's ancient Greek, nobody talks ancient Greek anymore, it's considered a dead language (it's still very close to regular Greek in terms of alphabet though... but that wasn't a part of the education method - I will say that it helped out a lot when visiting Greece to be able to read the signs since the alphabet was still virtually identical with I think like, one extra character added over the centuries?).

The teacher did all the things you expect from a cue system - teach the students the mnemonics, instruct them how the characters are all named (because ancient Greek has a name for every character) and detail how they all looked, but there was never any conversation on how the language was actually spoken. You just had to kinda figure out what the words meant. Small aside, but we did get a phonetics lesson for Latin, to explain how the name of the Romans most famous field general, Ceasar, would eventually have his name used for the leaders of the Roman state. That word would then turn into the German word Kaiser, a word that would be used to describe a certain group of state leaders, specifically emperors (even in different languages with words like Czar being derivatives of it, with a similar pronunciation). It helped a lot to understand Latin by seeing how the pronunciation gradually evolved, even though it wasn't spoken anymore.

The only reason I actually ended up learning it was because my grade was failing and due to an administrative error, I could do a resit on an alphabet test I completely failed earlier in the year. So to prepare for that test, I decided to ignore pretty much every single mnemonic/letter name that the teacher had taught me and I just did... a straight mapping. I mapped every character in Greek to a letter similar in my native language. I had a couple of doubles but it did work. I put it together with a small word list that used most of the letters and just learned how to pronounce those words. Suddenly the alphabet clicked and that was in less than a week, after a year of failed cue-based teaching.

As for Duolingo - as far as I have tried (with Japanese), it's overly reliant on the flashcard method of learning languages. It felt very ineffective; you don't really engage with characters or words, you just learn how to fill out auto-generated sentences and how to pick the right translation from a set of 3. I don't think the issue is gamification, but rather the framework thats being used here. (Probably in part because this particular framework is easy to put into programming while "figure out the right phonetics and put those together to figure out words" is very difficult to gamify, since you're going to need to do correction based on similarity, which is very different from person to person.) I might try learning Japanese again - it's still a personal goal of mine - but Duolingo did not help much there.

You and op are both correct. The problems are teaching only phonics (which a lot of SOR advocates want) and not teaching phonics at all (which happens in a fair number of classrooms).

I think if you did a study of Agile vs Waterfall and then took out all the nuance and then wrote an angry podcast about one side or the other it would be somewhat equivalent to this. i.e. reducing complex things (like project managment or teaching) to 'this way is wrong other way is right'. The skills/experience of the teachers/project managers are probably the biggest factor

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 tape and tells them to guess what the word is without seeing it. That feels so obviously dumb that there's no way anyone could have been fooled into thinking that was a superior method of instruction than phonics, right? Surely the podcast has to be exaggerating? If not, that's a level of stupidity that's actually high enough to make me angry.

Same thing with the idea that people read based on context (three cuing). Like, sure context can be a component of reading, but it's trivially disproven as the primary mechanism with a simple string of random words like: nanny overlying identify crinkly eats reunion. Is that hard to read? Obviously not, so clearly context isn't that important for strong readers, and teaching kids to guess words based on context rather than teaching them to actually read the words is dumb. You shouldn't need a scientific study to figure that out.