The flawed idea, buried deep within the article, is:
> The theory is known as "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information — or "cues" — to identify words as they are reading.
> ....
> In the paper,5 Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words. Instead, he argued that as people read, they make predictions about the words on the page using these three cues:
* graphic cues (what do the letters tell you about what the word might be?)
* syntactic cues (what kind of word could it be, for example, a noun or a verb?)
* semantic cues (what word would make sense here, based on the context?)
> ....
> Goodman's proposal became the theoretical basis for a new approach to teaching reading that would soon take hold in American schools.
> You know tens of thousands of words instantly, on sight. How did you learn to do that?
> It happens through a process called "orthographic mapping." This occurs when you pay attention to the details of a written word and link the word's pronunciation and meaning with its sequence of letters.
> ...
> That requires an awareness of the speech sounds in words and an understanding of how those sounds are represented by letters. In other words, you need phonics skills.
> ...
> when children don't have good phonics skills, the process is different.
> "They sample from the letters because they're not good at sounding them out," said David Kilpatrick, a psychology professor at SUNY Cortland and the author of a book about preventing reading difficulties.
> ...
> "The three-cueing system is the way poor readers read," said Kilpatrick.
> And if teachers use the system to teach reading, Kilpatrick says they're not just teaching children the habits of poor readers, they are actually impeding the orthographic mapping process.
> "The minute you ask them just to pay attention to the first letter or look at the picture, look at the context, you're drawing their attention away from the very thing that they need to interact with in order for them to read the word [and] remember the word," Kilpatrick said.
Chinese schools teach using phonics - specifically, using a phonetic transcription system based on the Latin script called pinyin. Thanks to the exact correspondence between spelling and Standard Chinese pronunciation, this system can be rapidly mastered. Once students have a working command of pinyin, they are taught to associate traditional Chinese characters (hanzi) with the pinyin words that they already recognise.
The introduction of pinyin revolutionised Chinese language teaching and had a near-miraculous effect on literacy rates; As a second-language user of Mandarin Chinese, I am indescribably grateful for it.
> The introduction of pinyin revolutionised Chinese language teaching and had a near-miraculous effect on literacy rates;
This is inaccurate. Taiwan continued using Zhuyin, the native syllabary China used prior to the 60s, and Taiwan's literacy rates have never lagged.
Pinyin and Zhuyin have a one-to-one mapping at the syllable level, but Zhuyin is more accurate at the single character scale. E.g., the sounds for both ㄜ and ㄝ are written as an e in Pinyin and ㄨ and ㄩ are both always written as u. Worse still, the ㄩ sound is also sometimes represented as ü in Pinyin (when preceded by an l).
Pinyin requires more context (and rules) to distinguish which vowel sound is being represented.
Zhuyin isn't perfect either. It's definitely a better representation of single consonant or vowel sounds but it still has its own warts around diphthongs and triphthongs.
Pinyin is definitely a flawed phonetic system, but it's usable and widespread. That's it's real strength, along with being less alien to non-Chinese speakers.
Zhuyin is also relatively new, at around 100 years old. Historically, the closest thing Chinese had to phonics was fanqie, which was a comparatively obtuse way of representing sounds with other hanzi.[1] Basically, any hint of a true phonetic system probably helped literacy rates during the 1900s.
>Pinyin is definitely a flawed phonetic system, but it's usable and widespread. That's it's real strength
I don't disagree. There's nothing particularly special about pinyin, but it was revolutionary precisely because it rapidly became ubiquitous in Mandarin instruction.
I don't think I can reasonably address the issue of zhuyin vs tongyong vs hanyu without stepping into a political minefield, but I will say that there's a world of difference between achieving full literacy on a small and prosperous island versus achieving full literacy in a vast nation with substantial poverty and under-development.
I argue that China would still reach the current literacy rate had they continued to use Zhuyin. The switch from Zhuyin to Pinyin was entirely political, and the two are basically the same to L1 learners. The significance of Pinyin is that it drastically lowers the initial learning barrier for L2+ learners from Europe and Americas (which has trade-offs, but that’s another whole topic).
I think Pinyin has had a bigger impact than Zhuyin simply by its use in China and in the broader Huaren communities. That said, Zhuyin is also a recent innovation, and so the point about having some kind of phonemic/phonic/phonetic system of spelling as your basis for literacy probably still stands, at least with whatever strength it has, I think the other poster might be overstating it to some degree, although it's definitely a godsend to have in Chinese now, whether it be Hanyu Pinyin, Zhuyin, or whatever.
I think you're overstating the complexities of pinyin, even if Zhuyin is better. The context pinyin requires is extremely limited, being exactly only the rest of the syllable. It's simple if one just thinks of it as a set of initials/finals and not as letters. The whole thing can be learned in a day, so there's not much to be gained in an improved system.
Hong Kong has been teaching Cantonese Chinese without using a romanisation system to do so and its literacy rate never lagged.
Pinyin may help second language learners greatly, but was never the cause of the literacy spike. It's the rollout of the education system to villages that caused it. If they taught Chinese characters without Pinyin, they would most likely have decreased literacy rates to a similar extent also.
I agree that counter evidence to the claim, but one thing to keep in mind is that Cantonese is a local language, which many speak at home and with close friends and family from birth (or at least some closely related dialect), while Mandarin is often not. So if you concede that something like Pinyin might help L2 learners, it's reasonable to think it might be less necessary, but still helpful in an L1 setting, which Mandarin sits somewhere between, and Cantonese is well in to L1. It will be interesting to see if something like Jyutping takes off in the native Cantonese speaking community at some point or not. It's also a different case because spoken and written Cantonese are such different languages, although I don't want to overstate what effect, if any, that might have.
That's interesting, because people always say that furigana is a "crutch" when learning Japanese vocabulary, but it would seem the be the natural correspondence of what you mentioned (namely first learning spoken japanese with furigana and then later associating the words you know with the kanji). Maybe the larger number of homophones (with lack of tones to distinguish between them) makes this less effective?
Furigana seems like a great idea to me and extremely useful. I expect that native learners use it and benefit from it.
Also I expect the onyomi/Chinese readings of many kanji might fall into phonetic groups as they do in the hanzi. (Note also that kanji and hanzi are basically the same word with some phonetic shifts.) Apparently onyomi actually means "sound reading."
There definitely is a phonetic element to it. Since most/many complex words (jukugo) you'll encounter are formed from the same ~2k kanji, you often end up quite literally sounding it out. As a simple-ish example, 音読み itself: 音 is read 'on', 'in' or 'son' in descending order of frequency. 読's usual onyomi is 'doku', but the み ('mi') at the end clues you in that this is a on-kun jukugo, where the second kanji uses the kunyomi reading because... nevermind. Anyway, kunyomi is... 'yomi', so, onyomi.
It's plenty complicated in practice with all kinds of stuff messing you up (multiple onyomi, nonstandard readings of all kinds, rendaku, etc.) but fundamentally you're operating phonetically, at least when you first encounter the written form of a word you probably have heard before.
On furigana: it's useful but also absolutely can be a crutch. Although you're generally going to want to acquire jukugo vocab from various sources and not just sound everything out after learning common kanji, that process of phonetically processing a compound word is a great workout for your fundamental kanji knowledge. On top of that, for whatever reason, I find it makes me feel like I've comprehended the text when I actually haven't, like the kid in the article with the dog story, though in this case it's lack of understanding through phonetic over, rather than under, emphasis. At least personally, it's easy to rip through the furigana reading and have my brain be like "yep, just turned all of those symbols into sounds, job done." That's probably part of why many resources, like https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/, allow you to quickly toggle them. Open a story and hit the 漢字の読み方を消す button.
> Furigana seems like a great idea to me and extremely useful. I expect that native learners use it and benefit from it.
So true, especially when you encounter a proper noun that includes kanjis. It's almost impossible to guess how to read them, even for native speakers, because the usual rules surrounding how to read kanjis are largely ignored when it comes to proper nouns.
Pinyin is only phonetically regular if you don't actually speak Chinese, and therefore learn all your pronounciations from Pinyin. Even for speakers of Mandarin in Beijing it lacks a competent ability to indicate a merged 兒 at the end of a character. In fact many people forget Pinyin by the time they enter highschool.
Whatever success attributed to Pinyin has less to do with Pinyin and more to do with the social changes that coincided with it's introduction. Bopomofo, a more phonetically regular and easier to use system was used for decades before Pinyin and is still used in Taiwan today.
In addition, there are many adults alive today in their 60s and over who never learned any phonetic system and can read and write just fine.
People in Hong Kong also don't seem to learn any romanizatiom system for Cantonese pronounciations in school and can obviously read and write just fine.
> In fact many people forget Pinyin by the time they enter highschool.
Since most Chinese people type Chinese using Pinyin-based input methods (not counting voice recognition and handwriting recognition as typing here, which are also pretty widely used these days), this claim is absolutely, undoubtedly, 100% false.
Edit: Somehow read “many” as “most”. Since “many” can mean anything from one thousand people out of 1.4 billion to all of them, it’s not possible to refute the claim. But the idea should be clear: forgetting Pinyin upon entering high school is not common.
You forget that a good number of professionals do not use phonetic input methods, and use component based ones like CangJie, Boshiamy, WuBi, Four Corners etc. Plus even phonetic input methods have "fuzzy modes". If you ever watch an experienced typer use a phonetic method you'll see that often they only enter the first letter of each character.
The fact that any number of people forget Pinyin at all demonstrates that it can't be compared to English phonics. You can't forget phonics, you can forget Pinyin.
Sure, you can forget Pinyin, that doesn’t mean people do forget Pinyin, which you have provided no evidence for and doesn’t match observed reality. No convenience features in Pinyin-based input methods will help you if you actually forget the whole system. In fact, I personally know elderly people who were educated in 1930s and 40s who later learned Pinyin because it’s easier to type that way.
And yes, I’m aware of the non-phonetic input methods, and that professional typists could type faster in them. But the learning curve is way steeper (compared to basically none).
Most of the results are actually asking what the PinYin for "忘" is so obviously enough people who know how to type the character forgot the PinYin.
For comparison, googling "forgetting how to spell" comes up with webpages about Alzheimer's and "olvidando cómo deletrear" comes up with links about dyslexia.
The learning curve for non-phonetic input methods are exaggerated. Just developing the mechanical skills to type at all takes a long time already and can be done in parallel with learning the input method. If you don't believe me go find someone who rarely uses a computer and ask them to type something in any language. The learning curve for PinYin input methods is only supposedly low because it's already taught in school. It's like saying CAD software has a low learning curve because most engineering degrees include a course in how to use it.
> I personally know elderly people who were educated in 1930s and 40s who later learned Pinyin because it’s easier to type that way.
That's your anecdota I guess. I know plenty of young people who refuse to use anything other than X non-phonetic input method and English speakers who swear by DVORAK or ortholinears or whatever.
1. Some questions in this category aren't actually about forgetting the Pinyin system, but rather, Pinyin for specific characters, often because people speak dialects where the pronunciations of words and characters don't perfectly map to Pinyin in Mandarin, or at all. Fuzzy modes serve that population. (Of course, there are also commonly mispronounced characters and words.)
2. A lot of older people educated in 70s or earlier may have been taught some Pinyin, but never systematically. I know from talking to people that this is especially true in rural regions (well what can you do when the teachers don't know Pinyin). They simply never mastered Pinyin in the first place. A good part of this population didn't even go to high school, but even highly educated people in this camp can have a bit of trouble with Pinyin later, after relearning; I know a PhD born in the 60s fitting this bill, and he could still stutter on a character's Pinyin from time to time when typing.
The questions you found are very likely from this camp especially when they didn't have to type for decades until smartphones became prevalent.
Younger people from 80s and especially 90s onwards were taught Pinyin from first grade or even kindergarten before they were taught to recognize characters, then PCs and smartphones came along to reinforce the knowledge. It's pretty damn hard to forget that.
Again, of course there are "many"/"plenty" of any kind of people doing fringe stuff in a country of 1.4 billion, but presenting outliers as common or mainstream is misleading.
I'm learning Chinese and I think you've avoided the question. The crux of the matter is how to learn the thousands of character-to-pinyin/meanings mappings. It doesn't fit at all into the phonics description given in this article because you can't sound out a character. And the way I'm learning is straight memorization which this article makes sounds bad, but what's the alternative in Chinese?
And this article says that a second grade reader can learn a new word after being exposed to it just a couple of times, but I'm not having that level of success to new characters I read in my passages.
I think the idea is to use Pinyin to bootstrap knowledge of hanzi.
A) This would allow you to use written language to teach hanzi and
B) This would allow you to have children read text that includes words they don't know how to read, by providing those words in pinyin.
I'm not sure how it actually works in Chinese, but as a adult second language learner of Japanese, having a phonetic system I can use to transcribe the logoriphic system is quite helpful.
It's a story teaching the meaning of the proverb 揠苗助长 (pulling sprouts to help them grow). Some of the characters are annotated with their pinyin above, e.g. 揠 yà or 筋疲 jīn pí. This text in particular is a bit weird in that it only uses 揠 yà in the title and replaces it with 拔 bá in the story, so the reader would have to infer that 揠 yà and 拔 bá are synonyms. I think 拔苗助长 is actually the more common way to write the proverb.
> It doesn't fit at all into the phonics description given in this article because you can't sound out a character.
You are wrong, it absolutely does. 放方芳房肪舫防紡 are all pronounced fang and contains 方. This stems from the evolution of the script, where a character was used to write various words with the same or close pronunciation. Then those characters where extended with other parts to reduce polysemy. This is similar the determiner of other logographic scripts (hieroglyphic, cuneiform) except the determiner is embedded in the character themselves instead of being separate ones.
While this phenomenon is less reguglar than in an alphabetic script (not that English has a straight graphemes/phonemes mapping either...) because of the script evolution , it’s happening nonetheless and is quite useful. So it’s not true to say that you can’t guess the sound of a character, because in a lot of case it’s possible to get an approximation.
Not sure why you're downvoted. You're absolutely right.
I'm only a year into learning Chinese, but I can often guess the sound of a new character just by recalling components of similar characters. The tone takes memorization, but the sound oftentimes has hints. Especially if it's a complex, uncommon character--almost always the sound derives from one of the common radicals it uses.
It's not as intuitive as, say, pinyin, but it's helpful and straight up taught by any decent Chinese textbook.
I do this guessing while trying to read an unknown charger but this article made me question the usefulness of that and is exactly why I'm unsure what the process in Chinese should be. Doing this looks more like the cueing process of picking a word with the right starting letter that matches the rest of the sentence and moving on. I certainly don't learn the word by seeing it a couple times in text.
> this article says that a second grade reader can learn a new word after being exposed to it just a couple of times, but I'm not having that level of success to new characters I read in my passages.
This tracks with some self reports for the most advanced L2 language learners though, that your ability to learn new words itself improves while you are learning new words. Maybe just requires a ton of exposure.
MattVsJapan talks about drilling vocab early on, then once he hit a certain level, he could often just look up a new word once and know it almost indefinitely, more like with English.
2nd grade is, what, 8 years of immersion? Exposure to something like 100-250,000 sentences, with practice or exposure for all available hours every day? It's a lot to catch up to.
Even so, with 2nd graders, we're not talking like "perspicacity" or "abrogate." Some words and some concepts will be harder than others.
> Reading scientists have known for decades that the hallmark of being a skilled reader is the ability to instantly and accurately recognize words.33 If you're a skilled reader, your brain has gotten so good at reading words that you process the word "chair" faster than you process a picture of a chair.34 You know tens of thousands of words instantly, on sight. How did you learn to do that?
> It happens through a process called "orthographic mapping."35 This occurs when you pay attention to the details of a written word and link the word's pronunciation and meaning with its sequence of letters.
I thought this means people recognize the entire word, rather than the letters of the word. Just like how you recognize a Chinese character.
Then you learn to map the Chinese character with the pronunciation.
The article claims that bad readers memorize a handful of high frequency words and rely on those. I read the parts you quote as saying that those words are not memorized as a chunk and I don't see how a similar process can be done on Chinese characters. I kind of doubt that they are read by decomposing into radicals.
Perhaps you should consider that characters are not images but consist of distinct groups of strokes. When I learned about 20 words suddenly I realized that some of them have sub-words embedded into them.
My favorite example of this, because it looks kinda silly and yet makes perfect sense (and appears to be the same between Chinese and Japanese, where I first ran across it):
Native speaker here. Other comments are not wrong but not complete.
There are several phases of Chinese (the text) learning
1. Mapping your daily voices to phonics and to the characters
2. Expand your vocabulary with phonic tools like PinYin
And the most important part:
3. Learn new words and meanings without any involvements of phonics at all.
Many native speakers can comprehend the concept of a word at young age and when they have grown up and put those words into speeches they found they have the wrong pronunciation or word order. LOL. Chinese words are ideograms and can be linked to "pictures" without proper pronunciation. Also Chinese is analytic language so people can literally guess its meaning from contexts.
Phonetic alphabets (e.g. pinyin) are used by learners as well as in computer input methods.
Moreover, some 80% of Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic hybrids (though the pronunciation of characters that share a phonetic element may not be identical in current Mandarin, they will often resemble each other closely, perhaps with a tone or vowel shift.) Learning characters in phonetic groups helps to anchor their pronunciation and phonetic elements can help when you encounter an unfamiliar character in context.
Its funny you mention that because I instantly thought of Japanese. I spent a few years there and learned to speak fairly well, but never learned to read much beyond the phonetically based character systems (hiragana and katakana), but never more than a hundred or so of the commonly used kanji. And while kanji are technically associated with specific sounds, there are tens of thousands of them, and they all can have different sounds in different situations. Since returning from Japan, I've been trying to do some studying of kanji with mixed success, and I find that it virtually requires the type of thinking here: trying to determine what the word would be based on context, as well as connecting the symbols in the kanji (which often do have meaning) words.
Sanskrit is interesting because all symbols are direct phonetic representations. If you hear a sound, you know how to write it. This is why it was able to be super effective at keeping the texts intact through centuries of passing down texts orally.
Sanskrit has the big advantage for that purpose of being "dead" (not taught as a first language), so its existence is academic and pronunciation is relatively fixed through time; Latin would be similar, and its alphabet, this one we're typing, is a good phonetic representation. The pronunciation of "living" languages changes quite a bit.
Most languages with phonetic writing systems (alphabet, abugida, syllabary, etc., but not pure abjad [1]) have direct phonetic representations. English, French, and a few other European languages are unusual.
Besides being dead as a reason for it being fixed, I think it might also reflect the high reliance on the oral transmission of texts (which your excellent examples I hadn’t heard about emphasize)
The name for learning (sacred) texts in Sanskrit is “shruti” , that which is heard.
Sanskrit grammar did change over time, at least until Panini wrote down the rules around the 6th century bc.
Also, something I just remembered, in vedic rituals there is actually a priest present who checks if the ritual and the sanskrit recitation is correct. This is also a reason we still have access to vedic sanskrit and we can be confident in its transmission accuracy afaik.
Something I found fascinating about learning Chinese while living in China was knowing exactly what a character meant (because it was written on signs etc.), but having absolutely no idea how it was pronounced.
Thank you for assuring me I wasn't the only one wondering throughout the article: "I must be a really poor reader to have missed the topic of the article!"
I don't finish the article because when I got to that point it seemed problematic but not something that couldn't be overcome. Aren't all learners going to find strategies to learn something and then alter those over time with the right teachers and introspection?
I didn't finish the article but does it explain (perhaps after a dozen or so foreshadowing paragraphs) why this method could not be overcome once learned?
Even the BBC aren't above this sort of thing. My 'favourite' example of this kind of writing is a BBC News article titled This little-known inventor has probably saved your life. [0]
You have to read about half of the lengthy, rambling article before you discover what on Earth they're talking about. Turns out to be about the inventor of the flight recorder. It follows of course that the title is simply untrue, which makes for a nice bonus.
Yeah, I’ve started to skip the first two paragraphs of all articles, now. This, combined with click-bait headlines, has started to make media articles more and more worthless. (In scientific writing and encyclopedia entries, they start with a summary so they immediately get to the point...)
memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don't know — are the strategies that many beginning readers are taught in school. This makes it harder for many kids to learn how to read, and children who don't get off to a good start in reading find it difficult to ever master the process.
Learning something badly can be disastrous. I self-taught myself to type years before I took a typing class in school. Despite multiple attempts to learn both qwerty and dvorak I still use my invented four-finger method that doesn't allow me to fully touch-type without looking down.
I recently read somewhere (maybe on the Wiki?) that there was a study that didn't find any advantage of classical touch typing over self-learned touch typing, in terms of speed of input at least.
In other words, nothing is stopping you from using your four fingers to type without looking at the keyboard. If you spend a whole day typing anyway, make a conscious effort, for a few minutes every day, to type by guessing where to move your fingers (whichever finger feels the closest or just the most comfortable). If you're like me, you already know where the keys are, you're just looking down to make sure. After a while, you'll see that you can write without looking, no problem. And at that point, it stops mattering if you use 4, 5, 6, or 10 fingers.
I was a 5-6-fingers non-touch typer for a very long time, my input speed was satisfactory anyway, so I didn't feel the need to learn the "proper technique," which seemed like a huge PITA. I was convinced that the proper touch typing is the only way to type without looking at the keyboard. I changed my mind due to a situation at work, where I was explaining something to a co-worker and had to use her laptop for demonstration. The catch was that her keyboard was completely blank. I was stumped for a while, but - having a reputation of a senior to uphold - I said (internally) 'fuck it, whatever happens, happens,' closed my eyes, and just typed. It worked, not 100%, but close enough. The co-worker wasn't impressed (well, she was the one who used such a keyboard, to begin with), but I was in awe. I realized that looking at the keyboard is just a habit, not an essential part of the typing process. Now I type mostly by touch, still use 5-6 fingers, still have satisfactory WPM, and I look down at the keyboard only when I'm distracted or when I have to reach some very rarely used key (like F5 - F9).
To summarize: if your work is based on typing on the keyboard, then the chances are that - after a few years - your fingers already know where the keys are. It's like riding a bike with hands away from the handlebar: if you've been cycling for a few years, you most likely are capable of doing this, you just need to realize it.
The correct idea is Phonics, explained in detail further down.
The section "this is not reading" blew my mind, that people will make up words from pictures that aren't even on the page. Then I thought about social media.
Fascinating article, ColinWright is on fire today (3 front page posts).
> The correct idea is Phonics, explained in detail further down.
That seems too narrow. I think the general idea is that there's no substitute for rote memorization of the basic characteristics of the writing system and its association to pre-existing language knowledge (usually spoken language). Phonics is simply one way to help speed that along in some scripts, though you still need to memorize the alphabet and basic syllables. In Chinese script (logograms), for example, the process is a little different and more laborious, including more initial memorization.
It's like when learning basic arithmetic. One has to learn by rote memorization the numbers 1-10 and their association to the abstract counting groups (2 of this, 4 of that, etc). No phonics involved. Then you similarly need to learn, through rote memorization, basic sums--1+1=2, etc. The concept of summation comes later. Without having that very basic foundation, you can't begin systematically exploring and building abstractions (through inference and, later, deduction) in the language of numbers.
Phonics is memorizing the alphabet and basic syllables as well as learning how to combine them into a spoken word. It's not narrow since phonics is by definition what you describe.
I was considering the distinguishing characteristic of phonics as sounding out a word so you can make an aural association to a word you already know. So rather than memorizing whole words you can memorize some basic syllables and rules to speed up the recognition and memorization process. You can't do that with a logogram script, or if your first language is sign language. (I'm sure remembering and identifying phonemes is still important for deaf children in the context of a phonetic language, but I'd bet it's a more arduous process, more akin to learning strokes in Chinese logograms.)
montessori teaches the basic number system by counting beads.
get a pile of beads, count them. get another pile, count them.
put the two piles together, count.
they have beads that let you count up to 1000. i don't know at which point they introduce written numbers, but they certainly learn to say and use the numbers, and experience them through counting before reading and writing them.
Brains are lazy. They are lazy for good reasons. They have a lot of work to do during a day and don't have the spare capacity to burn multiples of what they are already burning. They are already epic energy hogs in biological terms. Just telling them to "stop being so lazy!" doesn't work, and if you dig into it would probably be a bad idea if you could.
Consequently, one of the most dangerous ideas to feed a brain is one that works in the short term but fails in the long term. Once mired in the bad term idea, one must expend effort to switch to the better idea, and in the process, one might even go backwards temporarily, convincing the brain (quite rationally from a certain point of view) that this is a bad idea, thus making it even harder to convince the brain this switch is a good idea. (You have less control over this decision than you fancy.)
Without a lot of energy or help to get out, you can get stuck there permanently.
It's not just reading. Many skills have this pattern to them. I myself am stuck there with bowling. I have the classic "got decent at throwing the ball straight down the lane" failure. I know that I need to learn to curve the ball to get better, and I just don't care enough to do it. Given how rarely I play, my time of "getting worse before I get better" would probably be "every game I play for the rest of my life." But I am stuck in that hole. I've been there with some other skills, too; I'm not sure one can jump straight to ideal piano technique without going through this a few times.
But those are no big deal to me. Screwing up reading from the get-go is devastating.
I'm learning chess at the moment. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to slide back in rating every time I learn a new idea and try to incorporate it into my game.
I takes a lot of willpower to stick with it and fully internalize that idea. Then I read a new book and it starts all over again.
That's precisely the problem. That describes tools good readers use to understand meaning across a text, but teaching it as a way to recognize words is problematic.
> Adams thought this diagram made perfect sense. The research clearly shows that readers use all of these cues to understand what they're reading.
> But Adams soon figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not just as the way readers construct meaning from text, but as the way readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary.
Later in the article, Cueing or MVS are shown to be actually harmful to reading. This is backed by extensive research, and the final section shows how bad of a researcher Goodman is, still to this day. He is quotes as saying "My science is different."
Wow this article hit home. In the old days we learned looksay and phonics; it worked well for me, can't complain. A few years ago it was time for the offspring and the school had this new system. Sounded odd but I didn't worry too much.
A few years pass, kiddo is a good reader, though brute force possibly as we have no TV at home. But I noticed something weird. When encountering an unknown word it is replaced with something else and passed on. Say the word was Pennsylvania, something bizarre like "probably" is said instead. "Wait, what, I ask? That's not particularly close."
How can you really understand what you're reading with important words changed at random? The point where you stop and say, what is this word?... pen syl vvva neea (oh!) is incredibly important! That's when the lightbulb goes off and you learn, and my kid has been taught it's too difficult. Just skim on and worry about it later! Or don't? Who cares. Perhaps in elementary but sounds like a disaster later.
Now that I understand the problem, it looks like we have a lot of work ahead. Just remembered, they skimped on spelling too. :-/
Got me thinking about how I learned. Definitely wasn't cueing, even though I was in the late 90s - early 2000s cohort.
Lots of spelling tests, and A gamified computer program. Can't remember the name, but it was A system with quizzes for literally thousands of books that tested your reading comprehension and rewarded points for how well you performed. Entirely optional. I remember I and one other kid were miles out ahead of everyone else. So much so that we started to run out of big point books to read.
It's curious that this article never mentions the Hooked on Phonics program. It was always being advertised on TV 20 years ago.
I learned to read at home, as did my parents, and my kids. My mom used what i think is called "phonics," where we learned the letters, then learned to sound out words. Written English isn't perfect, but it has a phonetic alphabet, suggesting a clue as to how reading works in a language with a phonetic alphabet.
Everybody I know who has taught their own kids uses phonics. Most don't use a manual or any special teaching materials other than starting with really easy words.
Now there's another factor as well: We learned to read without the stress and pressure of learning it in a classroom. We had time to break it up into tiny pieces throughout the day. I see parents out with their kids. They'll point to a sign, and say: "What's that word?"
Also, we were given time to read on our own rather than moving on to the next subject, because there were no other subjects at home.
Heh. The first "product" I was ever technical lead on was a phonics based reading education "interactive CDROM" for children, a teaching course created by an educational psychologist as a reaction against the then-fashionable "holistic" method of teaching kids to read:
We launched that in late 1995 scrambling to get it into shops for the xmas market and before schools closed for the year. We were significantly screwed over by changes in the multi track audio capabilities between Win3.3 and Windows95.
I'm inordinately proud that (at least some of them) are still for sale, and I break out into a huge smile every time I see a shelf full of them at a bricks and mortar retailer. Last time I checked (maybe 5 years back now) my name (and those of my team) were still printed around the edge of the CDROM.
(I'm also astounded it still works at all, and impressed by Microsoft's dedication to backwards compatibility. That was largely developed in MacOS9 and Windows 3.3 using Macromind (later Macromedia) Director. It stopped working on Mac back when Apple gave up on supporting running legacy MacOS9 apps and the owner/client didn't want to pay to upgrade for Mac. Now it's sold as "Windows only", but I'd bet pretty good money if you bought a copy and resurrected a MacOS9 machine, it'd still run just fine...)
If I’m not mistaken, I recall using your software to learn to read (rather my parents bought it for me). Many thanks! Now instead of reading just books I read code.
My daughter when learning to read used to just memorize what words looked like, which really frustrated me. So 'apply' is 'apple' because it looks like the memory word.
Anyhow, relevant part of my story, I taught her 100% with phonics post that point. In the above scenario, I might say 'wait there's a y there where did that go? sound it out slowly'. In no time she became a near perfect reader. I highly recommend the approach to anyone.
I occasionally get to see a friend's ~7year old son practicing reading by reading out load. He obviously uses semantic cue to "assume" what a word is based on previous words, and occasionally gets a few words further then realises what he just said doesn't make sense, and he goes back and sounds out the incorrect work phonetically.
In this plague and WFH era, I've watched as the GoogleMeet live transcription does exalted the same sort of thing - it'll make a wrong word choice, then a few words later go back and correct itself based on grammar/syntax/context from subsequent words.
I sometimes wonder if that's an algorithm told to do something like "pick the highest priority word possibility that makes grammatical sense with all the previous words, if subsequent highest probability words then make the previous sentence fragment non grammatically correct, go back to previous words and try the next highest probability words to maximise grammatical correctness if the entire sentence so far" - or if it's just blackbox machine learned "magic" that happens to make similar mistakes and corrections as a sample 7 year old?
(Knowing Google, it's almost as likely that their algorithm is "keep building n-grams from each of the top n best-guesses of the previous y transcribed words, then count the number of times this each possible n-gram appears across the entire Google corpus of web pages, usenet, email, and google books, and pick the one with the highest historical use count"...)
> live transcription does exalted the same sort of thing - it'll make a wrong word choice, then a few words later go back and correct itself based on grammar/syntax/context from subsequent words.
If only HN text input boxes were smart enough to do the same!
> count the number of times this each possible n-gram appears across the entire Google corpus
I mean, what you describe is basically a Markov Model described by Claude Shannon in his paper on entropy. Applying to speech recognition is pretty straightforward: As you keep speaking after a transcription mis-step, the odds that you said the thing becomes less and less likely given the words that followed it.
A good teacher in a school will also break up phonics instruction and weave it in throughout the day. The challenge of giving individual instruction to 20-35 students is monumental, though. Source: I'm a kindergarten and first grade teacher.
You teach 30+ first graders solo? Each kid would get 2 minutes an hour. A close to impossible teaching task. Is that a normal teacher student ratio in your district? Is that normal for public school?
Looking around in the US[1], it looks like legally the cap can be from 1:15 - 1:25 (K-3). It looks like 1/3 of states don't have any legal cap. Funny enough, this chart[2] correlating reading performance and class size stops at 1:21 for 4th and 8th grade.
My kids are both strong readers, but took different paths.
The first taught herself to read before she started school. On day one the teacher tested her and she could read the first 200 words they were to be taught. She had had support and encouragement from us, and we read to her every night, but we never did any structured lessons with her
The second couldn't read when she started school, and was taught using phonics. It took a couple of months for it to click, but then she was getting letter sounds, understanding digraphs, joining sounds together, and then reading words. When she got to that point she just took off.
I feel like our first would have succeeded in the American system just fine. But the second really benefitted from laying that groundwork that let her understand the fundamentals. If she'd learned using the three cues system I feel like her self-directed progress would have been much slower.
I don't remember exactly how I learned to read, but it seems very strange to me that anyone would try to teach someone to read English without teaching them the sounds that the letters make.
It was in the late 1960s. I grew up near Detroit. We had visited the Henry Ford Museum where they had reprints of the classic McGuffy's Reader, mentioned in the article. We just went through that book. As others have mentioned, at some point it "clicked" and I needed no further instruction.
Like programming. ;-)
My mom also made a big deal of going to the library every week, like it was some kind of amazing sanctuary, which of course it was.
Now an odd thing I remember is that my office mate in grad school listened to the Rush Limbaugh Program, and the two advertisers I remember were Snapple and Hooked on Phonics. Funny what things we remember.
“Written English isn't perfect, but it has a phonetic alphabet“
What do you mean by “phonetic alphabet?” I thought the correlation between spelling and pronunciation is extremely weak in English. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos
I'm a kindergarten and first grade teacher. I have taught children how to read. It's amazing! I try to follow current research, but it's clear to me through articles like this that there is so much we don't know about how children learn to read.
EDIT (just adding on): It's clear to me from my experience that there is not one single way children learn to read. That much should be obvious to anyone who spends a lot of time with young children, but the field of education clings to the idea of "best practices."
Second, a lot of our practices in the U.S. still stem from the National Reading Panel, which was convened nearly 20 (!) years ago as part of No Child Left Behind. Yet it's easy to find criticisms of the report the Panel issued. Just Google it. Here's a good one to start with: https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2003/04/30/33yatvin.h22.h...
> It's clear to me from my experience that there is not one single way children learn to read. That much should be obvious to anyone who spends a lot of time with young children, but the field of education clings to the idea of "best practices."
One of the key points the article makes is that a "balanced literacy" approach doesn't work. A footnote explains:
> "If children are taught systematic phonics in one part of the reading program but are encouraged to use context to guess at words when reading passages, they may not apply their phonics skills consistently. Thus, the phonics component of the reading program may be undermined." — from The Use of Context Cues in Reading.[1]
I'm not sure why you think there shouldn't be best practices in reading education. Certain methods will outperform others. Why shouldn't we identify and refine the methods that prove to work best?
In my experience in teaching English as a foreign language to students of all abilities and levels... you quickly discover that different strategies work for different students.
Some students are strong with vocab, others with grammar. Some with listening, others with speaking. Some with oral, some with written. I could go on and on with 20 other different things.
Education experts do attempt to identify and refine the methods that prove to work best, but real-world teachers know that those methods come in waves, fads of academia, and that a teacher needs to know the basics of all methods, combined with the strengths and weaknesses of their students, and use their intuition to try to come up with a good combination.
So it's less about a "balanced" approach, and more of a "try everything and see what sticks with any individual student" approach.
Because here's what does work: let students build core competency around wherever their natural strengths are, and then they'll eventually get the other stuff.
But the idea that "certain methods will outperform others" is grossly simplistic. Sure there are some dumb methods that don't work for anybody but those get quickly discarded. Of the rest, even if a method outperforms in the aggregate, it's going to be terribly underperforming for a significant proportion of students.
Don't you believe that it's also possible that there are sometimes methods that do outperform all others in the long term for everyone (such as phonics) but can initially be harder than other ways (such as three-cueing)? So all _you_ see as a teacher in the little time you get with a pupil who doesn't learn as well is that the phonics isn't "working for them" and that three-cueing is "just how this person learns," but really you're just teaching them an inferior shortcut which leads to worse outcomes.
Nope, I don't believe so. In the long term we're all dead, and students need to be learning and staying motivated every day.
Remember, phonics gives immediate improvements too, for short words. So it's pretty much a false dichotomy.
For students who are picking up phonics quickly from the start, great. For the students who are struggling from the start, try other methods ASAP.
As a teacher, figuring out which methods work for a student isn't rocket science. Your students are either getting better on a visible daily basis or not. We're not talking a 5% difference in outcomes, it's more like 75% difference. (Of course, bad teachers just don't pay attention at all, or are too swamped with work to be able to.)
If you learned to read and continued to read few years later, it does not matter what method you used initially. After few years you are remembering how most common words look like and instantly "know" them.
This is exactly the point that the article is trying to dispel. If you learn to read in an improper way, such as 3-cue, you could carry that with you and struggle all your life.
The article states 40% of pupils will learn to read efficiently no matter what, it is going to be hard to identify those methods that do not work for anybody. Further we have talked about local maximum in the comments here, the brain is lazy so some methods will hurt your ability to learn.
On the flip side I agree that only doing phonics might be a local maximum for the group.
Thanks for calling out that footnote. To clarify, I'm a proponent of a strong phonics program. Within that, however, there are a myriad of ways to organize and structure the instruction. But I don't disagree with the article.
I called out the term "best practices" because it's often used to refer to pedagogy that is no longer supported by the research. I suspect this is the case in other fields as well: the so-called best practices we espouse are more a function of the values of our workplace or work community than anything else.
Because if they admit there are good and bad ways to teach, we might start evaluating whether the public school teachers are good at their job and fire them when they are not.
I'm not sure if figuring out best practices is possible or not, but from my observations of the field it is difficult to determine these types of things definitively. So I agree the emphasizing a singular set of "best practices" too much can be detrimental.
Moreover, I think when teachers feel forced to adopt a teaching method they dislike, their enthusiasm flags, and teacher enthusiasm is something that has a big impact on learning (I'd be interested to hear if anyone disputes the idea that miserable or apathetic teachers result in less effective teaching)
I think the most effective approach to this kind of research is a toolkit approach, where teachers adjust their teaching methods using different well-developed practices based on experience, different aspects of the student population, and the teacher's knowledge / enthusiasm for a specific technique.
I haven't experienced cueing, but I've seen its fallout, having switched coasts halfway through middle school. The change in literacy among my classmates was vivid. They would read straight past words, saying words similar but unmistakably wrong, due to only looking at the first couple of letters, and then never catching the mistake due to comprehension speed no faster than saying it out loud. In advanced English, it was about half the class that was like this; when I switched to the boring class later, it was absolutely every student except for me, at least in my class. Even in grade flippin' twelve, on books that were easy. Mind-boggling.
This is another way in which inequality is persisted. Private schools overwhelmingly tend to teach phonics while those who go to public school end up being taught the 3-cueing system.
Getting the schools to change approach requires political action against powerful lobbies. While a private school needs good outcomes to justify it's prices so gravitate to systems that produce that outcome.
Sometimes you hear these stories and just have to back up two steps and ask why we are obsessed with developing these monolithic curriculums. Can’t we just have teachers use their best judgment? Then we will have a greater diversity of ideas and more opportunity for success in the schools.
That is great in areas where the correct knowledge or pedagogy is not known. Then you can have different opportunities for success. This is horrible where a teaching or pedagogy is known to be better. As an example from a few days ago on Hacker News, suppose a teacher wanted to teach Roman numerals as the primary method of representing numbers.
A counterpoint would be that we apparently don’t know what we don’t know about pedagogies. Someone clearly thought this was the right way to teach reading, despite every intuition telling any reasonable teacher the opposite.
This is where tradition clearly is a strength of human intuition. Nearly everyone who learned to read (successfully) learned with the phonics method. If an individual visionary has the idea to use this new method of teaching reading to his five classes, that’s one thing. It’s another thing entirely for that same visionary to have the power to require every single teacher in the district to teach it that way.
The ambiguity inherent in your solution is similar to the ambiguity that would come from HN parsing all users comments as innerHTML.
I suppose it doesn't have to be a "monolithic curriculum" that addresses this kind of problem. But whatever it is it better be functionally equivalent in its ability to successfully thwart clever bad faith exploits. Otherwise you get the less populated parts of the U.S. "teaching the controversy" in biology classes as part of your "greater diversity of ideas."
I'm really not sure which approach I prefer. If you contextualise it to a company, it's crazy to think you could develop an effective system by having top-level management of a country-sized company devise a monolithic, cookie-cutter plan that gives teams zero autonomy or ability to use their personal judgement. You have to allow the men on the ground to innovate, and adapt to their specific problems.
The cost of autonomy is that some teachers will teach creationism, but it also means the people who are closest to & have the biggest stake in the learning of each child have control over how that kid develops, which in general seems better aligned with incentives.
So fire those teachers. There’s a difference between teaching a particular opinion and teaching proven falsehoods. University professors are basically free to teach whatever syllabus they like, why is that approach not translatable to the public school classroom?
I agree, we're not trusting teachers with their abilities. Like someone said on a top comment, there's several ways to teach children to read. I would rather leave this choice to the teacher.
We homeschool and my wife has taught 7 of our 8 kids using:
Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.
Highly recommended for parents with kids at the age to start reading.
That's the most famous product of the Direct Instruction project-- the idea that you could break down subjects into explicit, tiny pieces that students can master effectively, and standardize the most effective curriculum you develop after years of experiments.
It works far better than most educational programs, but teachers tend to hate it because it doesn't give them latitude for creativity and planning their own lessons!
Yes, I taught all 4 of my children using that book and it’s amazing and works and should be the standard everywhere.
It was actually recommended to us by our first daycare teacher who used to teach elementary school before retiring. She said that early in her career they were all using this book and never had a problem teaching any of the children how to read ... until the school system was flooded with new theories every year that promised to do it better only to end up worse with every decade she taught. So she went out and told every parent she could to get the this book and do it themselves.
Worked like a charm.
Unless I misunderstood the article, this book does use some of the 3-cue method with the stories in the last few chapters that have picture representations. But I get the feeling there's really a delicate balance between using techniques to understand what you're reading vs an ability to just read words.
You think this would be a good book for a non english native kid or is very 'english' specific? I can't find any good books in portuguese about teaching kids to read that doesn't use the 'visual' method (since it is what is used in schools). I wouldn't mind translating the lessons myself to portuguese and present it to him of course, but if 50%+ is english specific (grammar rules, etc) than maybe not a good idea
I've also had awesome results with this book! My 5 year old seems to really enjoy the lessons. He's still working on building confidence with regular text (the early lessons in the book use a special orthography), but doing fantastically well for his age.
That’s the book my mom used to teach me how to read. I don’t remember much about it, but it was apparently effective, so it’s nice that it’s stuck around for the past ~20 years.
My child was learning to read this way while I was distracted by some serious medical issues. Eventually I noticed she was making up most of what she was supposed to be reading. When I confronted the teacher, she told me she wanted my child to feel confident about reading.
None of the three cueing techniques mentioned in the article were used to teach my daughter how to read at school this year, and she has just completed her first year of school in California. We're currently preparing her for the new school year at home, and phonics is a very large part of the way Californian children are taught how to read. Books in the CA curriculum include Usborne phonics books set, and we're now using online learning from Lexia core reading software during COVID. It's in a large part phonic based learning too.
> None of the techniques mentioned in the article were used to teach my daughter how to read at school this year, and she has just completed her first year of school in California. We're currently preparing her for the new year at home, and phonics is a very large part of the way Californian children learn how to read.
Phonics is one of the techniques mentioned (positively) in the article, but California is far from uniform in how reading (or anything else) is taught (California is where one of the examples using three-cueing in the article is from.)
My father was a volunteer teacher at my school for reading classes and was told to use this top-down method of whole words, guessing, etc. Having struggled with dyslexia his whole life, but being an avid reader despite it, he simply disregarded what he was told and taught everyone in the class using phonics instead. To this day, even as a very late reader (I was probably 9 before I picked up my first real book, period), I'm astonished how much difficulty people have with reading when it comes to unfamiliar words or even familiar words that they haven't seen written before. I'm also astonished how much difficulty people have taking written words and integrating them into their speech.
I used to think it was simply the product of my being such an avid reader, but I'm starting to suspect it may be because I have that base in phonics.
As someone completing my Masters in Applied Linguistics, I see this focus on top-down strategies as an example of teaching people to run before they can walk. Sure they might get good at running, but sometimes you need to go slower, and while walking forms a strong foundation for the former, it's easy to conceive how the converse is not true. Meanwhile many kids get left in the dust with both a subpar run, and no ability to walk properly.
Just because people develop the ability to read words as a whole and use inference and other strategies to read quickly, doesn't mean those are the skills we should be teaching as "reading".
When I was younger I used to sometimes look at my father's disregard for academic knowledge as a flaw, but I'm understanding more and more that his skepticism is often quite healthy.
53 here, and I also don't remember "learning to read", but I do still remember wondering why so many of the other kids in my kindergarten class (4-5year olds here) couldn't read already.
My parents were always "readers" and growing up our house was always full of bookshelves stacked to overflowing with books and magazines.
I spent a lot of time as a pre teen and teenager going through my dad's unbroken collection of Scientific American magazine starting from the late 60s. I suspect Martin Gardner's column has had a direct influence on my career choices and why I hang out here... I remember many occasions when peers at university were first learning about things like Conway's Game Of Life, Penrose Tilings, and RSA public key crypto - and I'd be "Doesn't everybody know all this already? I think I read about this before I was in high school!"
For nostalgia's sake, I just went and found Gardner's RSA article. It was from 1977 - I was 10 (by which stage I was almost certainly grabbing the magazine from Dad as soon as he'd finished reading it).
Notable quote: "For example, to test a 130 digit odd number for primality requires at the most (that is when the number is actually prime) about 7 minutes on a PDP-10 computer."
21 here and I don't remember learning to read from the beginning. Only all the reading comprehension tests we had in school where they get you to explain what a paragraph means.
Somewhat related but I know someone the same age who seems to struggle with this. They regularly misunderstand what people mean online or fail to recognise satire (especially having issues when someone quotes a part of what they said implying that it was very strange/confusing/mocking it). I'm sort of at a loss thinking of a way to resolve this because to me its not even something I really thought had to or could be learned.
Yeah, I'm 27 and honestly, I have no idea how I learned. I've never understand why people debate on what's the best way to learn to read, because I don't think it really matters. But maybe, some other people are different.
Though, like by the time 1st or 2nd grade came along, I don't remember anyone in the class who was having problems reading. And I was kind of a bully, so I'm sure I would have made fun of them if someone was struggling (and I have a good memory of my put-downs!)
A good friend of mine had this bullshit done to him growing up, and can't spell for shit (which he had no trouble venting about through college) exactly because of the method in this article. His elementary school teachers literally told him to "think about how he would spell it" and then, and this is the mind-blowing part, were toooootally okay with whatever the fuck his child mind came up with. "Oh you spelled 'tree' just like the (literal) number: 100,000, that's great!!"
I'm just shocked this shit is still going on or that like anyone even thinks that could possibly fucking work. We don't have apriori knowledge to somehow write and read glphys, representing fucking sounds, which are time and location dependent... so how or why would this approach possibly work?
English has a relatively idiosyncratic relationship between letters and sounds. Does phonics work even better in languages that have regularized spelling, so "sounding out" always works perfectly? I could imagine that a native speaker would find it easy to learn to read in such a language.
Yes. Speakers of Russian, for example, find the concept of a "spelling bee" to be completely nonsensical--if you hear a word and can't spell it, you must just be completely illiterate, and vice-versa.
I have heard this is the case for Spanish as well, but I don't have personal experience in that case.
In Spanish:
word -> sound (is straightforward).
sound -> word (not so straightforward).
So, spelling does make sense, but it's not much of a thing like in English. We have some rules to aid the process, but at the end of the day, you need to have read a lot to know how truly write a word.
That being said, I find kind of weird the cue process described in the article. I think that in Spanish we always learn by identifying letters with sounds as there's a 1 to 1 relationship in that direction. I.e. every written word has only one possible pronunciation.
My mom was a middle school Spanish teacher, and her favorite trick was to promise her Spanish I classes that they’d be able to read (but not understand!) just about anything within the first week or two.
And indeed, they could - eighth grade Spanish I students had to have had an A in English the previous year, so they were all decent English readers.
I’ve found that German is mostly phonetic like that, but not quite as consistent as Spanish is.
This is not correct. A large part of Russian language curriculum in schools consists of dictations[1], as Russian is not strictly phonic (mostly it's unstressed vowel shifts, such as 'о'>'а').
It's nowhere close to English though. Spanish spelling is a breeze, much simpler than Russian.
Unrelated factoid: in my experience, average Russian has more chances to reproduce believable Spanish pronunciation than English.
I know that. I went through it while learning Russian. Nevertheless, the spelling system is close enough that, in my experience, that is in fact the point of view held by the majority of native Russian speakers--if you hear a word and don't know how to spell it, or see a word and don't know how to pronounce it, you need to go back to school. It's not something worth holding national competition about, or an ability worth being proud of, and Russians I have known are consistently baffled by the concept of an English "spelling bee".
Idiosyncratic is quite a friendly way to describe it.
Written English is jus plain awful and makes no sense whatsoever. It is basically impossible to read english without knowing the words and thus how to pronounce them.
You can read whole german sentences without understanding a word but still pronounce them correctly.
This is something you will often find in children reading a book; where the pronunciation is basically correct and then they ask what a certain word means at the end.
English speakers just stutter step across unknown words and are often unable to finish the sentence when they encounter something unknown.
This sort stuttering is really jarring and happens a lot even to adults.
Being german but reading a lot of technical stuff in english, the nonsensical nature of written English is just mind boggling.
In Bulgarian, we have a simple and direct mapping between sounds and letters. “Phonics” is the way we are taught to read and write - although I don’t think we have a name for it, it is simply “the way to learn to read”. I don’t know about any other way to do it and the methods described in the article sound nonsensical to me.
I remember how confused I was the first time I saw the concept of a spelling bee in a movie as a kid. If you know how a word is spelled, you can always correctly read and pronounce it.
Yeah, I was thought how to read at 4 or 5 by a fellow kindergartener, who I think was told by her parents. I entered elementary school where most learn how to read and write already being able to read pretty much anything in Czech.
Having a regular (and in Czech simple) transliteration is in my mind similar advancement as are letters compared to letter-words (as in Chinese).
And this is no conincidence - the way Czech is written was largerly engineered in the 19th century during the national movement.
And in the opposite direction, how does this work in a language like Chinese where "spelling" isn't a thing at all?
In Japanese, they start by teaching the kana syllabaries (which are phonetic and very regular), and then from 1st grade onwards they start the grueling task of memorizing the 2000+ kanji characters you need for basic literacy. But in Chinese it's all characters from day one, with a few crutches like pinyin/bopomofo for annotating readings.
As a speaker of phonetically spelled languages the whole thing reads like an onion article. The idea that you can teach reading without going through letters and syllables first never really crossed my mind.
My parents homeschooled me. They used phonics to teach me to read, and they didn't make me learn to read before I was actually ready. Those two things, plus lots of being read too, had me reading so much growing up, they had to limit me to one novel a day.
If COVID has you reevaluating schooling, I highly recommend homeschooling. Also, read up on when schooling should really start. My parents always recommend Better Late Than Early by Raymond S. Moore.
My eldest taught himself to read relatively young and by 6-7 yo, he'd read the Harry Potter series through twice. He'd mispronounce words he'd learned (as happens from those who learn by reading) but could define and give context for anything I tested him with. When he started school, I think they were using a system called Jolly Phonics
His sister entered school two years after him and they've since changed to Read Write Inc Phonics. She's learning along with the class and take-home books. Hard to truly judge, but the system seems effective. She has confidence and then success sounding out increasingly difficult words.
> He'd mispronounce words he'd learned (as happens from those who learn by reading) but could define and give context for anything I tested him with.
I _still_ do something very like this in my 50s. Words that my subconscious brain decides "don't matter", usually irregular character or place names in fiction, just become some kind of signifier in my memory so I recognise what they mean in the context of the story - but when I discuss that book with someone else they'll speak out loud one of those words and I'll have to take a few seconds to "reverse-phonics" it into a sequence of letters then visualise that in my head to work out which "signifier" (that I'd never bothered creating an audible form for) there talking about...
I remember doing this with a play I read for a class back in high school. When I was taking the test on it, I realized to my horror that I didn't know the name of one of the main characters – it started with a distinctive letter, so that was all my brain had kept.
I participated in MetaFilter for years before I went to any meetup. At my first meetup, I realized I had never thought about how to pronounce the nickname "MeFi" despite reading and typing it countless times.
They don't do this in my kids' school. Phonics all the way. It has its weaknesses as well. English spelling is a mess and there are so many rules it is hard as a parent to remember them all as adults don't read like this. And the rules often only hint at the word, they still have to try various combinations and have the word in their vocab and know it fits the context or it would often turn out nonsense.
I get kind of frustrated when my kids are breaking down a word into phonemes continually and still get it wrong. It is frustrating listening to a kid break down the same word page after page instead of trying to retain it.
It's a terrible way to learn. The example of context based words mentioned just doesn't work:
"For example, a child who says "horse" when the word was "house" is probably relying too much on visual, or graphic, cues. A teacher in this case would encourage the child to pay more attention to what word would make sense in the sentence."
This sentence could be either: "The man climbed onto the horse". "The man climbed onto the house".
Both make sense. Appalling.
"For Goodman, accurate word recognition was not necessarily the goal of reading. The goal was to comprehend text. If the sentences were making sense, the reader must be getting the words right, or right enough."
But text is made up of words, so if you cannot recognise the words the text will not make sense. "right enough" isn't good enough for text because subtle variations in spellings completely change the meaning, eg. bought / brought which everyone I know gets wrong - they mean completely different things.
Also, skipping words seems like an extremely stupid thing to do because the word could be the crux of the sentence. Without knowing what the word is, the sentence will lose its full meaning and make the entire sentence pointless. If skipping words is the "solution" to difficult words, surely this will reinforce the "skipping" concept so that any difficult word is skipped and their reading will not ever improve.
Interesting that nobody mentioned a magnificient essay "How and Why I Thought My Toddler To Read" [1]. I tried it with my son. He's now 6 years 3 months and reads fluently German, good Serbian (cyrillic), and okay-ish English.
Wow. Pretty sure I learned to read through phonics (also in California). I think the tricks of quickly skimming words and just inferring words from context are things that I do when I'm not deeply engaged in a text and just want to pick up the gist. I would never recommending learning to read that way. Maybe it's not as fun to teach?
I got towards the end of the article though and just kinda speechless at this reaction from the guy who came up with this theory. The damage that this kind of arrogance has done is hard to measure...
He brought up the example of a child who comes to the word "horse" and says "pony" instead. His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept.
I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn't the same thing as a horse. Second, don't you want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ says "pony"? And different letters say "horse"?
He dismissed my question.
And
Goodman rejected the idea that you can make a distinction between skilled readers and unskilled readers; he doesn't like the value judgment that implies. He said dyslexia does not exist...
My wife taught my daughter with phonics when she was almost 4. The summer before kindergarten she was already reading chapter books for second graders. I agree that phonics is a good method.
Whaaat? I wanted to (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ partway through reading this. Blows my mind that someone actually thought that was a better way to teach people to read... Learning to sound letters is the only way IMO...
My partner did EFL for years. She always said that truth lies both sides of the whole-word vs phonics debate.
Here in Queensland Australia it was deeply politicised in a left right electoral battle between state governments, teaching unions, public and privately funded schools.
As an EFL teacher her praxis was focussed on adults not pre-literate children which is an important distinction.
That said, I like this nutshell exemplifier of the problem.
"Cat" c-a-t. Cee aaye tee spells cat.
Now do that for "women" (UK english, Australian english typically pronounced "wimmin")
English sucks, the phonic rules are all over the place but; Is women the only word you do pronounce according to those rules, would you understand me if I said "women"? A key concept is having a reading buddy that can listen to you and try to understand.
I would say that the more frequent the word the more likely it is that the pronounciation is a tad different from spelling.
I learned to read early enough that I have no memory of it, it was before kindergarten; I was reading competently (e.g., "Citizen of the Galaxy") by then.
What I do remember is one moment, after I could already read, and that is the day when I asked my mom if we could please read something other than The Wizard of Oz because I was tired of it.
So if you're looking for a method, I recommend applying this technique: read the same book over and over until the kid can't take it any more.
Best way for your kids to learn how to read is to teach them yourself.
At Home.
From a very early age.
With Phonics or whatever technique works best for you and them.
Because school is not the place to teach a kid to read.
Now, using Phonics has helped in many, many ways. Recently on a trip to the kingdom, many people have been telling me I say Thai names very well. A name like: Surassa Fhaumnuaypol or Vajiralongkorn is easy -- just use phonics principles to slowly say it then speed up.
"The teachers drew her a Venn diagram of the three-cueing system. Adams thought this diagram made perfect sense. The research clearly shows that readers use all of these cues to understand what they're reading.
"But Adams soon figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not just as the way readers construct meaning from text, but as the way readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary."
Ultimately, this sounds like a difficulty in translating research into application. The cueing theory was incomplete but has taken over because it usually works. The newer theory is better, but has to fight its way in.
Teachers are required to have continuous training. There seems to be a breakdown between research and teacher education that isn't addressed in the article.
> The cueing theory was incomplete but has taken over because it usually works.
Except it doesn't.
> The newer theory is better, but has to fight its way in.
The “newer” theory is one of the two older theories mentioned in the article, both of which work better in practice and well as having better support in terms of research on how people actually read that the three-cue approach.
Three-cues seems to have taken off because it was easy to frame in terms of being a broad holistic approach at a time when that was fashionable for ideological/aesthetic reasons, and now it's gotten entrenched minds share and a bunch of commercial interests around it making it hard to dislodge organically. Kind of like MBTI only more prone to being abused where it actually matters.
> Teachers are required to have continuous training. There seems to be a breakdown between research and teacher education that isn't addressed in the article.
It's actually fairly directly addressed, as the vendors of both material for teaching reading and educational material and training on teaching reading are among those shoveling the debunked woo.
And in many cases it's not a matter of what teachers choose, but what district administrators have chosen and purchased decades ago.
> Teachers are required to have continuous training. There seems to be a breakdown between research and teacher education that isn't addressed in the article.
Absolutely. And actually, the breakdown starts with teaching education, where many classroom teachers are taught how to teach broadly, but not the sort of (more specialized) subject knowledge that lets you get inside a student's head to see where the errors are coming from. Elizabeth Green's book "Building A Better Teacher" was eye-opening to me.
This was an interesting read. I'm a priori skeptical of the claim that choice of method is actually all that important, but the article did at least try to provide support:
"researchers estimate there's a percentage of kids — perhaps about 40 percent — who will learn to read no matter how they're taught." -- implying 60% are sensitive to method
'Goldberg decided to teach some of her students using the phonics program and some of her students using three cueing. And she began to notice differences between the two groups of kids. "Not just in their abilities to read," she said, "but in the way they approached their reading."'
And it does seem true that relying on pictures is fundamentally not reading. The whole-word and phonics approaches actually teach to read text, which is kind of the point of learning to read.
I was surprised to read that bit, because the graph earlier in the article shows the percentage of twelfth graders who can read as holding steadily around 40%. Implying that whatever we're doing is as good as doing nothing at all.
I'm very surprised, since I thought that phonics was the current preferred method, probably because it is known to actually work, with evidence going back over decades (if not centuries) and across languages.
Hasn't phonics been a key part of Sesame Street for half a century or something?
The examples of kids who learnt reading through the three cuing systems on the article and in the comments remind me of GPT-2/3 produced text. Mostly correct but some unexplored words replaced by something that doesn't make much sense.
In my mind reading is the one subject where the child can’t afford to get it wrong. If you don’t do science education well, but the kids learn how to read well, they can always learn science by reading. Same with history, literature, and virtually every subject with possible exception of math. Reading is the key to unlock everything else.
As such, we should be very conservative in changing what has been proven to work. The article mentions how new theories came out in the 60’s and displaced the phonics based system which had been proven to work, leading to literally millions of people with an intellectual handicap due to poor reading skills.
This part captures the importance of parents reading to their children from an early age:
Other vocabulary words these first-graders had learned were posted on cards around the classroom. They included: wander, persevere, squint and scrumptious. The kids weren't expected to read those words yet. The idea is to build their oral vocabulary so that when they can read those words, they know what the words mean.
The joy a child feels when they finally read one of those words that they've only heard is a huge boost and encouragement to continue.
I don't really remember exactly what method we used in first grade back in the early 80s. I remember memorizing some words and being cued on them.
What I do remember is phonics in 3rd grade. I hated phonics and blamed it for not being able to spell because english is so inconsistent. It probably isn't phonics fault that I am terrible at spelling but I still remember hating phonics.
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
I think the real problem here is systemic, rather than being linked to any one cause. Reading is an active process, it's something you have to want to do. Kids mimic the adults around them, so if a child lives in a household or neighborhood where no adults are ever seen reading for pleasure, how is are they supposed to know that reading is something worth doing? Another issue is aversion to hard work: unless you practice the difficult task of trying to understand symbols you don't recognize, you're never going to get better at reading. Those sorts of mental hurdles are unpleasant for most, certainly enough to throw many readers off track.
On another note, who's to say there's any one best way to read? Surely there's more than one way you can get something out of a book. People's brains are wired differently, some might learn better one way than another.
I'm not sure how your comment addresses the article, which spent some time explaining research that does tell us what is more and less effective in teaching reading.
> Surely there's more than one way you can get something out of a book.
Maybe so, but probably not for first graders, which is what this article addresses.
Also if you combine more definitions of success, the appropriate methods become more constrained.
1) Read for the gist of it. 2) Read competently-or-better aloud based on exact recognition of words, with or without precise understanding. 3) e.g. Read precisely enough to see precise meaning if it is there, or recognize if the meaning is not precisely clear.
The understated outrage is that teaching for #1, only, is short-sighted and worse.
Because, as the article describes, the books they're reading are extremely formulaic, to the point where the whole book may be made up of identical sentences, except for the final word.
Well sure, that's one reason they might not be learning well--all I'm saying is there is a larger context outside of the classroom that influences reading
Yeah, teaching phonics works well. Seems a bit odd to claim that there is no way to teach it. Phonetic understanding makes both visual, and auditory memory connections. I have never found anyone who can't learn phonics.
That's the thing though; Chinese is a good counterexample that phonics instruction is not universal or fundamental to linguistics, but rather culturally specific. Phonetic written languages have the feature of mapping sounds to words and phonics instruction takes advantage of that.
I doubt phonics isn't fundamental to reading Chinese, though. I've learned how to read Japanese, which uses a mix of their own characters and Chinese characters. If you're reading Japanese and you don't know how to read a written word, you're basically screwed. You might be able to vaguely infer what the words mean based on the meaning associated with the characters, but that's not the same as knowing its exact definition. I guess it would also be the same for Chinese.
It's worth a 2-year difference in the age at which kids read. On one end is Chinese. On the other end is Russian and Spanish. English sits right in the middle.
Sure but optimizations are not fundamental. It is not even clear to me if phonics instruction (invented by some teachers?) was based on linguistics (a scientific theory).
If you just read massive amounts of books to your kids starting at 6 months you don't have to worry about any of this. My kids were reading chapter books at age 4 because I read them 20+ board books a day when they were babies, and I didn't have to stress about strategies like "phonics" vs "sight words."
Learning something is different from practised usage. What you have provided is not a counter example at all, it's evidence that once you have learned to read, you (usually) have deeper structures that can adapt to and survive perturbations.
The ability of adults who can read to be able to decode examples such as yours might be behind the drive to use the "guess and move on" method being discussed.
My personal experience of working with a wide range of people is that many of them see the words, say the words, and move on without actually internalising what they've said. The derogatory term "barking at print" comes to mind. I've seen it, and I find it sad that there are otherwise intelligent and capable people who fundamentally can't read.
> The theory is known as "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information — or "cues" — to identify words as they are reading.
> ....
> In the paper,5 Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words. Instead, he argued that as people read, they make predictions about the words on the page using these three cues:
> ....> Goodman's proposal became the theoretical basis for a new approach to teaching reading that would soon take hold in American schools.