If you graduated before they implemented this or aren’t American, the system they started to use to teach kids how to read is called three cuing. They teach kids to identify unknown words by guessing based on clues in pictures with the sentences, what word would ‘make sense’, and whether the answer they came up with looks right based on the first letter.
As you may have noticed, none of that is reading a word. These are strategies that borderline illiterate people will use to try to understand words, and for decades it’s been the method used by many schools across the country.
So that person you’re arguing with online who keeps going off on bizarre rants barely related to anything you said might not be a troll, they might just be functionally illiterate due to having never been taught to read. Yaaay!
Nah, my bizarre rants are just a feature of my neurology.
Highly recommend the “Sold A Story” podcast
Shully gully and mercy.
So that person you’re arguing with online who keeps going off on bizarre rants barely related to anything you said might not be a troll, they might just be functionally illiterate due to having never been taught to read.
That sounds like a problem with reading comprehension rather than phonics. Critical thinking skills are in short supply nowadays.
The problem with three-cuing is that it teaches people to skip words they don’t know. Having people just not read half the words in comments they are replying to explains so much. No wonder people have bad reading comprehension.
I learned phonics (which is essential) but also ended up self-teaching myself visual reading. Unless there’s an unfamiliar word or unusual sentence structure I usually don’t subvocalize or “hear” what I’m reading. When I was younger teachers would be upset because I typically finished reading the novel they assigned in the first or second in class “reading time”.
So there is absolutely significant value in visual reading, skimming, cueing, etc – but skipping phonics is insane. It’s like teaching someone how to run before they can walk. It also ignores not everyone is great at running and leaves those people especially screwed.
I usually intuitively understand slovene text when reading it. It just makes reading books more boring - so I read more English books (well I can also do it with English text, but not as good).
It also infuriates some people I read to - since I just skim trough the boring parts, which then sound like groups of random letters.
I skip words because I have attention deficit problems.
You skip words because you can’t read.
We are not the same.
Holy fucking shit this explains so much!
It was called whole word learning in my location (PA) circa 90s. My kids had to do stupid shit like draw borders around a word over and over while repeating it. Their homework directions never made sense to me so we practiced sounding things out. They were not encouraged to learn sounds in school— just memorize the word. If you didn’t know the word you were to look at the first and last letters and guess what belongs in context. Of course if you can’t read any of the other words guessing context is impossible. When my son struggled to read, the reading specialist gave me a book of essential words for him to memorize at home. Multiple times a year the kids did collages to match pictures to letters or words. We were told to work on it at home so I had to sign up for and save magazines to use the pictures. It was a useless, time-wasting project. Then there were the stupid assemblies that occurred regularly—90 minutes of yo-yo entertainers who were invited back every year, fund raising assemblies to sell wrapping paper (mostly to myself and my parents), the obligatory follow-up assembly to distribute the shitty prizes.
My favorite was the year they gave my son an award for a poem he wrote (Yay! We were so proud) and then the school tried to sell us a book of poetry written by all the 5th grade prize winners in PA. Who tf wants a book of 5th grade poetry? We framed and hung his poem on the wall.
All this to say schools appeared to be focused on everything except reading comprehension. Complaining parents were assured THEY were the problem. My kids ended up in private school because I didn’t want them to be functionally illiterate as so many others have. I am not surprised by reading levels in the US.
Defunding US public education is possibly the most successful move republicans made early on. It has worked brilliantly for them.
That’s simply not true, fortunately. All public schools are to follow common core standards and that includes phonics (sounding out words) over sight words and certainly over context guessing. Going contrary to the core is possible, I guess, but certainly not the norm.
If you’re curious, the debate was mostly settled in the 90s, during what my PhD advisor called the “reading wars.” Well, mostly settled… sight words still have a place in reading, especially when a word is contrary to its phonics. But basically, policy has prioritized phonics since Clinton, with to only some revision under Obama.
That’s not to say Americans aren’t dumb; doesn’t mean much if standards aren’t met. But it’s not as simple as saying we’re taught incorrectly. I could give a variety of reasons, although Lemmy users can probably guess poverty, politics and capitalism are pretty central to a lot of it.
Agreed I sub in multiple schools in rural PA. They’re all doing heavy phonics. More phonics then I was a kid for sure.
And the fact that you have a culture that rewards ignorance!
Researchers have tried to test that, too, although it wasn’t that strong an impact compared to funding discrepancy and parental neglect due to overworking and such. However, traditionally that type of research had racist undertones that assumed black inner city kids were the ones rewarding ignorance and somehow completely ignored the white Christian nationalist crowd.
I’d be curious to see more contemporary research on that, though I think researchers are scared to challenge religious or MAGA norms. That seems to be where ignorance is rewarded, compared to the college-first mentality you see in urban schools. But that’s my two cents, not backed by research (yet), unlike the data on poverty and curriculum standards.
Always remember when discussing with US citizens:
Only 13% of the population is proficient in each of these three areas—able to compare viewpoints in two editorials; interpret a table about blood pressure, age, and physical activity; or compute and compare the cost per ounce of food items.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy -> second to last paragraph of the first part.
yep. tis why my wife laments ever setting feet in turtle island. she knew she was part the 3% able to recite, sign, and localize curricula with goals, criteria, and pedigree for a generation that will never surpass her. Traumas are mitigatable, but not the isolation that no peer like her will ever exist.
1 in 4 people you see walking on the street in America is functionally illiterate. More than half can only read at somewhere around a 6th grade level or below. The US glorifies and revels in ignorance.
When I was in the 6th grade I got called into a room after the reading/writing test we all took. I thought I was in trouble. They just didn’t want the other students to hear that I was reading/writing at a college level while they were all at 2nd-8th grade levels.
I am actually autistic/adhd and had a lot of trouble in early development with language. I had a speech impediment, and couldn’t read or write properly. There was a single teacher at my public school who was in a wheelchair and would take me into her office and would sit there and practice my words with me and tell me how to position my tongue, and would teach me how to sound out words, and stuff like that when I was in elementary school.
I think that woman is fully responsible for me being literate. It’s crazy to think about how a few hours of one on one time as a kid had such a big impact on my early childhood development.
I’m very torn with that revelation. My nephew is in the second grade and he reads pretty good. My girlfriends child is in the 3re grade and she reads a lot. Like more than i do on average, and while my reading comprehension and speed is obviously much higher, she’s not that far behind overall. Thinking back, i read the same boojs as my mom when i was in 6th grade, i might not have understood them fully, because they were mainly political thrillers, but i read them. Si i don’t really know, how well does a 6th grader when it comes to reading?
What’s the alternative?? Just telling them?
I think you’re overstating the effect of this method of instruction, which mostly affected much older people.
It was popular between 1960 and 1980, and waned after that. Whole word and three cueing was never as popular as phonics, and even when used, was mostly used in conjunction with phonics.
This Wikipedia article collects quite a bit of history across multiple countries.
By the 1990’s, pretty much every American school system was back to phonics as a foundation. And by 2020, there were pretty much no American schools discouraging phonics instruction and the foundation for teaching reading.
The Wikipedia article that you linked completely disagrees with that you posted:
“According to a survey in 2010, 68% of K–2 teachers in the United States practice balanced literacy; however, only 52% of teachers included phonics in their definition of balanced literacy. In addition, 75% of teachers teach the three-cueing system (i.e., meaning/structure/visual or semantic/syntactic/graphophonic) that has its roots in whole language.[127][128]”
I just read the underlying survey results from the linked source in the footnotes. Which are from a 2020 study, not a 2010 study, but I’ll leave it to someone else to fix the Wikipedia page, as my VPN address is blocked from editing Wikipedia.
22% of instructors teach systematic phonics as their method of instruction. 4% use whole language, the system that discourages phonics emphasis. 68% use balanced literacy. And of those, when asked to give their own written definition, more than half (52%) explicitly mention phonics as part of it, literally the plurality answer in what the phrase “balanced literacy” means. 21% mention “phonemic awareness.” 14% mention “all five essential components of reading instruction,” which comes from a National Reading Panel definition that includes phonics and phonemic awareness as 2 of the 5.
The study report itself explicitly disclaims trying to draw too strong of a conclusion that teachers aren’t using phonics just because they didn’t use the word in their definition. And other keywords like “whole language” only got 6%.
But we don’t need to try to infer what percentage, because the study itself explicitly surveyed the importance of phonics. For the question “When you’re teaching students to read, how much emphasis do you place on phonics?,” 70% answered “a lot,” 28% answered “some,” 2% answered “a little,” and 0% answered “none.”
The study itself pretty strongly supports the idea that almost everyone in the US is teaching phonics as the foundation of reading for 5-7 year olds.
Please check out the investigative reporting by American Public Media, they document schools continuing to use it post-2020 and even some teachers talking about how their school district flat out said they’ll change the program description to comply with the law but not how they teach. If you think this isn’t happening anymore you’re really missing a story.
I’m aware of this debate and the history, and cheered the reintroduction of mandating phonics instruction to New York Public Schools, one of the last holdouts in the country.
So yes, I agree: research and common sense show that phonics-based instruction is a more effective way of teaching children how to read, compared to the long-discredited whole language movement.
But I take issues with two ideas in your post: first, that this is an issue that affects a lot of people, and second, that this affects younger generations more than older generations.
To the first point, I’m arguing that most people eventually learn how to read, regardless of what the formal district or state level curriculum says to use. Some combination of parents and caretakers and external learning materials (children’s books, children’s television, apps and toys, tutoring, external programs like the very popular hooked on phonics) are teaching them outside of school. Lots of teachers are giving individualized instruction and getting people past the hump, even if the district or state curriculum says to do things a particular way. Many kids enrolled in non-phonics curricula still get plenty of exposure to phonics instruction. New York being slowest to return to phonics contributed to this perception, in that New York’s (and Columbia University’s) outsized media/cultural influence led this conversation to be had decades after it was already settled in most of the rest of the English-speaking world.
For the second point, your post makes it sound like this is something that young people today are encountering for the first time. No, these ideas stem from a centuries-old debate with non-phonics instruction peaking basically during my own childhood in the 80’s. The backlash against whole language was going strong in the 90’s, and culminated in the federal Department of Education coming down hard on the side of phonics during the GWB presidency. Most of the state and local educational systems got on board by then, too. And maybe the boomers that got the most concentrated version of Whole Language grew up to be slightly less literate than other generations. But whatever it is, there are so many other things affecting them today, too, to where “how they were taught to read in 1960” isn’t going to be a factor distinguishable from plain old noise.
Yeah, the investigative reporting I linked goes into literally everything you’re saying plus some showing that it’s still happening. I don’t have the time to recap hours and hours of investigative reporting. If you’re interested in further detail you can listen to it.
No, I’m saying that what you’re talking about doesn’t actually link cause and effect. Curriculum selection is a small part of the educational challenges in this country (and in other countries), and many students come up short for all sorts of different reasons, from family/home issues, nutrition, poverty, truancy and attendance, instructional quality (regardless of what written curriculum the instructor should be teaching), etc.
Meanwhile, some excellent students can thrive no matter what they’re given. It’s not like the kids attending the whole language schools grew up with like 0% literacy rates.
So there are kids that were gonna learn to read well under either paradigm. And some that were gonna be bad readers under either.
To pin the broad swath of reading issues on this narrow slice of curriculum design is overstating the effects of curriculum. That’s what my original comment was getting at, and still what I believe. More details about curricula don’t actually address my non-curriculum points: that you can’t just argue with an idiot on the internet and conclude that the reason for his idiocy is because he must’ve been taught with the three cueing method. That’s too much of an inferential leap.
The idea that how you teach children something doesn’t affect how well they learn it is flat out stupid. Going ‘oh well some kids are better at learning this core skill than others so it doesn’t matter how you teach them, therefor it doesn’t matter how you teach anyone because some of them were just going to be bad at it no matter what’ is built on assumptions on top of assumptions. I don’t accept that some children are destined to be bad at reading, and I hope to god anyone teaching children doesn’t believe that. Even special ed teachers should be believing in the capabilities of their students.
Literally everything you’re bringing up is addressed in the reporting I’ve linked you. You aren’t tellling me anything new. It doesn’t change that starting kids off on a poor foundation for understanding how to read is not going to magically turn them into readers. In fact, the very issues you bring up (wealth inequality) tie in to how this is disguised in rich peoples’ school districts by the fact that they can just afford tutors if their kid struggles. BTW, if you want people to focus on the non-curriculum aspects of teaching you should probably just say that instead of hinting around it and then implying someone is an idiot for not changing the subject.
i lived in california from ages 4-8 and we did phonics basically every grade level.
i moved to florida about 3/4 through 3rd grade and that was when i learned about educational standards at the ripe old age of 8 when everyone in my new third grade class read at a first grade level and even my teacher didn’t seem to know what she was doing.
i have a formative memory from my first day. i asked the kid next to me when recess is, and his response was, “what’s recess?”
moth has younglings, and they definitely were taught to sound out words that can be. some words cannot be sounded out, those are called sight words. moth supposes that this isn’t something that’s nationwide.
I love everything about this comment
That is…concerning.
I kinda like to play with writing systems, like Avatarian (Script made for Avatar Legend of Aang and Seven Havens), where each glyph is mapped onto a sound in US English IPA rather than just redesigning glyphs in the Latin Alphabet and I sometimes wonder if it would’ve been better if we had this system (with glyphs for “ch” and “Ll” of course).
Now reading that I think it might be a better system.
Here’s the comment I made last time this idea popped up in a thread:
Even if we were to adopt something like the Shavian alphabet, it would only work for a few generations at most until sound change and dialect divergence built up enough to once again strongly divorce spelling from pronunciation. Not to mention the fact that it’s impossible to come up with a phonetic* alphabet that accounts in a useful way for dialect differences, even just in American English.
This has already happened with hangul, probably the paradebeispiel for successful intentionally designed phonetic systems: spellings that were once phonetic (though, again, in only certain dialects) have now become conventional due to sound change.
So, in addition to the dialect problem, you’d end up having to either completely replace the alphabet again every hundred or so years, or you’d be right back where we currently are. Plus, interventions into the spelling system will a) make older publications harder to read without mass-translating them all into the new systems every few decades which b) will create reading difficulties for the generations that end up having to switch with each new update.
Not to mention the fact that spelling things the way we currently do preserves etymological information (though imperfectly) about the words in question.
That isn’t to say our current system is perfect, but rather that any such system is arbitrary, and will eventually become conventionalized either way without active, persistent intervention that comes with its own significant downsides.
*Used here in the lay sense, not the linguistic sense
When that happens, you just do a rechtschreibreform.
it would only work for a few generations at most until sound change and dialect divergence built up enough to once again strongly divorce spelling from pronunciation.
As a Spaniard this is bonkers. We have dialects but everyone is taught how each letter sounds and that hasn’t changed in a long while. Even when there have been changed, there’s a central institution that records them. Our language is consistent withing it’s ruleset. It’s crazy how inconsistent English is. Just don’t change the sounds each letters do, why is it so hard?? It’s so weird.
If someone wants to pronounce a word differently (not shorten, just straight up different) hit’em with a stick and yell them to speak properly at school. Ffs.
Your comment shows an ignorance of how language works.
As a Spaniard you should know that a) Spanish is one of the most diverse modern languages, and b) it has seen a large number of structural changes in both pronunciation and grammar since even Cervantes’ Early Modern Spanish.
Spanish spelling also follows general etymological principles, and has similar inconsistencies with English for the same reasons, though it doesn’t have as many sources for loanwords, and so it doesn’t have quite as many subregularities in its orthography as English does.
Languages don’t care whether there’s a “central institution” recording it, because language is constantly negotiated between speakers, and so we will continue to see exactly the same sort of divergence of arbitrary orthographic practices from pronunciation that we see in English, along with all of the already-existing dialectal differences.
It’s crazy how inconsistent English is. Just don’t change the sounds each letters do, why is it so hard?? It’s so weird. If someone wants to pronounce a word differently (not shorten, just straight up different) hit’em with a stick and yell them to speak properly at school. Ffs.
/c/badlinguistics
There’s a difference between a spoken dialects existing and everyone being taught as a kid how to sound letters the same way. There exists a unified way of speaking the language in Spain that if you do everyone understands you.
About the link you linked on inconsistencies with written to spoken.
In general, the orthography of Spanish is such that the pronunciation of most words is unambiguous given their written form
Then it describes inconsistencies that don’t exist in Castilian. In Castilian X is always ks, using x as sh is something only done in regional dialects or languages. They even use Mexican as an example when in Spain Spanish, it’s written and pronounced Mejicano and Méjico, with the hard J that our grammatical rules would force you to say when reading that word. We now use the x to write Mexico but that’s similar to how in English you now write Türkiye, because it’s a given name and for respect. Same for Ximenez, I believe that’s in Catalan/Valencian and they do pronounce it as sh, but that’s another language now is it? In Spanish that surname is written and pronounced Jimenez.
Languages don’t care whether there’s a “central institution” recording it, because language is constantly negotiated between speakers
Sure, having a common ruleset doesn’t help when negotiating /s
The fact that y’all have so many loan words that make your everyday life and you have to learn in a case by case basis of how each word is “supposed” to be pronounced is crazy. In Spanish and other similar Latin based languages we automatically know how to pronounce words we have never heard because the language is unambiguous from written to spoken, no one will look at you weird or tell you you spelled stuff wrong if you follow the ruleset. We even have the ` to indicate the syllable that needs to be stressed so that it’s obvious for a reader how to pronounce words.
Yeah the language has changed, sure. But dismissing a central organization that records them and maintains a strong ruleset that incorporates changes is silly.
better system
Nothing beats shorthand. Gregg Centennial is the most versatile. Capitalism is why shorthand barely praxis today.
A quick look at Gregg shorthand and I’m not too sure how it would work. I mean it’s great shorthand but as an everyday writing system on things like signs and books it fails because a lot of the glyphs look the same.
Avatarian does a similar thing but with distinct glyphs and putting them into blocks creates something that can be considered symbols for easier reading, especially considering the most common words tend to be the shortest.
if you’ve ever used an abudiga, you were already shorthanding. Gregg was designed for over a 100 years to abudiga IndoEuropean phonetics. What “signs” do you see incapable of being abudigad? Entire libraries already came and went in Gregg.
I’ve read Bryan Konietzko’s conlang. I am literally a conlang.
I just prefer logograms over abjads.
(with glyphs for “ch” and “Ll” of course)
INB4 that user who insists on using thorn characters shows up to fight the good fight.
JOKES ON YOU, AVATARIAN HAS A THORN CHARACTER IN BUILT INTO THE SYSTEM!
On the contrary…
If you are interested APM did a whole podcast about this. I haven’t listened but I hear it’s great.
I knew the kids couldn’t read because I have multiple English teachers in my family, but until I listened to season 1 of that podcast (working through season 2 now) I had no idea it was from them not even being taught the basics of how to read! One guy they interviewed who learned to read fluently as an adult was basically like ‘when I learned I was like, that’s all you do? Why the fuck didn’t anyone teach me this?’
I genuinely believe that this and the ‘common core’ math stuff are intentional measures to dumb down a population. Not really sure what to do about it though
Common core math is how high performers in math tend to already approach math concepts. The controversial examples focused on “number sense” do instill good habits and instincts for error correction (especially important in the age of calculators and computers), and don’t detract from the importance of the actual mathematical operations. Either way, common core math curriculum as a whole is good, and continues to be a good set of goals for learning math. I’m somewhat sympathetic to the argument that the math standards are too high and leave some kids behind, but that’s less a problem with the standard and more a problem with our ability to get kids up to that perfectly reasonable standard, of what we should hope that all adults should know.
The main criticisms of common core that I sympathize with are that they deemphasize the humanities too much, but that’s not exactly a problem with the math standards themselves.
My only real exposure is helping friends kids with their homework, and it really seemed like they were focused way more on shortcuts to correct answers for simple problems than how and why numbers interact. Which I guess is kinda what you’re saying! Imo those are great techniques for working at a higher level, but in no way a substitute for observing and understanding the processes that lead to those answers. You’ll get plenty of competent accountants that way, but you won’t inspire many mathematicians.
