(no subject)

[lirazel]

I recently listened to a (very interesting, recommended) 6-episode podcast called Sold a Story about why so many USAmerican kids (and Kiwi kids, too, apparently!) can't read. Long story short: a lady from New Zealand came up with this theory that kids don't learn by sounding out the words but by paying attention to context and stuff like this ("three-cueing"). Her ideas took off and schools stopped teaching phonics. There's a big publisher and some superstar reading pedagogy authors who have made an empire from teaching this weird theory despite the fact that neuroscience is very clear that, actually, yes kids do indeed learn phonetically. This is accompanied by a theory that if you just give kids books on topics they're interested in, they will learn to read automatically? I guess? The idea is to make them "passionate" readers but not actually, you know, worry about whether they understand the mechanics of reading. Which, as a lifelong passionate reader, seems wrong-headed.

It's a depressing story (mostly because it appears that upper and upper-middle class families have papered over this problem by hiring private tutors, while poorer and working class kids just suffer), but what I kept getting hung up on was that this has to be an English-language problem, right? The root of this thing has to come down to the fact that English has such weird and quirky spelling for so many words. A language like, say, Spanish that uses an alphabet or syllabic system for phonetic spelling--in which you always, always know how to pronounce the word just by looking at it--could never give rise to such a theory, right?

So the fact that this took off in the Anglophone world has got to be just another manifestation of the way that Anglocentrism bites us in the butt--if any of these people had looked at how kids learn to read Korean or whatever, they would have realized that their theory can't be right?

Or am I missing something?

Comments

[sophia_sol]

yeah I've read about the three-cuing approach
and it does not seem at all right as a universal approach for teaching English reading! the articles I've read have indicated that a certain percentage of children WILL just learn to read no matter what approach you take to teaching them, but for the kids outside that set, they need phonics, if they're going to be long-term successful. I think you're right that it takes a language with a spelling as weird as English to give rise to a theory like three-cuing!

admittedly I do know someone who is an excellent English reader who I think has never used phonics strategies once; I get the sense they do whole-word recognition, as if English were written with logograms that you learn to recognize the shape of, word by word, instead of any individual letters being relevant ever? which is totally wild to me as a way to approach reading an alphabetic language! to me, the way I store words in my brain requires me to know the spelling, or it can't settle in properly! but I suppose it's an example of how some kids just WILL make reading happen no matter what

[lirazel]

Yeah, like, obviously there are a great many English words that you can't read phonetically (or...you know, a given letter can make more than one sound which is complicated!). But the basics? The skeleton of the language? You absolutely can and should read those phonetically! Just because "knight" is so hard doesn't mean that "cat" shouldn't be read phonetically!

admittedly I do know someone who is an excellent English reader who I think has never used phonics strategies once; I get the sense they do whole-word recognition, as if English were written with logograms that you learn to recognize the shape of, word by word, instead of any individual letters being relevant ever?

Well good for them, if it works for them! I do think it makes sense that there are different strategies that different readers use. But as a baseline approach, surely phonics should be the first step?

but I suppose it's an example of how some kids just WILL make reading happen no matter what

Yeah, I think I'm probably one of those people, but I don't think there are all that many of us!

[lauradi7dw]

My guess is that over time most successful readers of English are treating words like (using your word) logograms. Some people encourage sight words from the beginning -Lots of board books for toddlers are like that, with a word next to a picture, especially useful for nouns. It's clear to me when I am reading things as sight words and when I'm sounding them out, especially when reading aloud - if we're looking up a medication, for example, and reading it to each other, we'll breeze through the stuff about take it before breakfast with a full glass of water and then slow to a crawl while sounding out the generic chemical name of the med.

I am goofing around with Duolingo Korean, and I find that I'm trying to make sight words out of what I see rather than sounding them out, even though sounding out is much more straightforward in Hangul than in English (not 100%, though). My guess is that readers in most languages end up doing this.

I know Dr. Seuss gets a bad rap as a person, but don't people still read Hop on Pop? The very basics of sounding out right there.

[hashiveinu]

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.

I keep telling my ESL student how little sense English spelling makes, and tell her, "It's easier than Chinese, but not by that much."

[lirazel]

There are just so many exceptions! To every rule! I think that's one of the most frustrating things about learning English.

[seekingferret]

cahn had a post about this pedagogical argument last year and I think that the argument COULD be entirely correct but it's the kind of thing where it's important to remember we're still deep in the middle of a Replication Crisis in social science research and I think framing this kind of story as being that one side of the pedagogy argument is totally ignoring science and the other side is on the side of science feels almost inherently dishonest. Human brains are complicated, any experiment involving them is subject to all sorts of confounding factors and is extremely sensitive to the questions being asked and types of experimental conditions that are easy to overlook even being part of the experimental setup.

[lirazel]

we're still deep in the middle of a Replication Crisis in social science research and I think framing this kind of story as being that one side of the pedagogy argument is totally ignoring science and the other side is on the side of science feels almost inherently dishonest.

Yeah, that makes sense, though I know nothing about neurological research at all. The podcast does certainly have an agenda--one that it's very straightforward about. Most things in life rest in the nuance, don't they?

Human brains are complicated, any experiment involving them is subject to all sorts of confounding factors and is extremely sensitive to the questions being asked and types of experimental conditions that are easy to overlook even being part of the experimental setup.

Thank you for this reminder!

[likeadeuce]

I do think there are complexities to it and I know of school districts that have gone to the other extreme with intensive phonics drilling to the point that at least one person i know took their child out of public school because the strictness of the method made her miserable-- but that's likely part of a larger issue with how schools handle student behavior and maturity levels, not reading science per se.

[theseatheseatheopensea]

A language like, say, Spanish that uses an alphabet or syllabic system for phonetic spelling--in which you always, always know how to pronounce the word just by looking at it--could never give rise to such a theory, right?

But it did! Up to the late 80s/early 90s, the phonic method was widely used (that's how I learnt!), but then the psychogenetic/immersive method became super popular. That in itself was not a problem--quite the opposite, because it definitely created a more immersive approach and reading experience. But in my opinion both methods can (and should coexist), because our brains need that structure when we are first approaching reading. Otherwise it's just like you said: a sort of reading pedagogy fad (that totally misrepresents Piaget's theories, I think!). And I agree with you in that poorer and working class kids are the ones more affected by a method that doesn't contemplate their reality. When I was a school librarian (in the mid 2000s), I definitely saw that kids benefited from immersive reading, and but also that they need that first structured approach! Giving kids books about things they're interested in is great (I hooked a lot of kids by offering them dinosaur books! XD) but first you have to give them the tools and structure to read them! Over here, in recent years, a sort of hybrid model has been tested, and I think that works a lot better.

[lirazel]

OH YAY! This is exactly why I asked the question, because I was hoping someone could give me some insight from a different language perspective. Count on you to do that!

But in my opinion both methods can (and should coexist), because our brains need that structure when we are first approaching reading....When I was a school librarian (in the mid 2000s), I definitely saw that kids benefited from immersive reading, and but also that they need that first structured approach!

Yes, this makes sense! So much sense! That phonics would be an indispensable part of learning to read but that there are other tools too! I'm really fascinated by the fact that it popped up in other languages too--thank you for correcting me!

[rekishi]

In Germany, a few years after I was out of primary school, they started teaching writing not anymore with a beginner's reading/spelling book but let the kids write the way they were hearing the words.

Which has led to a whole generation or two who don't learn how to spell correctly when they start writing and have to re-learn how to spell. Which, for many many children, doesn't happen. It's a travesty, really.

(German is easier on the phonetics than English, but we still have a few quirks with the diphthongs and the ss/ß spelling.)

[lirazel]

Wow, that's so interesting. I had no idea that this was happening in multiple languages. Incredible.

[dasmims]

What I find especially weird when it comes to German is that we had a reformation of our spelling. Neue deutsche Rechtschreibung (new German spelling(?)) is new for a reason. Stuff got simplified and the rules we use nowadays are based on phonetics, as far as I understand it. The usage of "s", "ss" or "ß" doesn't change anymore just cause you use a verb in a different tense for example.

As far as languages go, German with the new spelling rules, is pretty logical.(if you ignore genders....)

[sunshine304]

Oh god yeah, this very weird trend! It started in the 1980s and for a while it was quite popular. Now, at least in my state it's basically forbidden because it's been shown that children learn so many wrong spellings this way due to the weird characteristics of the German language you mentioned.

What's actually working for many children is going by phonetics and syllables. I can't remember how I learned to read in school, but a popular way to start is using easy words that have very clear syllables where you can't make mistakes ins sounding them oout so that the child learns the sound chorectly in combination with the letters/word. You add some words they have to memorise to build the first few short sentences, like "mit" (with). Children also usually use a table with pictures + starting letters to help with sounds, but that doesn't work for English of course because of so many different ways to say a letter...

Spelling has been a huge issue in elementary school and many children have problems even without that very questionable "reading through writing" method. German states work with a basic vocabulary, I think about 800 words, that children have to know and be able to spell correctly when they leave elementary school. There are also some preogressive methods to help children with spelling, working individually on their texts etc. But it's really a problem, not enough teachers, too many children in a class, too many things to teach and not enough time...

[dasmims]

I think, I have heard something similar happening in Germany. Lately,there seems to be a tendency to let children write however they want for the first year or so.

There are phaenomena in spelling that you can't hear if you haven't practiced it or rules you can't apply if no one taught you. Like when to use "s", "ss" or "ß", or when to use "äu" verus "eu". Also capitalisation is like a thing and you can't hear that.

[lirazel]

Yeah, somebody mentioned that upthread and that's so WEIRD. It seems very backwards. Like, eventually you're going to have to learn it anyway! So why learn something else you're just going to have to unlearn?

[dolorosa_12]

mostly because it appears that upper and upper-middle class families have papered over this problem by hiring private tutors, while poorer and working class kids just suffer

Can confirm that a) this stupid technique of learning to read was taught to us in Australia and b) my upper middle class mother was horrified and paid a private tutor to teach my sister and me spelling using phonics. It wasn't that we couldn't read, it was that my sister in particular couldn't spell (I was better off as I read so voraciously that I'd somehow learnt to spell by osmosis). The situation was marginally better in the 1990s because we were mainly taught by baby boomers and a handful of people my grandparents' age, who had all learnt phonics and retained lingering elements of it in the curriculum. (There was a similar problem with being taught mental arithmetic in maths classes — you do actually need to learn these things like drills, with lots of boring repetition, for them to be able to stick — and my mother paid for us to be tutored at the local Kumon centre, after a particularly dreadful year in primary school where my Gen X teacher basically didn't teach us any maths at all and my mother realised I didn't understand how to do division.)

I would say that in my own family's case, the decision to pay for private tutoring came only after literally years of my mother ringing up the school to complain and coming in for meetings with teachers (I believe she took it all the way to the principal) to complain about this, and got nowhere.

In terms of the non-Anglophone world, I have been told anecdotally by e.g. my German husband, my friends who are raising their son in the Welsh-speaking part of Wales etc that because spelling is phonetic, children in those countries don't have to have spelling tests in the classroom, and the idea of American-style spelling bees is absurd because (apart from loanwords) there's no ambiguity in spelling. I remember a friend from Iceland saying that in his school, they weren't just taught phonetics, they were taught the International Phonetic Alphabet, because it was considered important to know a universal way to represent phonemes, since such phonemes can be spelt in various ways if you use e.g. the Latin alphabet.

[lirazel]

I figured that if it originated in New Zealand it probably made it to Australia as well. Yikes.

(I was better off as I read so voraciously that I'd somehow learnt to spell by osmosis)

Oh same.

I would say that in my own family's case, the decision to pay for private tutoring came only after literally years of my mother ringing up the school to complain and coming in for meetings with teachers (I believe she took it all the way to the principal) to complain about this, and got nowhere.

From the people they interviewed in the podcast, this sounds like a very, very common situation.

children in those countries don't have to have spelling tests in the classroom, and the idea of American-style spelling bees is absurd because (apart from loanwords) there's no ambiguity in spelling.

Right! My brother-in-law thinks it's wild!

I remember a friend from Iceland saying that in his school, they weren't just taught phonetics, they were taught the International Phonetic Alphabet, because it was considered important to know a universal way to represent phonemes, since such phonemes can be spelt in various ways if you use e.g. the Latin alphabet.

I think this would be a great think for everyone to learn! But only after everyone's learned to read in their own native language first, obviously.

[elperian]

This is just so bizarre to me! And yes, Anglocentrism - or at least monolingualism - seems to make this easier to succeed, because (like with programming) with multiple languages you can start to think about how systems work instead of just one case.

[lirazel]

I think all the time about how many stupid systems Americans accept because they don't know anything about how other countries do things so they don't even believer there are other options.

[lowhours]

oh, i read one of their articles about this a while ago!
( https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading )

i found it deeply compelling and honestly pretty confusing, because i couldnt remember how i learnt to read OR how i was taught (which may have been different), and then i also struggled to believe that the poor teaching strategies were really THAT bad and nonsensical. I felt like surely some ~contextual strategies made sense, right? using the letters and sounds you recognise, what kind of word could it be? etc etc. but then it was like, oh yeah we just let students guess the completely wrong word and didn't correct them. !??!?!?!?!?! . i couldn't comprehend how that would EVER be understood to be a viable way to teach reading, or like... anything. The anecdote at the very end of this article - where goodman says that a child misidentifying the word "pony" as "horse" is totally fine - just made me so SAD. It's such an impoverished way to look at reading, language, and communication as a whole!! :( :( :( :( :( :(.

anyway, im glad you posted about this, because the discussion in the comments is super fascinating!! the question of how literacy pedagogy for children works in other languages is now going to haunt me!!!! All my rudimentary googles are about best practice/contemporary education, but it'd be fascinating to hear about how different alphabets have shaped different reading cultures in general. to jstor i go....

[lirazel]

I also do remember how I was taught to read!

but then it was like, oh yeah we just let students guess the completely wrong word and didn't correct them. !??!?!?!?!?! . i couldn't comprehend how that would EVER be understood to be a viable way to teach reading, or like... anything. The anecdote at the very end of this article - where goodman says that a child misidentifying the word "pony" as "horse" is totally fine - just made me so SAD. It's such an impoverished way to look at reading, language, and communication as a whole!! :( :( :( :( :( :(.

RIGHT????? Who is satisfied with that?????

Yeah, I did not expect the comments to be as interesting as they are, but I should have because I have tons of interesting friends who know so much more than I do!

[ceciliaj]

My thought: I loved the podcast, but I did feel bad for some of the teachers who felt attacked by it. It's true that teachers are treated like crap for the most part in the US, and some of them felt like this podcast fueled those flames without really giving them credit for all the hard work they do. The villain in the piece for me is the colleges of education who are supposed to be in charge of keeping teachers up to date with the latest research in the many hours of mandatory continuing education they have to do while working full time, but instead just recycle the same garbage they've been teaching for years and enjoy their job security. I actually was talking to a friend of mine who has been switching between public school teaching and university teaching about the possibility of doing a master's in curriculum and instruction and then maybe working in a college of education, and she told me I absolutely shouldn't, because teachers hate taking those mandatory classes, and it's very hard for them to respect education professors who haven't taught in a public school themselves in a decade or more. That's the hard thing, I was seeing it as "oh, this would be an interesting way for me to have a job I would like," but when I looked at it more closely, I realized that it's not worth it if you have enough empathy to notice that your students are overworked and under-served by your institution.

My other thought is, I think because teachers are overworked and underpaid and annoyed by useless/toxic continuing education requirements (that often turn into marketing opportunities for garbage like three cueing), they are rightly resistant to demands that they face any objective evaluation of their effectiveness as teachers. Partly that's because there's really no fair way to do it -- there's really only so much you can do with students you see 45 minutes a day or whatever, and as your friend notes above, that's all part of the larger replication crisis in social science research. You can't find a really reasonable metric for teaching effectiveness, and most of the people who come up with one are trying to sell it, not help you teach better.

However, I do think many teachers overestimate their effectiveness. I think it's partly a nice white lady/nice Jonathan Kozol phenomenon, where people think being kind to others and creating nice spaces for them is "enough", and certainly people like you and me probably enjoyed some of those nice spaces in school, because we were fortunate enough to learn to read without hindrance, and thus to enjoy lovely nooks and writing assignments.

But let me give you an example of what I mean. So there is this visiting scholar from Taiwan at Penn State this year, and she does these workshops trying to teach the students how to do more "extensive reading" in Chinese. Obviously learning to read in a second language is different from learning to read in your native language, but still, it's an interesting approach. So she did this one hour workshop last spring, and I attended it, and it was lots of fun. She told us about the Cool Chinese extensive reading platform, had us write some websites we like on a big poster and she told us we could try watching Chinese TV and reading the subtitles. That was basically it. Oh, and she told us to follow her on her instagram, which, by the way, she monetizes and tries to sell clothes on. Then this fall, I told her I ended up using the extensive reading platform with another teacher, and that I really enjoyed it. She said "yeah, I already told you about that, it wasn't the other teacher." And I said yes, you told us about it, but I did not end up using it at that time, and the account you gave us expired, so I had to beg this other teacher for one, and now I ended up using it. And she said, "well, I also gave you guys a lot of great reading strategies." And I was like wow, I can guarantee you that none of the other students ever used the platform again unless another teacher brought it up, because you only told us about it once, at a one-hour meeting, and then gave us accounts that expired very quickly. But somehow she turned that into a conference paper about how she's teaching American college students to read in Chinese. And I don't think she's that unusual! I think teachers take an incredible amount of credit sometimes for doing basic work, and why? Not because they naturally buy into their own hype, but because it's incentivized. It's good for her to go to national foreign language teaching conferences and tell people she's using new platforms for literacy instruction. It sounds like she's a highly engaged foreign language teacher. But it really doesn't reflect the reality. Like, she probably has taught some students very well at some point! But the story that gets told is so fake.

[lirazel]

Thank you thank you for this!

I 1000000% agree about the teachers who are feeling attacked. Teachers are embattled on every level, underpaid, not appreciated...this has got to feel like just one more front in a war they're not winning. I am so sympathetic to that. All of the teachers they talked to in the podcast genuinely thought they were doing what was best for kids, and I know that's the case for most teachers most places. I feel terrible that people are using this as fuel to attack teachers.

The villain in the piece for me is the colleges of education who are supposed to be in charge of keeping teachers up to date with the latest research in the many hours of mandatory continuing education they have to do while working full time, but instead just recycle the same garbage they've been teaching for years and enjoy their job security.

A great point.

they are rightly resistant to demands that they face any objective evaluation of their effectiveness as teachers. Partly that's because there's really no fair way to do it -- there's really only so much you can do with students you see 45 minutes a day or whatever, and as your friend notes above, that's all part of the larger replication crisis in social science research. You can't find a really reasonable metric for teaching effectiveness, and most of the people who come up with one are trying to sell it, not help you teach better.

Absolutely.

However, I do think many teachers overestimate their effectiveness. I think it's partly a nice white lady/nice Jonathan Kozol phenomenon, where people think being kind to others and creating nice spaces for them is "enough", and certainly people like you and me probably enjoyed some of those nice spaces in school, because we were fortunate enough to learn to read without hindrance, and thus to enjoy lovely nooks and writing assignments.

Oh, yeah. I hadn't really articulated this to myself, but I think you're spot-on with this.

That's a really interesting example. And she's not, like, a bad guy there, it's just...not really that helpful. But how could she be in one hour session? What do those things really accomplish?

[sobsister]

I have got to get better at checking dreamwidth, you have such interesting discussions over here! I literally just had a professional development day all about this shift, since the Ontario Human Right's Commission recently released their Right to Read Inquiry Report that concluded "Ontario’s public education system is failing students with reading disabilities (such as dyslexia) and many others, by not using evidence-based approaches to teach them to read."

Now teachers in Ontario are in this weird spot where depending on what board you teach in, you have some resources that are approved and some that you're being discouraged from using but there's no new resources being bought to replace defunct ones because the government hasn't actually moved to implement any of the OHRC's recommendations. So resources in school libraries/classrooms may not be decodable (because publishers stopped pushing decodable books) but our board has entirely halted purchasing reading resources until this all gets resolved.

Like someone upthread said, it's frustrating that many of the teacher training programs don't spend much/any time on how children learn to read - in my experience, our language courses in teachers college focussed on literacy programming for older students who already know how to read, not on the actual processes of learning to read (e.g. phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension). So new teachers are reliant on their own independent learning, taking AQ courses in reading, and their colleagues to help them develop their reading programs...Most experienced teachers I know who were using phonics didn't stop using them entire, but they were encouraged to include them as part of "balanced literacy".

[lirazel]

Oh thank you for chiming in! I so appreciate having a teacher's perspective!

I am not surprised that teachers are being asked to do something but not being provided the resources to do it, but I do hate it so much. Teachers are so frequently set up to fail.

many of the teacher training programs don't spend much/any time on how children learn to read - in my experience, our language courses in teachers college focussed on literacy programming for older students who already know how to read, not on the actual processes of learning to read

That's failing you!