lirazel | (no subject)

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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?

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I hope this German example works:

Die Sonne und der Mond sind Himmelskörper. Sie scheint von allein, er reflektiert ihr Licht.

The English translation would be:
The sun and the moon are celestial bodies. It shines on its own, it reflects its light.

If we pretend, we don't know how the sun and the moon work for a second, we can't tell which one is the light source and which one the reflector, in English. In German we can, cause the sun is considered feminine and the moon is considered masculine.

So the German is closer to:
The sun and the moon are celestial bodies. She shines on her own, he reflects her light.

But in English that makes no sense, unless the sun and the moon as personified in some way. In German it's just grammar.

Another example would be:
Der Hund jagd die Maus, der sonst den ganzen Tag schläft.

The dog hunts the mouse, who usually sleeps the whole day.

Who is usually sleeping? In English we can't tell, in German it's clear.

The dog (masc.) hunts the mouse (fem.), who (masc.) sleeps the whole day.

does that make sense?

Edited 2022-12-02 21:32 (UTC)

Inventive spelling was definitely a thing in our local schools in the 1990s. It must be based on some version of phonics because it was entirely sounding things out, which doesn't necessarily work in English. It was endearing to see a picture of a dinosaur when my daughter was in kindergarten labeled
"A trnsrus rex is scry." The idea was that by second or third grade, the kids would be able to read, and the words they were reading (correctly spelled, from books) would sink in somehow and replace the made-up spelling the students used when they were younger. And they had vocabulary lists that they were supposed to be drilled on at home. This worked for some of my daughter's classmates - I was a spelling helper in the 3rd grade and some of the students were getting words right that many adults have a hard time with (I remember "separately" in particular, for some reason). My daughter took much longer to make the switch. She started getting sent home with extra homework, to write the words ten times or make up sentences, etc. I don't think any one system works best for a whole classroom of individuals.

It does, thank you! I always work best with examples, and that helped a lot. That's certainly a better theory for why gender developed than any I've ever seen, though in my admittedly incredibly biased opinion, it isn't worth the confusion of having to remember gender for every single noun on the planet!

I didn't know about any of that! Wow, thank you for sharing!

It definitely makes learning a language harder, but when you grow up with you don't really think about it. It's just part of the words. Also, I think having a gendered language like German as a first language doesn't help a lot, when learning a new one.

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....

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.

Edited 2022-12-03 02:08 (UTC)

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?

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!

It definitely makes learning a language harder, but when you grow up with you don't really think about it. It's just part of the words.

Yeah, definitely! It's such an uphill battle for an adult learner though!

I feel your pain - I'm currently learning Italian and the genders are a problem, 'cause they are different from what I'm used to.

I may be projecting about the modern (then) idea of modern language instruction. They were still doing spelling tests the same way that had been done for a hundred years, probably (10+ words a week, given to the kids on paper early in the week, dictated later in the week, a new list the next week).

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".

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!

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