lirazel | (no subject)

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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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.

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!

Most things in life rest in the nuance, don't they?

Absolutely! I'm planning to listen to the podcast, I find this stuff fascinating, but it's all about the nuance. Skimming the podcaster's science of reading reading list, it includes an article arguing that phonics is better than whole word, but also that a lot of phonics education is bad too- in practice, it claims, many teachers who are teaching 'phonics' are doing it badly. But that to me sort of begs the question. Maybe whole word is better than phonics, but even more teachers are simply teaching it badly!

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.

Edited 2022-12-02 20:13 (UTC)

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.

Oh wow. Yeah, sounds like reading pedagogy isn't the root of that, but still, that's extreme.