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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?
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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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.
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But this made me think about how I leaned English (which was ~15 years ago, so that too might have changed).
They basically practiced simple sentences with us first e.g. "I like ..." and we would learn words for food, or hobbies or animals to fill in the blanks. In our book the vocabulary was written down in English (duh) and in IPA, so if we weren't sure about the pronunciation, we could check on a chart, how to pronounce the IPA.
We never learnt the weird rules, that I see in some posts, like "i befor e except after ...". And from what I understand those ""rules"" often have more exceptions than one can reasonably remember.
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I am very good at German grammar though, so if anyone had told me that tenses are essentially constructed in the same way, it would have made sense that much sooner.
As it was, that summer I discovered fanfic and in 8th grade my English was great! And then in Oberstufe/LK had a teacher who didn't know any idioms or similes in English, so my grades tanked because I tended to use them in exams.
Ah, to never go to school again.
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Animes, fanfiction and, erm, Netflix alternatives taught me English in the end.