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?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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.

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?

I just saw

rekishi saying essentially the same thing. 😂 I have no idea why they would change it, or what was the problem with the first method.

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.

Btw, I never learned IPA, which my teachers (my school??? my state????? I have no clue) didn't believe in, so it was a lot of guesswork which, in English is..............adventurous.

I also never learned these rules for English pronunciation. We had IPA in the vocab lists but didn't do much with it...? Then again, my first English teacher was really not good and I was so bad at the end of 7th grade because I knew all the words and could understand all the texts, but I couldn't for the life of me build correct sentences because I never understood the rules for English sentence building (because there are some! XD). We didn't have to talk in English in her class except for reading homework aloud, so that was quite the culture shock when we got the new teacher in 8th grade and he only talked in English. XD He was completely shocked (and that first class text was an even bigger shock for him, though I was good suddenly because he had repeated all that sentence structure stuff and I was like, "...oh! So that's how tenses work!" XD)

Yeah, my English was terrible at the end of 7th grade to the point where I was failing it very badly. I'm terrible at grammar. My first English teacher was also terrible at teaching grammar. I'm sure she was pretty good in later grades, but she was useless for a bunch of 5th graders in the mid 90s where no one knew any English yet (maybe the rich kids did, I certainly didn't).

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.

Similar story here: I had horrible English lessons until the 8th grade but by then I had completely given up on it.
Animes, fanfiction and, erm, Netflix alternatives taught me English in the end.