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

oh yeah absolutely, eventually you get to treating words like that if you're a fast, good reader - I'm sure it's why I'm much slower with reading unfamiliar fonts, because the words look different! I thought the person I was referring to was interesting because they do not even approach unfamiliar words with phonics, and would not sound out an unfamiliar medication name.

Okay, here's an interesting thing--with unfamiliar words whose pronunciation is foreign enough to me (for example, lots of foreign words, especially names), my brain sort of shrugs and gives up on the phonics thing and just looks at the whole word. Not always--with Spanish, I always sound the words out. But with, say, a Chinese name, I pretty much just take a mental screenshot of the name instead of figuring out how to pronounce it.

oh fascinating!!!! whereas for me I ALWAYS stop and carefully sound out the word or name, because I cannot stand it if I don't! I wonder if it's in part that I need the sense memory of how it's pronounced to back up my ability to quickly recognize it, because I'm pretty aphantasic?

It only happens with foreign words, and mostly with names. And not ones that I use a lot--I have a phonetic pronunciation of the main CQL characters' names in my head (though it's almost certainly wrong), but whenever a side character who isn't important shows up, my brain just does the screenshot thing. It's like...it's not important enough to waste time trying to decipher it? Or something?