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 god yeah, this very weird trend! It started in the 1980s and for a while it was quite popular. Now, at least in my state it's basically forbidden because it's been shown that children learn so many wrong spellings this way due to the weird characteristics of the German language you mentioned.

What's actually working for many children is going by phonetics and syllables. I can't remember how I learned to read in school, but a popular way to start is using easy words that have very clear syllables where you can't make mistakes ins sounding them oout so that the child learns the sound chorectly in combination with the letters/word. You add some words they have to memorise to build the first few short sentences, like "mit" (with). Children also usually use a table with pictures + starting letters to help with sounds, but that doesn't work for English of course because of so many different ways to say a letter...

Spelling has been a huge issue in elementary school and many children have problems even without that very questionable "reading through writing" method. German states work with a basic vocabulary, I think about 800 words, that children have to know and be able to spell correctly when they leave elementary school. There are also some preogressive methods to help children with spelling, working individually on their texts etc. But it's really a problem, not enough teachers, too many children in a class, too many things to teach and not enough time...

reading through writing

This gives me flashbacks to a former Professor of mine: reading and writing are two different skills. She repeated that lesson in so many ways, so many times, I'll never forget.

It definitely wasn't at thing when I was in school, but maybe it simply hadn't reached there yet. I learned of that weirdness when I was already in secondary school, but it was a thing for a long time.

Iirc, it's been........a long time, we had a huge chart with the pictures you mentioned and we had a Fibel (to read) with single syllables and short sentences and we learned spelling by writing out each new word in a Kladde, that had to be prepared by the parents before the start of first grade with sections for each letter, like a dictionary. And then we had to write them down as, I think, "(das) Haus".

As languages where written and spoken match, German is still one of the easier ones. If only the grammar (and, admittedly, the genders) were easier....