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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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

Can confirm that a) this stupid technique of learning to read was taught to us in Australia and b) my upper middle class mother was horrified and paid a private tutor to teach my sister and me spelling using phonics. It wasn't that we couldn't read, it was that my sister in particular couldn't spell (I was better off as I read so voraciously that I'd somehow learnt to spell by osmosis). The situation was marginally better in the 1990s because we were mainly taught by baby boomers and a handful of people my grandparents' age, who had all learnt phonics and retained lingering elements of it in the curriculum. (There was a similar problem with being taught mental arithmetic in maths classes — you do actually need to learn these things like drills, with lots of boring repetition, for them to be able to stick — and my mother paid for us to be tutored at the local Kumon centre, after a particularly dreadful year in primary school where my Gen X teacher basically didn't teach us any maths at all and my mother realised I didn't understand how to do division.)

I would say that in my own family's case, the decision to pay for private tutoring came only after literally years of my mother ringing up the school to complain and coming in for meetings with teachers (I believe she took it all the way to the principal) to complain about this, and got nowhere.

In terms of the non-Anglophone world, I have been told anecdotally by e.g. my German husband, my friends who are raising their son in the Welsh-speaking part of Wales etc that because spelling is phonetic, children in those countries don't have to have spelling tests in the classroom, and the idea of American-style spelling bees is absurd because (apart from loanwords) there's no ambiguity in spelling. I remember a friend from Iceland saying that in his school, they weren't just taught phonetics, they were taught the International Phonetic Alphabet, because it was considered important to know a universal way to represent phonemes, since such phonemes can be spelt in various ways if you use e.g. the Latin alphabet.

I figured that if it originated in New Zealand it probably made it to Australia as well. Yikes.

(I was better off as I read so voraciously that I'd somehow learnt to spell by osmosis)

Oh same.

I would say that in my own family's case, the decision to pay for private tutoring came only after literally years of my mother ringing up the school to complain and coming in for meetings with teachers (I believe she took it all the way to the principal) to complain about this, and got nowhere.

From the people they interviewed in the podcast, this sounds like a very, very common situation.

children in those countries don't have to have spelling tests in the classroom, and the idea of American-style spelling bees is absurd because (apart from loanwords) there's no ambiguity in spelling.

Right! My brother-in-law thinks it's wild!

I remember a friend from Iceland saying that in his school, they weren't just taught phonetics, they were taught the International Phonetic Alphabet, because it was considered important to know a universal way to represent phonemes, since such phonemes can be spelt in various ways if you use e.g. the Latin alphabet.

I think this would be a great think for everyone to learn! But only after everyone's learned to read in their own native language first, obviously.