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

Inventive spelling was definitely a thing in our local schools in the 1990s. It must be based on some version of phonics because it was entirely sounding things out, which doesn't necessarily work in English. It was endearing to see a picture of a dinosaur when my daughter was in kindergarten labeled
"A trnsrus rex is scry." The idea was that by second or third grade, the kids would be able to read, and the words they were reading (correctly spelled, from books) would sink in somehow and replace the made-up spelling the students used when they were younger. And they had vocabulary lists that they were supposed to be drilled on at home. This worked for some of my daughter's classmates - I was a spelling helper in the 3rd grade and some of the students were getting words right that many adults have a hard time with (I remember "separately" in particular, for some reason). My daughter took much longer to make the switch. She started getting sent home with extra homework, to write the words ten times or make up sentences, etc. I don't think any one system works best for a whole classroom of individuals.

I didn't know about any of that! Wow, thank you for sharing!

I may be projecting about the modern (then) idea of modern language instruction. They were still doing spelling tests the same way that had been done for a hundred years, probably (10+ words a week, given to the kids on paper early in the week, dictated later in the week, a new list the next week).