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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?
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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( https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading )
i found it deeply compelling and honestly pretty confusing, because i couldnt remember how i learnt to read OR how i was taught (which may have been different), and then i also struggled to believe that the poor teaching strategies were really THAT bad and nonsensical. I felt like surely some ~contextual strategies made sense, right? using the letters and sounds you recognise, what kind of word could it be? etc etc. but then it was like, oh yeah we just let students guess the completely wrong word and didn't correct them. !??!?!?!?!?! . i couldn't comprehend how that would EVER be understood to be a viable way to teach reading, or like... anything. The anecdote at the very end of this article - where goodman says that a child misidentifying the word "pony" as "horse" is totally fine - just made me so SAD. It's such an impoverished way to look at reading, language, and communication as a whole!! :( :( :( :( :( :(.
anyway, im glad you posted about this, because the discussion in the comments is super fascinating!! the question of how literacy pedagogy for children works in other languages is now going to haunt me!!!! All my rudimentary googles are about best practice/contemporary education, but it'd be fascinating to hear about how different alphabets have shaped different reading cultures in general. to jstor i go....
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but then it was like, oh yeah we just let students guess the completely wrong word and didn't correct them. !??!?!?!?!?! . i couldn't comprehend how that would EVER be understood to be a viable way to teach reading, or like... anything. The anecdote at the very end of this article - where goodman says that a child misidentifying the word "pony" as "horse" is totally fine - just made me so SAD. It's such an impoverished way to look at reading, language, and communication as a whole!! :( :( :( :( :( :(.
RIGHT????? Who is satisfied with that?????
Yeah, I did not expect the comments to be as interesting as they are, but I should have because I have tons of interesting friends who know so much more than I do!