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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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I 1000000% agree about the teachers who are feeling attacked. Teachers are embattled on every level, underpaid, not appreciated...this has got to feel like just one more front in a war they're not winning. I am so sympathetic to that. All of the teachers they talked to in the podcast genuinely thought they were doing what was best for kids, and I know that's the case for most teachers most places. I feel terrible that people are using this as fuel to attack teachers.
The villain in the piece for me is the colleges of education who are supposed to be in charge of keeping teachers up to date with the latest research in the many hours of mandatory continuing education they have to do while working full time, but instead just recycle the same garbage they've been teaching for years and enjoy their job security.
A great point.
they are rightly resistant to demands that they face any objective evaluation of their effectiveness as teachers. Partly that's because there's really no fair way to do it -- there's really only so much you can do with students you see 45 minutes a day or whatever, and as your friend notes above, that's all part of the larger replication crisis in social science research. You can't find a really reasonable metric for teaching effectiveness, and most of the people who come up with one are trying to sell it, not help you teach better.
Absolutely.
However, I do think many teachers overestimate their effectiveness. I think it's partly a nice white lady/nice Jonathan Kozol phenomenon, where people think being kind to others and creating nice spaces for them is "enough", and certainly people like you and me probably enjoyed some of those nice spaces in school, because we were fortunate enough to learn to read without hindrance, and thus to enjoy lovely nooks and writing assignments.
Oh, yeah. I hadn't really articulated this to myself, but I think you're spot-on with this.
That's a really interesting example. And she's not, like, a bad guy there, it's just...not really that helpful. But how could she be in one hour session? What do those things really accomplish?