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

I have got to get better at checking dreamwidth, you have such interesting discussions over here! I literally just had a professional development day all about this shift, since the Ontario Human Right's Commission recently released their Right to Read Inquiry Report that concluded "Ontario’s public education system is failing students with reading disabilities (such as dyslexia) and many others, by not using evidence-based approaches to teach them to read."

Now teachers in Ontario are in this weird spot where depending on what board you teach in, you have some resources that are approved and some that you're being discouraged from using but there's no new resources being bought to replace defunct ones because the government hasn't actually moved to implement any of the OHRC's recommendations. So resources in school libraries/classrooms may not be decodable (because publishers stopped pushing decodable books) but our board has entirely halted purchasing reading resources until this all gets resolved.

Like someone upthread said, it's frustrating that many of the teacher training programs don't spend much/any time on how children learn to read - in my experience, our language courses in teachers college focussed on literacy programming for older students who already know how to read, not on the actual processes of learning to read (e.g. phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension). So new teachers are reliant on their own independent learning, taking AQ courses in reading, and their colleagues to help them develop their reading programs...Most experienced teachers I know who were using phonics didn't stop using them entire, but they were encouraged to include them as part of "balanced literacy".

Oh thank you for chiming in! I so appreciate having a teacher's perspective!

I am not surprised that teachers are being asked to do something but not being provided the resources to do it, but I do hate it so much. Teachers are so frequently set up to fail.

many of the teacher training programs don't spend much/any time on how children learn to read - in my experience, our language courses in teachers college focussed on literacy programming for older students who already know how to read, not on the actual processes of learning to read

That's failing you!