
The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading - Treblemaker
https://www.apmreports.org/story/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading
======
teilo
I came from a big family, and I have 6 children.

I have taught all my children to read using McGuffey. I helped many of my
siblings learn to read. Much of the discussion around phonics is missing the
point.

It is a caricature to say that "phonetic" reading is completely phonetic to
the exclusion of sight reading. This is binary thinking. Nobody teaches it
that way.

The goal is not and never was to read phonetically ever after. In fact, from
very early on, the concept of "sight words" is introduced. The phonetic method
is a bridge and a tool to internalize words. The goal is to recognize words
effortlessly, without thought.

So what is the difference between the old phonetic methods, the later sight
methods, and the modern (debunked) contextual methods?

It's all about where you start. The phonetic method uses phonics as its
foundational concept. You begin with the sounds, and you learn the exceptions
as you go. But even the exceptions are aided by phonetics. Most "sight" words
still have enough of a phonetic component to clue the reader into what's going
on.

Sight reading, on the other hand, assumes the reader will pick up enough
phonics as they go along, contextually. But with this method, everything must
be learned by rote. The "bridge" of having phonetic tools at your disposal is
not taught.

Now some children are simply sight readers, and do poorly with phonics. Not
all minds are alike. But even sight readers benefit from having a foundation
in phonics.

~~~
shkkmo
Reading the article, the thought I kept having was: "But I do all of these!".

It seems to me we should be teaching all of these tools. It makes no sense to
give people just one. Some tools work better in some situations, and some
tools work better for some people.

Phonetic reading is very useful when learning many foriegn langues.

Contextual reading is always useful for learning new vocabulary and knowing
when to look up a new word or skip and back-fill meaning as you get more
context.

Sight reading seems like it should be the goal, so why not also teach it
directly alongside those first two techniques for when the going gets tough?

~~~
dpark
> _Contextual reading is always useful for learning new vocabulary and knowing
> when to look up a new word or skip and back-fill meaning as you get more
> context._

If you don’t have phonics down well, you cannot actually learn new words from
context. If you cannot “sound out” the unknown word in your head, then no
amount of context is going to allow you to actually learn the new word.

Context is a great tool for understanding what a new word _means_. It is
useless for telling you what a new word actually _says_.

------
SamReidHughes
Having been taught with phonics, or at least having seen my classmates taught
this way, I'd never imagined the world could be this fucked up. If you're
going to teach this way, why not throw out the language and write with Chinese
characters? The Japanese have a whole set of phonic letters that they use to
teach kids.

If a kid can't sound out supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, fire his
teachers. "Sound out." Now there's a word I haven't heard in a long time.

~~~
musicale
The vast majority (some 80%) of Chinese characters are phonetic-semantic
compounds, that is they contain both sound elements and meaning elements.

So it's actually very useful to study phonetic groups in when learning Chinese
characters!! Even when there are tone or vowel shifts, the phonetic groups can
really help you match a character to its sound.

It's kind of like the situation where English spelling usually diverges from
an exact phonetic representation, but it still provides an approximation of
the actual pronunciation of the word which is enormously helpful in matching
it to its spoken form.

~~~
SamReidHughes
A funny story about that. When I was a kid, I had two different words in my
head: one which was pronounced "muh-sheen", and another which I found in The
Way Things Work, that was spelled 'm-a-c-h-i-n-e' and pronounced "match-ayn"
(rhymes with chime). That's what I got from sounding out the word. I had two
parallel concepts in my head growing up, one rather technically oriented that
involved inclined planes and levers, the other being machines like toasters,
or whatever was on This Old House, probably. This ended when one day, I read
something else that used the word and realized, rather excitedly, that there
was no such thing as a match-ayn.

------
williamDafoe
My brother in law was taught to sight-read (recognize words on sight and not
to analyze phonemes) and he always struggled and regretted it!!!

Phonics is the #1 advantage of ALL western languages. The idea that teachers
would not leverage the #1 advantage of the entire language just shows how
foolish our teacher education system can be!

Don't let teachers screw up your kids with educational FADs! We didn't! We
taught our kids at 3.5 - 4.5 to read using phonics before kindergarten! We
used:

[http://www.headsprout.com](http://www.headsprout.com) .

Our kids loved it! The risk of these FADs damaging your child's entire
education would make this program cheap even if they charged $1000 (it's $200
- a small 10% increase over the last 14 years!)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
My oldest was in the vanguard of phonics in our local schools in the UK. His
spelling is terrible because he spells things phonetically, which simply
doesn't work in English.

~~~
rbobby
> His spelling is terrible

There's a fix for that... MS Word and browsers :)

Word's little red underline dramatically improved my spelling. Words that I
would habitually misspell would annoy me with that little red underline. I'd
concentrate on the word and the correct spelling and eventually I stopped
misspelling it.

My favorite example... their... almost always I'd write "thier" (the few times
I'd write "their" I'd doubt myself and switch it to "thier"). Nowadays I
almost never misspell it (it also helps me sometimes to think "the IR").

Without Word's instant spell checking I'd still be a bad speller who'd spend
too long running the spellchecker.

------
WalterBright
Phonetic spelling is probably the greatest invention in written languages
since paper.

I am constantly amazed that teachers on the front lines fail to recognize
this. I'm saddened that UI designers keep replacing phonetically spelled words
with icons and emojis.

~~~
jcranmer
> Phonetic spelling is probably the greatest invention in written languages
> since paper.

Paper dates to about 100 AD. The Greek alphabet, which is the first full
alphabet (that records both vowels and consonants), dates to about 800 BC.
Therefore, phonetic spelling predates paper by at least 900 years. Possibly
older, if you want to count later cuneiform (which is mostly a syllabary) or
Egyptian or Phoenician (abjads, lacking vowels) as phonetic spelling.

~~~
WalterBright
Papyrus dates back much further.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus)

~~~
jacobolus
Akkadian was written with phonetic cuneiform from maybe 2500 BCE.

------
voldacar
>For example, a child who says "horse" when the word was "house" is probably
relying too much on visual, or graphic, cues. A teacher in this case would
encourage the child to pay more attention to what word would make sense in the
sentence.

WTF? Wouldn't you just tell the child to slow down, look at the letters that
make up the word, and speak the word out loud? This makes zero sense
whatsoever

~~~
jdm2212
Yup! And that sane approach (look at the letters that make up the word, and
speak the word out loud) is phonics.

~~~
voldacar
It's staggering to me that something so simple and obvious even needs to
_have_ a specific name like "phonics". That's just called reading lol. It's so
bizarre how these people get put in positions of power over our educational
system

~~~
jdm2212
According to my parents (who were actually alive then), there was a backlash
against more traditional educational approaches (particularly anything
involving memorization) in the '60s. Education reoriented towards teaching
students to be creative and think critically rather than accept received
wisdom. Whole language caught on as part of that -- teach kids to _think_
rather than just follow an algorithm. Unfortunately in this case the algorithm
is a fundamental necessity needed for higher level work.

Edit: commenter below links to Tom Lehrer's New Math, and yeah the crap they
made me do in math class ("write a paragraph reflecting on what you learned
about multiplication") is also an instance of this 60s reaction against
rigorously and uncritically learning foundational material so you can do
meaningful critical thought once you've mastered the basics.

~~~
csa
> According to my parents (who were actually alive then), there was a backlash
> against more traditional educational approaches (particularly anything
> involving memorization) in the '60s.

Yeah. This was the cognitive revolution after a long period of (excessive,
imho) behaviorism.

The pendulum swang too far in the other direction in some cases.

------
ajuc
It's very funny looking at this discussion from a mostly-phonetic writing
system POV.

In Polish the system is regular (even the exceptions) and nobody considers
trying to teach kids not to exploit that. You just remember how each letter
sounds and then the dozen of so special combinations (which are still mostly
regular). And you can read.

Yes you learn to read slow at first, and then you develop fast reading by
yourself, it's natural and comes with reading a lot. I don't know anybody
reading sound-by-sound past the age of 10, and usually kids learn to read
whole words after they read their first long book (traditionally it's "Kids
from Bullerbyn" here).

I wonder how much longer it takes to teach kids reading such complicated
writing system like English. Here it takes about 1 year, usually when they are
in the first class of school.

~~~
Avamander
Now imagine having a language like Estonian (or Finnish) as your first
language, basically every letter has one sound corresponding to it, the length
of any vowel is signified by how many there are and stress is always on the
first syllable.. Exceptions are incredibly rare, one can count them on a
single hand.

The concept of a spelling bee made literally 0 sense to me until I had to
actually learn English.

~~~
CarVac
Imagine a spelling bee of all the European languages where you have to
determine what language a word is and then spell it...

That's an English spelling bee.

~~~
danaris
That's actually very much what spelling (or pronunciation, going the other
way) is like in English, because there _are_ rules for spelling English
words—it's just that there are several sets depending on which language we
mugged the word from.

------
ianbicking
I sometimes wonder if we need a better phonics. Doing it by letters feels
crude, it requires a big gestalt moment when the kid puts the sounds together,
and overemphasizes our very malleable vowels.

Something based more on syllables would seem better to me. Consider a simple
work like “back”: kids sound out buh-ah-kuh which is a completely crazy
version of the real word. You can’t say a B without a vowel, but instead of
using the actual vowel (a) consonants usually get an “uh” added to them.

Learning syllables means learning maybe 5-10 times as many sounds, but then
it’s also easy to add “ing” and “sh” and all the many combinations of letters
that can’t be individually decoded.

The second problem is the kid has to pick out those letter combinations even
though words are just a stream of letters. I wonder if it would be supportive
to write the words in multiple colors to show the internal structure?

I feel like this must all exist already in some curriculum...?

~~~
rossriley
Modern phonics teaching introduces digraphs and trigraphs at an early stage of
the process, so children learn to recognise these. My partner is a specialist
phonics teacher and places a dot underneath each digraph, trigraph or
individual letter sound so that they can quickly recognise the components.

So boil will have a dot under b, one under o-i and one under the l.

They can then spot that oi is a digraph; in the early stages they do this by
saying out loud, an o and a i make 'oy'

~~~
ascorbic
They also learn "split digraphs" like "a_e", so they know the different
between e.g. "fat" and "fate". I was amazed by how quickly my kids picked this
stuff up when they started school (at 5). They were both reading and writing
full sentences before the end of the first term. Phonics is a great system.

------
Marsymars
Reading is both one of the great pleasures in my life, and an invaluable tool
for acquiring new knowledge. It horrifies me to think that millions could be
denied those pleasures and tools because of easily-remedied educational
failures.

~~~
LocalH
Nobody gives a shit about things like that. They're too busy worried about
left vs right politics, or religion vs secular belief, or any host of other
relatively unimportant issues, to even notice this happens. I'd imagine this
is worse in the US as well, given the large cultural adversity to intelligence
in the first place.

~~~
wahern
A couple decades ago phonics was a huge issue in the culture wars. For people
of a certain age and political bent phonics represents a dumbing-down of early
education; a concession to lower-class kids and especially of minorities. As I
recall (as an adolescent observer) the debate overlapped with the controversy
regarding ebonics, with which phonics might be somewhat conflated in people's
minds.

If there's an analog today it's Common Core, or something related to Common
Core. It doesn't lend itself as well to us vs them politics, though, as it's
mostly a constellation of issues about which everybody has something negative
to say. And I think that's true more generally--K-12 education is a
quintessential political talking point. Everybody has strong opinions, they're
just all largely the _same_ _uninformed_ opinions. It takes effort to keep
people split along party lines, so you don't see the same persistent talking
points across the years. Take vouchers--briefly a strongly divisive issue
along party lines, but now a very muddy topic. People still have strong
opinions, there's just no simple narrative for the media to play on.

~~~
LocalH
To me it speaks to this desire people have to have input in a field that they
don't know or understand. Somehow, when it comes to education, people feel
like they have a right to decide how their kids are taught, even though they
know nothing about efficient and non-damaging teaching methods. They don't
like change as well, many of them probably say "that's how I learned to read,
so it's good enough for everyone".

I used to be naive and think that _everything_ should go to popular vote. Now
I realize how infeasible and futile that would be. It would end up being an
unmitigated disaster as people fight over _everything_ instead of just a few
hot-button issues.

------
fiblye
That chart for reading proficiency among 12th graders is rather... shocking.

Is there similar data for other countries available? It'd be interesting to
know if this is an issue unique to America (among developed nations), shared
among English-speaking countries, or if it's a problem equally distributed
across the world.

~~~
csa
Ehhh... it uses some terms of art that might be slightly misleading to those
not familiar with the field.

The chart specifically lists “proficient” and “advanced” at 12th grade. What
do those words mean?

[https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/reading/achieveall.asp...](https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/reading/achieveall.asp#2009_grade12)

For “proficient”, the “inferences” and “interpretative statements” components
will rule out most readers.

For reference, these are some of the skills that higher level SAT and GRE
reading questions attempt to evaluate.

The way one could (somewhat crudely) relabel that data is “what percentage of
12 graders could plausibly read college-level texts”. Interestingly, the
college attendance numbers match these percentages fairly closely.

------
phkahler
I like to recommend a kids video called "The Letter Factory". Start around.
Age 3. Then move on to "The Word Factory". The 3rd in the series is not nearly
as good in my opinion, but those two gave my kid a great start on reading. And
they're fun.

------
mkagenius
Nobody teaches to picture the story though. Mostly what we read are some
actions, almost always. Actions need to mentally pictured to get involved and
have a superior understanding. Without lack of this skill, we are distracted
by our vision.

Half the time my brain is thinking of other things while I am reading
something. There is too much distraction in your while you are reading
something. Even your own eyes will give you unnecessary visuals like "wow look
at the font and the color and how the corners of the phone is rounded, the url
of chrome changed to a new round url bar" "https is just a symbol of lock in
black color"

------
viburnum
My kid’s school did mostly phonics with a fair amount of sight reading for
common words. What a weird thing to be an absolutist about.

------
rossdavidh
So, it all makes sense, but by this theory, it seems like the english words
"through" and "tough" and "benign" should be really hard to learn, compared to
"true" and "stuff" and wine". Also, English ought to be harder to learn to
read than, say, German or Spanish. But I don't know of any evidence that
English-speaking countries have lower literacy than Spanish- or German-
speaking countries.

I don't mean that phonics isn't useful, but the idea that having multiple
strategies can kill your ability to read sounds fishy.

~~~
jdm2212
Anecdata: As long as I knew her, my ex had the difficulties described in the
article. She blamed how she was taught to read in school -- specifically not
having been taught phonics. I figured that was nonsense, and blamed a
peculiar-to-her learning disability.

At some point I read Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" (which is 20+
years old at this point!), which describes all the research on learning to
read... and which pretty conclusively proved to me that my ex was right. For
at least some subset of kids, not learning phonics leads to a lifelong reading
issues.

~~~
AdieuToLogic
While phonics certainly are important to reading comprehension, IMHO a
teaching technique which the article does not address is described in:

Reasons to Teach Word Stems and Roots[0]

0 - [https://mrsrenz.com/reasons-to-teach-word-stems-and-
roots/](https://mrsrenz.com/reasons-to-teach-word-stems-and-roots/)

~~~
gamedori
That is a useful system for middle readers with limited volcabulary to jump
into high school / professional reading, but not so good for very early
readers. Note how all the grecoroman stems are defined in terms of germanic
words, which are phonetic.

The article is concerned with students who find words like "rabbit"
challenging, not with students figuring out "neologism".

~~~
AdieuToLogic
Point taken.

Perhaps this comment[0] I posted earlier more directly addresses the article's
intent in how to help teach reading skills.

0 -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791015](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791015)

------
wallace_f
>a third of fourth graders can't read at a basic level

Academia/education in America needs to move past this "can't fail" philosophy.

Bad schools need to fail. Good schools need to grow.

~~~
jumelles
What does "fail" mean? What would happen to the children who attend a school
that has "failed"?

~~~
wallace_f
Same thing that happens with everything else. They patronize a different
service provider.

~~~
xnyan
In America that idea is absolutely pointless. For almost all children, local
property taxes are the source source of education funding. A local school
board administers this money and has a huge amount of discretion in spending
it with practically no oversight. They were responsible for hiring the
previous school administration and will also hire the next,

If you have any idea of how to get out of this situation I'd be thrilled to
hear it.

~~~
wallace_f
What is unique about education that it must be funded in such a particular
"situation" in the first place, versus all other service industries?

------
wvenable
I haven't noticed this so much with reading, but it seems like the same
misguided strategy is also being used for math. Instead of teaching the
fundamentals (like algorithms for long division) and instead they teach all
the mental tricks for doing quick math.

This should be especially concerning for software developers -- it seems they
no longer teach (at an early age) the very things that made me like math and
eventually computers.

------
learnstats2
I'd say the pathway to fluent reading is:

1\. no concept of reading, context is not helpful

2\. start to read, use context to cover any weaknesses and gaps

3\. become fluent reader, no longer need context to cover weaknesses and gaps.

As an experienced educator, I would say there is no process of learning
(anything) that doesn't follow this path, whether using context is formally
taught or not.

It's an important part of teaching to understand where weaknesses are being
papered over and support fixing that. It may be that one teaching method or
another makes certain weaknesses easier to identify or fix, but in the end,
enough dedicated practice is going to sort out these weaknesses either way.

The article presents this as though context is bad - but you need context to
bridge from the start to the end of the process.

The article repeatedly says "poor reader" when it is really talking about a
stage of learning to read (the anecdotes describe people stuck on this stage).

In my opinion: This is a really dangerous way of representing the problem of
educating people, which denies agency to learners.

~~~
scotty79
> 1\. no concept of reading, context is not helpful

> 2\. start to read, use context to cover any weaknesses and gaps

> 3\. become fluent reader, no longer need context to cover weaknesses and
> gaps.

That's completely not how you learn to read.

Step 2. is start to learn what sounds to make when you are seeing given
combination of letters. And then learn gradually how to make the sounds faster
and for longer sequences of letters. Until you reach step 3 where you can
blurt a word or even few at a time as one or few sounds at good pace.

At no point the context comes into play. It usually is even harmful because it
makes you make stuff up instead of reading. Often wrong, occasionally correct
which seems even more harmful.

Context is important only after you read completely fluently and begin to read
new domain of knowledg with completely unknow vocabulary. Then you can get
some words meaning from context. Although you should always check if you
guessed correctly.

If you would like to know more about how most people in the world learn to
read please find out how kids learn to read in other languages than english.
English is a bit quirky but in no way unique. What's unique is english
approach to reading teaching. I don't think anywhere else kids are encouraged
to make stuff up as they go.

~~~
learnstats2
I... don't agree.

Context is noticeably awkward when you get it wrong, and I'd say the article
appears to have identified this as a problem and presents it as "this is a
problem therefore it must be fixed". But, most of the time, there is not that
awkwardness: context is extremely helpful to learners - of any subject.

It also appears that you are describing how to learn to read in an alphabetic
system - so it's not immediately obvious that what you have said could apply
to "most people in the world".

~~~
conscion
Context is noticeably awkward when a reader already knows how to read. Take
the example in the article.

> But Rodney said: "My dog likes to lick his bone."

The context makes perfect sense and matches the picture. The issue is 'Rodney'
didn't actually read half the words.

~~~
learnstats2
I did read the article and was referring to exactly that. This happened once
to this child and so I'd call it cherry-picking. It's not as easy to observe
when context is helpful as when it fails.

As an adult, I probably only read about half the words in a useful e-mail.
(hopefully with more skill than a child reading a picture book). I wouldn't
call that an issue.

------
ptx
> For Goodman, accurate word recognition was not necessarily the goal of
> reading. The goal was to comprehend text. If the sentences were making
> sense, the reader must be getting the words right, or right enough.

That's like saying "if the code compiles, it must be correct enough". Seems
like a terrible idea.

------
scotty79
Such a long article on reading and teaching and no mention of syllables. Is
this completley unrecognized concept in eanglish reading teaching?

Teaching kids to read in polish goes like this: letters -> syllables -> words
-> sentences (with an overlap of the steps).

Known words and sentences are used throughout the process to illustrate the
things you are learning at the moment and sort of tease what you will be able
to do when you master current step.

I imagine in language where same letters can have so many different sounds the
concept of syllables should be even more useful.

Teaching kids to read sentences before they can recognize what sound which
letter bunches mean seems like telling kid to swim before he learns to float
or tread water.

~~~
mabbo
The danger here is that many of the patterns that go from letters -> syllables
are completely messed up in English. (Come to think of it, the entire darned
language can be like that).

I remember in grade 3 having a teacher give a lesson on syllables. We would
clap along with each syllable in the word. She asked me to do this for "Fire".
I clapped twice, as there is clearly an audible Fy-er" two syllables in
Canadian English. She told me I was wrong, clapped once, and said "Fire"
quickly. She "knew" that a word with "consonant - vowel - consonant - vowel"
pattern makes a single syllable. Never mind that my ears, and the rest of the
students' ears, can hear that she's wrong.

The end result was her confusing the class about what syllables are. I
remember the lesson well, because what I really learned was that teachers mean
well but aren't always right.

~~~
scotty79
I don't mean syllables as in precise definition (they are kind of fuzzy as
your expeirience shows) or especially not counting them or learning which you
should put the accent on.

I'm talking about the fact that if you know how fi-(i)re sounds, you can guess
how hi-(i)re sounds or even ty-(y)re or de-si-(i)re.

~~~
dqv
That's more or less what phonics is. It's discussed in the article. There's a
combination of learning how sounds map to letters/letter combinations and then
learning how they are used in real words (with spelling tests). The teacher
shows the letter combinations first and the students sound them out. Then the
reverse happens: the teacher sounds out the letters and the students have to
write down every letter combination that corresponds with that sound. Then
there is a spelling test that uses the sounds with a lot of edge cases where
patterns/guessing won't work. They would also have students read aloud to make
sure they were moving along smoothly.

------
knolax
The flawed idea in question are the following strategies:

> memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don't
> know

Personally I think the phonics vs. sight words debate in English pedagogy
misses the point entirely. The problem is that English divides words sentences
into "words" and not morphemes. This way words like 'disambiguation' or
'boustrophedon' appear as a hard to parse blob regardless of which strategy
you use. In my experience, schools have already started teaching "word roots"
and the strategies needed to break words down into those roots. This to me
seems like the key strategy.

~~~
pdonis
Word roots are the key strategy for the next step _after_ phonics: figuring
out the _meaning_ of what you're reading. But in order to do that, you first
have to have the skill of matching what's written on the page with the speech
system in your brain, and that's what phonics is for. You learn to speak by
making sounds; phonics matches what's written on the page with the sounds you
learned to speak. Just as children can speak words whose meanings they don't
yet understand, they can read words whose meanings they don't yet understand.

From the article, it seems like the original author of the MSV system got this
backwards: he thought the understanding had to come first. It doesn't. The
understanding builds on the phonetic foundation in reading just as it does in
speaking.

~~~
knolax
I'm not sure sounds are needed to link to the language system in the brain. I
remember as a child that there were certain words that I never bothered
assigning sounds to until long after I internalized them. Even if sound is
needed, I don't understand why the author couldn't just assign the sound of
the letters in a word being read out in order for words she didn't know. I'm
sure we all do that for certai n bash commands. I do admit though that I don't
know much about developmental psychology so it's just my two cents.

~~~
pdonis
_> I'm not sure sounds are needed to link to the language system in the
brain._

In the sense that, for example, deaf people can still learn speech, just not
with sounds, this is of course true. But I'm talking about the case of a child
with normal hearing and speech, where meanings are linked to spoken and heard
sounds when they learn to speak.

 _> there were certain words that I never bothered assigning sounds to until
long after I internalized them_

Words that you read, or words that you spoke? I'm going to assume the former
since speaking a word _is_ assigning a sound to it. If you don't assign sounds
to words that you read, how would you speak them? If somebody asked you to
repeat what you just read, what would you say?

 _> Even if sound is needed, I don't understand why the author couldn't just
assign the sound of the letters in a word being read out in order for words
she didn't know._

That's what phonics _is_ : you learn to sound out words you don't know letter
by letter. Gradually you build up skill to the point where you can
effortlessly translate written words to sounds, or more precisely to the
structures in your brain that you previously linked to spoken or heard sounds
when you learned to speak.

~~~
knolax
> If you don't assign sounds to words that you read, how would you speak them?
> If somebody asked you to repeat what you just read, what would you say?

I didn't speak them. I didn't need to. If I actually needed to read it then
obviously I would've given it a closer look and derive some sounds for it, but
it wasn't necessary in order to internalize the word and use it when
articulating my thoughts in my mind.

> That's what phonics is: you learn to sound out words you don't know letter
> by letter.

I'm talking about reading the letters out like an initialism, so assigning the
sound "en-em-see-el-ai" to "nmcli". Even without any training in phonics the
author must've at least known the names if the letters?

~~~
pdonis
_> I didn't speak them. I didn't need to._

In other words, you weren't using those words to communicate anything to
anyone else, just for your own internal thinking. Fair enough.

 _> Even without any training in phonics the author must've at least known the
names if the letters?_

A child might know the names of the letters but not know that sounding out
words letter by letter is a good idea. The article discusses in some detail
that apparently the strategy of sounding out unknown words letter by letter
does not occur to children who aren't taught it; instead they use other much
less effective strategies that do occur to them.

~~~
knolax
> A child might know the names of the letters but not know that sounding out
> words letter by letter is a good idea. The article discusses in some detail
> that apparently the strategy of sounding out unknown words letter by letter
> does not occur to children who aren't taught it; instead they use other much
> less effective strategies that do occur to them.

Oh ok I see. That makes sense.

------
eljefe900
This article buries the lead.

TLDR: Phonics works, Current strategies don’t.

What actually works is the shortest part of the article. It’s infatuation with
what doesn’t work puts what does work more than halfway into the article.

I would have appreciated the article to be structured as “Phonics works, MSV
Doesn’t and here’s why they’re different”

~~~
MaximumYComb
I wasn't aware of the methods used in the US. Here in Australia, we have
phonics at my daughters' school and she's coming along really well. My
6.5-year-old daughter is able to read basically anything I put in front of her
by sounding through words.

~~~
DanBC
But make sure she has an age appropriate dictionary so that she can learn what
the words mean, as well as being able to sound them out.

I love phonics. It's powerful. But sometimes children are so confident at
sounding out words that we miss the fact they don't always understand those
words.

------
heyiforgotmypwd
In the early 80's, my parents pulled me out of California's public schools
when the state/county ditched phonics for some unproven nonsense, to a private
school that was founded on proven teaching methods (name of the school was
Challenger). When I reentered a different public school district in grade 3, I
was ahead of other students by around 2 grade-levels. In retrospect, the
private school was far superior to the public school system, even in an upper-
middle class area because the public schools experiment/ed arbitrarily with
curriculum in unproven ways on a large scale and didn't seem to be held
accountable at a large-scale for playing with children's futures. Instead,
individual teachers are micromanaged with outcomes of BS standardized tests.
And also, US public schools were further ruined by NCLBA of 2001, and now the
head of Navient is in charge of the DOEd. _sigh_

Bottom line: Find a Waldorf forest school that instills curiosity, excellence
and basic subjects using proven methods, because US schools are rearranging
the deckchairs while the band is playing... _glurg, glurg, glurg._

------
pts_
The Indian private school educational system does teach phonics which might be
why lots of Indian origin kids ace the spelling bee in the US.

------
yoz-y
I was taught with phonics (not English) and one of the reasons was that
reading is taught at the same moment as writing. So you learn to write first
letters at the same time as you learn to read them. Iirc the first two were M
and A

------
lowbloodsugar
I asked my teenager about this, and they described this method as how they
read. Any advice on teaching her how to read properly, now that they are a
teenager?

------
milesskorpen
I think this article is missing some basics. I know, for example, that Lucy
Calkins’ program has a phonics program in _addition_ to the parts referenced
in this article.

~~~
teilo
The article specifically addresses the problems with mixing cueing and phonics
when teaching reading.

------
SubiculumCode
So what is a good phonics system for my child? Advice?

~~~
DanBC
In England you can try Jolly Phonics, or books by Ruth Miskin.

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jolly-Phonics-Activity-
Books-1-7/dp...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jolly-Phonics-Activity-
Books-1-7/dp/1844141608/)

Ruth Miskin (Amazon haven't arranged this page well)
[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ruth-
Miskin/e/B0034N7454](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ruth-Miskin/e/B0034N7454)

~~~
GordonS
I used Jolly Phonics with my 2 kids (in Scotland) - they both enjoyed it, and
it allowed them to learn all the phonics surprisingly quickly.

I think the major feature of Jolly Phonics is that each phonic is accompanied
by an _action_ , which not only makes it fun, but also helps distinguish
between similar phonics.

For example, for 'd' you make a drumming motion; for 't', you move your head
from side-to-side as if watching a tennis volley.

Can't recommend it enough!

------
AdieuToLogic
There is a reading comprehension system[0] which combines visual association
(pictures) with various forms of word identification (spelling, phonemes,
sentence composition, etc.).

In short, associating pictures with the words which describe them in various
comprehension exercises, increasing in difficulty based on progress, has shown
to help students in their reading comprehension.

Perhaps this can help some parents out there.

0 - [http://www.explodethecode.com/](http://www.explodethecode.com/)

------
whenanother
so obviously a scam to destroy public schools and handicap the working class
children. if you want to fix this just force the wealthy kids to attend public
schools. the reason why the wealthy actively are destroying public
institutions is because they are not using it.

------
patsplat
This is a disturbing article to read after watching my son struggling to learn
to read.

------
warabe
Thank you for sharing this. It was such a good read.

------
calf
I'm a little confused, was Shakespeare taught phonics?

~~~
juped
In Shakespeare's day, words didn't even have consistent spellings. Of course
he wrote and read phonetically.

~~~
calf
But English is phonetic (but is it, compared to German or Japanese?) which is
conflation with _phonics_.

The article did not clearly explain what cognitive science has to do with
phonics, which AFAIT is a heuristic system for Western languages. So when I
studied Chinese as a child, how did I learn to write Chinese, nonphonetically,
without confusing horses and ponies? A heuristic is an optimization but not
fundamental but the article clearly asserts that phonics is fundamental to
language in that if you don't use phonics you get illiterate students... I
think there's some conceptual conflation or some middle case being ignored by
the author: A) Is [formal instruction in] phonics necessary? v.s. B) Is 3-Cue
harmful? These are not proper opposites.

Here's a provocative claim made in a more sciencey article I just found:

"The linguist David Crystal (2003) estimates that the phonics can explain only
about 50 percent of English spellings."

[[https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/03/27/case-
why...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/03/27/case-why-both-
sides-reading-wars-debate-are-wrong-proposed-solution/)]

And further down:

"As the linguists Venezky (1967) and Carol Chomsky (1970) explained, English
prioritizes the consistent spelling of morphemes over the consistent spellings
of phonemes."

~~~
knolax
English's primary strength over other European languages is its use of
logography. It's sad to see how most English speakers see that as "BuT iT
IsN't PHoNeTicALlY rEgUlaR!". This is despite the fact that phonetic shifts
across time and space mean that no writing systen will ever be completely
phonetically regular. Phonics can be useful but they can't be fundamental
because the impossibility of phonetic regularity means that phonics will
always be somewhat misleading.

------
dqpb
Oakland California. Wow. The bay area can't even teach their kids how to read.

------
momokoko
The reason for this debate is that different IQ levels require different
techniques. Higher IQ students will be more able to apply patterns and systems
from phonics to words seen for the first time.

Lower IQ students tend to struggle with mapping systems onto new material. So
the more brute force systems, like memorizing whole words, tends to have more
success.

We see similar things in learning mathematics.

~~~
AdieuToLogic
> The reason for this debate is that different IQ levels need different
> techniques.

"IQ levels" are almost impossible to measure objectively, excluding medically
identified learning disabilities. Reading comprehension difficulties are less
a function of fluid intelligence (commonly called "IQ"), and more so
environmentally induced. Examples of this are, but not limited to:

\- Instability at home

\- Lack of parental involvement

\- Prejudice, explicit or subliminal, by school staff.

\- Hunger and/or fatigue

\- Dejection resulting from some combination of the above.

~~~
vackosar
Even if they are environmentally caused, isn't it still better to personalize
to the kids ability at the time of teaching? That is every now and then remix
the students into groups for which you would have some optimized strategies to
teach?

~~~
AdieuToLogic
My response was to directly address the concept of intrinsic low verses high
IQ dogma.

As far as optimizing teaching techniques, I can only say I believe there is
not an easy answer for that. People are different, kids do not operate as
adults would, group dynamics sometimes benefit with change and other times
not, and I would be hard pressed to think that personalizing to the extent
possible would be a bad thing.

In short, IMHO there is no universally applicable solution to the teaching
problem domain. Which is likely why so many of us hold teachers in high regard
and remember them so well.

EDIT: preposition and indefinite article use.

