Ask Slashdot: Are We Teaching Children The Wrong Way To Read? (apmreports.org) 333
Slashdot reader Thelasko says his oldest child made some "interesting" statements when they came home from first grade:
One particular phrase that bothers me is, "I can read pictures." Recently, I heard a radio show on NPR about whole-language reading instruction, and how it's a terrible way to learn. I've since learned that this is a hotly debated topic. I learned to read in a phonics-only setting. To me, this is the only way to read. I don't look at pictures, or the rest of the sentence unless I am completely clueless about what a word is. This whole-language approach just seems wrong. Have any Slashdot members been through this experience with their children?
Did anyone find good research supporting one way or the other, not just opinion? What is your opinion on whole-language versus phonics only reading instruction?
Other Slashdot readers shared some thoughtful comments. I75BJC wrote: From my personal experience, the Whole Word Method of learning to read did not help me. It limited my vocabulary and, especially, my ability to learn new words by myself. In a word, the Whole Word Method "SUCKS". Big time!
My 3rd grade teacher was horrified at our lack of reading skills (after 2 years of the Whole Word Method) and began teaching Phonics to the class. That helped but she could not dedicate the time to Phonics as if it were the way to read. It helped a lot but it didn't undo the damage that the Whole Word Method caused. Having been taught both Phonics and the Whole Word Method, I would say, from experience, that Phonics is the better method. As an Education Major in college, I would state that my professional opinion is that Phonics is vastly superior.
BTW, the debate between Phonics and the Whole Word Method has been going on for decades -- more than 50 years...
And Iamthecheese wrote: Some children learn better by listening, some by reading, some by doing. Some will learn by phonics best, some by getting cues, and most from a combination of these. You know what a child needs? Teachers and parents who love them enough to try different methods if the child is struggling. That's what's missing.
Schools that are glorified daycare and parents who don't have time for their children are the problem. Fix that and everything falls into place. Love the children enough to make sacrifices for them and treat them as individuals...
Where do other Slashdot readers stand on this debate? Leave your own thoughts in the comments.
Are we teaching children the wrong way to read?
Did anyone find good research supporting one way or the other, not just opinion? What is your opinion on whole-language versus phonics only reading instruction?
Other Slashdot readers shared some thoughtful comments. I75BJC wrote: From my personal experience, the Whole Word Method of learning to read did not help me. It limited my vocabulary and, especially, my ability to learn new words by myself. In a word, the Whole Word Method "SUCKS". Big time!
My 3rd grade teacher was horrified at our lack of reading skills (after 2 years of the Whole Word Method) and began teaching Phonics to the class. That helped but she could not dedicate the time to Phonics as if it were the way to read. It helped a lot but it didn't undo the damage that the Whole Word Method caused. Having been taught both Phonics and the Whole Word Method, I would say, from experience, that Phonics is the better method. As an Education Major in college, I would state that my professional opinion is that Phonics is vastly superior.
BTW, the debate between Phonics and the Whole Word Method has been going on for decades -- more than 50 years...
And Iamthecheese wrote: Some children learn better by listening, some by reading, some by doing. Some will learn by phonics best, some by getting cues, and most from a combination of these. You know what a child needs? Teachers and parents who love them enough to try different methods if the child is struggling. That's what's missing.
Schools that are glorified daycare and parents who don't have time for their children are the problem. Fix that and everything falls into place. Love the children enough to make sacrifices for them and treat them as individuals...
Where do other Slashdot readers stand on this debate? Leave your own thoughts in the comments.
Are we teaching children the wrong way to read?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:English is a phonetic language. (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently, Whole Word can work. The problem is the One Size Fits All approach. And outright daming one method is a version of that. Otherwise you would give it a try.
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That's what I thought. Bow before my holy and single method! Everying else must be bad, and people never learn without my method, they can only "learn". You are but another ideologue.
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I claim based on 6+ decades of experience that students who learn how to read despite being officially taught using the whole word method would have learned as well or better if taught using phonics, or any other formal method that exposes them to enough text and pronunciations.
Let's drill down this a bit, what are the IQs of the two children in question? Actual scores, or just a relative relationship or general
Re:English is a phonetic language. (Score:5, Insightful)
Best explanation I have heard:
You can read faster by whole word reading just as you can play music faster by playing by ear. But you can read more difficult passages by reading phonetically just as you can play more difficult music by reading music. You can spell better with phonics just as you can write music better if you can read music.
Steve Waller
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I think that is correct, but ignores the effect of confidence.
There seems to be a threshold effect at which the confidence increases and the child wants to try reading new books and words. The key words technique (concentrate on the 300 words most commonly used) may get to that stage faster in kids capable of doing so, but phonics will work better for kids with less confidence.
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Everyone who learned with whole words can read phonetically, too.
Or how else would you learn anything else e.g. a second language otherwise?
'Whole word" / "look-say" based on flawed premise (Score:3)
You can read faster by whole word reading just as you can play music faster by playing by ear. But you can read more difficult passages by reading phonetically just as you can play more difficult music by reading music.
And that is the datum which, misunderstood, led to the design and adoption of the disastrous 'Whole word" / "look-say" ("look and say") teaching method.
Researchers studied fast and slow readers to determine what was the difference. They found that fast readers achieved higher speed by recogn
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I myself learned reading by asking my mother what was written somewhere (shop signs, signs on boxes etc.pp.), and when I went to school, I could already read. So for my own experience, it would be "Whole Word" again, as I never asked for single letters, always for complete words and sentences (and differently than many, I never tried to write my own name).
Re:English is a phonetic language. (Score:4, Informative)
That's plus or minus two full standard deviations (taken as 15) from the defined average of 100. Per this calculator [gigacalculator.com], 4.8% of people are at 125 or higher, 1 in 21, 1.6% 132 or higher, 1 in 61.
May I suggest that your very intelligent children are completely useless examples to extrapolate from for the population at large?
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It was Phonics. And just because you don't like the result, you put the word learned in quotes?
That's what I thought. Bow before my holy and single method! Everying else must be bad, and people never learn without my method, they can only "learn". You are but another ideologue.
I have found that different things work for different people. I learned via phonics, and am a voracious reader, when I was in grade school, I read through our entire family encyclopedia. My son learned the whole word method,and also enjoys reading.
But some students will struggle with one way or the other. A related example is math. I was marginal with math until algebra, and then it all fell apart. Until Electronics shop teacher introduced our class to slide rules. Something clicked, and it clicked hard
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Second, in this instance, "data is not the plural form of anecdote" because there are effectively a limitless number of outside factors that could explain someone acquiring the ability to read despite being taught to do so incorrectly. If nothing else, that individual may have been even better able to
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The problem is the One Size Fits All approach. And outright daming one method is a version of that. Otherwise you would give it a try.
Indeed. But if you drop that, the bureaucratic morons in charge need to start to recognize children as individuals and that is just not really in their skill-set.
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Her assorted cousins ran the usual gamut, but the more readers they had around, the more likely they were to be reader
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Have your whole words child read the following words:
sublime
petrified
voluminous
Heisenberg
Planck
relativity
quantum
Newtonian
Gaussian
Einstein
holocaust
serendipitous
precipitous
precipitate
deconstructionism
predicament
discomfited
anamorphic
pulchritudinous
antidisestablishmentarianism
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilocovolcanokoniosis
di-isobutylphenoxyethoxyethyldimethylbenzylammonium
chloride
phenylethylamine
oxytoci
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Re: English is a phonetic language. (Score:2)
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Does it benefit our ruling class?
Re: English is a phonetic language. (Score:3)
Does it benefit our ruling class?
"Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government." Thomas Jefferson?
This is why modern education is a failure from the standpoint of the citizen. Big bad government wants nothing more than useful idiots. Look at your stupid phone, repeat the party line. "Critical thinking and self-reflection have no business in today's world".
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Jeff Goldblum, is that you?
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Re:English is a phonetic language. (Score:5, Informative)
Now they brought it back under "common core"
Common core is just selling the same failed shit.
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It was initially rolled out nationwide in the 1930s as I remember, but that was a slow process because of the grinding depression FDR prolonged until WWII required him to stop his war on businesses so we could make war on the Axis. Then most of the nation's output was focused on the war effort, but enough data was available in the early 1950s [slashdot.org] to conclusively demonstrate the "shape
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>"Unfortunately, between ideology I touch on in the previous link, and the US education bureaucracy not eager to acknowledge that they crippled a large fraction of a generation of school children, the fight rages on as you note."
And because we have no school choice, parents within a crappy school zone are stuck with no options, unless they are rich and can send their kids to [typically extremely expensive] private schools or somehow have the time to teach, re-teach, and/or de-teach everything themselves.
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The thing is, the system we had before whole word was forced on the nation starting in the 1930s worked for the vast majority of students. My mother didn't know any English until she entered public primary school in the very early 1940s, but the teachers were no nonsense and demanded that she and her fellow students with little or no English learn it, learn it quickly, and learn it well. So she ended up speaking it as well as a native English speaker.
Please look again at the timeline I cited, almost every
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>"Please look again at the timeline I cited, almost everything you cited wasn't a factor when whole word was introduced and first ruined a large fraction of a generation [...]."
I was referring to the entirety of education, not reading, specifically. And some of the things I listed we are just starting to feel the impact now; I believe it is going to get much worse.
>"You've left out one thing that prevents entire classrooms of students from learning much or anything: discipline."
Indeed. And that is a
Re:English is a phonetic language. (Score:4, Interesting)
May I suggest that trying to teach children who can't read anything else is a mostly hopeless task? How can they solve word problems in math? Read their history books, you can transmit only so much info in say 150 50 minute lectures per year. "Language Arts" are obviously a total loss with no insurance. Computer skills? Maybe there's a bit of hope there. Mechanical skills, there's some hope, but there's a lot blocked to them, plus if they can't read warning labels....
I'm actually not sure how much worse it can get, a whole lot of this is simple recycling of a sort, where a known working method is replaced with something that doesn't work, there's pushback and some reversal, then it if it's English, or something else if it's math, is repeated for another cycle. We've literally been fighting against whole word for 64 years if you take Why Johnny Can't Read as the start of the counter-revolution, and I'm know some people were noticing before then.
But the educational establishment never ceases to amaze, it would have never occurred to me that children would be rewarded with candy for acting up in class in my very Red state part of the country (90/10% Republicans to Democrats, law enforcement totally supports civilian gun ownership, very religious, Pentecostal and Catholic, we spend a great deal of money keeping our infrastructure going, etc.). The Long March through the institutions very conspicuously targeted education for the obvious fundamental reason.
You're second paragraph is well taken, but I'll further point out we're in the 3rd full generation of failing to teach people the most basic, the absolutely fundamental key to learning everything else, reading.
Where is this going to end up? "The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!" (that's from Kipling in 1919).
Having studied this in some detail, I think that's more correlation than causation. For example, echoing one of your points, with like one exception they all lack fathers. Although there are special cases like the Stoneman shooter, adopted by an old couple, father died when he was pretty young, mother not long before he went on his entirely predicable rampage, and again the adopted thing, something just plain messed him up beyond the usual. Hmmm, and I don't have any sort of handle on the drugging of young boys so they'll act more like girls in grade and middle school (I just know from a friend and his father that ADHD is real, post college he was diagnosed and it made a big difference, to him and his father who was also diagnosed and started taking the drugs).
Re:English is a phonetic language. (Score:5, Interesting)
The "shape of the word" method is what's advocated by speed readers. By recognizing the word by its shape without first sounding it out, you create new mappings in your brain straight from the visual cortex to the language center. The advantage is that the visual processing center of your brain is much larger and faster, which allows you to read faster than you can speak - over 10x faster (hence speed reading). The disadvantage is that because you're learning a completely new way to process language, it's harder and takes longer.
You can do both - learn phonetic reading first, then later learn speed reading. But like learning a Dvorak keyboard layout, until you get up to speed with the new method, there's a strong tendency to fall back onto the old method which you're already know, because you're much faster with it. And unlike a keyboard which you can swap out and force yourself to use the new method, the only way to force yourself to use the alternative reading method is entirely in your head. So I can see why the people who advocate this approach want it taught before kids have learned how to read by sounding out words.
I took a speed reading course, and it's useful for reading things like news articles, somewhat useful for technical articles (it's not always effective because you often have to stop to think to understand the concepts being explained).. But I've stopped using it for reading fiction because it detracted from my enjoyment. Language is so much more than words - the way you stress certain words, break it up into phrases, etc. contributes so much more to how meaningful language is. It's basically the same problem which forced us to develop smilies and emoticons - writing doesn't convey the intent behind what you write. A lot of times you can figure out the intent, but not always, which is where the emoticons come in. Likewise, good fiction makes it clear from the words (use of common phrases, conveyance of the emotional state of the character speaking) what the intent is supposed to be. And thus sounding out how a speaker would say those words increased my enjoyment of the book. It's basically the difference between reading musical notes, vs playing them (in your head) with feeling.
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The thing is, English is not a phonetic language, as the word "phonetic" itself demonstrates. English is a mix, partially phonetic. But explain "pneumatic" or "bdellium". So. You need a mix of learning techniques, and really common words probably are best learned as chunks. You don't learn letters as individual strokes. But when a word is as uncommon as "fishing" then you need to learn the word by pieces...and phonics is learning the word by pieces taken to the extreme.
Re:English is a phonetic language. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a masters in education and researched this when my kids were at this stage. The reason for this debate is the pitifully poor level of evidence that both sides cling to.
It is the epitome of the Dunning Kruger effect.
In the right hands, both can work well.
My perspective is that for kids who learn fast then whole words work best, for kids that learn slower, then phonetics is best.
We could resolve this with a very large properly conducted randomised controlled trial, stratified appropriately, and it is shocking that no one has done this, but I could not find any evidence.
What would I recommend? try the ladybird books that come in either phonics or whole word 'read with me' version and see what works. I found that the 'read with me' tom and kate version worked much better for my kids as the phonetics ones, but I am sure that 2 years down the line then there wouldn't be much to choose in terms of outcomes.
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We really don't need large scale randomized controlled trials for this. The answer is already there as we can see the significant drop in pass/fail levels in multiple grades over several years whenever the whole word method is put into place. It's similar to the new math garbage, and the significant drop in students passing standardized tests. To give you an example from here in Ontario, reading/writing tests fell around 10% between two groups of students between Jr HS and HS itself. Math? Math was terr
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You need that randomized test. Seriously. The trend you observe can far too easily have other reasons or can be a lot stronger than the actual effect under consideration is due to other reasons. Statisticians have learned this the hard way, most others are still bumbling about and misinterpreting data.
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I have a masters in education and researched this when my kids were at this stage. The reason for this debate is the pitifully poor level of evidence that both sides cling to.
It is the epitome of the Dunning Kruger effect.
Probably with a large dosage of the Peter Principle in there as well. Remember that it was discovered in education.
Incidentally, whenever there is a heated debate but both sides have poor evidence, then this is about ideology, not about facts. Happens routinely with average humans that do not actually have any real insight into how things work.
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You're pointing out how "phonics" actually works in the real world for English, you learn a general method that works for the majority of words, and then a bunch of exceptions that just have to be recognized, some have sub-rules, some you just have to lear
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You don't have to be a super-genius. Once you get enough experience you recognize words and match them to their sound and *gasp* meaning. That is like saying you have to be a super-genius to memorize the meaning of words. Amazingly the brain can store and recall trillions of patterns and their associated data. Did you "learn" how to read the word "what" via phonetics, or just by seeing the word and remembering it was pronounced a certain way, and memorizing the meaning? My guess is the latter, because you p
"Why Johnny can't read." (Score:2)
Didn't we have this debate a long time ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Rudolf Franz Flesch (Vienna, 8 May 1911 – New York, 5 October 1986) was an Austrian-born naturalised American author (noted for his book Why Johnny Can't Read), and also a readability expert and writing consultant who was a vigorous proponent of plain English in the United States. He created the Flesch Reading Ease test and was co-creator of the Flesch–Kincaid readability test. Flesch advocated use of phonics rather than sight reading to enable students to sound-out unfamiliar words.
Re: English is a phonetic language. (Score:3)
English is horrible un-phonic, as numerous reformers over the years have observed. Consider the word COLOR (read "culler"), which uses two Os, neither of which make an OH or or OOH sound. Consider anything with a gh in it, which could be read as G, as FF, or as silent. Consider the terminating B in words like JAMB, but not its homophone JAM. English is schizophrenic.
And part of the reason is because the letters is the simplest (least-foreign) words are decidedly not phonic. H is used in WHEN and WHERE (but
New math for reading? (Score:4, Interesting)
Seems pretty straightforward that most people will listen and talk more than they read. If you liken objects to phonetics, you can learn lots of new words without even seeing what the words look like and are spelled.
Whole Language Sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
Learning how to sound out and pronounce a word you have never SEEN before is the essence of reading. English is HARD in this respect, and the "rules" have so many exceptions, but it's still an essential skill.
We raised two children through adulthood. The oldest ran into the whole language BS, and struggled. WE had been teaching him phonics from home, and ran into a school district that told us we were being "counterproductive".
Number one son struggled with reading his whole life as a result.
When number two son hit the same point, we were better prepared, told the school system to eat-shit-and-die; he got phonics at home and read ahead of his class for the duration.
DO NOT accept this progressive, touchy-feely approach to learning. Sometimes, old proven methods are, gee.... OLD AND PROVEN.
FWIW, when you learn a foreign language, once you get beyond the first few days, they teach you how to read and pronounce, because the rules are different and you need to know how to match a printed word with a word you have heard., but never seen.
This IS what READING is all about.
Red
Re:Whole Language Sucks (Score:5, Funny)
"Learning how to sound out and pronounce a word you have never SEEN before is the essence of reading. English is HARD in this respect, and the "rules" have so many exceptions, but it's still an essential skill."
English? Hard words?
How about:
Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung
I tried to post more of them but I got a "Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there." from Slashdot when trying to post.
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Re:Whole Language Sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Whole Language Sucks (Score:5, Funny)
Well, good for you. I just tried reading that word out loud and my wife called 911 because she thought I was having a stroke.
Re:Whole Language Sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
Compoundwordsonlyseemhard.
Re:Whole Language Sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
I have never seen that (German) word before.
But not only can I pronounce it the first time (German pronunciation is 100% regular), I know what it means.
For inquiring minds, it's automobile liability insurance.
Red
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Nobody uses words like this one except people missing the point. That a construct is allowed does not make it a good idea to use it. That comes from other factors.
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English words are hard because it's not phonetic.
(Some) German words might seem hard because they are compound. That's a different aspect of the language.
In practice, compound German words are only hard if you do not know the partial words and can't tell where one word ends and the next starts.
If the German's would want to fix their language, they could use hyphenation like Kraft-fahr-zeug-haft-pflicht-versicherung. For the moment they cho
Re:Whole Language Sucks (Score:4, Informative)
>If the German's would want to fix their language, they could use hyphenation like Kraft-fahr-zeug-haft-pflicht-versicherung. For the moment they chose not to and instead cling to the existing grammar.
How would that be a "fix"? It's the exact same word, and is only easier to recognize to someone not familiar with German compound-word rules. There would be no advantage to native speakers who are accustomed to spelling compound words the way they're pronounced - all strung together.
English in contrast is plagued by inconsistencies that do trip up native speakers on a regular basis. Moving to phonetic spelling would indeed be a fix, because it reduces the cognitive load on the reader (and writer), who currently have to not only learn to associate the spoken word and concept, but also the spelling as a third, largely independent symbol.
The extreme version is something completely non-phonetic like Chinese - where the connection between the spoken and written language is completely arbitrary, and even college-educated native speakers often have absolutely no idea how to read or write infrequently used words.
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English? Hard words?
How about:
Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung
I'll do you one better: knife.
The fact I could look at that German word (compulsory third party car insurance in case anyone is interested) and instantly pronounce it correctly regardless of its length is what makes German a really easy language to read. It doesn't matter how long the word is, how complicated it looks, it doesn't matter if there are three 'f's in a row such as in Schifffhart. It sounds exactly as how it's written. In English the pronunciation of letters is incredibly dependent on its contex
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Justaddthespaces:
kraft fahr zeug haft pflicht ver-sicherung
Re:Whole Language Sucks (Score:5, Interesting)
When you learn [any] language, once you get beyond the first few days, they teach you how to read and pronounce, because the rules are different and you need to know how to match a printed word with a word you have heard., but never seen.
This. 100% this.
So, my almost six year old is learning how to read. And watching him learn is teaching me how many patterns there are in English, and how many crazy words there are in English. For example, the first words I taught my son were "at" words..."hat", "cat", "bat", etc. He has a very easy time recognizing them now. Except when he was reading to me one day, I heard him read a word as "wat". I told him to try again, and he said "wat" again. I looked at the word more closely, and for the first time I realized, "what" looked like an at word. And this is one of hundreds of examples where, as he's reading phonetically, I have to tell him things like "the 'g' and 'h' are silent in "right" or "weight", but they make an 'f' sound in "rough".
Repeating the parent, reading is all about matching what you see on a page to what you hear in language. Having studied Arabic for a year myself, my language teacher -first- had me develop oral understanding. After six months, she then taught me the alphabet and helped me develop written understanding. But as I was first reading, I -had- to use phonics to decode what I read. Only after lots of practice and an existing understanding of the word did specific words become recognizable as a word without first decoding its letters.
To add to the conversation, my greatest fear today is how our schools are doing away with libraries in new schools that they build. It's a growing trend [washingtonpost.com], now that 1-1 digital devices are becoming more common in school districts. Take away the library, and you take away a student's primary source of reading material for which to practice the skill. (Digital devices do not make up the difference.) And people wonder why our 2019 NAEP English test scores went down eight points [usatoday.com].
Re: Whole Language Sucks (Score:2)
With Arabic, according to both my native speaking teacher(Lebanese) and non-native speaking ones (one of whom learned at Americsn University Cairo) even native speakers have a hard time reading the language, especially if the diacritic vowels are left out. It's a fun language to write in though. I really liked the flow of it.
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This might be the thing. Finland has very high international literacy scores, but they don't actually start to teach reading until the kids are 7. Perhaps the secret is they do "whole language" for the two years, verbally, then buckle down and shift tack to phonics, rather than trying to 'balance' the whole thing the whole way through.
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Except they don't do "whole language" do they? They teach exclusively *verbal* language until 7, and then teach spelling. They also likely have a distinct advantage over teaching English spelling, since Finnish is always spelled like it sounds.
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Japanese is an unfair example! It has syllables, and not very many of them (49 or so?), only the vowels and 'n' are stand alone phonemes (ignoring how ending vowels of many syllable are sometimes dropped or mostly so in practice, at least in Tokyo-ben). And ignoring regional dialects, it only has one way to for example pronounce the vowels, although combinations of them add additional sounds. And as you sort of note, has few exceptions or special rules.
It could well be the very best language for puns giv
This is a century old issue (Score:5, Interesting)
Or almost so. The 1955 book Why Johnny Can't Read pointed out the disaster of "Dick and Jane and Their Running Dog Spot" as Jerry Pournelle liked to describe the "whole word" method. His wife's career was teaching the hardest of cases, people in prison of I think all ages, how to read, of course using phonics. He even developed a computer program to use the method, started programming a IBM 650 in the 1950s for his psychology Ph.D., in which he learned politics beats science.
The claims of "different learning methods" have been proven largely or entirely wrong. For reading, as long as you recognize there are, say, three groups you can divide people into. There are those who will pick it up no matter what formal method is used to teach them, these were the sorts of kids that whole word was "tested" on roughly a century ago, such as the children of professors at the University of Chicago. At the other end, there's a group that find reading very hard or impossible to learn, because they aren't smart enough, are dyslexic, have worse disabilities, etc. In the middle, there's a very large group that finds it easy if first taught phonics, and impossible if whole word is used.
The malpractice of dropping phonics, I think in part due to a crusade against "drill and kill", that is, the rote memorization that's needed to learn both phonics and the math tables for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, drastically lowered the nation's literacy rate. And 65 years after the above mentioned book the battle is still raging, with far too much of the US education bureaucracy still determined to cripple as many of their charges as possible.
Because if you don't know how to read, and can't do math in your head which is necessary when you get to algebra and beyond, you're an ignorant peasant without much of a future.
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in part due to a crusade against "drill and kill", that is, the rote memorization that's needed to learn both phonics and the math tables for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division
This. Modern educators hate rote memorization for some reason. Maybe they think it's old-fashioned, and anything old can and must be improved upon, and anything new is better almost by definition.
I recently read that in our schools, column substraction is making a comeback (this is the way most of us probably learned, substracting numbers in each column from right to left, carrying the overflow to the next column). I was surprised that they stopped teaching such a simple and straightforward method, and
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Maybe also because it requires real and hard work for the students?? And supervision to make sure they're actually doing it? And really puts in teacher's faces that students are very much not equal? There is a tremendous prejudice against it, which is
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This. Modern educators hate rote memorization for some reason. Maybe they think it's old-fashioned, and anything old can and must be improved upon, and anything new is better almost by definition.
Very much so. It's the exuberance of youth. You always want to push the limits, break the rules, try something new. However, for a LOT of things, there is no benefit in doing so. I know that I used to want to do that too (I am two score and 11 annals on this planet)...
You also see this happen a lot in the tech/science world, and it's always been so. Young new person wants to be creative, prove their worth, and try new approaches to problems. It used to be that was encouraged, with limits - often guide
Kids were failing (Score:2)
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Also a sure way to make a society dependent on technology fail. One wonders whether Huawei has better equipment than US competitors simply because Huawei engineers were not subjected to this "equal outcome" nonsense.
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FIFY, read some of my other postings in this topic. The late 1960s period you refer to would be a reaction to when the method was first called out in 1955 in Why Johnny Can't Read, which put its proponents on the back foot with standardized test scores plummeting.
The right way to learn (Score:4, Insightful)
The right way to learn to read is to actually, um, read. It isn't a science. It just requires practice. The reason Johnny can't read is because Johnny doesn't read. Kids that like to read, learn to read. Kids that don't like to read, and aren't forced to read, don't learn to read.
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No, that's the right way to learn to read better. Reading is something you literally can't do without first being taught how to do it. Once you've been taught the basics, THEN practice can make you better. But if you put a book in front of someone that is completely illiterate, they won't be able to practice, because the symbols are nonsensical scribbles on a page.
Old fart here (Score:3)
Dunno what the public schools were doing in my day, because my mom taught me phonics before they got their hands on me. She launched me with Dagwood & Blondie in the Sunday funnies -- and I was off and running with Dr. Seuss (who had ONE book then) and L. Frank Baum in that order.
By the time I got to third grade...I didn't. They just skipped me over it.
Parent of a 1st grader (Score:2)
Regardless of what is being taught in school, it's what the parents do at home that determines the overall success of the child. My son reads at a very high level because we have always read 2-3 books to him each night. Starting in Kindergarten we had him read back to us.
Complaining on the internet isn't going to help. Go to school board meetings, work with your children at home. Flash cards are a very easy way of supplementing
Huh? (Score:2)
Porque no los dos? (Score:2)
Phonics is needed as an aid to reading. But learning whole words is also needed to internalize words, especially those that phonics fail. I say this from e
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As much as I believe in teaching phonics, it's not a 100% solution for learning 'Merican English. You just gotta memorize the spellings...... BUT, there is s
This was always weird to me about Americans. (Score:2)
Please don't take this as an offense, but where I'm from, using your speech center to read, is considered shameful. We associate it with the stereotypical 'most primitive rural redneck troglodytes'. A bit like "mouth-breather" in the US.
Of course it's just a stereotype, and meant to insult, but it nicely shows the contrast. We consider it normal, to 'read the pictures' (and write them too!). It's also *way* faster.
But I'd go one step further than the article, and claim that there are different types of peop
P.S.: I should have read the whole fucking summary (Score:2)
Dammit, me!
Nevermind then... ... maybe the comment still is useful to some people.
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For our intelligent 3-4 year old... (Score:2)
The microphone problem (Score:2)
He who has the microphone commands the room. The debate is mute. As long as the “ system” lives. It’s just a tool. They teach children obey. That’s the American way.
My own children would not listen to Phonics out of fear they violate the “ official” whole language mantra. BUT. They couldn’t spell. Raised as a point of failure of the curriculum “ they don’t need to learn spelling” was the shocking retort “ every device has spell check now!
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Except that's demonstrably not true. Student/teacher ratios were much worse back before whole word was forced on the nation starting in the 1930s. The Google Ngram Viewer [google.com] is very useful
There were bursts about it at the start of the previous century, I'd assume Progressivism in the face of the tidal wave of non-native English speaking immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, and in the late 1920s and early-mid 1930s when whol
Homeschooler perspective (Score:2)
Our grade-schooler learned to read using the phonics method, and it has proven to be a solid method for many of the other families in our homeschool group (about 20 families). The biggest advantage to the phonics method, as far as we
Bob Books (Score:2)
Thing One here just started reading along. She's pretty smart. Began devouring novels six months after "Cat had hat".
Thing Two here needed some assistance. After the school was no help at all I did some research and eventually found Bob Books [amzn.to] which methodically increases word complexity, building both confidence and skill. Highly recommended for any 1-5 year olds on your Christmas list.
What *I* learned: don't count on the schools - teach your kids to read. Reading them stories frequently from ages 1-5
Reading in unnatural and not instinctive (Score:4, Interesting)
Reading and writing, on the other hand are cultural and have to be taught painstakingly.
English is particularly hard in this respect. Ideogram/pictogram languages like Chinese are easy start learning, because each spoken word is a symbol/picture. Basic vocabulary of 100 to 500 words is very easy. Then it gets hard.
Phoneme languages like Hindi, Sanskrit, Tamil are better. Each language letter/glyph is a distinct syllable. Each consonant+vowel combination gets its own picture. Usually you write exactly what you say and read exactly what you hear. Not much of silent letters, no ambiguity between glyphs and pronunciation. About 256 glyphs and you can write down all the sounds made in the language.
Romance script is more difficult. Not enough vowels. Short and long vowels have the same symbol. Consonants and vowels are written up and the reader has to put them together in the mind to create the sound. Very compact and efficient when it comes to number of glyphs to learn, just 26. Then it is a big mess.
Grammar is easy, reading it tough.
No single right way (Score:2)
The key part of this is that the vast majority of children learn to read without mu
It seems to depend on whom you ask. (Score:3)
Phonics is better (Score:3)
Anecdotal, and not data.
I am 71. My reading education was "look see" with Dick and Jane.
I overcame this crappy method because I had an innate ability to do so.
I learned later to utilize phonics.
My younger brother is dyslexic.
Whole language messed him up. His reading comprehension is fair, but his writing sucks. He had to have all his college papers typed by others (girls) who corrected his spelling as they typed.
Phonics (Score:3)
Phonics is the only way. "Whole Language" is bullshit snake-oil.
I had never even heard of this before today! (Score:5, Insightful)
Woodworth went to public school in Owosso, Michigan, in the 1990s. She says sounds and letters just didn't make sense to her, and she doesn't remember anyone teaching her how to read. So she came up with her own strategies to get through text.
Strategy 1: Memorize as many words as possible. "Words were like pictures to me," she said. "I had a really good memory."
Strategy 2: Guess the words based on context. If she came across a word she didn't have in her visual memory bank, she'd look at the first letter and come up with a word that seemed to make sense. Reading was kind of like a game of 20 Questions: What word could this be?
Strategy 3: If all else failed, she'd skip the words she didn't know.
I went to a private school through 8th grade, and I've never even heard of this 'whole language' nonsense until just now.
This almost makes me think of it like it's some sort of child abuse; how can someone be 'taught' (using the term as loosely as language allows, here) to 'read' using a highly flawed and apparently ineffective method like this? It clearly and objectively does not work.
If so many kids were 'taught to read' like this, could that be the reason we have so many misunderstandings on the internet and in email, and why so many people are seemingly so dumb these days? I'm not even kidding, I'm not bullying or trolling or baiting when I say this, I'm dead serious: if you have an entire swath of the adult population who, when presented with a word that they don't have a 'picture' of in their mind, just skips over it because they don't know what to do with it (and have no tools built in their minds to figure it out), then how can people effectively communicate?
This almost sounds like something you'd do to a slave race to keep them from learning things you don't want them learning.
Language is key, essential to learning in general. If you hamstring that, you effectively prevent people from being able to learn things on their own.
Two Ways to Read (Score:3, Insightful)
Irrelevant question... (Score:3)
Yes, the phonics vs. whole language debate is an old one & pretty pointless because it isn't comparing like with like. Reading is a complex activity & the second most cognitively demanding thing human beings ever do (writing is the first), & which can't be reduced to simply decoding (phonics) vs. word recognition (whole language).
According to what most experts now agree upon, known as the "Simple View of Reading," fluent, competent reading is a combination of 8 overarching threads, each with its constituent knowledge, skills, & strategies. See: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws... [amazonaws.com]
Systemic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) teaches children how to "decode" graphemes (individual or combinations of letters) into their corresponding phonemes (individual sounds that make up words). Everyone decodes when they read. This is settled science (See Stanislas Dehaene's brain-imaging & behavioural psychology research into what the eyes & brain do when we read, e.g. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/... [sciencemag.org]). SSP only addresses ONE of the 8 threads in the Simple View of Reading (Another is memorising "sight words," i.e. exceptions to the usual phoneme-grapheme correspondences, which Whole Language promotes, although exclusively).
If we leave it to chance, i.e. different kids grow up in different home environments with different attitudes, exposure, & support to reading, then some kids will learn to decode better than others. Explicit instruction in SSP helps those kids who need it (& most do) to catch up with kids who've somehow managed to self-teach &/or have had sufficient reading support at home, thereby providing one of the fundamental abilities our education systems are supposed to, to everyone, i.e. reading.
SSP is a vital but insufficient element in educating the vast majority of children to become competent readers. Over-simplified, straw-man, so-called public debates like the original post above, help no-one. The issue with early literacy instruction at the moment is that many teacher-training colleges still aren't training teachers how to teach reading according to what the science says, but that's slowly changing.
If you're genuinely interested in what the current scientific consensus is on early literacy development & instruction, this OER textbook is relatively clear & accessible (Remember, this is a complex topic!): https://open.umn.edu/opentextb... [umn.edu]
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Except the whole point of this "debate", going back to the 1955 Why Johnny Can't Read, is that for a very large fraction of students, sight reading doesn't work! We now have almost a century of hard evidence of this.
Re:as long as they learn about (Score:4, Insightful)
You seem to have evidence. Then show it.
Here is a good survey of the scientific evidence:
The Evidence on How Kids Learn to Read [psychologytoday.com]
whole word reading is the norm.
Indeed it is. Most people recognize entire words by sight. But that is not the best way to learn to read. Phonics should be the foundation and should be taught first.
Does one size fill all? (Score:3)
My first son taught himself to read before he could walk. I remember carrying him as a babe-in-arms as we walked past at the post office, and at the sight of the sign he proudly announced "POST!" (He had a toy post truck with the same POST logo used by AustraliaPost). Even earlier he'd announced the, admittedly easy word, 'Bobo' which was the name of a chimp in the English language book he had, when I opened the box with his first Bobo Siebenschläfer (a squirrel?) book.
By the time he went to school, h
Re: as long as they learn about (Score:3)
You asked for a reference, he gave you a reference, you rejected it on the basis that you can't be bothered.
Please take your trolling elsewhere.
Re:as long as they learn about (Score:5, Interesting)
Reminds me of the story, where Richard Feynman experimented with how exactly he could measure time while counting.
He found, that he could do it, but it would impair him from doing other "phonetic" tasks. One day he met a colleague who was doing the same experiment, except in his case he was impaired doing "visual" tasks. After comparing notes they found that Feynman was, and has always, counted by silently saying the numbers in his mind, but the colleague was counting by seeing the numbers moving past in his mind.
Funny side note: My first language is German, my second language English, and right now I learn Japanese for fun. In the different alphabets there, Hiragana/Katakan basically only work phonetically, while Kanji only work visually, so Japanese children basically have to use both methods in parallel. I wonder that influences the brain.
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It gave us tentacle porn and the Toyota Production System, so let's be thankful for that.
Re:as long as they learn about (Score:5, Insightful)
This. Both my daughter and I have issues with decomposition. We both taught ourselves to read before kindergarten through sight reading and both ran into issues with the school trying to re-teach us using phonics. Fortunately my daughter had the advantage of having a dad who had been there, done that.
The reason we have different techniques is because we have different ways of learning.
Initial Teaching Alphabet (Score:2)
the lack of a consistent standard pronunciation for English makes it difficult to agree on how to reform the spelling
In addition, a spelling reform that uses IPA vowels would obscure morphophonemic relationships between words such as "nation" and "national".
it might be possible to do a gradual transition where children learn Simplified English first
Should the Initial Teaching Alphabet (I.T.A.) [wikipedia.org] be reintroduced?
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Re:Simple enough (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a shame you got modded down (and I probably will, too), but whilst your terms and example are a bit harsh for the current woke ones, it is spot on. Not everyone is equal. Not everyone is an Einstein. Not everyone is a Yo Yo Ma. Not everyone is a Shaquille O'Neal. Not everyone has a 100 IQ. And not everyone deserves a medal or trophy.We all have different talents, skills, and levels thereof. Some kids are insanely brilliant and grasp complex concepts fast; others just didn't inherit the mental capacity to do so.
It is NOT discriminatory nor harmful to recognize different levels of ability, and to push each individual to achieve to their level of ability. What IS discriminatory and harmful is to insist we ARE all equal and thus change the way people are challenged and taught in school so that the outcomes are equal - which inevitably means dragging down the high-performers to the lower end of the spectrum.
If the "woke" side of things (which is unfortunately, IMHO, driving much of the conversation today) were actually practicing tolerance and diversity as they claim, we'd recognize a diversity of skill/ability, AND a tolerance for those with little and much, and support an individual to succeed in whatever they are good at. Celebrate successes, rather than retard the opportunities in a belief that having one succeed in place of another is "intolerant" or "hateful".
I have a good friend - yes, an actual friend I grew up with - who is pretty far on the autistic scale. He started out as a production line assembler - and he's still doing that. Repetitive, simple actions are perfect for him. It's about where he can exist. He's a fantastic bike maintenance guy, though, and loves to ride - so we ride quite a bit. We talk about life, we enjoy classic rock, and we ride. He's got his own unique skills that far eclipse mine, and I encourage that. He also knows I have my skills and talents that are way above his, and he takes it at face value. If I come up with something I need built, he trusts I will design it correctly and think through the process perfectly. And I trust he'll execute it a few thousand times to absolute perfection - regardless of the complexity.
We interact well at the levels we're at, BECAUSE we accept the fact our levels are different. It's not demeaning nor pretentious, it is what it is. Just like friends who are way smarter than me, but are amazed at my (limited) musical and performance skills. They can't imagine getting in front of a few thousand strangers and singing out a tune, or leading a 3 hour set of lectures. To me, it's second nature. Diversity is not just ethnicity or gender; it's skills, talents, experiences. Recognize and celebrate it, and stop the freaking equalization of life.