You Were Probably Taught to Read Wrong | Otherwords
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- Опубліковано 18 вер 2024
- Over the last few years, schools across the country have been coming to terms with the possibility that the dominant method they've been using to teach kids to read... is TOTALLY WRONG.
Otherwords is a PBS web series on Storied that digs deep into this quintessential human trait of language and finds the fascinating, thought-provoking, and funny stories behind the words and sounds we take for granted. Incorporating the fields of biology, history, cultural studies, literature, and more, linguistics has something for everyone and offers a unique perspective on what it means to be human.
Host: Erica Brozovsky, Ph.D.
Creator/Director: Andrew Matthews & Katie Graham
Writer: Andrew Matthews
Producer: Katie Graham
Editor/Animation: Andrew Matthews
Executive Producer: Amanda Fox
Fact Checker: Yvonne McGreevy
Executive in Charge for PBS: Maribel Lopez
Director of Programming for PBS: Gabrielle Ewing
Assistant Director of Programming for PBS: John Campbell
Stock Images from Shutterstock
Music from APM Music
Otherwords is a production of Spotzen for PBS Digital Studios.
© 2024 PBS. All rights reserved.
sources:
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www.edweek.org...
www.frontiersi...
journals.sagep...
www.tandfonlin...
www.tandfonlin...
www.edweek.org...
drive.google.c...
psycnet.apa.or...
www.nytimes.co...
www.nytimes.co...
www.nytimes.co...
open.spotify.c...
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www.thereading...
time.com/62050...
I took the "hooked on phonics" or whatever TV program, and in one summer I remember just becoming a reading machine. Between 4-5 grade. It actually worked for me. That and the local librarians let me check out literally anything I wanted. I still remember the sounds of the tapes, and the lessons somewhat.
❤❤❤ to your local librarians
I'm a librarian and same!!
So, you're saying that _hooked on phonics worked for you?_ (Get it? Cuz that was the tagline on the old TV ads 😀)
As a bilingual kid, I "taught myself" how to read in English, by just reading the books how I would read them in German and from the sound extrapolate what the English word was. So it seems like phonics worked for me!
I think a lot of English is related to German too, so I’m sure that helped a lot. English is like one of those languages that just kinda stole from everyone across Europe. 😂
This is one of the dark secrets of the flawed cueing method: it takes credit for kids who learn to read *despite* their system, not because of it. I think most of the successful readers who went through that system either had parental input that helped them understand phonics, or they worked it out "by accident".
I was taught phonics. The biggest problem is that English is only about 40-50% phonetic, if even that. It's probably less. Phonics is still the way to go, though.
Long term I believe it's going to get more phonetic due to being taught phonetically. A lot of spelling errors are in the direction of more phonetic speech. Obviously accent differences will mean this can't truly happen but for any words that are less affected by accent and dialect I suspect they'll move to being phonetic over time.
This actually isn't true. All but a very few words can be sounded out. The problem is that both people are taught rules that aren't actually rules, which makes it harder when they come across "exceptions" that they don't realise aren't actually exceptions. A lot of it also comes down to people being taught only one sound per consonant and 2 per vowel when so many letters actually make multiple sounds. For example, people think "was" is a word that has to be memorized, but it's not. The "uh" in the middle is a very common schwa sound found in English and the buzzy s sound ("z") is s's second sound. This is why it is so important to have proper phonics instruction: English becomes a lot less confusing when you actually understand it.
English spelling definitely needs an overhaul. A very fyu simpel twekes wud go a long wae.
As a kid, I was hooked on phonics. It was a 40+ year struggle. Rehab. Relapses, but I'm finally in a good place.
I learnt using phonics too. I used to take great delight in sounding out words like "naughty" and "Wednesday" when I was in primary school. Sounding out non-phonetically-spelled words is still how I remember how to spell some of the ones I don't use often
I was taught phonics exclusively in the late 90s, early 00s in one school district and then moved to another district well after kids were done learning to read. I was always considered a very advanced reader. It makes me wonder how many of my peers were just struggling due to a bad curriculum (and whether I as getting misplaced praise).
I learned to read by being read to by my mother from the beginning. I knew how the words sounded because they were sounded out to me. I can't stress enough the importance of one-on-one interaction with a parent about reading at the earliest age. School then can be about refining and expanding on that basic skill.
Yeah, I was watching this video kind of confused at first like "I don't remember this being a problem for me when I was learning to read." but then I remembered I was already reading by the time it was getting taught in school, so I must have mostly learned the basics from my mom reading to me. I was always a really strong reader and I'm just now realizing how much my mom probably had to do with that.
We match books with audiobooks for our little dude and she reads (means comprehends) at a 6th grade level at 8 years old.
My parents and grandmother were instrumental in my reading education because they read to me and let me follow along and ask about meaning, but also encouraged me to learn on my own. I don’t know if it was the same for my brother, who never grew the same love of reading and writing as me, but our elementary education and personal learning styles were/are also very fundamentally different because he was taught in an immersion environment and I was taught in a Waldorf-type environment.
Reading with your child is a wonderful experience, and it's great to hear when families enjoy and have success with it. However, it's important to recognize that even though we all need the same skill set to read, every child's reading journey is unique. While some children may learn to read naturally through shared reading, this isn't the case for everyone. In fact, only about 5-10% of children pick up reading effortlessly in this way.
Interesting fact: Arabic without dots makes you dig, and this digging is good for depth, creativity, contextual comprehension and courage. Why courage? Because if you train depth to be more deep (with Arabic without dots it'll get more deep), then your courage increases. You're then less sensitive to outwardly things, like a big spider or a snake. If you don't have a lot of depth, then you will be sensitive to a big spider or snake.
My grandmother was a childhood reading specialist, so I was reading & writing by age 4. She taught me phonetics with a dash of cueing & heavily emphasized reading compression.
40 years later I'm extremely comfortable buying a college textbook & teaching myself new subjects.
Thank you for reminding me my upbringing was special & why practicing grace for those who aren't comfortable using skills in which I excel is critical. Your show & others like it help me recognize & check my privilege.
Teaching kids sight words uses this method. And its a terrible way to teach. When a kod gets to a word they were never taught, they cant read it
My kids were taught a combination of sight words and phonics. My 8 year old is constantly reading books, so something must've worked
@@RushedAnimation My older brother read a lot. And some sight words need to be taught, but it should be mostly phonetics. For example, he read the word "Debris" before he knew how it was pronounced. He then went on to pronounce it "De bris" for a while.
Some words are sight words, most aren't, kids should be taught some sight words (like "the") almost as if they were letters of the alphabet.
I think learning to read words by sight comes naturally with practice.
Only partially true. In phonics based curriculums, "sight words" are the exceptions to the rules.
In so-called science of reading curriculums, there's a larger reliance on sight words in the way you're talking about.
I’ve struggled with Dyslexia my entire life. I haven’t found good content that explains it. Can you do a video on it? That would be amazing.
I went to a class taught by a dyslexia expert last month and was blown away when she shared phonetic skills that works well with dyslexia. I had never heard of most of them, such as the two-tap rule. During class I accidentally said aloud “ why aren’t all kids being taught to read this way???”
I wish my kids, especially my dyslexic daughter were given stronger phonetic skills in school settings.
The best way Dyslexia was ever explained to me was to not think of it as a "reading" disorder. I was told the modern understanding sees it, specifically, as an inability to draw a certain kind of symbolic link to phonemes. It's almost like face-blindness. You can KNOW what a face is, but you're unable to see a "face," just a chin, a nose, eyes, etc. Dyslexia makes it so you don't make automatic connections to the "structure" of a word compounded from individual "parts." You see the letters or an entire word, and you can get SOME kind of connection to the definition of the entire "symbol" through those pathways, but, as an example, a dyslexic won't see the word "precarious" as the prefix "pre," the core word "car," and the declension "ious." They'd either be able to symbolically associate the shape of the word to its definition, or they could construct the word from characters INTO sequential phonemes, and by vocalizing them into an internal or external monologue, circumvent the part of the brain that isn't making the connection. They explained that that's why a dyslexic could skim past the word "precarious" if they had it memorized, but would be tripped up and have to sound out the word "precarious-ly," because, in the brain, it's an entirely new word despite having only a minor structural addition.
@@mr.bennett108that is great info. But I have to reread it multiple times to understand, and the comprehension isn’t totally there. That’s why it would be great in video form.
I find dyslexia to be a double edged sword. I read 2-3 times slower than other people with my educational background, but I do think it helps in science and engineering. I understand that people with dyslexia use the part of our brains that deals with symbols to read instead of the part that deals with language. It can help to strengthen that part of the brain, but it can also lead us astray when we notice that p, b, and d are all the same letter just oriented differently. There are fonts that you can use where those letters are all completely different. I hear that this helps some people.
It makes so much sense now, why so many of my peers during popcorn reading often read a word wrong and then continued on. I don't remember much about how my elementary school taught reading, but I do remember my mom emphasizing phonics at home. I always sound out words but none of peers seem to do so very often.
Awesome video!
I was taught to guess word meanings from context. Now, as an adult, I keep finding out that I was very wrong about the meaning of a word I had been using
That's how I spent several child years thinking 'folly' was a castle tower. Turns out that specific tower was a folly to make!
I was taught to ask my parents about words I didn't know... we are in the same boat
tbf, it's impractical to teach children the individual meanings of the 40000 words the average English native speaker will know as an adult (back of the envelope math, that's 20 new words per school day from K-12). There should really emphasis placed on the continuous acquisition of new vocabulary. I had an English teacher that introduced me to Anki (a really good flashcard app) and have since been inputting all words I do not know the exact meaning of when reading into it. Over the last 5 or so years, I have improved by vocabulary by around 8000 words.
Inconceivable.
@@gregchapman2646 A Tier
Before I comment about the video, I just wanted to say how incredible it is that PBS is putting out high quality UA-cam content.
Idea Channel was a introduction to the idea (heh) of video essays, and Storied is amazing too. Such good work!
Interesting fact: the Arabic word for "pizza" is "tulayna" (تلينة), which is derived from "talyunaa" (تليوناء), which means "Italy". "Talyunaa" comes from "Italiano".
God, I miss Idea Channel. I hope that guy's still doing interesting things.
@@TheK.E.He is! Mike Rugnetta is the host of the podcast Never Post
@@TheK.E. he has a cool podcast called Never Post, and showed up occasionally on shows like Crash Course. He actually was just a guest on one of my fav gaming podcasts, “Something Rotten” with talking about Spec Ops: The Line (spoilers: he hated it) (but like, in a good way)
Imagine your life's work helping teach children actually hurt them, and the best you can say in response is "nobody's perfect 🤑".
I don't have to image. It feels terrible. I think that's one of the reasons why so many teachers push back against SOR: nobody wants to be told they made a mistake, let alone that they made one that hurt 100s to 1000s of people!
Story of humanity, people are always coming up with new ideas and ways to do something, and usually the way a person learns something, they dig their heels in as the "right" way. In some ways that's understandable. If people weren't attached to certain habits and conserving them, it would be hard to pass down information from generation to generation. But sometimes, people need to give up what they learned.
Anyways, things always tend to better ways to do something in the long run. There's probably tons of stuff we are doing that might be bad that we'll discover in coming decades. Well we did the best we could with the knowledge and understanding we had at the time. Nobody is perfect :)
One of the reasons I will never make fun of someone who may say a word wrong. They learned the word from reading it, rather than hearing people say it. And I commend them for being more well read than what those around them verbalize.
Ah yes, the Reader's Accent, I know that struggle well.
I was taught reading in the early 80s in Germany (learning full words) and my mom early on taught me how to just read a word I didn't understand letter by letter. My mom's approach made me a much better reader and helped with the fast reading I can still do today - even in two languages by now. Yet, the idea that you can guess at the meaning of a word from the sentence isn't wrong. It's just not something you should do for every word, just for the occasional unknown one.
Exactly! A friend of mine from the gym asked if I would help her son because they were threatening him with leaving him behind in 4th grade and not moving him forward. I'm not a reading specialist, but I said I would do what I could. I let him choose a book, and he made what turned out to be a bad choice, because there was a lot of interior monologue, which made for a long hefty book. We made it through, but what I noticed as we read was that he was encountering words like Rudder and pedal and he had no context for those because he didn't know anything about airplanes. And he wasn't hearing those English words in his house. He was hearing Portuguese, cartoons, and BET
The problem is that English spelling is not completely phonemic, and there is plenty of historical spelling, and "fake" historical spellings (e.g. doubt)
That first example is how I make sense of drunk people typing
If you want kids to learn how to read early on, then turn on subtitles for all of your streaming services. If they’re going to spend time in front of the screen, make sure they’re learning how to read while doing so.
My kid is mildly autistic, and he insisted on subtitles and, if available, SDR (where they tell you whats happening, for deaf people).
If you want kids to learn how to do anything early on, they shouldn't have enough screentime at a young age for it to make a difference whether subtitles are on or not
@@Altoclarinetsthat's simply not true. There's a huge amount of unsupported fear mongering when it comes to screens.
Digital screens are a tool just like any other. If kids are using the tool to shovel crap into their brains, then it quite obviously has a negative effect. But parents and educators would rather demonize screens than teach kids how to use them healthily.
Modern phones and tablets are truly wonderful learning devices. My kids have been playing reading and math games on screens since they were 3. They're all far more advanced than their peers in these subjects.
@@Altoclarinets Ideally sure, but we now live in a world where we are surrounded by screens. If they're going to be part of your family's lives - which for the vast majority of western families they will be - you may as well lean in to the opportunities they present to educate your child. And turning on subtitles is a huge help for learning how to read.
Yup. My mom figured all the 90s RPGs I would nose into playing with my much older brothers helped me learn addition, subtraction, and reading maps. I think she’s right since I never struggled to understand locations and represented information on a map.
I listened to "Sold A Story" when it came out. The description of cueing sounded absolutely bonkers to me. We use a phonetic alphabet, and discarding phonetics being a good idea is just bizarre. At that point we may as well just go back to pictograms... Aw, hell, it's freakin' emojis. Eggplant me in the peach.
Based on this video essay alone it's easy to spot a problem with cueing: some things just CAN NOT be self-taught. I, for one, self-learned the words "melee" and "meme" exclusively through written context, but never heard their actual pronunciation for _years._ (I had been pronouncing them "mealy" and "memm").
Likewise, apparently Mom self-learned the word "cairn" but always pronounced it as "karn", when its actual pronunciation basically rhymes with "karen".
Heck, even my username here is an exercise in phonics.... the official pronunciation of "atelier" (owing to its French origin) is "ah-telly-ay", but I've heard it pronounced "at-tell-lear" on a small number of occasions.
as someone who learned how to read (in English and in my language) in the Philippines and now works with adult literacy, learning about cueing was a shock to discover...like...they really just taught reading like that? omg??
I agree! Cueing made very little sense to me.
I was not a natural reader as a child. I dug my heels to avoid reading and likely struggled with a bit of dyslexia. If it wasn't for being taught to "sound it out" I know my reading skills would not have developed. Granted, there are words that are still difficult for kids to intuitively "sound out" like "island" or how to pronounce words more staunchly rooted in other languages, but it gets you to a point it is at least closer than just "context" and "how it looks." And all my friends who were those "really gifted" kids that managed to read extremely young (2 or 3) did so because their grandparents got them (surprise surprise) those books and accompanying video learning sets that focused exclusively on phonics. I can't believe after my childhood teachers and others tried to make kids learn to read from basically "lol words shape and vibes idk."
I was one if those 'gifted' children. My grandmother happened to be a school teacher who specialized in early literacy. When other kids were learning to read I was helping her grade papers for fun. A grandparent who's involved in their grandchild's education is indeed an incredible gift.
I was reading at 3. I don't know how or why because I do not remember people reading to me, no one gave me phonics. I do remember having a set of disney record album books- like Peter and Wolf, with music and cast and pages with words that were the same as on the record, so I could follow along. I don't remember any tutelage, and my mom was not a big book reader, nor anyone other that I remember.
@d.rabbitwhite I remember those!! I had a little white mini suitcase record player with an orange handle that was red on the inside. I still remember the lady saying: "Turn the page."
I'm suddenly grateful that my grandparents taught me how to read before I entered school. The comprehension gap between the other students and myself now makes a lot of sense.
Reading doesn't just confer an advantage where language is concerned. It also helps with understanding the relationship between actions and consequences, so it's important to social and scientific learning.
I learned by reading a ton of books before, but I would've learned words a million times faster with Dr. Brozovsky around!
Took a speed reading class in college. This is pretty much what I remember.
Let me tell you what a total fail this was for my very bright, very dyslexic niephling. First thing I did when they moved in and started homeschooling (lit degree) was to decouple the visual act of decoding language - hard work - from the pleasure of reading - which we often did with audio books or reading aloud. A decade later, they still have to sound out almost all words, but love to learn and is a voracious audiobook reader. Despite haters complaining that isn't "real" reading.
Weird brain contrast with my very autistic daughter who is hyperlexic and taught herself to read at 3 when she was mostly still non-verbal. Very surreal to have a kid who struggled so hard with spontaneous speech but to could read aloud with inflection. She never sounded words out and had great difficulty trying to reverse engineer beginning and ending sounds for tests 🤷♀️.
Last is son with undiagnosed hearing loss. And we realized he had zero phonemic awareness and sight word reading didn't work, we switched to memorizing rhyming words to learn phenomes, so he could sound things out. A couple years later at an eval they were completely weirded out that a kid with hearing and visual tracking problems could read at or above level. (They were even more weirded out when we taught him to spell using the Scribblenauts game.)
Three very different neurodivergent brains and only the most gifted, most autistic, naturally hyperlexic reader taught herself to read while being read to. So yeah - phonics and lots and lots of reading aloud with your kids.
Reading has always come natural to me, and I just recently found out that I'm autistic. Reading and writing are definitely my special interests.
I started reading to my two daughters when they were still infants, and now, 30 years (as of tomorrow), and 19 years later they still love to read. My eldest is also autistic.
Your description is from the last video on Sailing!
Forgot to replace the "Lorem ipsum" 😅
@@ransentheberge2233 or it was a secret test!
It was just such a good description it transcends video content
8:01 Now the whole “Oh I wasn’t used to saying this word out loud” thing makes so sense.
Or "I've only seen it it written"
I was thinking about that concept this morning.
I've heard the word polygamous far more often than I've read it. It occurred to me that people who saw the word 1st might struggle with pronunciation.
@@nilawarriorprincess There are quite a few words like this. I remember 'epitome' being one I struggled with when I was younger because when I read it, in my head I figured it sounded like epi-tomb, and then once I actually heard it for the first time, trying to change my way to the correct way in my head was quite difficult.
Especially with fantasy fans, I don't know how many times we've had the conversation where the audiobook readers can't spell and the written word readers can't pronounce a name... (Friend and I agree that "Kahlan" should not be pronounced like in the Sword of Truth adaptation, but default to different "Maura" vs "Mare-a" for Jade. )
@@pingidjit "Epitome" is actually a pretty famous example of a word that people struggle to pronounce.
That's the bane of the existence of us ESL learners who really like reading. We're used to complicated words, but sometimes we haven't got the foggiest idea of how native speakers pronounce it.
I still vividly remember when I learned to read a big word...by sounding it out and realizing I knew the word and used the word in speech.
That's what I never realized until I helped a friend's son who was hearing Portuguese at home. He was encountering words in the book that he'd chosen for us to read together to help him get from 4th grade into Fifth grade, and when he encountered words that he didn't know, it was because he never heard them in his house. He only heard cartoons, portuguese, and BET
As a second language speaker of English, I experienced things differently from the native speakers... My saving grace is always the vocabulary I acquired from my native tongue.
I learned reading in Malay, and gradually learned English through reading, movies, cartoon, and basically anything that has two translation.(There are some brochures with the same title but different language editions, and it really helps, I still collect them today)
Having an uncle who was taking English at a higher level helped build my speaking vocabulary, but the bulk of learning to read and spell, still fell on my tiny hands at that time.
Over time, I build up skills with cues and phonics (which I only found out what they were in this video) and build enough vocabulary to enjoy reading as an entertainment.
My system is, when you can imagine or draw the thing, spell it and pronounce it perfectly, it is then considered as part of your vocabulary. If you have a mother tongue that's different than your target language, you just have to learn the latter half!
It's better to learn reading, spelling and writing in a native tongue different than English if you have it, but if English if your native tongue, you'll have to work extra hard, cause you don't have any reference point to start with.
The school my kids go to uses a mix. They teach some sight words as “trick words” as they don’t match the phonetic rules, but the rest is more phonetic.
I really wish Otherwords was it's own channel with more frequent content!
Language as I see it is primarily a spoken art, not a written one. People who are good readers tend to be very articulate as well. It is from that basis we should teach reading not as an act in and of itself abstractly separate from the rest of language, but as an extension of how communication works generally.
Absolutely. I always hear a voice in my head when I read
I didn't start pick up spoken language until I was 7, I have phonological dyslexia and also I'm autistic, I apparently had zero interest in communication and my ability to understand spoken language is really bad, I can't remember sounds, I can't think of sounds, I can't remember the order of sounds, I can't form sounds, and that's me today even after putting in a lot of effort. I started off with written language, and while I did figure out some words I needed a lot of help to be told words, and right now when I read I just read, I don't assign it a sound (I have no idea what words sound like, I can stumble through it enough that my wife understands me but she's put in a lot of time to understand me and encourages me to talk, she does sometimes pause for a few seconds while she figures out what I've said but she never wants me to repeat myself because she knows how much I hate it; my family also encourage me to talk but will ask me to repeat myself multiple times), I also don't figure out what words I don't know mean (various dictionaries and encyclopedias are my most visited websites, right now I see 4 wikipedia tabs, 2 non-wikipedia wiki tabs, 1 thefreedictionary tab, and 2 urban dictionary tabs).
However, my reading comprehension and speed is "above average". When it comes to maths however my reading comprehension is incredible, and I'm a human calculator and I just know the answer after looking at an expression and I can do more than just basic operations, I can do calculus for instance; in the UK some of our maths exams are ones where a calculator is "required", and I can just do it without a calculator, I did always check but the calculator always agreed with me and I get perfect marks in every maths exam I've taken after the age of 10. I have no idea what's going on in my head, I have no idea how other people think but I just think, other people have described thinking as "if almost talking internally" and it sounds super inefficient. I did pick up maths before language, figured out so much on my own prior to finding out that it's not new
I was taught to read the only way that I would accept. Also, very much not effortless to listen to someone talk, it takes conscious effort and I can only handle 30 minutes of it per day, I do listen to most UA-cam videos muted to avoid my brain attempting to listen.
(I'm fully aware that this video is about typical people, and my brain is not typical)
This made me appreciate the brilliance of the *Speak & Spell* I had as a kid. That was the OG one from the early '80s. I was addicted to that thing. Very phonics focused.
Now, I don't know if the *Speak & Spell* is _the_ reason I always maxed out English in my aptitude tests. That wasn't the only area I was gifted in. But I get the impression that thing really helped my developing mind.
+I'm also reminded of those _Hooked on Phonics_ TV ads, and wondering how phonics being forced into infomercial land, at least partially, plays into all this.
My school in the 90s did the whole word model. 2 years later when we dipped in test scores they went back and did intensive phonics lessons.
To be fair, english spelling is so distant from english pronunciation, it's nearly a logography. I doubt this cueing method could have spread far in a language with a closer mapping between letters and sounds.
My mom taught me to read phonetically, and had me read along with books on tape to get used to how words sounded. I hated it - being forced to read just took time away from other things I wanted to do. Then one day she took my siblings and me to the library and I found a book that - holy crap - was fun to read! Suddenly I couldn't get enough of reading, and I quickly got way ahead of the average reading ability for my age. But that couldn't have happened if my mom hadn't taught me to read in the first place.
I think the big difference was that reading became a fun thing. If we relate reading to things that kids like - reading about their subjects, or reading with friends or as a bonding activity with parents - I think we'll see much better results than if we make reading a dull chore.
we have the same (or a similar) dispute in France, between a 'traditional' way of teaching the letters and then the sounds and the words, and a much decried 'global' method that teaches you to recognize the whole words, but much less the letters and components.
English and French are always going to have this problem, when their use of letters are so hostile to figuring out pronunciation.
“I’m not convinced I know how to read. I’ve just memorized a lot of words.” Nick Miller
Some form of this was going on by the 1960s (not the 1980s). Starting reading in the Cincinnati Public Schools in 1966, I was taught “Look/Say” method: remember the order of the letters and the shape of the word.“ Thank God for Mrs. Krismer, who on the first day of third grade, threw all that out and taught my class phonics. That is the moment I actually began to read (not just memorize words). Upon being tested in my junior year, I was one of the very few who could read at my grade level. The testers said most were reading at a second grade level.
I lived in Dade county Florida in the early 70's where English and Spanish were taught side by side. So I had to learn two versions of the alphabet and the myriad ways each letter, diphthong and triphthong could be pronounced.
I was taught to sound words out first. Then try various alternate pronunciations. Only if you still didn't know what it meant then, you used context.
When I was in high school, my school offered a speed reading course. You had to take a reading speed test first. I wasn't selected for the course. When I asked why, I was told that my reading speed was already higher than the target reading speed for the class. Although I read very fast (2000 WPM with full retention 24 hours later), I always thought I could be even better if I had some formal instruction in the technique.
The problem here is that English is not entirely phonetic. I remember my mother pointing to the letter "e" in a word on a page and insisting "You know what this letter sounds like!" And I burst into tears - because I really didn't! Point to another "e" on the page, and chances were, it made a different sound, or no sound at all. Even spelling patterns can have multiple pronunciations and completely different patterns can make the same sounds. I was taught in a school that emphasized phonics, and that ended up being pretty incompatible for me, because so many words in English are idiosyncratic. I really do read whole word, not sounding them out, instead looking for shape and pattern and syntax. I basically had to memorize a good chunk of the English language before I could fluently read. Once I did at about 10 years old, I went from reading at a level of a struggling kindergartner to reading at a high school level. However, I also know that this is unusual - I know a few other people who are similar, and funny enough, we're all librarians with maters degrees now, but were "poor readers" as kids. But I've worked in schools and I've seen plenty of kids who needed to build fluency with decoding before they could tackle comprehension. And for those kids, a curriculum heavy in phonics, especially early, would give them more to build on. But by saying that ONLY phonics works, ONLY phonics should be taught, you freeze out people like me, whose brains honestly don't track that way. Those kids will stay "poor readers" because phonics will not give them enough. Meanwhile, cuing, context clues, pulling whole words at a time, those are great skills for anyone to have - just not at the exclusion of other strategies. A REAL "balanced literacy" approach would be great - and I agree that what has so far been packaged as "balanced literacy" wasn't really balanced. It isn't useful for either side to be constantly insisting that it has to be all one way or another. We want to put a host of strategies in the hands of teachers so they can apply them to their students as needed.
ב''ה, won't beat up on people with different learning styles, but if not teaching that letters *vaguely* represent sounds (with a billion exceptions because English is the mugging of numerous languages in a trenchcoat), it's not just throwing off reading, but history for the whole scribal history of how sounds were converted to documents and documents to spoken words when universal literacy wasn't so much a thing.
That's why it's important to introduce the history lesson, whether or not it's the only approach to 'how to read quickly,' but yikes on the 'e' example if it wasn't quickly explained as a joke.
@@josephkanowitz6875 I just want to make clear - there was no joke. There was an illustration. I was a first grader, and had been struggling despite wonderful support from my family, from my slightly puzzled teacher. My mom and I had been working through a book - probably for 10 minutes or so, but to my child's mind, it seemed like we'd been at it forever. I was so frustrated from what seemed like all these trick questions, over and over again, traps that just proved how dumb I was, of which the "e" is just the one I mentioned because it was the one that was just too much, and I burst into tears of frustration. That was real, and it's something I remember so crystal clearly. There are plenty of letters that play nice, that can be decoded phonetically fairly reliably, but there are a lot of vowels and combined sounds where the spelling is pretty much arbitrary, and I didn't know which rules applied. I could give plausible answers, but if I answered with whatever sound it had made the last time before it, it would probably be wrong. And I was so tired of being wrong.
It's that kind of feeling that cause kids to give up on reading - because they cannot apply what they've been taught. Because they're not getting the results that adults expect from them, what they see peers accomplishing with ease. And that would be true for kids for whom phonics is overall a better strategy when they've only been taught whole word as it was for me who needed more whole word instruction when I was given only phonics. Neither theory came from no where - they are strategies that work, in different amounts for different people. While the trend under this "whole word only" curriculum has been downward, with a lot of struggling readers, some kids thrive with it, and other kids probably wouldn't prefer it, but have learned under it to a point of proficiency. My main point is that a "phonics only" system would also leave kids behind, when all they need are these other strategies.
Making it a "war" where only one side is right and where one side is completely banished is the problem. Literacy is a tricky thing to ask our minds to do. As the video said, it is a tool, a construct, and generally our brains are not hardwired to acquire literacy the way spoken (or signed) speech is. Any strategy that we can teach that makes that acquisition easier, we should train our teachers in, so that if a kid isn't responding with one method, they can be given other strategies to try. I do think more kids would learn easier with a predominately phonics curriculum. But we shouldn't completely reject the "whole word" tools either. To make the overall system better, you don't have to completely delete or invalidate the part that wasn't working as well. Take the parts that were useful from whole word, add back the methods from phonics that we know work, and build something that is actually balanced. And keep looking! If we find new strategies, then those can be brought in as well. Holding up one way of teaching literacy as "the ONLY way" is what's problematic.
The history of writing is a fascinating topic - it's part of why English orthography is such a mess. I will point out that some writing isn't based on letters representing sounds. That's not the way Chinese characters are based for instance. But that's not the topic here. The topic here is a very serious one, about creating a curriculum where all children acquire literacy in English because we have made it a fundamental skill within our society, and doing that in a way that is inclusive, efficient, and supported by what we know about cognition, child development, and our current best understanding about how our brains work. Let's make a toolkit with as many strategies as possible so we can support all children as they learn to read.
Teachers made us look up words in the dictionary when we could not spell them. It sucked. My version of "sounding it out" meant I might think something had an O sound when it was actually an A. Pre internet, those giant dictionaries were massively intimidating.
So there I was, looking thru the Os, more than half a giant book away from the As, feel self-conscious and frustrated. And finally, the spelling was still wrong and I was demoralized, standing alone before a book that was bigger than my whole torso... guessing... incorrectly.
It's even more frustrating when the first letter is inconsistent with its sound. Like pterodactyl or mnemonic. You tell a kid to look up pterodactyl in a dictionary, they are obviously going to attempt to look it up in the T section. Even an adult would do the same thing.
My son is dyslexic and for him guessing a word meant the first one that started with that letter even if it didn't make sense. When corrected he would list words with that starting letter until stopped and asked to sound out the word. I should probably add that we're in the UK and whole word wasn't a method taught, we're still doing phonics
Basically phonics is like getting educating. Without it, one is just trained or apprenticed but lacking the tools for learning.
I was born in 1985 and I was taught phonics and by first grade I was reading chapter books, by 4th grade I was reading at a highschool level, by 6th I was college level. I think the biggest factor in my advanced reading skills was my love for stories which my parents instilled in me. My parents read to me every single night till I was a teenager. And before I started school I would beg my parents to teach me to read so I could continue reading after they were done each night. Learning phonics wasn't tedious at all because it was the secret code that allowed me to consume all the stories I wanted without having to have someone to read to me.
Also I was allowed to read whatever age appropriate books that I wanted. Some people believe that kids should always read challenging books but I definitely don't. By 4th or 5th grade I could read a Goosebumps book in under an hour and I would read tons of them. But it never hindered me in reading more advanced books and I would seek out books that were considered great literature. I competed in Battle of the Books competitions. I did well in the most advanced reading class at my school.
Always having reading associated with fun and enjoyment made even slogging through the most complex books for school at least a little bit fun because I knew I would learn something new even if it took a bit of mental digging. I looked at difficult books like puzzles or mysteries to figure out.
I think the more we can connect reading to positive, happy feelings and memories the more kids will want to read. I remember visiting my Grandparents when I was 7 (we lived in Alaska and they lived in Michigan most of my life until then) and my Grandma read me my Mom's childhood copy of the Boxcar Children everynight that we stayed with her. To this day that book is one of my favorites. I definitely could have read it to myself by that age but it was so special to share it with my Grandma. And then when we went home I checked out every Boxcar Children book I could get my hands on. (I believe there were around 40 at that time) and even after being well past the age range for those books I would reread them.
I think raising literacy rates should definitely be a mix of instilling the love of books, stories, and reading plus teaching phonics. Though I don't think we should over teach phonics. Once reading is at a certain level kids shouldn't have to go over all the stuff they already know repeatedly.
It’s unfortunate we’ve been taught how to read incorrectly for so long, otherwise I would have been able to read all of these comments. Oh well.
I wonder if whole language theory is the reason a lot of people (including adults) when reading aloud often read a word wrong and end up saying a synonym instead without ever realising it. It's as if they are reading the general meaning of the sentence instead of the words themselves.
My mother was a teacher and taught me to read using flash cards when I was two. She encouraged me to make observations about similarities between words, and explained the evolution of language to me, so we would discuss some words in relation to their French or German or Latin roots. It took me a couple of years to get to the point of reading silently, but then I just learned on my own, asking about unfamiliar words or using the dictionary. I've since spent most of my life writing or editing for a living. Her method wasn't foolproof, though. My brother resented the idea of being expected to learn to read, and was six or seven before he mastered it.
As I learned to read [English] back in the '50s, I suspect I was taught using phonics. But I do wonder if the scientists have probed into reading learning in China, where phonics can't be used as the written language doesn't indicated the pronunciation for the most part.
It's strange that I don't remember being taught how to read in school at all. Because I was always in the higher reading level, I just assume that I learnt how to do it at home sometime in my very early years and skipped all those phonics lessons I might have had. Or did I actually have teachers that taught whole language theory? That I don't know which one it was is a real dilemma.
Something similar happened with me. I could read before I started kindergarten. It was because my mom read to me a lot since I was the youngest, we did word search puzzles together and would race to see who could find the next word the fastest. I also did phonics books for fun
OMG those earrings are AMAZING! Against the Dr's hair, the orange lozenges look like they're floating! Magic 😮❤
Phonics is so important and what we should return to.
I watch these for the outtakes at the end sometimes as much as for the amazing content itself.
Dreams in mythology would be a good topic for Fate and Fabled. Now that they've done trees, the sun, cats, music, and tricksters, they should do dreams.
Learned how to read from context clues when I was three, asking my mother how to read words on cereal boxes, what billboards said, anything with a word. Then, I just knew how to read by the time I was four. My teachers thought I was a genius. I'm not. My favorite word was 'duck'.
i’m autistic and only learned to read when i was close to 9, my (award winning) teacher told my mom to read to me, get flashcards, and leapfrog phonics dvds from the library. my teacher would read to me, and then show me the passage and have me read it back. she got me to read in only a couple months! she taught me how to sound out words and guess context if there was an unfamiliar word.
i developed a love of reading i’ve continued to this day. crazy to think if i didn’t get placed with her due to tuition help (she taught at a private catholic school) i might not have learned to read.
thank you ms. bloom ❤
I am dyslexic and it tool being sent to a special school for kids with learning disabilities for me to learn how to read. The school used phonics. Now I am currently working to teach my daughter to read and we are using phonics. This is the best way to learn English even if it is not perfect because the English language is a mix of different languages with different spelling rules and then words had their spelling changed for one reason or another and it is often just an illogical mess.
Tarzan learned to read without phonics, so he was able to read english but couldn't speak it.
I went to a "back to basics" grade school in the late 70s/early 80s, and one thing that distinguished the curriculum was that they used phonics. My kids (now in highschool) got a mix of phonics and cueing, but got a ton of phonics, roots, etc at home and (therefore?) are above their grade level in reading
Learning about how reading is taught is fascinating to me because… I genuinely don’t remember learning how to read! I was already reading Green Eggs and Ham on my own at age 3, would regularly steal my sister’s Babysitters’ Club books which is how I learned how to read silently, and walked into Kindergarten with a copy of Indian in the Cupboard, scaring my poor first year teacher LOL. Closest I can think is like, seeing Hooked on Phonics commercials on TV, and I vaguely remember something about sounding out unfamiliar words. Other than that, I got nothing bc oops hyperlexic. ^^;
ETA: another comment mentioned subtitles and that makes me think of Closed Captioning on TVs, which is probably what also helped me, now that I think of it. I would always turn it on for reasons I don’t recall as an adult lol. (Now I just use subtitles bc audio mixing is #%^* in a lot of modern shows and movies.)
I had an experience similar to yours, except that Baby-Sitters Club and captioning on TV were not around then, lol.
They tried to move me from first grade reading into second grade reading and leave me in first grade math, but the scheduling turned out to be too traumatic for me. So I went from doing addition and subtraction to multiplication by zero, multiplying everything by zero. It didn't sink in at first, and I think to this day it is why I learned to embrace languages, reading, writing and to take as much math as I wanted to, but never excelled in it... even though I am great at languages.
It's so hard for people to admit when they're wrong, especially when their mistake makes money for them.🙄
Like if anyone here remembers Hooked On Phonics
And Muzzy for spoken language!
Hooked on Phonics worked for me!
Only really saw commercials but yes I do. Is that even still around I wonder?
I did phonics before Hooked on Phonics was a thing!😂
Interesting fact: the Arabic word "fiskil" (فسكل) means "last horse in a race". Learn Arabic good-wise!
I can’t really remember learning to read tbh, but I think I was told to sound out words… even now though, I know that unless I’m purposefully trying to speed read, I saw each word in my head as I’m reading
I'm dyslexic and now normal people know my pain lol imagine always having to decode jumbled letters when reading. That's what it feels like!!!!
Clay and Goodman are assuming that kids have equal access to lots of books, they don't. I did phonics as a kid and learned about prefixes and suffixes. I also was read to as a kid. My mom and I read higher reading books. So by the time I was in 3rd grade, I was reading and comprehending well beyond my age group. Reading compression is what matters because kids can just memorize sounds and say words while faking comprehending whatever they read.
As someone who grew up learning to read through phonics, I was really surprised to learn that cueing has been the dominant method in teaching reading for so long. I hadn’t even heard of cueing until recently, and it’s eye-opening to see the differences between the two approaches. Phonics always seemed like a more logical and structured way to build reading skills, so it’s interesting (and a bit startling) to discover that cueing has been so widely used. I’m glad that scientific research is now shedding light on what works best for children, and I hope it leads to improvements in how reading is taught going forward. It’s important that educational practices are guided by evidence to ensure the best outcomes for students.
i don't really understand why people felt the need to make it so fancy? i don't remember anything like that from my time in school, afaik we just had a lot of reading aloud and reading quietly, and that seems to work just fine. Trying to come up with rules and stuff would have just confused the living daylights out of me as a kid.
Because somebody in grad school had this concept and wanted to test it out and then it got adopted by the local school system and things snowball from there
I have dyslexia and ASD. When I was in elementary school I was taught mostly phonics and struggled heavily. By middle school I was in danger of being held back because I tested under a sixth grade so they decided to switch to a 'soft' whole language mode. Was testing at grade level. Why? Because they realized I read sentences like how someone might read a foreign language (ie. This is a sentence become This sentence is a). I still struggle to read and writing but it's much better now. The lesson IMO: There is not one size fits all way to learn.
"Sound it out" is what it's all about!
When I was two years old, I started hiding in the hall closet, where our books were kept, and reading the big red dictionary. My favorite page was the page that explained how to read the pronunciations. With my Sesame Street knowledge of letter sounds, I was able to figure out that page pretty quickly. After learning the pronunciation page, I was able to use that knowledge to read ANYTHING! I was thrilled! I had the secret! It was THAT easy! The big red dictionary became my favorite book!
At some point later, my six-year-old sister decided to read to me. She stumbled over words, but since I was only two years old, I was used to people reading to me, and I didn't say anything while she read. Then she got stuck on a word. I recognized the word. It was an easy one I'd seen in a lot of other books. I started to get impatient, and I said, "elephant!", to try to move her along. She ran through the house screaming, "[my name] CAN READ! [my name] CAN READ!" My mom and dad rushed into the kitchen. I still sat in the chair at the kitchen table, with the book on the table in front of me. I was baffled. What kind of joke was this?! Of course I could read. It was easy. They asked me to read the next page of the book. I don't think I'd ever been so confused in my entire life. What's the big deal? It's just reading. It's not like I did something difficult, like crossing the monkey bars without falling. THAT was nearly impossible. THIS was just reading.
When I got to kindergarten, I was confused all over again. Our class had 35 kids, and only five of us could read. I wondered why, since reading was so easy. Just watch Sesame Street and read the dictionary's pronunciation page, and you've got all the instructions you need right there!
Now I'm 44 years old, and our country is filled with people who don't know "your" from "you're", who don't know "lose" from "loose", who don't know "there" from "they're" from "their", etc. A whole generation now uses the non-word "bruh" more than any actual word. ("Bruh" is not a word. "Bruh" is the sound one makes when one vomits.) I'm always reminded of the 1980s sitcom dads who said to their teenagers, "how did you fail English?! You SPEAK English!"
Yeah, when I read the short jumbled sentence, it's easy but I definitely sound out all the words in my head without thinking about it. In fact as I'm writing this I realised at least when typing in English, not my native language although I've developed to be bilingual, I sound out the words in my head as I'm typing them. Coincidentally in my native language, finnish, almost every word is pronounced exactly as it's spelled. For some reason it's not uncommon for kids to read relatively proficiently before they go to school (7 years old for us).
Edit: Having read some of the comments, I definitely sound out everything I read in English in my head. Never paid attention to this before 😂
It's funny, because I've always liked reading and I excel at languages, but when I try to read out loud inside my second language, (which I often dream in, I'm good at it), it feels artificial to me😅😊
I learned to figure out the meanings of words from context very young - I remember learning “melancholy” and “indignant” correctly from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland at the age of six or seven. But I’d already become a proficient reader by that age, having learnt to do it the traditional way, with phonics and old fashioned literacy lessons.
0:40 This naivety and wordly innocence is what I love about PBS. Showing a battle as people brandishing spears and axes like it's 1024, instead of assault rifles and handguns like it's 2024.
i learned to read another language that does not use the latin script. i had some rudimentary introduction to the alphabet. and then i'd just look at an unknown word, sound it out, match it to similar sounding words i knew and then add context clues to come up with a pretty good guess. over time this process has gotten fast enough that i can easily read almost fluently and this has led to my word bank growing in size which had further sped up the process. so i'd say it's a combination of phonics+cueing
PBS = wonderful. Common core and new math groupings = failure. I knew teachers that were teaching children the old way if they were struggling. It works.
I’ll be honest, I loathed listening to Hooked on Phonics tapes at home as a kid in the late 90s-early 00s with above average reading comprehension. But, there are still times where I’ll read a word and think back to how it may sound aloud before the meaning.
But while that particular model didn't work well for you, the system itself can. My mother read out loud to me a lot, and we did word search puzzles together. She bought me phonics books that I did for fun. I grew up before Hooked on Phonics was a thing. And yet, the method did work well for me, and I have always excelled at reading, writing, and languages
@@LindaC616 My mother is also an avid reader, and, like yours, read to and with me throughout my early childhood. Did some of those word puzzles you mentioned too. As a result, I’ve also always excelled in language arts. The Hooked on Phonics tapes themselves just didn’t grab my ADHD brain in the same way as having another person around, I suppose.
I suppose I'm lucky, because I grew up as the same time as this wave really took off, but my education was totally focused on phonics. I distinctly remember learning most spelling and grammar rules as functions of *speech,* so when any ambiguous situation came up, I would sound out both versions in my head and choose the one that sounded "cleaner" or easier to pronounce. By 2nd grade I was literally reading at a High School level and was averaging over 300 pages a week in my school's Reading Olympics.
Somehow, I'm reminded of trying to make sense of Anthony Burgess's made up English dialect in the written A Clockwork Orange.
The whole idea of the reading wars is strangely fascinating to me. My mother insisted on her children learning a phonics-based curriculum as early as the late 1970s, and I wasn't even aware of cueing until I was an adult. (Seeing Hooked on Phonics commercials confused me as a kid because, well, didn't everybody learn to read that way?) All three of her kids were reading before they started kindergarten, and we all grew up to be voracious readers. When I started teaching middle-school Shakespeare classes as an adult, I would instinctively encourage my students to sound out unfamiliar or archaic words. It was only later that I realized why the kids acted like sounding out new words was a new and revelatory experience.
Thanks, Mom!
I would say that having a connection to a word makes it easier to read. Most people can read words from a different language if the alphabet is similar but it would be sounding the letters out to make the word. Reading the word would also go through the same verbal/sound part of the brain but it would not be easy to read. When we know what something is and know the sound of the word, it will be easier to read the word. I also think that one of the problems with literacy is not reading the stories/information that we want to read. I hated reading when I was young because I was not interested in it. When I started reading Science Fiction and Fantasy books (with a lot of dialogue), I couldn't get enough. I went from reading one word at a time to reading entire sentences and paragraphs. Now, if I read something that I am not interested in, it takes more time but nothing like when I was young. I do think that we skip words that we know should be there (like "the", "a" and others) but this is not something we do in the beginning.
I never had issues picking up reading but the Hooked on Phonics set sold back in the 90s did absolute wonders for my younger sister's ability to read.
I was a phonics kid who started school in 1980. One thing that having learned the phonics approach has really helped me with is in learning how to pronounce names that are relatively rare in the US. I'm able to break down the name into its constituent sounds when I see it written down, which really helps me to pick up the pronunciation when I hear the person say their name a few times.
This would explain some of the problems I have talking to people on the internet -- It's like they would see the structure of the sentence I had written, not pay attention to the key words within the sentence, completely misunderstand the meaning, and then they'd argue vehemently against me as if I had said something completely different to what I had. The only times when people consistently understood me was when I made a familiar point that lots of other people have already made before.
I felt like I was going crazy, and I moved away from social media because it was too frustrating, but this explains a lot!
(I was taught to read using phonics, by the way)
I attended school in the 80s and 90s, but I've never heard of this reading style. It's been so long, I don't remember how I was thought to read. I do remember the Hooked on Phonics commercials during this time though.
As Dyslexic raised by a special educator I can firmly state that Whole Language is crap!
My aunt was taught using the Whole Language Approach, and she had extreme difficulty reading, so much so that my grandma decided she wouldn’t let that happen again, and so when my mum was born, her mum taught her to read by phonics. My mum became a very fluent and eager reader. And then when I was born, my mum started teaching me how to read within days of my birth. I was sounding out board books by the age of 8 months, and I could read fluently by the age of 2 years.
Phonics works!
Thank you for caring about the kids. Reading is important. It's so important that everything is based on reading and comprehension.
my wife is a first level teacher and i would love to show her this, saddly no spanish subs avaiable :-/
When I was earning my high school teaching license I remember reading a book that said something along the lines of "Americans are too concerned with school being fun." This story seems to be an interesting example of that. Cueing was sold with the idea that it would make reading fun, but it isn't the method that makes a child decide whether they like reading or not. I always try to make my lessons interesting and fun but because fun is subjective there will always be some students who disagree with me no matter what I do.
I went to elementary school in the 90s (91-96) and I never heard of cueing. I remember being taught phonics. I am dyslexic, and I remember my parents and teachers telling me to "sound it out." So, this is really surprising to me. My mind is blown!
Learning about this phenomenon really clarified a lot of things that I've observed in my students over the years as a Spanish instructor in the US. Spelling in Spanish is basically entirely phonetic, so in theory it shouldn't be very difficult to learn how to pronounce new words if you already know what sound corresponds to what letter--- you can just sound it out. This seemed pretty obvious to me (someone who mostly learned how to read via Hooked on Phonics lessons) but over the years as a teacher I've had a surprising amount of students (including very good students in high level classes!) who just balk at new words or don't seem to understand the 'sounding it out' process at all. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that at least part of the problem is that they never learned how to sound out new words in English!
My kid learned to read on their own. I learned when I was really young, like 3, but my kid began "real" reading around 8yrs. This is because I did not "teach" reading and my kid did an alternative schooling situation where non coercive ed was a focus. My kid had and has tons of books, I read and still read books daily, and I read to my kid all the time and we listened to audiobooks. I had a collection of kids books before even knowing I would have a child because I liked the way they were written or illustrated. Family members fretted that kid may have a learning issue. I knew there wasn't, at least in this regard, and did not worry. I knew my kid was going to read when they were ready or had had enough of having to ask what a sign or a menu said.
What I mean by real: Often my kid would pick up a book then pretend to read by making up a story according to the pictures or if it had more text than picture, just making up a story based upon the title. Eventually it dawned on my kid that a book full of words was a whole world new to my kid. So the first real reading was a novel. It was either Harry Potter or Anne of Green gables, not sure as both were read about the same time.
When I was in the first grade, I was humiliated- put into the hall where one was publicly put to show the whole school that one did something bad, because I read better than everyone else. As I wrote, I learned to read when I was really young, so by 1st grade the books they gave were super easy. I read the story. The teacher accused me of not treading it. I said that I had and finished. She said "well, then read it again". I did and still finished before most of the kids. She asked me to tell her about the story. I did. She accused me of knowing it and not reading - essentially lying, and put me in the hall. My parents never stood up for me when I told them what had happened. "you must have done something..." There were many incidences like this all through schooling- nonsense and the actual holding back of real learning.
This was the main impetus for my needing an alternative to conventional public schooling. We had a publicly funded democratic school that was non coercive and heuristic in nature. My kid is turning 18 and even with stupid screens, reads books, even revisiting the kid's books we have because they are cool, funny, or good or beautiful or all of the above. We still have all of those kids books. I did not bring in yucky stuff. (stuff that talks down or is some sort of propagandized religious stuff).
I have noticed that almost everyone I know who is confronted with an unfamiliar or foreign word just guesses it or refuses to pronounce it.
Nobody seems able to decode a word letter-by-letter or syllable-by-syllable.
I think we need to bring back phonics and use it ALONGSIDE the whole-language theory, because people are seriously ill equipped.
Foreign words frequently do not follow regular phonics in English. You cannot decode foreign words that are loaned into English, because they usually maintain their foreign pronunciation
Just asking…not sarcastically…why would we put whole language alongside phonics when WL has been shown by multiple scientific methods not to be consistent with how humans learn to read and has produced bad results for an entire generation? Teachers have only limited time with students…time spent on WL would take time away from phonics, which is what has been clearly demonstrated to work.
8:34 Glad to know I'm not the only one who sometimes struggles with 'movement' and 'moment' 😭
5:08 That's easy, I can read Welsh!
I remember learning phonics. I was born in 97. I also had spelling tests. I was always taught to sound out words. I never received sight words.
Always wondered what happened to phonics. I actually liked it, way back in the day, lol
I grew up in New Zealand in the 80s, but my mother (a trained teacher) took us out of school and homeschooled us (for various reasons, buy mostly because the education system of the time was failing my autism-spectrum older brother, and would have failed my dyslexic younger sister).
I was fed phonics rules until I was sick of them, but once it clicked, I went from not being able to read to being able to read basically everything in a very short space of time (including amusing moments like me asking the meaning of that word in graffiti I had just read...!) Because I could read anything, I did, and being homeschooled meant I had a lot of time to do it, so I would even read entire volumes of the encyclopaedia.
When I reintegrated into school at 11 years old, I was, by far, the fastest reader in my class. I don't know what my reading level was, as I didn't think to ask it when we were tested, but one of my friends was happy that he had a reading level of 14 years at only 12. I was almost twice as fast as him, so probably had at least an adult level of reading ability before I even hit my teens.
Now in adulthood, I find it disturbing how many of my peers are barely literate. I can read new words from other languages often fast enough to keep up with saying them out loud, and definitely so for unknown words in languages where I'm familiar with the phonetic structures (e.g. Māori). Many people I see around me stumble on even fairly straightforward words (ones that are longer but relatively simple from a phonetic perspective).
It makes me angry that such a wrong idea was taken so seriously, and now generations of people can't read properly. I'm also deeply thankful that my mum's hubris(?) meant I was given the tools to understand the written world so well.
You mean to tell me that a replacing a method of teaching which developed organically by a method developed based on overly academic theory derived from necessarily limited information is a bad idea? Huh. Who would have thought. I didn't care for it at the time but I'm glad my mom was so involved in my education growing up. She made taught me to read with phonics and made sure I had ready access to books which fostered a love for reading. Yes, there were periods of tedious learning that I as a child hated. But that's life and dealing with tedious tasks is itself a necessary skill. Consequently, I was always been a very strong reader relative to my peers and have a love for reading to this day.
20 years ago, I saw other kids in High School, even in Honors classes, slowly struggling to sound out words when asked to read outloud. At the time, with the popularity of "Hooked on Phonics" I had incorrectly assumed they were terrible readers because they had learned to read phonetically.
Now I understand I had come to the backwards conclusion. The children were slow and struggling to sound out words because they had never been taught how to do it correctly. While I apparently mostly self-taught myself to read, that is almost certainly atypical and while a small selection of children can probably do it (and is likely why the cueing theory got started in the first place), it can't realistically be treated as a method for teaching most children.
As someone who accidentally learned to read before school (mum told me how she found me reading words I recognised from the newspaper after she had regularly read to me following the words with her finger) I then had to relearn reading as a Nana reading to my grandson after becoming medically blind (at normal reading distance words were too blurry to read easily but I could work out by shape most words in familiar books and if needed held books closer to see other words more clearly (my clearest focus is 4 inches from my nose which is smudged words on my phone/ tablet screen). I noticed my grandson learned reading through play and pattern recognition so he was even younger than I was when he started picking out words out of context (3.5 years old to my 4 years old). He was “car crazy” and by 2 he could tell us all the various car make logos and could instantly tell a Hyundai H symbol from Honda H symbol (he could also tell if the wheel trim was wrong for a car make).
Meanwhile now I’m learning braille I find it easier to write/ type the braille cell than to read it (I have “fizzy fingers” making decoding the dots by touch difficult). I actually wrote a blogpost explaining how it all worked out for me and how I felt it compared as I used to help struggling readers as a “parent helper” in the schools my children attended here in the UK which went phonics heavy for new readers after my children left school (20 years ago).
I didn’t start learning phonics until my grandson was born 10.5 years ago as my daughter started learning them as she used to help her friends young children so decided to introduce “letter play” using phonics to my grandson from the very beginning.
I taught myself to read at a young age, but before I could do that, I learned what sounds were associated with each letter, so not learning from scratch - I had those clues to help me