Gaining the ability to read begins from birth, and by the time that kids are school age they should be clamoring for books if the parents did their job.
After time-worn basic reading instruction in first grade, it's a matter of parents enforcing reading-time at home for school mandated reading. Then providing access to the reading material that the child desires for their free reading. Whatever it is. Book-bound comic strips are an early popular grade-level choice, and are fantastic. If a child is behind, then go simpler. Everything else is a band-aid or less practical if not detrimental in comparison. Some kids need services if they have deficits, but that doesn't imply that the standard practice is flawed. All top readers came out of this type of early progression. So have most middling readers, often just separated by the amount of time they've chosen to put in. Or were compelled to put in.
Many parents are not academic and can’t do a good job in passing on academic skills no matter how hard they might try. Many other parents would prefer to teach their kids different things about how to live a life.
I grew up on a farm, and the start of my journey into tech was fixing machinery and building things outside with my father. With my kids I want to create a similar experience so they feel like they have the power to take things apart, fix them and make whatever they want. I don’t want to jam them up all evening reading and doing times tables.
I've heard many anecdotes of teachers discouraging teaching kids those things at home ahead of the curriculum.
Though reading should be something teachers are equipped to handle very wide range of competency.
(I feel somewhat qualified...)
It is a mistake to make the kids memorize the times tables before they intuitively understand that multiplication is a repeated addition (or visually, that multiplication is a rectangle). The right moment to memorize comes a few weeks or months after they can calculate the result without memorizing. I think it is safer to wait, because many parents would be tempted to make it prematurely, in order "not to waste time".
Generally: understanding first, memorizing later. If you memorize first... many kids won't even try to understand, because "they already know it". The problem is, if you remember without understanding, there is nothing to correct you if you make a mistake. An incorrectly remembered fact feels exactly the same way as a correctly remembered fact, and you have no alternative way to check.
Also, memorizing instead of understanding is a strategy that works well in short term and terribly in long term, because memorizing a small thing for a few days is easy, but then you forget it (kids famously lose a lot of what they learned at school over summer holidays), and when the memorized things accumulate, it becomes too much and you start confusing them. Actual understanding takes more time, but it can survive the summer holidays, and already understanding many things makes understanding an additional thing easier.
(But when the day comes to memorize the times tables, spaced repetition is your friend.)
Cognitive development is a process, of which language development and reading are a major subset. That development is always in-process.
The longer that one waits to start children down the path of language development skills, the lesser the chance that they will be able to fully develop their potential for that skill.
For example if you speak to a child less than you should or could, that child's language and overall cognitive development will be significantly disadvantaged when compared to a child with similar potential but much more attentive parents.
Think of a disability where one hears less language, and then research developmental outcomes for that group.
The same carries over to reading skill. The earlier that you start, and the more that they get, both listening and eventually reading themselves, the much higher likelihood that they will become an advanced reader.
You aren't jamming them up. You are giving them an immense lifelong gift. In addition to attending to a significant cognitive need.
And again, plenty of children raised with reading are also commonly taught be adept at technical and manual skills. Most people would choose a smarter mechanic, who among other things has the proficiency to read complex documentation.
Kids want to be read stories at night. Its a major developmental need. You should read stories to your kids. Then, when they are ready, you should buy them simple books like comics. Then age appropriate books as they are ready. Content doesn't matter so much. It's mostly the volume of reading that matters. Every little bit helps.
Connecting the words they hear as you read to what they see on the page is an important early step. You don’t need any academic training - just read to them.
> Many other parents would prefer to teach their kids different things about how to live a life.
Reading and writing are probably among the most important skills you can teach your child in order for them to fully participate in modern societies.
I absolutely agree that reading and writing are critical skills. In fact, I think they’re so critical that we should demand that professional educators teach children how to do it.
That didn't really change until High School, when I found most of the standard reading assignments in English class to be tedious and hopelessly old-fashioned. If I'd also had trouble reading from a technical standpoint at that time, I have no idea how I would have gotten through it.
The cueing theory seems misguided, in teaching kids to regard pictures as the source of information. I'd say that teaching kids to read requires a mix of activities, with a heavy dose of phonics, but also activities that create a joy of reading, by showing interesting people and stories. I can't see how cueing helps.
Cueing reminds me of some of the stranger ideas in math pedagogy in elementary schools, notably that rather than learning algorithms for arithmetic operations, kids should invent their own, and maybe have several, which they choose from in a specific problem. Of course, some students have much more difficulty than others, but there really are some basic ideas they must master in order to be competent at arithmetic. Allowing a kid to amass a forest of partially working techniques and then have to hack through it to solve any problem seems ridiculous to me, much like putting a student driver in a car, with no training, and telling them to try various things to see how to drive to a given point without getting killed.
Trying to invent ways to do math operations is not a bad idea per se... it's just that at some moment you should teach them the universal and efficient algorithm instead.
It's like, if you are learning to program, and try your own ways to design the code, and then someone teaches you the design patterns. I don't believe that you were harmed by trying to program your own way first. You will probably appreciate the design patterns more, and maybe understand them on a deeper level, now that you have a first-hand experience of the problem they were designed to solve. I even suspect that without this extra experience, people would be more likely to over-engineer their code, e.g. to use a complicated design pattern where a simple function call would suffice.
Similarly, after trying a few ad-hoc ways to add numbers, you will appreciate the standard "put them in a right-aligned column, proceed from right to left" algorithm more. But you will also notice that you can add 199 and 601 without putting them in a column first.
The crime of these approaches was failing to teach the kids the standard solutions. Experimenting for a while is itself OK.
1 kid has grown into an avid reader, the other two (twins) have never embraced it. It's easy (and often appropriate) to blame the parents, but sometimes it's on the student to actually want to do it.
It makes me sad and I would love to change it. Having video games come into the environment (not my choice) certainly did not help.
Money is an inescapable reality for every service in society. But most clinics are busy, and so there isn't a real incentive to try to slow walk clients. Which would be radically corrupt on a number of levels. Even if some backroom financial functionary in a clinic were to have that thought on occasion. I've never heard it verbalized nor seen any evidence of it trickling down from management.
Moreover, most (but not all) clients will be perpetually slightly behind if they start behind. Even if they catch up at a faster rate, with the help of services. Thereby justifying services if the family wants them. But that's not the same as clinic level corruption. It's just a fact of cognitive development. But there's no better advertisement for a clinic or clinician than graduating a client.
Although I can't speak to reading in the following regard, I agree that there are sometimes lesser supported therapy methods for some delays. This is where the art of picking one's therapist is important, as they differ and what they use is within their discretion. As is the case across the rehab field.
Yes
That is a problem
Of course after some exposure and repetition you start to recognize whole words at a glance. That's just natural, but I never remember learning to read by memorizing whole words.
USSR, 70s, the same, my older cousin, 5th grader a the time, taught me to read that way before my first grade. (It was pretty normal to learn to read before starting the school. The writing though was taught at school.)
English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach doesn't quite work well.
But at the same time, English teachers don't want to go the full Chinese route. Because if learning letter combinations is somehow "colonizing" ( https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers... ), grinding through thousands of words to memorize their pronunciation is probably something like torture and genocide.
That seems to be one of the main components of Russian accent in ESL.
For each letter you can find a way it is pronounced most frequently, and then take a subset of English consisting of words that follow those rules completely. (For example, the word "cat" is pronounced as a concatenation of the most frequent way to read "c", the most frequent way to read "a", and the most frequent way to read "t".) You learn to read these words. Later you start adding exceptions, for example you teach how to read "ch", and then you add the new words that follow the new rules. Etc, one rule at a time. (You leave the worst exceptions for later grades.)
>> This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do
If you feel "colonized" by reality, I guess you can rebel, but you shouldn't expect reality to reward you for doing so.
I presume you mean it's not particularly 1-to-1 spelling <—> phonetic.
It is highly phonetic, but it does have alternate mappings between individual or adjacent letters and sounds. And silent letters or syllables.
But alternate rules are rarely random. There are usually many words represented by each rule. And those words often have similar overall spellings and phoneme patterns.
This is called "phonics" and was universal until recently. The 1980s had commercials advertising "Hooked on Phonics works for me." - Hooked on Phonics being a books on tape program to help children read.
TFA says phonics was popularized in the 1800s.
This should be obvious, but a surprisingly large number of people don't get it. They don't see "running" as the logical next step after "walking", but rather as an alternative to it. "Why are you teaching my child to walk, when you could teach him/her to run instead?"
They imagine that the fastest way to get to the advanced lessons is to skip the beginner lessons. Yeah, it's a good way to get fast to the Lesson 1 in the Advanced textbook... and to remain stuck there forever, because you don't know the prerequisites.
The article describes what happens when the people who don't get it are setting the rules for others to follow.
Someone noticed that the advanced readers read fast (correct), sometimes entire sentences at once (kinda correct), and concluded that the proper way to teach children is to insist that they do it from the start (utterly insanely wrong). You should increase your reading speed naturally, as you get lots and lots of practice; not because you skip letters - that's actually when we should tell the kids to slow down and read it again.
As an anecdote, my daughter was learning reading in her native language in school starting with letters, then syllables and had a very hard time moving past that with a lot of support from teachers and family.
She started learning to read in English almost 5 years later by reading the whole words from the start and outperformed her reading and comprehension speed to her native language very quickly.
There are huge number of variables in play and common sense frequently doesn't work.
Glad to see a return to phonics.
I assume it means the former is just one person theorizing from his personal experience as a teacher? That's what we call "observational science"?
Where as the cognitive labs, they tried to setup some experiments and did some double blind? Or was it more looking at brain activation?
Cognitive: watch kids, but pay attention to details and pair them with models of relevant psychological/cognitive models. Ideally, the models help explain the details, or the details help update the models.
Cognitive models have much more explanatory and prediction power. But are not much help, no help, or misleading, wherever there are no good models yet.
Given cognition is nowhere near a complete model, more a (not entirely consistent) patchwork of a great variety of models, both approaches remain important.
Since you said both look at controls to assess that they're better than random ?
But from the article, it seems to imply there hasn't been controls applied to the three cues system. Therefore it would have always remained just some children become good readers with this methods, so it probably works.
And what I'm not able to gather is, how much better are the controls applied by the cognitive one?
A link to the multi episode podcast this article is the basis of. Incredible reporting
https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.10...
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p...
Any time you research an educational innovation, part of the work is to measure to what extent the implementation is faithful to the intent. Education research is not like physics research.
I absolutely apply that understanding when I read research about major changes in the way reading is taught.
I actually think the only way to be confident is to do some kind of primary research yourself. Otherwise, tread lightly and skeptically.
I know it's not popular to say it but my son learns anything I teach him, he might not enjoy the process very much but he never forgot anything I taught him because I make him work. His teachers don't make him do anything with the results you can imagine. If you point it out they say if they did parents would complain.
1. Remember that you are looking at an experiment with n=1.
2. It sounds like you think the key to education is coercion. ("His teachers don't make him do anything...".) That's a grim world, too.
Also, I hope you are looking at your home country's educational system with clear eyes.
Not to say I disagree that the US educatonal system is a mess. If you stopped at your second sentence I would entirely agree.
As you went on, I started to wonder if you had an experience teaching your child something that was difficult for them. It's not just _forgetting_ that makes learning difficult.
I initially struggled to pick up reading, as phonetics is a very difficult method if i cannot tell the letters apart half the time. Once my reading speed started to pick up, it was thanks to dismissing phonetics entirely and reading by whole word, but that leap took time.
Talking with others in adulthood, i seem to rely more on whole word than is typical. Others get tricked up by incorrect letters in words, yet i match the word anyway if it has the right shape. The below sentences read to me equally.
- I am unbothered by spelling mistakes to a much higher degree than others
- l ma unloethsred bs sqellnig mitsakes la a mucb hgiher degeee thna ahters
Another issue i encountered is finding reading fun. My parents read a lot for me to make me like stories (which is commonly given as advice to get children reading), but this backfired. My comprehension and appreciation of stories were years ahead of my capacity to read them. Being barely able to get thru "harry potter and the philosophers stone", but preferring "The Lord of the Rings".
I now work in a field where reading highly technical text is a major part of my day. Peculiarly, my lower reading speed from my inability to skip properly (something i struggle with because of aforementioned dyslexia) seems to raise my reading comprehension. I many times found details or explanations others don't because they skimmed over important words or phrasings in highly information-dense text.
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I really think foreign words should be read phonetically. Taking the first letter and guessing is an insane way to teach to kids to me. I could imagine they don't pick up new words since they learn to guess words they know instead. Using contexts may become important later as we learn to skim-read, but i don't think we should teach kids to guess anything as they first start to learn.
The second lesson, the teacher says: 'Now we have to learn some hard words. The 'ti' is called a quarter note, and the ta is a half note'. Finally, the whole thing started to make sense to me. Then the teacher says: 'But don't try to understand that, these are very hard words for adults, just memorize them and do what makes sense from context.' Trough that lesson, the teacher kept stressing that same message: Too hard, adult words, do what makes sense instead and use the hard words only to impress the outsiders.
I've kept a deep distrust for teachers telling me to do what makes sense in context. I've always kept asking for the actual rules and correct words instead, however complicated they were. It happened a few times later in life too, like my economy teacher giving 'debit' and 'credit' guidelines based on vibes without telling they should be balanced, with subtraction being complicated math according to her.
I like how this sentence itself is an example where the MSV system falls flat: Neither graphic, nor syntactic nor semantic cues would help here to decide whether "house" or "horse" comes first in the sentence.
Your brain tokenizes sounds into words. A beginner reader has to parse text into sounds and then into the token. An advanced reader can skip the middle step and parse text into tokens. But you still have to know how to parse text into sounds, there's no way around it.
It'd be like giving someone a French texbook, only instruct them in English, don't even mention the different sounds, and somehow expect them to learn conversational spoken French. It's nonsense.
For me: I've found that constantly moving towards more difficult things that you aren't quite prepared for is the most effective route. The foundational work I require to accomplish the task is the first thing that gets solidified for me, even if, in my opinion, I'm awful at it when I start. This is one of my criticisms of the modern educational institution and their focus on grades: it discourages this sort of exploration, since it will negatively impact your future (especially if you are the only one doing it). I've always thought that if you are getting an A+ on everything you do, you're wasting most of your time.
/{End of Rant}
bell-cot•10h ago
dang•3h ago
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