It's wild to me that they thought phonics was tedious and boring. When I was little, every time I was able to read an entirely new word by sounding it out, I felt like a badass code breaker.
@WilliamJacobson-t5p Good luck in Japanese. Since the challenge in Kanji is higher given you've got to remember radicals (components of a kanji) to reconstruct the features of the letter like remembering a face, you've got something more abstract to learn that I think will feel even more bad ass. There's not many shortcuts you can take sadly, sure there are some pictographic Kanji like 山yama (mountain) and 川 kawa (river) but they're few and Far between and there's gonna be Chinese readings even to those Kanji that complicate it further. Just take japanese one letter at a time and Ganbatte!!!
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 distinctly remember some of my classmates in high school and middle school were HORRIBLE at reading to the point that- even as a child- I wondered if they had learning disabilities or something was wrong with their eyes. By the time I had finished High school I realized that the curriculum in my school system- and most of the ones in America- was completely and utterly broken. We didn't learn enough history, nobody knew math, some people legit couldn't read, etc. From what I've gleaned it seems like things haven't changed all that much from then to now. Tbf I think the fault is shared between the school system and the parents.
omg i remember doing Hooked On Phonics as a kid, and i can distinctly remember also being an "advanced" reader in school. unsurprisingly, i also loved to read aloud in class during those 'popcorn' reading sessions haha
Same! This is the first time I've ever heard about any other reading "method" being taught. I can't imagine trying to guess words on a page... lmao. I was hooked on phonics all these years and never even knew😂
@@itsafroggytimeOh wow I was always an “advanced reader” but reading out loud is a whole different skill IMO! I was okay at it until there was a large number but lots of kids struggled with reading out loud. And the schools never taught it, they just expected you to do it with no training. They were grading us on a skill they never taught in class!
I don't think I started learning how to read until middle school, and the teacher found a book I enjoyed. most of my 'readding' classes were boring learn to sound out the words or read them out loud in a row. the kids that do learn for real teach themselves. the ones that need teachers get stuck until they find the one teacher that actually helps if it happens at all.
I cannot recommend "Sold a Story" enough. I'm not a parent, but I shared their confusion and fury in realizing that their kids were functionally illiterate despite their schools insisting otherwise. It's a fantastic piece of journalism, and absolutely worth a listen!
I started first grade (northern California) in 1960. "Sound it out" was the mantra for learning to read; phonetics all the way, and lots of spelling tests. When we little kids asked why certain words didn't get pronounced by the general phonetic rules we were told something along the lines of "English is just a language with a lot of exceptions to the 'rules', get used to it, learn the exceptions." Not easy, but there it is, and I became a proficient and avid reader and it has served me well to this day. My son learned the "whole language" style and can't read well and has no desire to read.
Not necessarily due to the methodology by which he was taught to read. This is complex and nuanced. My 8 y.o. granddaughter does not like to read (probably due to her ADHD), but she can decode pretty much any word and has been doing so since first grade. I do not fault her teaching for her disinterest in reading, though she will research and read about topics that interest her, she just resists reading fiction.
@@julialewis1138well no one “likes to read”. But people like to engage with stories and information they are interested in through the act/process of reading. It’s like saying someone doesn’t like to hear, but likes listening to Taylor Swift’s songs, lol. Once you learn to do it well, reading is invisible. Information just goes into your mind when you look at the shapes.
@@TheKraken5360 That makes sense. I can't say with authority that the way I was brought up by my parents helped encourage my love of reading, but it feels right. One of the "quality family time" activities that we did when I was growing up was to all sit in the same room together each reading their own book. To this day, I still get a feeling of "togetherness" if I'm reading my own book surrounded by other people reading their own books.
I was a bit confused watching this video, because I'm pretty sure I learned via phonics in the early 2000s. My parents read to me, but didn't teach me formally - in reading time I just memorized each page by the picture and didn't even look at the words. I learned in first grade, and remember sounding it out being how I was taught. Plus Sesame Street having that letter-of-the-day segment showcasing how a letter sounds. I had no idea about the other method! It surprises me how many kids who grew up navigating the internet can't read very well. Nearly everything on the web requires some reading to navigate, and even video platforms make heavy use of subtitles a lot of the time - you can especially see it on the "Shorts" here on TH-cam. I get the internet/social media making sitting down with a novel seem boring, but literacy in general seems more necessary than ever.
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 do not think I am autistic, but even as a small child I was analytical. I wanted to know the reason for everything. The underlying pattern. I had difficulty learning to read until someone taught me the spelling rules, such as "the silent e makes the vowel say its name." After that, I quickly learned to read above my grade level. I learned multiplication almost instantly when the teacher showed arrays of 4 x 2 objects and 2 x 4. Turn the array on its side and it the same thing. Again, I had to see the underlying idea. To this day, I cannot remember multiplication tables, but I work out the answer with an array and mental arithmetic. For example, 8 x 9 is 8 x 10 minus one row of 8. (80 - 8 = 72). (Any number times 10 is easy to remember.)
Did they not teach you phonics earlier because of Autism? I know an autistic kid who is obsessed with letters and phonics. He learned to read at age 4 and even started reading Russian from videos but rarely talks.
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.
I remember a funny video during Covid of a British parliament member videoconferencing who's cat jumped up on the desk. Watching it again a couple times, I started listening to what the man was saying. He spoke about a study that proved that putting subtitles (in the same language) on in movies and cartoons for children greatly increased their reading proficiency and he was advocating for a law to be passed so that all tv programs for children would have to put subtitles on. I thought it was brilliant, but I've never heard more about the subject.
I can confirm this to be true-at least for my son. We are a big anime family and my son was really in love with pokemon so he would watch with CC on. When he got older, and learned how to read, it also helped with his fluency and quickness in reading/comprehension. He is just a regular kid… but his reading is always a grade or two above his current grade level. And now he is attempting to learn Spanish and Japanese at 11. We read nightly and watched anime. That’s all. 🤷🏾♀️
@@Sweet_Pea_12 I experienced it myself learning English. The best advice my older brother gave me was to choose a movie you've already watched and understand what is happening and watch it in English (target language) with English subtitles. That way you could watch the movie and listen to practical English, train your ear by relying on subtitles when you don't understand something all the while without stressing to follow the plot. I remember I chose "Pirates of the Caribbean". I think that at that point the third movie was just out so I had already watched the first one a couple of times. Edit: watching English movies with subtitles and actively using a dictionary while reading (even when you understand the context or the global meaning of a word) were game changers. "High school" is six years in Belgium, I went from barely 50% on exams (for my English course) my first two years to top of my class without trying the last two.
@@killiansirishbeer In a movie theater in Oslo some years ago, I watched an American movie with Norwegian subtitles. Even though I am a native English-speaker, I kept trying to read the subtitles in a language I didn't know. Written text is powerful
I started to learn English when I was 9 and it was pretty difficult to keep up. What really helped was watching shows and movies, even listening to music in English with the subtitles. That way I could read and listen on how to pronounce the words at the same time.
My mom is deaf, so I grew up with subtitles on everything. I also learned how to read very early. I still watch everything with subtitles because I prefer it. HOWEVER, I will say that overdeveloping visual skills may have negative effects on listening skills. My auditory processing has always been a bit behind my peers. So yes for subtitles! But don't overdo it.
I really do feel like the early proponents of whole language theory had their hearts in the right place. They were observing some very real problems: English orthography is highly irregular, so you can’t really learn to pronounce things going letter by letter; you need the context of the whole word, or even the surrounding sentence or more, to figure out pronunciation. And schools often do wring the love of learning out of students by not giving enough time for independent exploration. The idea that reading should be something children see as fun, rather than a challenge to overcome, is totally valid. And so you have this new theory that tries to address these issues, and that’s great! The problems come when you try to push these things on schools around the country without any actual research being done first! I’m glad people are still innovating in the field of early childhood education. We need to keep doing that! We just also need to validate those innovations before rolling them out so widely.
What was it that was paved with good intentions? I agree, they meant well, but ignoring or not at least reviewing and incorporating the science caused generations worth of trouble.
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
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.
When I was a child in elementary school (early 1970's) we had two distinct language classes -- Phonics (which they called "English") and Whole Language (which they called "Reading" or "Reading Comprehension"). BOTH of them, almost every day. Then I grew up and heard that people are arguing loudly about whether kids should be taught by one or the other. And I was like... HUH?
Yeah. I was taught both and my reading and reading comprehension skills were better than my classmates through law school and to this day. Fun Fact: anthropologists (which I am, science lawyer here) consider phonics to hook into how human brains develop, which heavily influenced by word acquisition and word interrelation, whereas (ironically) “whole language” hooks into implied and nonverbal communication modalities, so there are educational advantages to both but the former will teach “reading” more effectively.
I think that's what this video is glossing over. Whenever I read what whole language proponents have been saying the last couple of decades, I don't hear anything about cueing. The usual whole language recommendation is that phonics cannot be the sum total of instruction; children need a rounded combination of many approaches. They claim it is possible to overemphasize phonics so that children never get beyond trying to sound out words. Some scientific research seems to suggest it is possible to have too much as well as too little phonics. I'm not an expert, so I don't know who is right in this debate, but I often see articles like this one which misportray what I hear whole langauge proponents saying today.
@@ytseberle TLDR; no schools I know of teach the way the video implies, so if it is a problem, it's a very rare one. Whole language methods are used for comprehension skills and to help diagnose reading difficulties. A far more common problem for reading skills is teaching reading too early instead of focusing on building oral language skills first. You can teach popular "phonics" reading style programs but there are also writing based programs that work well as well. As a teacher of years P-6 in my country (Australia) and therefore an expert in this field, this video was... very weird to me. Granted I don't know the intricate details of the American curriculum, but I have done some research into it at various points when I was briefly considering studying/teaching in the US. 1) The programs she's talking about aren't used to teach reading, they're used to teach comprehension. Like I've NEVER heard of that being a thing in the last 2 decades that I've been researching/studying/teaching it. But I will absolutely use visual, semantic and syntactic (or rather slightly different words, but same principle) to diagnose issues with reading and comprehension. E.g. If they're making a lot of visual errors, I'll reteach phonics principles. If they're making syntactic errors, I'll give them some extra lessons on grammar to help them with that. If they're making semantic errors, I'll work on various pre-, during- and post-reading comprehension skills to help them learn what to look for. Notice that the solution to only one of those reading problems is phonics. So you're absolutely right that there can definitely be too much phonics. 2) As someone who specialises in teaching kids how to read when they're having issues, one of the top reasons reading levels are going down in many countries is that we keep trying to solve the reading problems through teaching it earlier. But many, many kids just cannot fundamentally get it until they're around 7 because of developmental changes in their brain that no one can control, which means they'll have years of learning to hate it and then be worse at reading because of the early pushing. We really should be spending all grade until 6 years old doing oral language and sound lessons only, which involves way more skills than people think (rhyming, blending, segmenting, vowel play, oral story comprehension, etc.). Nowhere is this more clear than when I try to teach a class full of 10 year olds poetry and they can't rhyme and I have to backtrack a LOT. 3) There's actually more methods than what's commonly known as 'phonics'. Most phonics programs are letter to sound based. The alternative is sounds to letters based instead, with more of an emphasis on writing. So for example, phonics is reading based so you learn that at ee sounds like long e sound. In the writing one, I would teach instead the sound first (long e) and then teach that it can be spelt as 'ea' 'ee' 'ie' 'e' 'ey' 'ei' 'i' or 'y'. The students have a chart with all the sounds and when they are trying to write they find the sound they're trying to spell and then pick which spelling choice is most likely to work. At first, we only focus on them getting the correct sounds, so the student could literally choose to spell fish as "ghyti" and I wouldn't bat an eye a long as they could point to all the correct sounds (I'd just be assessing oral abilities to segment the sounds of the word). But as you go on, you teach specific lesson on which spelling choice is most likely to work (because English doesn't have true rules...). E.g. In the program's first year, I might do a lesson on how a "consonant sound at the end or middle of the word might be spelt with two letters (ss, pp, gg, etc.) but never at the beginning of a word" and the spelling rules lessons would get more complicated as they got older. I use this method a LOT because I find if a kid is having issues with phonics methods, they'll almost always understand reading better with this approach instead.
Yes, I've heard about something like that. A friend of mine taught at a charter school where for spelling they often focused on inherited sounds from the French, Greek, or Latin and how to tell which spellings went into which words. Or something like that. I'm interested in that, because that whole myth of, "Well English just doesn't make sense as a language," that a lot of adults pass along...there is logic to it, it's just not taught to kids so of course they're confused by inconsistent spellings.
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.
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.
Yeah. I don't even remember learning how to read since I was so young when I did, but being ahead of the rest of my grade did ensure I got harder spelling tests, snd my special needs coordinators always worked with me to get those words right.
I used “I Can Read” “Sweetpickles” “Reading Rainbow” “The Letter People” and other fun tools back in the early 80s. My reading and language skills were always top notch. Thanks, mom (and my public schoolteacher).
Great video! I saw this "phobetics vs. whole language/cueing" mentioned in a post on reddit for why new college students struggled so much, and having only learned to read using phonics didn't know there was a "new" way to teach reading. So, wow, this does explain a lot. As someone that reads and grades college-level writing, your example or hypothetical of trying to read a whole paragraph of the cued (first-last letter) text is reminiscent of me reading that (supposedly) college writing. When students don't spell words right (spellcheck??), use the wrong word (classic there/their problem), or just use unusual grammar (very related to reading comprehension), it takes my brain two to three times as long to figure out what the student is trying to say. Sure, its only ten seconds, but it should be two seconds. Compound that by ten or twenty times for a short essay. Its *exhausting* but it has to be done so I can provide students feedback on how to fix it. And that's not even getting to the question of whether their response to an essay question or whatever is good or not (i.e. the content of their essay).
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 actually still “sound out” words on occasion. I was also taught word association for memorizing and remembering things. To this day I still do that and I feel that was quite successful. But, like anything else, it all depends on how your mind works things out. It could have been great for me and way too abstract for someone else. The one thing I did learn, which I wish had been done differently is “multiple choice”. I think it relied too much on narrowing it down, deducing, eliminating what was definitely incorrect, and in the end, sometimes guessing the answer (remember when the general consensus was “when in doubt” pick C)! I was great at “Who wants to be a millionaire”?🤪My feeling now, is that just knowing the answer would have been a more solid way of learning. Truly learning and knowing the information. Once your conditioned, it's very hard to change what you've already learned so long ago. Most of the time, I know the answer, but its not readily available in my mind however, If you ask me in multiple-choice format, I immediately know the answer. Can you imagine if we communicated that way all the time. Your out and about and someone asks you a question your not sure of, your first response is, “give me four choices, A, B, C, or D…
Mispronounced words often just means a lack of diverse language background. In the southwest, Latin or Spanish words are common knowledge, and almost nobody knows intuitively from a young age how to pronounce Greek words. Basically no one knows or cares how to pronounce Mandarin.
This explains so much why some students would completely struggle to sound out words in my class. Much less to do with their actual reading ability and more to do with how they were taught.
It makes me sad listening to my classmates read aloud 😅 Whenever they come to words they don't know how to pronounce, even easy ones, and any new proper nouns, they just go silent and wait for the teacher to say the word so they know how to pronounce it
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".
Well it helps there that German and English are very related, that method probably wouldn't work (or would be a lot harder) coming from more distant or completely unrelated languages
@@spacelinx English is related to German, but not from "stealing" from German. They both developed from the same proto-West Germanic. What you're thinking of when you talk about English "stealing" words is more like how a lot of English vocabulary comes from the French, even though French and English are not closely related, due to the Normans invading England
@@scheddoc Related languages are certainly easier, but it depends on the language - there are quite a few languages that are written using the Latin script (an upside to colonialism), so if you've come from say Swahili or Māori, you'd be able to pretty easily learn the extra letters and sounds for English. (Noting that English vowels are a problem for speakers of both those languages, as they - like most alphabet-based systems - are properly phonetic, whereas English has a lot of exceptions).
There were a lot of things my dad didn’t handle well in raising and educating me, but I will die on the hill that his decision to teach me phonetic reading starting at age four was one of the best things anyone has ever done for me. To this day, I have a love for and understanding of the English language that I don’t find among many others, and moreover, it gave me an outlet for my love of storytelling. I’ve loved stories as long as I can remember, and the very night I finished the first book in the reading course my dad had me on, I ran to the computer, and typed out a story using what I had learned. At first the course was a bit tedious, sure, but as soon as I realized how many things learning to read opened up for me, I was all in.
Teaching phonics is extremely important. To jump start early readers, sometimes memorizing high frequency words can reduce frustrating for beginners, but this should never replace phonics instruction.
At 7:10 I feel like it is painted as a false dichotomy, cueing vs phonics. I was taught some mix of both and I both sound out new words and use context to establish their meaning. Phonics only helps children read words they can speak, and english is horribly unphonetic.
I understand this perspective, and have definitely been taught a mix of these two strategies as well, especially with the rise of standardized testing. However, this video implies that coming up with a pronunciation for the words you are reading is an essential part of the reading process, even on a neurological basis. Otherwise, people who have only ever read a word would not attempt to use that word in conversation, for example, or know how to attempt it. Thus, one must teach children how to pronounce all the words they are expected to read, no matter how funky the spelling gets. Like it or not, memorization is part of the deal.
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.
Yes my mom taught me how to read before I started school! I think it really helped cos my reading comprehension is still higher than a lot of folks I know in my thirties
Samsies! My grandmother taught me and my sibling and cousins to read before we started school. But I also distinctly remember a 2nd grade text book called Phonics We Use. This was in 1977. Seems I got a double dose of the good technique and I've always been a super strong reader (and writer). I eventually became an English professor, but ironically, I've never taught anyone to read.
I don’t even remember how they taught kids to read at my school. My mom taught me to read before I started school and I was able to improve on my own without instruction. I didn’t pay attention to lessons at all.
@@sed8181They don't. Kids just learn to fake it by listening well in class. They can puzzle their way through assignments but it takes them so long that they're functionally illiterate. A proficient reader can finish a test in half the time of most students.
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.
This is the key component that isn't being addressed; you had influence from home. Parents now rely entirely on the education system and that's unfair.
IMHO, cueing is more useful as a memory aid when learning foreign languages as if it's your native language, you probably already know the word or can get some listening materials where they talk about the subject form which to learn from.
@@NoriMori1992 Only in the sense that you need a parent or sibling to do the reading and helping the kid sound things out. The actual resources to teach reading via phonics are pretty old and there's materials that can be obtained for little or no cost.
As a kiwi who grew up with the whole language theory I'm actually quite happy that most of my teachers ignored it. My parents also ignored it. I've seen younger siblings struggle through whole language theory and tried to correct it. Its rough
Anecdotally agree. High reading level by 3 years--had a Grandmother who just buried me in books, and I loved it. Hmm, realizing why I was so bored and frustrated the first years of school now that I say it that way. Do people not teach their children to read BEFORE school?
My grandmother was a distinguished professor of education at Harvard, with a specialty in early literacy acquisition, and author of a book for teaching primary school teachers how to teach language that's still in use today decades after being published. When I sent her the New York Times article where Lucy Caulkins (someone she knew from conferences and such) admitted she was wrong, her response was, and I quote: "I give her a lot of credit for backing down in the face of new research."
If you listen to the "Sold a Story" podcast that's mentioned in this video, you'll know that Ms. Caulkins did not admit to anything freely. She only started to make some small changes after the evidence was already overwhelming.
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)
Yes I was taught the same way in NYC around the same time. Context helps but sounding out a word by the letters is how the process is supposed to actually work.
Before I comment about the video, I just wanted to say how incredible it is that PBS is putting out high quality TH-cam content. Idea Channel was a introduction to the idea (heh) of video essays, and Storied is amazing too. Such good work!
@@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)
I'm very happy to see PBS reporting on this. I listened to Emily Hanford's "Sold A Story" podcast a while back and really hoped, at the time, that more people would hear this message.
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!
It doesn't work for everyone, though. I was a voracious reader, perfect verbal SAT score, graduate fellow in a literature department, taught, blah blah blah. I was a sight reader, am a sight reader, and will die a sight reader. Not all brains can process phonics, so it's not some magic better system.
I learned to read before kindergarten, thanks to the old PBS show in the 1970s, "The Electric Company", along with a grandmother who took us kids to the library every week; the running joke in the family was me coming back with a huge stack of books that I could barely carry. EC focused on phonics, as did my grade school classes. It wasn't until I was in high school that we were taught about learning word meanings from context, but they also focused on word roots: prefixes and suffixes and their root meanings from Latin and other languages. Figuring out a word from context is only part of the process. It only works if you can read everything else. Thank gods Electric Company got to me first!
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.
I’ve been trying to understand my dyslexia better, too: while it doesn’t hinder my reading, I certainly can’t spell and sometimes don’t see what’s right in front of me (two words, one misspelled and one correct, will appear to be the exact same letters in the same order…I have to get up and walk away for a moment before I can find the difference.
Thanks, PBS. These AOC videos are great. I learned how to read before I can remember. by first grade, I could easily read the newspapers. Learning to "sound it out" showed me how to easily pronounce new and bigger words. Context clues taught their meaning.
At this point every time I hear someone say "THIS is the only correct way to learn, learning in other ways will hurt you" I just have to roll my eyes. I've learned many different subjects and one thing is consistent. More information, especially from a variety of perspectives, is exactly what HELPS. Memory is formed by making connections. The more, the better. Don't starve students of information.
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??
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.
XKCD Ten Thousand Everyone learns everything they know at one point in thier life. On average 10,000 people in the US are learning a point of common knowledge every day.
I'm still kinda amused at the resurgence of the word "hearth" now that we've got games using it (World of Warcraft and other games by the same company use "hearthstone"). Except the generation of players have, for the most part, not encountered the word in speech before encountering it in the game, and so they're teaching it to each other in voice chat like kids passing it along on the playground... and doing so by attempting to relate the spelling to a known word. They say "hurth" and "hurthstone" -- like "earth" It's originally "harth" and "harthstone" -- like "heart" and "hearty" I wonder how many other words kinda vanish into obscurity on an oral/aural level and then get rediscovered by something trend that brings back the spelling but not the sound, and then they get re-analyzed and pronounced in a new, typically simpler manner.
@@Arkylie Fun fact! Hearth comes from the Old English "heorth", which was pronounced more like "worth" with a currently uncommon diphthong. Yes, it did change pronunciation over the years to the one that rhymes with Garth (sorry for the Wayne's World reference, but I cannot think of any other rhyme at the moment), and it seems to be changing again. Be wary of claiming anything in English is "the original", since the language gone through so many spelling changes and sound shifts throughout the centuries. I'm sure if you even dig just a few decades past where I stopped off, you would get yet another unrecognisable word.
I wouldn’t blame teachers for this, many have little power to raise the alarm in the face of administrators who are convinced the system they paid for “works”
@@inamib.9786exactly. They don't sell these systems to teachers. They sell them to districts who force the teachers to use them. Anyone else as frustrated with Dream Box as I am?
It's always easier to notice things like this when working one on one rather than having to deal with a whole bunch, and the bigger the class the easier it is to miss things.
The research has been clear, consistent, and overwhelming since the 70’s. Not to sound conspiratorial but there’s a dark agenda or undercurrent somewhere. The greatest prison and other societal ills pipeline is through illiteracy.
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.
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 haaaate this as a teacher. I get told by STUDENTS that I need to be more fun, and I’m like… Dude you’re in middle school reading under a 2nd grade level. This isn’t fun for anyone, but we gotta get it done.
@WMDistraction most of life is about doing something hard so you can do something else you enjoy. Even my favorite hobbies very annoying aspects to them.
There’s value in learning being fun for everyone, but that doesn’t mean making it fun is the most effective. Also, there’s some shade thrown on the people selling books pushing one system. That’s ridiculous. If the system is good, they deserve the money. If the system is bad, the money isn’t the problem.
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.
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'm Australian, so things may have not have been totally the same here, but it sure is similar. I spent my first few years at a school that did what I now know is phonics, and then when I was 8 my family moved interstate (from SA to QLD), and in my new schools I suddenly found myself in a position where I was terribly behind in mathematics, but I was more advanced than most of my peers in reading, so instead if putting me in a school grade where I was on par with the others in Maths I was left in my nominal year, struggling in the deep end, because I was so far ahead of them in reading (and they figured I would catch up eventually, which never happened). It wasn't until my younger siblings entered schooling and saw how they were being taught, by making them learn by memorising whole words instead of sounding them out, that I realised why so many of my peers struggled to read even well into High School. I'm so glad I spent my foundational years in another state that taught the OG phonics instead of that memorising bullcrap. Otherwise I'd be like my younger siblings, who were constantly bugging me to spell out dinosaur names etc as they couldn't themselves because "I've never seen that word before". Did that never cross thses educator's minds, that there is no way to memorise the whole freakin dictionary, that at some point they are going to need to learn to sound outa word that they've never come across before?
Japanese is a perfect example of how phonetic association is key to literacy. While learning to read Chinese characters they literally write the way the word is read phonetically on top of the characters. Japan has one of the highest literacy rates in the world.
Learning japanese right now actually and can confirm that it is pretrybeasy to read when they use furigana and kanji. While I dont know if kanji counts as "whole word" reading, having to memorize the often unique symbol is significantly harder than sounding out things via the furigana
That’s cause Japanese is a phonetic language-if you know how it sounds, you’ll know how to spell it (with the exception of a few common particles, which have changed sounds over the years but are never represented in kanji form). English isn’t phonetic. In fact, phonics isn’t even spelled phonetically.
I am a tutor for elementary students. I can say first hand that non of the kids I have worked with have known what I mean when I say to "sound out the letters." it's basically impossible to help them figure it out for themselves
Before anyone can sound out the letters, they need to know the sounds those letters make. If teaching children who learned (or attempted to learn) sight reading, you cannot just have them sound out. You need to take two steps back and teach the sounds before they can learn the words. Phonics is the only logical reading method - if you begin at that oh so primative beginning. But then there are the exceptions - words that are not spelled the way they sound. Those, unfortunately, have to be learned the hard way.
@@joanmitchell6271 Not necessarily. Instead of the traditional letters to sound reading focused programs, you can do sound to letter writing focused methods that give a lot more context for the way that different phonemes are spelt. Context: I'm a teacher who helps kids learn to read when regular school has failed them and the sound to letter programs always work great with them (though age plays a huge factor in my success too).
We absolutely do teach phonics and have been doing so. I don't know where you live, but this is not new information and look/say went out years and years ago.
I also tutor. I read a lot to my oldest child starting early. I still needed to drill a lot when he was sick in kindergarten. He read a chapter book while I registered him for 1st. Also he sat in my phonics classes. I sure that helped, but blending was hard.
I think the real problem with how people are taught to read is that there's this weird implicit assumption that it HAS to be done only one way or the other, when in fact learning to read is really probably more of a two-step process that needs _both_ approaches. Phonics is the first step, without a doubt. It's how I learned to read - at first. I remember very distinctly learning the basic sounds made by letters and their combinations. But that didn't take too long, because there's not actually all that much to it when you think about it (it's only 26 letters to deal with) and once I had that all figured out, which I think was before the end of 1st grade, it was off to the races. Once I was at said races, though, contextual extraction of the meaning of words mattered more for increasing my vocabulary and actually having a full comprehension of what I was reading meant, as opposed to just being able to sound it out. Starting with phonics makes a BIG difference. But all language is ultimately contextual, so we really need a hybrid approach that shifts between the two as appropriate. If you start at phonics but never move to teaching things like vocabulary and intentionality of word choice through the lens of context clues, people learn the sounds but not how to fully interpret and understand their meanings. If you skip phonics, then people end up with a weak foundation and can't decode the writing as easily, which holds them back because you can't get context clues and meanings out of words you can't recognize easily.
@@wasd____ Exactly. To me it seems really simple: you need phonics for the words you already know, cueing for the words you don't yet know. Everybody who learns to read has already acquired their native language, so first they should use phonics to learn to read the words they already know. Later they should use cueing to expand their vocabulary (in the same way that you use cueing to expand your vocabulary when listening). Since English spelling isn't very phonetic and consistent, cueing will play a somewhat bigger role early on than for other languages with an alphabet.
I learnt about 3-cueing a couple of years ago from some internet friends. Phonics is the gold standard in Australia, so you can imagine my shock hearing about this. I learnt to read in Kindy/age 4, with a heavy emphasis all the way through primary school on recognising letters and letter combinations, sound variations, and conjugations in words in order to 'sound-it-out,' and we had pre- and post-learning spelling tests every Monday and Friday all the way to the end of primary school. We were also taught to look up words we didn't recognise in the dictionary, instead of guessing, because guessing wrong could change the whole meaning of a text. I started reading novels by age 8, which I know is not that early, but I wonder if I would have picked any up and come to enjoy reading so much if I hadn't been taught to read so thoroughly. Even the classmates of mine who hated reading recreationally could still read perfectly fine - they just didn't get enjoyment from books. I'm glad the US is starting to course-correct - it's scary to think how many cohorts 3-cueing impacted. Also, anyone who says learning to read with phonics is boring has clearly never seen a room full of 4-year-olds go absolutely nuts overs Letterland ;)
Thank for doing the good work. I hate that teachers “don’t take sides”. Phonics drills work but it need to be drilled. The school taught my kid magic e and what a diphthong is, but never got him reading, just lots of gluing exercises.
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.
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."
@@d.rabbitwhiteI learned to read at 3 as well. That would have been around 1976, and I learned mostly from the public television show The Electric Company, which taught mostly via phonics instruction (and goofy skits). Add to that a brain that took well to reading and a small library mostly made up of my mom's old Golden Books, and I was set.
I was a gifted child who ABSOLUTELY COULD NOT read phonetically, despite all the grandparents and libraries and librarian aunts and PBS and Electric Company and Golden Books surrounding me. I absolutely did not learn to read at 2 or 3... but I was read-along to, and looking at the words, once I hit memorization threshold, I began reading whatever I could get my hands on. I thank God (and my mother) for not putting me in a phonics program and stressing me out. There is NO TEACHING STYLE that will serve all brains. (But reading TO children, and having captions on all children's programs, would likely help all of the learning styles.)
A major benefit for my reading was a collection of story books with 45's that you played and followed along in the book. Most of the stories are now considered non-PC, rightly so, but the method was undeniably beneficial.
Watching TV with captions was a big help for me in learning how to read and appreciating how to sound out words. I would read along with whatever was on, which taught me to pronounce words I hadn't heard before. My sister also taught me cursive before I even started school. Back then, we had Accelerated Reading, where you could earn prizes by reading books and taking quizzes. I did it mostly for the freebies, haha. To date, I've read about 500 books, and I think phonics played a key role in fostering my love for learning new words. This isn't to say that it's the best way but certainly better than not teaching kids how to sound out words.
Thank you, Dr. Brozovsky! As a non-native speaker, I had to learn English as a second language during my teenage years. I spent six years being tutored by native speakers (yes, it did cost my parents a fortune), and often times i wouldn't know a word they were saying, so i would guess it, I'd do the same with written text as well. Turns out, it's an entire learning system! I wouldn't recommend it though - sometimes I was very wrong lol. Now I have a masters degree in linguistics and work as an interpreter but surprise! translators and interpreters are trained to guess words and phrases they're unfamiliar with. So it's a working strategy for those who already know the language to a certain extent
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.
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 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.
@@Stratelier It's not just about being self-taught - it's limiting people to early-elementary level vocabulary. Once the books come without illustrations, students will be completely lost as to context. I can assure you that elite schools did not leave phonics behind - cueing just helped reinforce the divide between who is deemed "worthy" of a quality education and who doesn't.
@@cactus2260 from my limited experience with Japanese, logograms make it extremely difficult for me to read texts with unfamiliar words because I can’t sound them out. I imagine Chinese second language learners with an European first language will find reading difficult as well. But native speakers of both those languages are apparently capable of sounding out completely unfamiliar words fairly accurately, so idk if it’s actually hard in general.
@@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.
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.
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.
It was adopted earliest by districts looking for cost-savings, unfortunately. A phonics-based curriculum usually meant subdividing the homerooms into small-groups by reading-level, each of which needed its own teacher (or paraprofessional) and its own set of materials & in-class / homework. Expensive! Look-Say, or Whole Language, meanwhile, put most of the onus for reading materials on the parents, and you could walk the entire class through a picture book or two as a group. So much of the country got sold-out on this nonsense, and now we have at least 2 generations' worth of non-readers and many who are barely functionally-literate.
@@KonguZya how did you learn the meaning of the words in your language? You may have learned some by looking them up in a dictionary or by being taught their meaning, but the meaning of 99% of the words you know, you will at some point have inferred from the context in which these words were being used when you read or heard them. This is cueing. When you first learn to read, you already know a lot of words, so first you should learn to read those known words by learning how to sound them out.
@@KonguZya I wrote a longer comment to someone else above going into more detail but as a teacher, short answer; it doesn't. We don't use whole language models to teaching reading, we used it to diagnose reading difficulties and then depending on which of the three they're struggling with, we then know what kinds of lesson will help them. I've literally never heard of this being used as a method to teach kids to read the way the video is implying until today, despite 2 decades of reseearch/study/teaching.
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)
@@maniacpwnageking What's about it is a stretch? My hypothesis is just that if a lot of people have poor reading comprehension, that could be why they often reply to written posts in a way that makes it clear they haven't understood the post
@@boraxmacconachie7082ironically I bet that person who said it's a stretch and the likes are those exact people with zero comprehending skills you discussed in your comment.
I taught myself to read before starting school using what I know recognise is Marie Clay's method. My mother read to me every day, and I was surrounded by books. When I went to school I was taught how to sound out words I didn't know. I had the best of both worlds. I've always been an avid reader, and now I'm a writer. Very interesting, thank you!
I had trouble learning to read and was taught a lot of those "tricks" like looking at the pictures and was made to work on cite words. I remember being so proud because i could "read" a dr. Sues book... without even looking at it... I memorized a whole book I wanted to read so badly and was trying so hard. I will never forget the confusion I felt when the disappointed teacher told me that I was not reading, even though memorization/cite words were all I was taught to do.
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.
Some people learn from context, others from decoding. When I was a student in the sixties, everything was phonics. I could read, with very high comprehension, but I didn't have the memory skills for phonics. Therefore, I had to stay in at recess every day with the phonics worksheet I had not done in the morning, which I still couldn't do. I got bad grades in reading. Meanwhile, I read every book I could get my hands on and wrote poetry for fun. When I was getting my master's in education everything was whole language, but the remedial classes were pure decoding. Why can't we comprehend that there are different styles of learning and stop condemning curriculum (and the students that benefit from them) as "wrong"?
That doesn't make any sense. How could you read with very high comprehension when you didn't know the phonics? The phonics are literally how you read unfamiliar words...
@@Andoxico nope, some of us are purely non-phonetical. I can attempt to make noises out of my mouth if I see a bunch of new letter groupings, the way a non-Russian speaker might ATTEMPT a Russian word, but it's not "reading."
Right on, phonics is torture. Everything I did in education was centered around verbal/language arts, and I had the opportunity to have it confirmed I could NOT PROCESS phonetically -- in undergrad, trying to read Riddley Walker for a literature class, and in grad school, trying to learn Ukrainian phonetically and failing miserably. I am curious, do you also have aphantasia? I have complete aphantasia... so much of these pro-phonics comments seem like it only works for people with visual imaginations, who may "hear" things in their head when they read.
@@mmybickers Just the opposite. I have a vivid imagination and I am a visual learner. I also have an intuitive learning style. I am very bad at memorizing, though.
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.
"Connect reading to positive, happy feelings" is sort of the issue. At this point, we've got a solid two generations of non-readers. The kids in grade school now, have parents who had their reading ability halted somewhere in 4th through 6th grade (if not earlier). The main indicator of how well a child will read in early grades (barring actual disability) is how much reading their parents do.
I’m a decade older than you, but I also came from a reading family. We read long novels on summer road trips, passing the book around each of us to read a chapter (or more) aloud. We had “bedtime” stories at home well into our teens, too. My dad is a very theatrical reader, which got us engaged and kept us there. A parent having a true love of reading goes a long way toward instilling a love of reading into the next generation. So, thanks Dad, for making my kid a genius reader, I guess? 😂
@@eiPderF It really makes a difference! Both of my parents had parents that read as well. Both sets of my Grandparents had large, prominent bookcases in their house. I think the schools obviously can't replicate parental reading influence but they have to do better about encouraging the love of reading and not just focusing on learning to read. Also I just want to say that my Mom was 16 when she got pregnant with me and still had a year and half left of highschool when I was born and my Dad had dropped out but went back as an adult learner to get his diploma and they still made it a priority to read to me. I'm very grateful for that.
It seems like the video, and perhaps also the science, are ignoring the possibility that this is a false binary? What if both methods in concert are more effective? Or what if one method works for some children and the other works better for others? Why do we still assume that all children learn the same way?
True, although I don't know what that means for the teacher who is in front of a mixed classroom. I mean, I do, because I taught a foreign language, and some people learn better by doing things, others learn better by visually, and still others learn better by listening. So you do have to adapt. I'm just not sure how you would do it at the elementary level
Even supposing it were a false binary, it seems evident that reading is so influenced by speach that it makes no sense to teach reading using methods that rely on the faculty which appears have such a negligible affect on literacy. The phonics method has been used for a long time and with superior results.
@@RuthvenMurgatroyd on the other hand, I see the advantage to using whichever method helps each individual the most, particularly when we are talking about students who are either neurodivergent or non-hearing. As a hole in the classroom, if you have to choose one approach, the sound does seem to be the most effective. But we have to be ready to adapt to every student
Yeah, I learned to read in the late 90s / early 2000s using mostly phonics with a smattering of cueing(?) and it worked well. Just being able to sound out an unfamiliar word and say it aloud can't teach meaning or grammar, whereas reading it in a sentence using those context clues can.
I’m not surprised that a curriculum that reduced “tedious” study in favor of guessing caught on in the United States. 😂 My mom taught me to read by **gasp** READING TO ME. When the other kids in kindergarten told me that they didn’t know how to read I thought they were lying. And they thought **I** was the one lying! I had (undiagnosed) dyslexia; if I could learn to read before age 6, your kids can too. Just effing read to them and sound out the words as you do. Young minds are eager to learn. It’s what brains do.
Sadly, I was part of the great “New Math” experiment. Worst thing ever. I loved science, but I was hamstrung by this failed system of mathematical instruction.
I was taught using sounds (not in the US), and to this day sounding out words is one of my best methods for several things: - remembering a word (it is part of my process for learning it when I look it up and allows me to repeat in my head and stuff. I couldn't remember words half as well if I wasn't sounding them out) - reading (when I have trouble concentrating, sounding out words helps me forcus on the meaning rather than having my eyes just gloss over the page, and hence helps me realize when I'd been reading a sentence wrong) - remember the spelling of words by associating sounds to letter groups (k sound could be k or c or ck or ch, and those associations become actual items in my head that allow me to remember words better by linking them together by spelling - lose vs loose, duck vs dock (which look decently similar), etc I ca't imagine reading, writing prose, writing poetry, singing, or anything else really, without the sound part. To this day, I still pronounce certain words correctly (in English as a non-native speaker) thanks to stuff I learned first when I was learning to read, and am able to easily correct people when asked (it vs eat, bc ea is a long i sound, not the short one - sorry I'm not being very clear tbh I don't have the patience to explain what I mean right now, but I'm sure you can glean it) I had no idea it was taught differently in the US. The way I was taught to read stuck by me for the past 16 years and has never failed me. While it's a subjective feeling, I can't fathom being told to just guess the meaning of words, especially when there are some words (like 'wince') that I got wrong definition-wise for half a decade at least because I hadn't looked the meaning up
Ylnow that "would you be able to read an entire book like this?" portion feels very accurate to two things I do with video games especially: Playing them to learn another language, and using dumb joke mods to make all the text change Ls and Rs to a W. It takes quite a moment to read new words in those sentences even with context, although for the latter one it did take me quite a bit to realize even in context that word "wuwew" was "ruler" 😂 Just what this whole concept reminds me of. While I can't say I remember what it was like entirely when I was learning to read (I have bad memory and just remember always reading as a kid, always absorbed in books and ahead of my level in them and not understanding what being "good or bad at reading" meant) my time earning both Portuguese and Japanese in my adult years has really been refreshing in regards to the difference between sight and phonics. Definitely leaning towards phonics, but both can be important especially depending on the language you are learning (for English I would say phonics with memorizing the rule breaking words with gentle correction and discussion. My little brother wrote "iland" yesterday and I explained the silent s makes it "island" and we laughed about it but he did it did look right when he fixed it lol)
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.
I got taught phonics in early childhood and it got changed over in late primary school to the NZ lady's method. I never really understood phonics well, and just memorised all the shapes of the words I learnt. I always had a disconnect between words I read and speech, until I saw and heard them at the same time. One thing I've noticed is that the quality of older writing (pre 2000's) is better for decoding meaning from context. A lot of writing these days is simpler to make it "easier" to read but I find that it lacks ways to clarify meaning within itself a lot of the time.
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. )
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.
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
I'm 31 years old and I also don't remember being taught to read. I have enjoyed reading pretty much my whole life. It was frustrating in middle school and high school when we took turns reading out loud. At least half of the students read the books as if they were in lower elementary school.
A few remarks: 1) AFAIK, studies on phonological recoding show that people retrieve the phonological representation of a word when reading complex texts but not when reading simple texts. The interpretation of this is that: Activating the phonological representation is not necessary to comprehend meaning but it can support it. Focussing on a written word will automatically trigger the phonological activation; it's something we can't suppress. If the word is easy to understand from context because the text is simple, the semantic interpretation will be activated BEFORE the phonological representation. If the word is hard to understand, the phonological representation will be activated first and the semantic representation follows. Hence, when reading very simple texts, our attention doesn't linger on one word long enough to activate the phonological representation. We understand the meaning very fast and move on to the next word before we can "sound it out" in our inner voice, and that is why people don't do phonological recoding in simple texts. But in more complex texts, we need to pay longer attention to each word, such that the phonological representation will inevitably come up - and once it comes up, it helps speed up the activation of the semantic representation. So that's why the speed readers have it backwards; they see that when people easily and quickly understand texts they don't subvocalize and assume that subvocalizing slows them down when the truth is that the causation is inverse: texts that can be understood easily and quickly don't need subvocalizing. 2) This video talks a lot about universal human cognitive abilities but only looks at English as if studies with English were representative of human cognitive abilities in reading in general. Human writing systems range from logographic systems like Hanzi to scripts with an extremely consistent and two-way predictable phoneme-grapheme mapping such as Turkish. I can't imagine phonics would be equally useful for Turkish and Chinese; it must be way more useful for Turkish. English is kind of in the middle of the two.
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.
Okay, this response is going to be complicated and, to be honest, a little weird: I'm an autistic adult with "hyperlexia," which is the accelerated acquisition of reading & language skills (maybe at the expense of some others). In fact, according to my mother, while most kids walk at 10 months of age and talk at 14, I was *exactly the opposite,* talking at 10 months and walking at 14 . . . by which time I had already started basic reading. (Since I do not remember anything before the age of 2, this technically means that I do not remember not being literate.) Now, because Mom never actually explained how I was able to pick up reading so quickly, the "cueing" hypothesis sounds extremely tempting. Instead, however, it falls flat as I look back on my life, as I realize how I've never been able to learn anything else that way, especially social skills. On the contrary, autistics like me are notorious for not being able to learn or pick up on anything without explicit instruction or information: I can't figure out what to do at my job until my boss assigns me something, I needed books and videos to teach me fashion tips I couldn't pick up through observation, and it can take me a long time to realize that I even appreciate something socially or aesthetically . . . like the fact that it took me so many Storied videos to figure out how beautiful Dr. Brozovsky is. "Context," my eye. Moreover, if I wanted to teach someone to read from scratch, I would never think to use anything other than a phonics-based approach. So how can a theory that runs so counter to my experiences and my impulses explain how I picked up a basic skills at a prodigious level? My belief is that cueing's founders mistook reading for a kind of social skill, rather than a technical skill, and expected us to pick it up the same way: socially, recreationally, and essentially through osmosis. Unfortunately, this doesn't work very well in the first place, being geared mostly towards the naturally gifted, and leaving everyone else behind even when it comes to social behavior. (I can attest to this first-hand.) It's more like the kind of advanced learning that you'd expect from someone who already knows what they're doing, so that while I *can* do many of the things that Whole Language Theory describes, that's probably because I have both talent and prior experience. Overall, this theory was a product of its times and of the culture that produced it: a culture that values extroversion, social awareness, informality, and fun, fun, fun while disdaining studiousness and intellectualism. That isn't the way I roll, and I don't think that it serves the human brain well, either.
I like your take very much. Your point about mistaking reading for a social skill when it's actually a technical skill is, I believe, very relevant to technological skills as well. My Millennial peers were explicitly taught how to use computers and word processors in the 80s and 90s, and we were able to build on those skills as teenagers so that it looked like we - the young people - were just naturally good at technology. But then with the generation after us, everyone was fooled into thinking that children are just "digital natives." Kids just KNOW how to use computers, Word, email etiquette, etc. So those skills were taught less and less, to the point that college professors are finding a lack of computer skills among their Gen Z students!
@@courtneyandkavita7703 Yep: youngsters today are addicted to using their phones for everything. Back in the days when I still worked at H&R Block, I remember one, rather difficult and higher, who actually insisted on doing all of our computer-based training on his phone, when it clearly wasn’t appropriate to the task. (He didn’t last long.)
I was very lucky to have involved parents who intuitively taught me phonics, and an older school teacher in 1st grade who switched to using phonics with me when I was clearly struggling. I eventually became really good at reading because of those early influences. I always wondered why so many of my classmates in high school struggled when we were forced to do roundrobin reading, after all, you just sound it out, right? Now I know!
6:09 not to be THIS guy, but I think the fact that the parents getting involved in their kids lives illuminated the issue was the problem the whole time🤷♂️ Idk, maybe talk to that thing you made every now and again lol
I volunteered in my son's classroom in 1985 and observed the use of "whole language" instruction. It didn't work and my son fell behind. That's when I started researching the subject and found lots of research supporting phonics. When I confronted the superintendent with the results of a governmental study that found phonics was the best way to teach reading, he replied that the authors relied too heavily on phonics. I ended up sending my son to a private school that used the phonics method and he caught up in no time. I have had this debate with educators over the years and they always defend their curriculum, sometimes saying they use a mix of cueing and phonics. I have found the old "rules" (i before e except after c, short vowel followed by double consenants, etc...) to come in handy with not only reading but in speaking and spelling as well.
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!
Either your a genius or you have the ages completely wrong, 9 months old can't even properly pronounce syllables and have limited vocabulary let alone read
I taught English a few years ago. It’s insane. In places with state tests, they’re teaching kids to learn a test so the schools can get good scores and benefits from it. The people who make the tests are the ones who sell the department of education the materials and then ship it to the schools. My kids were struggling with vocabulary and when I brought it up to the Academic Coach that we need more focus on fluency to help with comprehension, she asked me if I had properly taught them how to guess context clues from the multiple choice formula. I quit and teach Art now. Now, I combat media literacy and critical thinking skills. Which is also a huge issue.
Random clue from the example at the start of the video: I had a pretty easy time with the jumbled words, and a somewhat more difficult time, but I could make it work, with the example where the words were blurred out except for the first and last letter. That suggests to me that my brain is using more information than just the first and last letter, but that brains are pretty amazing, and a brain that has been trained for about 35 years to read can make do with reduced information to put things together, even if it makes things more difficult. Later on in the video, as you make the jumbled passage more complicated, your brain, amazing as it is, is having to work even harder. As you mentioned, this can lead to frustration. There's a lot to be said for the idea that children should find joy in reading, and that teaching with this in mind can be helpful, but, as you note, experience with these simple examples seems to point to the idea that it's very difficult to find joy in reading when you're bogged down by the mechanics. But to avoid getting bogged down by the mechanics, you don't avoid the mechanics, you just get so proficient that you stop thinking about them explicitly most of the time, because without that solid foundation, you won't be well equipped to handle new words and phrases from which you're trying to learn new ideas. If you need to understand the idea of the passage in order to have enough context to decode new words, you'll have a very hard time learning new ideas from reading. Interestingly, it feels to me like math education may have learned the wrong lesson from reading education here. In recent decades, math education has leaned more and more into wanting to help children love math and avoid painful drills, but I've sometimes seen elementary curricula that veer too far away from teaching the basics. Now, math education of the past may have been able to benefit from helping children enjoy math more and avoiding as much pain as possible in learning arithmetic, but, as someone with an extensive math background, I couldn't get to the fun part of math, science, and engineering without first building up expertise in the basic mechanics of arithmetic, basic algebra, and so forth. We shouldn't make our curriculum so onerous as to scare children away or make it painful, but there does need to be an emphasis on learning the basic mechanics, making sure that kids can sound out their words or know how to interpret the math problem in front of them so that they have the tools they need to appreciate and enjoy Shakespeare and Tolkien, Newton and Euler. I guess there is a certain balance there, where you need children to be able to see the joy in and on the other side of what they're learning, but really make sure that they get the basics they need to get to that joy.
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
I'm glad you mentioned this. As a dislexic child who learned in the UK, and has grown up loving to read, I was taught phonics and I'd never heard of this alternative method. Even in adulthood, I might have to sound-out a word if I have never seen it written, I have no idea what I would do if I were taught this context based reading.
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.
@@carultch I believe in French you can usually figure out the sound by reading, but not the other way around (going from what you hear to how to spell it.)
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 grandpa (a US History teacher) did the same with all of us! Dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopedia - if you don't know, go to the shelves. But now we all - mom, aunts & uncles, all us grandkids - have an incredible breadth of language, and a fair bit of resilience & humility. There's nothing wrong with not-knowing! We're all of us learning new things, forever, and the experience of knowing how to find out what you don't know is more important than the spelling of some particular word.
The real problem here was thinking of these as being an 'either or' situation. Either you learn phonics or you learn cueing. Curing is a very advanced reading technique which needs the underlying ability to sound out unfamiliar words to work. To me this whole thing sounds like trying to teach kids algebra without first teaching them arithmetics or their times tables.
Genuine question- why does the “guessing” work in second languages and/or when you’re older? Correct me if I’m wrong, but in french class for example, sounding out the words would never help me figure out what they mean… I take the root of the word and look at the context to figure it out- or figure out the idea of it- and that works a lot better
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 :)
@@jmhorange But at the same time, if people hadn't jumped on the trendy new way to teach reading before it had been researched more thoroughly, we wouldn't have had to unlearn it now. There's a balance that should be reached where you hold a more traditional course against the choppy waves of progressive ideas, while still being open to change once those ideas have been thoroughly vetted and tested.
@stevenjones8575 I disagree on two accounts. 1) "refuse to try the new thing until it's been proven better" has historically been used as an excuse to never change no matter how much evidence piles up. People with an invested interest in the old way will always insist there's not enough evidence. This is the same entrenchment we are seeing from people who don't want to shift back. 2) research on a new method is impossible without employing the new method on a large enough scale to be able to differentiate the norm from the statistical noise However, I do agree with you that uniform replacement with no strong evidence was hasty.
@@stevenjones8575 There's jumping on a trend and then there's doing something across generations for 6 decades until research proves it's not very effective. Who would even waste years of their careers researching cueing if it wasn't adopted? Where would they even gather enough multi year data on cueing to reach any conclusions if the method was invented and then no schools adopted it for 6 decades while it was tested if it actually worked? Why would the proponents of cueing even care about the method and not move on to something else if the length of time to test something to make sure it has no flaws is more than the length of their career? I will just say, I did not learn cueing. As an orphan born in the early 80s in a poor city with underfunded schools, perhaps they didn't think it was worth teaching people like me things like cueing. They just taught us the pre 1960s way of reading. My heart goes out to my wealthier American counterparts. Hopefully they will one day find it in their hearts to forgive the teachers that led them astray. They are not unlike the children of Einstein's generation who unfortunately wasted their science classes learning about Isaac Newton's incorrect theories of gravity. Unfortunately Einstein's theories say time travel is impossible. People do the best they can at the time, and learn from their mistakes. No use blaming people of the past cause they didn't have the knowledge you currently possess...until Einstein's proven wrong and we can time travel. Nobody is perfect. But in all seriousness, if learning cueing harmed you in any way, I'm sorry. But reading is a learned skill, you still have time to learn new ways of reading :)
Frustrating that the switch to cueing doesn't seem to have been based on scientific evidence. I'm not mad that it was given serious consideration as a better learning model. But I am mad they didn't actually vet the process before mass implementation.
"Evidence" and research findings can be tweaked and gamed. There is more nuance to this issue than some would have us believe, though attempting to sound out a word is generally first and foremost.
I feel that it should be common sense that cueing is not the way to go. What is the point of using the Roman alphabet in writing our language if we’re not going to use its phonetic component. At one point, I had learned 400 kanji (Chinese pictographs), but I can’t say how many I still remember. It took a lot of effort to memorize these 400 symbols. It’s definitely an interesting writing system, but compared to alphabets or syllabaries, it’s just not efficient: it takes many years to be functionally literate.
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.
Homeschool Mom here👋 It's phonics. Teach your children phonics. Steps: 1. Have them watch Letter Factory from Leap frog every day for a couple weeks-a month. Consonants and short vowels✅ 2. Use Explode the code curriculum. It's perfect IMHO. I used as a kid and all my kids have used it. You learn every vowel and consonant blend in a logical order ✅ 3. Start reading with Bob books. Slowly. Cover the pictures so they don't guess words based on the images. Repeat each book until they are comfortable and layer reading a new book and old book so they don't feel overwhelmed. 4. Get the phonics readers by Nora Gaydos. They are colorful and fun. And follow a phonetic progression. 5. Make sure they are reading books they enjoy! I highly suggest Mo Willems Elephant and Piggie books. 6. Read to them!!! As someone who grew up being homeschooled using phonic it blows my mind ever child can't read. Heart breaking 💔
Looking at the paragraph example with the mixed up letters made me think of my daughter's difficulties reading. As they said, she uses so much energy decoding that meaning is lost. And it's not enjoyable! I was an avid reader as a child (1970s). My oldest started out loving reading - until she "had to" - you know, that "encouraging" to read that required charting it all! The youngest had more trouble learning to read - partially from having an older sister sharing my reading time so I didn't read as many basic books to her before she got to school - at which point, "whole language" teaching kicked in and she struggled all the way. She did a little better when I got Hooked on Phonics (and was encouraged to use it by her teacher that wasn't allowed to). But working full time combined with a tired, stubborn child didn't lend itself to much time on Phonics. I thought it was highly likely she has dyslexia. But maybe it's just the school system letting her down.
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 TH-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)
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.
Research shows that so called "sight words" or "trick words" -- irregularly spelled high-frequency words -- are learned and retrieved by the brain the same way that regular words are: matching sounds to letters and letters to sounds. Students develop a "set for variability" that lets them try different sounds when their first attempt to sound out a word isn't quite right. Kids can learn that the sounds in "said" -- /s/ /e/ /d/ -- correspond to the graphemes , even though spelling /e/ as is unexpected. Pretty soon, it's not that unexpected! Kids can also understand that is built with + , just like is built with + and is built with + (where then suffix indicates that the saying and paying happened in the past). Spellings really do make sense. There is no need to teach students that some words can't be sounded out and need to be memorized as whole words. That's not an efficient way for students to learn large numbers of words, both regular and irregular, so that they can recognize them instantaneously. The efficient way that matches how the brain reads words is to match sounds, letters, and meanings.
It's wild to me that they thought phonics was tedious and boring. When I was little, every time I was able to read an entirely new word by sounding it out, I felt like a badass code breaker.
I’m currently learning Japanese and I feel exactly this way when I sound out a word I don’t know in Hiragana/Katakana successfully.
@WilliamJacobson-t5p Good luck in Japanese. Since the challenge in Kanji is higher given you've got to remember radicals (components of a kanji) to reconstruct the features of the letter like remembering a face, you've got something more abstract to learn that I think will feel even more bad ass. There's not many shortcuts you can take sadly, sure there are some pictographic Kanji like 山yama (mountain) and 川 kawa (river) but they're few and Far between and there's gonna be Chinese readings even to those Kanji that complicate it further. Just take japanese one letter at a time and Ganbatte!!!
@@WilliamJacobson-t5p I learned to read Japanese the same way.
Same
As a teacher and an avid reader, I love your comment so much.
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 distinctly remember some of my classmates in high school and middle school were HORRIBLE at reading to the point that- even as a child- I wondered if they had learning disabilities or something was wrong with their eyes. By the time I had finished High school I realized that the curriculum in my school system- and most of the ones in America- was completely and utterly broken. We didn't learn enough history, nobody knew math, some people legit couldn't read, etc. From what I've gleaned it seems like things haven't changed all that much from then to now. Tbf I think the fault is shared between the school system and the parents.
omg i remember doing Hooked On Phonics as a kid, and i can distinctly remember also being an "advanced" reader in school. unsurprisingly, i also loved to read aloud in class during those 'popcorn' reading sessions haha
Same! This is the first time I've ever heard about any other reading "method" being taught.
I can't imagine trying to guess words on a page... lmao. I was hooked on phonics all these years and never even knew😂
@@itsafroggytimeOh wow I was always an “advanced reader” but reading out loud is a whole different skill IMO! I was okay at it until there was a large number but lots of kids struggled with reading out loud. And the schools never taught it, they just expected you to do it with no training. They were grading us on a skill they never taught in class!
Yeah fr I learnt by phonics and whenever a person can’t read a word I get so confused bc I’m just like.. sound it out.
“I’m not convinced I know how to read. I’ve just memorized a lot of words.” Nick Miller
The science behind this though... it's actually pretty accurate
I don't think I started learning how to read until middle school, and the teacher found a book I enjoyed. most of my 'readding' classes were boring learn to sound out the words or read them out loud in a row. the kids that do learn for real teach themselves. the ones that need teachers get stuck until they find the one teacher that actually helps if it happens at all.
The average brain can memorize about 2,000 words (sight words) without a phonics system, then we basically hit the wall.
"I don't trust fish ... they breathe under water!"
I cannot recommend "Sold a Story" enough. I'm not a parent, but I shared their confusion and fury in realizing that their kids were functionally illiterate despite their schools insisting otherwise.
It's a fantastic piece of journalism, and absolutely worth a listen!
Listening to it now
I loved it too and it made a lot of sense when I looked at my nephews and friends kids, that are NOT reading
Essential listening for every parent and teacher
Take it with a grain of salt.
I'll look it up
I started first grade (northern California) in 1960. "Sound it out" was the mantra for learning to read; phonetics all the way, and lots of spelling tests. When we little kids asked why certain words didn't get pronounced by the general phonetic rules we were told something along the lines of "English is just a language with a lot of exceptions to the 'rules', get used to it, learn the exceptions." Not easy, but there it is, and I became a proficient and avid reader and it has served me well to this day. My son learned the "whole language" style and can't read well and has no desire to read.
Not necessarily due to the methodology by which he was taught to read. This is complex and nuanced. My 8 y.o. granddaughter does not like to read (probably due to her ADHD), but she can decode pretty much any word and has been doing so since first grade. I do not fault her teaching for her disinterest in reading, though she will research and read about topics that interest her, she just resists reading fiction.
@@julialewis1138well no one “likes to read”. But people like to engage with stories and information they are interested in through the act/process of reading. It’s like saying someone doesn’t like to hear, but likes listening to Taylor Swift’s songs, lol. Once you learn to do it well, reading is invisible. Information just goes into your mind when you look at the shapes.
You should read with him. I'm convinced that many proficient readers were actually taught by their parents, not their school.
@@TheKraken5360 That makes sense. I can't say with authority that the way I was brought up by my parents helped encourage my love of reading, but it feels right. One of the "quality family time" activities that we did when I was growing up was to all sit in the same room together each reading their own book. To this day, I still get a feeling of "togetherness" if I'm reading my own book surrounded by other people reading their own books.
I was a bit confused watching this video, because I'm pretty sure I learned via phonics in the early 2000s. My parents read to me, but didn't teach me formally - in reading time I just memorized each page by the picture and didn't even look at the words. I learned in first grade, and remember sounding it out being how I was taught. Plus Sesame Street having that letter-of-the-day segment showcasing how a letter sounds. I had no idea about the other method!
It surprises me how many kids who grew up navigating the internet can't read very well. Nearly everything on the web requires some reading to navigate, and even video platforms make heavy use of subtitles a lot of the time - you can especially see it on the "Shorts" here on TH-cam. I get the internet/social media making sitting down with a novel seem boring, but literacy in general seems more necessary than ever.
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 do not think I am autistic, but even as a small child I was analytical. I wanted to know the reason for everything. The underlying pattern. I had difficulty learning to read until someone taught me the spelling rules, such as "the silent e makes the vowel say its name." After that, I quickly learned to read above my grade level.
I learned multiplication almost instantly when the teacher showed arrays of 4 x 2 objects and 2 x 4. Turn the array on its side and it the same thing. Again, I had to see the underlying idea. To this day, I cannot remember multiplication tables, but I work out the answer with an array and mental arithmetic. For example, 8 x 9 is 8 x 10 minus one row of 8. (80 - 8 = 72). (Any number times 10 is easy to remember.)
Sounds like she got you to… bloom.
*puts on sunglasses*
Aww... Sounds like she really cared and knew your mom just needed some recommendations and suggestions. Good thing your mom listened ☺️
Made me cry. A good teacher is so so important
Did they not teach you phonics earlier because of Autism?
I know an autistic kid who is obsessed with letters and phonics. He learned to read at age 4 and even started reading Russian from videos but rarely talks.
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 😀)
same! I went from not reading at all to reading chapter book series in a few months
huked on fonix wirkd fur mee! jk phonics rule!
I remember a funny video during Covid of a British parliament member videoconferencing who's cat jumped up on the desk. Watching it again a couple times, I started listening to what the man was saying. He spoke about a study that proved that putting subtitles (in the same language) on in movies and cartoons for children greatly increased their reading proficiency and he was advocating for a law to be passed so that all tv programs for children would have to put subtitles on. I thought it was brilliant, but I've never heard more about the subject.
I can confirm this to be true-at least for my son. We are a big anime family and my son was really in love with pokemon so he would watch with CC on. When he got older, and learned how to read, it also helped with his fluency and quickness in reading/comprehension.
He is just a regular kid… but his reading is always a grade or two above his current grade level. And now he is attempting to learn Spanish and Japanese at 11.
We read nightly and watched anime. That’s all. 🤷🏾♀️
@@Sweet_Pea_12 I experienced it myself learning English. The best advice my older brother gave me was to choose a movie you've already watched and understand what is happening and watch it in English (target language) with English subtitles. That way you could watch the movie and listen to practical English, train your ear by relying on subtitles when you don't understand something all the while without stressing to follow the plot. I remember I chose "Pirates of the Caribbean". I think that at that point the third movie was just out so I had already watched the first one a couple of times.
Edit: watching English movies with subtitles and actively using a dictionary while reading (even when you understand the context or the global meaning of a word) were game changers. "High school" is six years in Belgium, I went from barely 50% on exams (for my English course) my first two years to top of my class without trying the last two.
@@killiansirishbeer In a movie theater in Oslo some years ago, I watched an American movie with Norwegian subtitles. Even though I am a native English-speaker, I kept trying to read the subtitles in a language I didn't know. Written text is powerful
I started to learn English when I was 9 and it was pretty difficult to keep up. What really helped was watching shows and movies, even listening to music in English with the subtitles. That way I could read and listen on how to pronounce the words at the same time.
My mom is deaf, so I grew up with subtitles on everything. I also learned how to read very early. I still watch everything with subtitles because I prefer it.
HOWEVER, I will say that overdeveloping visual skills may have negative effects on listening skills. My auditory processing has always been a bit behind my peers.
So yes for subtitles! But don't overdo it.
I really do feel like the early proponents of whole language theory had their hearts in the right place. They were observing some very real problems:
English orthography is highly irregular, so you can’t really learn to pronounce things going letter by letter; you need the context of the whole word, or even the surrounding sentence or more, to figure out pronunciation.
And schools often do wring the love of learning out of students by not giving enough time for independent exploration. The idea that reading should be something children see as fun, rather than a challenge to overcome, is totally valid.
And so you have this new theory that tries to address these issues, and that’s great! The problems come when you try to push these things on schools around the country without any actual research being done first!
I’m glad people are still innovating in the field of early childhood education. We need to keep doing that! We just also need to validate those innovations before rolling them out so widely.
What was it that was paved with good intentions? I agree, they meant well, but ignoring or not at least reviewing and incorporating the science caused generations worth of trouble.
Meaning well, but doing harm does the same thing as meaning badly and doing harm.
BS. They never provided any scientific studies whatsoever to prove that their theory is legit. Sounds like outright fraud to me.
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
When I was a child in elementary school (early 1970's) we had two distinct language classes -- Phonics (which they called "English") and Whole Language (which they called "Reading" or "Reading Comprehension"). BOTH of them, almost every day. Then I grew up and heard that people are arguing loudly about whether kids should be taught by one or the other. And I was like... HUH?
Yeah. I was taught both and my reading and reading comprehension skills were better than my classmates through law school and to this day.
Fun Fact: anthropologists (which I am, science lawyer here) consider phonics to hook into how human brains develop, which heavily influenced by word acquisition and word interrelation, whereas (ironically) “whole language” hooks into implied and nonverbal communication modalities, so there are educational advantages to both but the former will teach “reading” more effectively.
I think that's what this video is glossing over. Whenever I read what whole language proponents have been saying the last couple of decades, I don't hear anything about cueing. The usual whole language recommendation is that phonics cannot be the sum total of instruction; children need a rounded combination of many approaches. They claim it is possible to overemphasize phonics so that children never get beyond trying to sound out words. Some scientific research seems to suggest it is possible to have too much as well as too little phonics. I'm not an expert, so I don't know who is right in this debate, but I often see articles like this one which misportray what I hear whole langauge proponents saying today.
English as a separate course from reading wasn’t about phonics…it was about grammar, punctuation, mechanics, etc…
@@ytseberle TLDR; no schools I know of teach the way the video implies, so if it is a problem, it's a very rare one. Whole language methods are used for comprehension skills and to help diagnose reading difficulties. A far more common problem for reading skills is teaching reading too early instead of focusing on building oral language skills first. You can teach popular "phonics" reading style programs but there are also writing based programs that work well as well.
As a teacher of years P-6 in my country (Australia) and therefore an expert in this field, this video was... very weird to me. Granted I don't know the intricate details of the American curriculum, but I have done some research into it at various points when I was briefly considering studying/teaching in the US.
1) The programs she's talking about aren't used to teach reading, they're used to teach comprehension. Like I've NEVER heard of that being a thing in the last 2 decades that I've been researching/studying/teaching it. But I will absolutely use visual, semantic and syntactic (or rather slightly different words, but same principle) to diagnose issues with reading and comprehension. E.g. If they're making a lot of visual errors, I'll reteach phonics principles. If they're making syntactic errors, I'll give them some extra lessons on grammar to help them with that. If they're making semantic errors, I'll work on various pre-, during- and post-reading comprehension skills to help them learn what to look for. Notice that the solution to only one of those reading problems is phonics. So you're absolutely right that there can definitely be too much phonics.
2) As someone who specialises in teaching kids how to read when they're having issues, one of the top reasons reading levels are going down in many countries is that we keep trying to solve the reading problems through teaching it earlier. But many, many kids just cannot fundamentally get it until they're around 7 because of developmental changes in their brain that no one can control, which means they'll have years of learning to hate it and then be worse at reading because of the early pushing. We really should be spending all grade until 6 years old doing oral language and sound lessons only, which involves way more skills than people think (rhyming, blending, segmenting, vowel play, oral story comprehension, etc.). Nowhere is this more clear than when I try to teach a class full of 10 year olds poetry and they can't rhyme and I have to backtrack a LOT.
3) There's actually more methods than what's commonly known as 'phonics'. Most phonics programs are letter to sound based. The alternative is sounds to letters based instead, with more of an emphasis on writing. So for example, phonics is reading based so you learn that at ee sounds like long e sound. In the writing one, I would teach instead the sound first (long e) and then teach that it can be spelt as 'ea' 'ee' 'ie' 'e' 'ey' 'ei' 'i' or 'y'. The students have a chart with all the sounds and when they are trying to write they find the sound they're trying to spell and then pick which spelling choice is most likely to work. At first, we only focus on them getting the correct sounds, so the student could literally choose to spell fish as "ghyti" and I wouldn't bat an eye a long as they could point to all the correct sounds (I'd just be assessing oral abilities to segment the sounds of the word). But as you go on, you teach specific lesson on which spelling choice is most likely to work (because English doesn't have true rules...). E.g. In the program's first year, I might do a lesson on how a "consonant sound at the end or middle of the word might be spelt with two letters (ss, pp, gg, etc.) but never at the beginning of a word" and the spelling rules lessons would get more complicated as they got older. I use this method a LOT because I find if a kid is having issues with phonics methods, they'll almost always understand reading better with this approach instead.
Yes, I've heard about something like that. A friend of mine taught at a charter school where for spelling they often focused on inherited sounds from the French, Greek, or Latin and how to tell which spellings went into which words. Or something like that. I'm interested in that, because that whole myth of, "Well English just doesn't make sense as a language," that a lot of adults pass along...there is logic to it, it's just not taught to kids so of course they're confused by inconsistent spellings.
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.
Yeah. I don't even remember learning how to read since I was so young when I did, but being ahead of the rest of my grade did ensure I got harder spelling tests, snd my special needs coordinators always worked with me to get those words right.
I used “I Can Read” “Sweetpickles” “Reading Rainbow” “The Letter People” and other fun tools back in the early 80s. My reading and language skills were always top notch. Thanks, mom (and my public schoolteacher).
Great video! I saw this "phobetics vs. whole language/cueing" mentioned in a post on reddit for why new college students struggled so much, and having only learned to read using phonics didn't know there was a "new" way to teach reading. So, wow, this does explain a lot.
As someone that reads and grades college-level writing, your example or hypothetical of trying to read a whole paragraph of the cued (first-last letter) text is reminiscent of me reading that (supposedly) college writing. When students don't spell words right (spellcheck??), use the wrong word (classic there/their problem), or just use unusual grammar (very related to reading comprehension), it takes my brain two to three times as long to figure out what the student is trying to say. Sure, its only ten seconds, but it should be two seconds. Compound that by ten or twenty times for a short essay. Its *exhausting* but it has to be done so I can provide students feedback on how to fix it. And that's not even getting to the question of whether their response to an essay question or whatever is good or not (i.e. the content of their essay).
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 actually still “sound out” words on occasion. I was also taught word association for memorizing and remembering things. To this day I still do that and I feel that was quite successful. But, like anything else, it all depends on how your mind works things out. It could have been great for me and way too abstract for someone else. The one thing I did learn, which I wish had been done differently is “multiple choice”. I think it relied too much on narrowing it down, deducing, eliminating what was definitely incorrect, and in the end, sometimes guessing the answer (remember when the general consensus was “when in doubt” pick C)! I was great at “Who wants to be a millionaire”?🤪My feeling now, is that just knowing the answer would have been a more solid way of learning. Truly learning and knowing the information. Once your conditioned, it's very hard to change what you've already learned so long ago. Most of the time, I know the answer, but its not readily available in my mind however, If you ask me in multiple-choice format, I immediately know the answer. Can you imagine if we communicated that way all the time. Your out and about and someone asks you a question your not sure of, your first response is, “give me four choices, A, B, C, or D…
Mispronounced words mean the kid learned by reading.
It's unfortunate that somehow phonics became associated with the right wing, so idiot educators abandoned it.
Mispronounced words often just means a lack of diverse language background. In the southwest, Latin or Spanish words are common knowledge, and almost nobody knows intuitively from a young age how to pronounce Greek words. Basically no one knows or cares how to pronounce Mandarin.
This explains so much why some students would completely struggle to sound out words in my class. Much less to do with their actual reading ability and more to do with how they were taught.
It makes me sad listening to my classmates read aloud 😅 Whenever they come to words they don't know how to pronounce, even easy ones, and any new proper nouns, they just go silent and wait for the teacher to say the word so they know how to pronounce it
@@TheHappyZappy I believe that's more out of fear of embarrassment. Same when you come across a hard name.
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".
Well it helps there that German and English are very related, that method probably wouldn't work (or would be a lot harder) coming from more distant or completely unrelated languages
@@spacelinx English is related to German, but not from "stealing" from German. They both developed from the same proto-West Germanic. What you're thinking of when you talk about English "stealing" words is more like how a lot of English vocabulary comes from the French, even though French and English are not closely related, due to the Normans invading England
@@scheddoc Related languages are certainly easier, but it depends on the language - there are quite a few languages that are written using the Latin script (an upside to colonialism), so if you've come from say Swahili or Māori, you'd be able to pretty easily learn the extra letters and sounds for English. (Noting that English vowels are a problem for speakers of both those languages, as they - like most alphabet-based systems - are properly phonetic, whereas English has a lot of exceptions).
There were a lot of things my dad didn’t handle well in raising and educating me, but I will die on the hill that his decision to teach me phonetic reading starting at age four was one of the best things anyone has ever done for me. To this day, I have a love for and understanding of the English language that I don’t find among many others, and moreover, it gave me an outlet for my love of storytelling. I’ve loved stories as long as I can remember, and the very night I finished the first book in the reading course my dad had me on, I ran to the computer, and typed out a story using what I had learned. At first the course was a bit tedious, sure, but as soon as I realized how many things learning to read opened up for me, I was all in.
Teaching phonics is extremely important. To jump start early readers, sometimes memorizing high frequency words can reduce frustrating for beginners, but this should never replace phonics instruction.
At 7:10 I feel like it is painted as a false dichotomy, cueing vs phonics. I was taught some mix of both and I both sound out new words and use context to establish their meaning. Phonics only helps children read words they can speak, and english is horribly unphonetic.
I understand this perspective, and have definitely been taught a mix of these two strategies as well, especially with the rise of standardized testing. However, this video implies that coming up with a pronunciation for the words you are reading is an essential part of the reading process, even on a neurological basis. Otherwise, people who have only ever read a word would not attempt to use that word in conversation, for example, or know how to attempt it. Thus, one must teach children how to pronounce all the words they are expected to read, no matter how funky the spelling gets. Like it or not, memorization is part of the deal.
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.
Yes my mom taught me how to read before I started school! I think it really helped cos my reading comprehension is still higher than a lot of folks I know in my thirties
Samsies! My grandmother taught me and my sibling and cousins to read before we started school. But I also distinctly remember a 2nd grade text book called Phonics We Use. This was in 1977. Seems I got a double dose of the good technique and I've always been a super strong reader (and writer). I eventually became an English professor, but ironically, I've never taught anyone to read.
I don’t even remember how they taught kids to read at my school. My mom taught me to read before I started school and I was able to improve on my own without instruction. I didn’t pay attention to lessons at all.
@@sed8181They don't. Kids just learn to fake it by listening well in class. They can puzzle their way through assignments but it takes them so long that they're functionally illiterate. A proficient reader can finish a test in half the time of most students.
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.
This is the key component that isn't being addressed; you had influence from home. Parents now rely entirely on the education system and that's unfair.
Why would you need to check your privilege?
My autistic sister taught me phonics when I was 3. I didn't have a "first word" because when I started talking it was in complete sentences.
IMHO, cueing is more useful as a memory aid when learning foreign languages as if it's your native language, you probably already know the word or can get some listening materials where they talk about the subject form which to learn from.
@@NoriMori1992 Only in the sense that you need a parent or sibling to do the reading and helping the kid sound things out. The actual resources to teach reading via phonics are pretty old and there's materials that can be obtained for little or no cost.
As a kiwi who grew up with the whole language theory I'm actually quite happy that most of my teachers ignored it. My parents also ignored it. I've seen younger siblings struggle through whole language theory and tried to correct it. Its rough
Anecdotally agree. High reading level by 3 years--had a Grandmother who just buried me in books, and I loved it. Hmm, realizing why I was so bored and frustrated the first years of school now that I say it that way. Do people not teach their children to read BEFORE school?
I've heard many parents discourage teaching reading before school because they'll be bored in school.
My grandmother was a distinguished professor of education at Harvard, with a specialty in early literacy acquisition, and author of a book for teaching primary school teachers how to teach language that's still in use today decades after being published. When I sent her the New York Times article where Lucy Caulkins (someone she knew from conferences and such) admitted she was wrong, her response was, and I quote: "I give her a lot of credit for backing down in the face of new research."
Crazy how a few people ruined the education of millions of kids and made tons of money off of it.
If you listen to the "Sold a Story" podcast that's mentioned in this video, you'll know that Ms. Caulkins did not admit to anything freely. She only started to make some small changes after the evidence was already overwhelming.
@@Ansalioncan’t think of anything more American.
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)
Yes I was taught the same way in NYC around the same time. Context helps but sounding out a word by the letters is how the process is supposed to actually work.
To be fair phonetic reading is much simpler in German because the spelling is much more regular.
Before I comment about the video, I just wanted to say how incredible it is that PBS is putting out high quality TH-cam content.
Idea Channel was a introduction to the idea (heh) of video essays, and Storied is amazing too. Such good work!
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)
I'm very happy to see PBS reporting on this. I listened to Emily Hanford's "Sold A Story" podcast a while back and really hoped, at the time, that more people would hear this message.
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!
You learned how to read like everyone else. No biggie.
It doesn't work for everyone, though. I was a voracious reader, perfect verbal SAT score, graduate fellow in a literature department, taught, blah blah blah. I was a sight reader, am a sight reader, and will die a sight reader. Not all brains can process phonics, so it's not some magic better system.
@@fraslex You vastly underestimate how many people actually can't read or can't comprehend what they've read ...
Thanks to my mom, I was also reading, writing, and doing basic arithmetic before kindergarten :D
"I wasn't even aware of cueing until I was an adult."
I am still not. I suppose I should discover what this is.
I learned to read before kindergarten, thanks to the old PBS show in the 1970s, "The Electric Company", along with a grandmother who took us kids to the library every week; the running joke in the family was me coming back with a huge stack of books that I could barely carry. EC focused on phonics, as did my grade school classes. It wasn't until I was in high school that we were taught about learning word meanings from context, but they also focused on word roots: prefixes and suffixes and their root meanings from Latin and other languages.
Figuring out a word from context is only part of the process. It only works if you can read everything else. Thank gods Electric Company got to me first!
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.
I’ve been trying to understand my dyslexia better, too: while it doesn’t hinder my reading, I certainly can’t spell and sometimes don’t see what’s right in front of me (two words, one misspelled and one correct, will appear to be the exact same letters in the same order…I have to get up and walk away for a moment before I can find the difference.
Thanks, PBS. These AOC videos are great. I learned how to read before I can remember. by first grade, I could easily read the newspapers. Learning to "sound it out" showed me how to easily pronounce new and bigger words. Context clues taught their meaning.
At this point every time I hear someone say "THIS is the only correct way to learn, learning in other ways will hurt you" I just have to roll my eyes. I've learned many different subjects and one thing is consistent. More information, especially from a variety of perspectives, is exactly what HELPS. Memory is formed by making connections. The more, the better. Don't starve students of information.
But if they can not read that information.
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.
Same same 😅
Abakada is the best!
Like cueing is the way you learned English an Tagalog. That is also how we read Chinese.
Same from Indonesia here.. cueing seems so stupid 😅 because our languages (bahasa and tagalog) are quite phonetic.
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.
XKCD Ten Thousand
Everyone learns everything they know at one point in thier life. On average 10,000 people in the US are learning a point of common knowledge every day.
I'm still kinda amused at the resurgence of the word "hearth" now that we've got games using it (World of Warcraft and other games by the same company use "hearthstone"). Except the generation of players have, for the most part, not encountered the word in speech before encountering it in the game, and so they're teaching it to each other in voice chat like kids passing it along on the playground... and doing so by attempting to relate the spelling to a known word.
They say "hurth" and "hurthstone" -- like "earth"
It's originally "harth" and "harthstone" -- like "heart" and "hearty"
I wonder how many other words kinda vanish into obscurity on an oral/aural level and then get rediscovered by something trend that brings back the spelling but not the sound, and then they get re-analyzed and pronounced in a new, typically simpler manner.
Really? Nowadays it shows that they're terminally online.
@@Arkylie Fun fact! Hearth comes from the Old English "heorth", which was pronounced more like "worth" with a currently uncommon diphthong. Yes, it did change pronunciation over the years to the one that rhymes with Garth (sorry for the Wayne's World reference, but I cannot think of any other rhyme at the moment), and it seems to be changing again.
Be wary of claiming anything in English is "the original", since the language gone through so many spelling changes and sound shifts throughout the centuries. I'm sure if you even dig just a few decades past where I stopped off, you would get yet another unrecognisable word.
Absolutely infuriating that parents were immediately able to deduce that their children were bad readers but teachers had their heads in the sand
I wouldn’t blame teachers for this, many have little power to raise the alarm in the face of administrators who are convinced the system they paid for “works”
@@inamib.9786exactly. They don't sell these systems to teachers. They sell them to districts who force the teachers to use them. Anyone else as frustrated with Dream Box as I am?
It's always easier to notice things like this when working one on one rather than having to deal with a whole bunch, and the bigger the class the easier it is to miss things.
Our public school establishment pays no penalty for being wrong.
The research has been clear, consistent, and overwhelming since the 70’s. Not to sound conspiratorial but there’s a dark agenda or undercurrent somewhere.
The greatest prison and other societal ills pipeline is through illiteracy.
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.
I didn't expect a Malay speaker would watch this video.
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 haaaate this as a teacher. I get told by STUDENTS that I need to be more fun, and I’m like… Dude you’re in middle school reading under a 2nd grade level. This isn’t fun for anyone, but we gotta get it done.
@WMDistraction most of life is about doing something hard so you can do something else you enjoy. Even my favorite hobbies very annoying aspects to them.
There’s value in learning being fun for everyone, but that doesn’t mean making it fun is the most effective.
Also, there’s some shade thrown on the people selling books pushing one system. That’s ridiculous. If the system is good, they deserve the money. If the system is bad, the money isn’t the problem.
Teachers need to read Alfie Kohn. He debunks everything you're whining about with actual science
@@belugaflying You say that like it still has meaning after Covid during which we saw how “actual science” works these days.
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'm Australian, so things may have not have been totally the same here, but it sure is similar.
I spent my first few years at a school that did what I now know is phonics, and then when I was 8 my family moved interstate (from SA to QLD), and in my new schools I suddenly found myself in a position where I was terribly behind in mathematics, but I was more advanced than most of my peers in reading, so instead if putting me in a school grade where I was on par with the others in Maths I was left in my nominal year, struggling in the deep end, because I was so far ahead of them in reading (and they figured I would catch up eventually, which never happened).
It wasn't until my younger siblings entered schooling and saw how they were being taught, by making them learn by memorising whole words instead of sounding them out, that I realised why so many of my peers struggled to read even well into High School.
I'm so glad I spent my foundational years in another state that taught the OG phonics instead of that memorising bullcrap. Otherwise I'd be like my younger siblings, who were constantly bugging me to spell out dinosaur names etc as they couldn't themselves because "I've never seen that word before". Did that never cross thses educator's minds, that there is no way to memorise the whole freakin dictionary, that at some point they are going to need to learn to sound outa word that they've never come across before?
Japanese is a perfect example of how phonetic association is key to literacy. While learning to read Chinese characters they literally write the way the word is read phonetically on top of the characters. Japan has one of the highest literacy rates in the world.
Learning japanese right now actually and can confirm that it is pretrybeasy to read when they use furigana and kanji. While I dont know if kanji counts as "whole word" reading, having to memorize the often unique symbol is significantly harder than sounding out things via the furigana
I'm not proficient, but I do love how straightforward Japanese is in its spelling and pronunciation.
Korean as well!
That’s cause Japanese is a phonetic language-if you know how it sounds, you’ll know how to spell it (with the exception of a few common particles, which have changed sounds over the years but are never represented in kanji form). English isn’t phonetic. In fact, phonics isn’t even spelled phonetically.
@@xreev0xyes, phonics is spelled phonetically. You just weren’t taught rules for it
That first example is how I make sense of drunk people typing
lol lol
I am a tutor for elementary students. I can say first hand that non of the kids I have worked with have known what I mean when I say to "sound out the letters." it's basically impossible to help them figure it out for themselves
Before anyone can sound out the letters, they need to know the sounds those letters make. If teaching children who learned (or attempted to learn) sight reading, you cannot just have them sound out. You need to take two steps back and teach the sounds before they can learn the words. Phonics is the only logical reading method - if you begin at that oh so primative beginning. But then there are the exceptions - words that are not spelled the way they sound. Those, unfortunately, have to be learned the hard way.
🎯
@@joanmitchell6271 Not necessarily. Instead of the traditional letters to sound reading focused programs, you can do sound to letter writing focused methods that give a lot more context for the way that different phonemes are spelt. Context: I'm a teacher who helps kids learn to read when regular school has failed them and the sound to letter programs always work great with them (though age plays a huge factor in my success too).
We absolutely do teach phonics and have been doing so. I don't know where you live, but this is not new information and look/say went out years and years ago.
I also tutor.
I read a lot to my oldest child starting early. I still needed to drill a lot when he was sick in kindergarten. He read a chapter book while I registered him for 1st.
Also he sat in my phonics classes. I sure that helped, but blending was hard.
I think the real problem with how people are taught to read is that there's this weird implicit assumption that it HAS to be done only one way or the other, when in fact learning to read is really probably more of a two-step process that needs _both_ approaches. Phonics is the first step, without a doubt. It's how I learned to read - at first. I remember very distinctly learning the basic sounds made by letters and their combinations. But that didn't take too long, because there's not actually all that much to it when you think about it (it's only 26 letters to deal with) and once I had that all figured out, which I think was before the end of 1st grade, it was off to the races. Once I was at said races, though, contextual extraction of the meaning of words mattered more for increasing my vocabulary and actually having a full comprehension of what I was reading meant, as opposed to just being able to sound it out. Starting with phonics makes a BIG difference. But all language is ultimately contextual, so we really need a hybrid approach that shifts between the two as appropriate.
If you start at phonics but never move to teaching things like vocabulary and intentionality of word choice through the lens of context clues, people learn the sounds but not how to fully interpret and understand their meanings. If you skip phonics, then people end up with a weak foundation and can't decode the writing as easily, which holds them back because you can't get context clues and meanings out of words you can't recognize easily.
@@wasd____ Exactly. To me it seems really simple: you need phonics for the words you already know, cueing for the words you don't yet know. Everybody who learns to read has already acquired their native language, so first they should use phonics to learn to read the words they already know. Later they should use cueing to expand their vocabulary (in the same way that you use cueing to expand your vocabulary when listening). Since English spelling isn't very phonetic and consistent, cueing will play a somewhat bigger role early on than for other languages with an alphabet.
I learnt about 3-cueing a couple of years ago from some internet friends. Phonics is the gold standard in Australia, so you can imagine my shock hearing about this. I learnt to read in Kindy/age 4, with a heavy emphasis all the way through primary school on recognising letters and letter combinations, sound variations, and conjugations in words in order to 'sound-it-out,' and we had pre- and post-learning spelling tests every Monday and Friday all the way to the end of primary school. We were also taught to look up words we didn't recognise in the dictionary, instead of guessing, because guessing wrong could change the whole meaning of a text. I started reading novels by age 8, which I know is not that early, but I wonder if I would have picked any up and come to enjoy reading so much if I hadn't been taught to read so thoroughly. Even the classmates of mine who hated reading recreationally could still read perfectly fine - they just didn't get enjoyment from books. I'm glad the US is starting to course-correct - it's scary to think how many cohorts 3-cueing impacted.
Also, anyone who says learning to read with phonics is boring has clearly never seen a room full of 4-year-olds go absolutely nuts overs Letterland ;)
Thank for doing the good work. I hate that teachers “don’t take sides”. Phonics drills work but it need to be drilled.
The school taught my kid magic e and what a diphthong is, but never got him reading, just lots of gluing exercises.
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.
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."
@@d.rabbitwhiteI learned to read at 3 as well. That would have been around 1976, and I learned mostly from the public television show The Electric Company, which taught mostly via phonics instruction (and goofy skits). Add to that a brain that took well to reading and a small library mostly made up of my mom's old Golden Books, and I was set.
I was a gifted child who ABSOLUTELY COULD NOT read phonetically, despite all the grandparents and libraries and librarian aunts and PBS and Electric Company and Golden Books surrounding me. I absolutely did not learn to read at 2 or 3... but I was read-along to, and looking at the words, once I hit memorization threshold, I began reading whatever I could get my hands on. I thank God (and my mother) for not putting me in a phonics program and stressing me out. There is NO TEACHING STYLE that will serve all brains. (But reading TO children, and having captions on all children's programs, would likely help all of the learning styles.)
A major benefit for my reading was a collection of story books with 45's that you played and followed along in the book. Most of the stories are now considered non-PC, rightly so, but the method was undeniably beneficial.
Watching TV with captions was a big help for me in learning how to read and appreciating how to sound out words. I would read along with whatever was on, which taught me to pronounce words I hadn't heard before. My sister also taught me cursive before I even started school. Back then, we had Accelerated Reading, where you could earn prizes by reading books and taking quizzes. I did it mostly for the freebies, haha. To date, I've read about 500 books, and I think phonics played a key role in fostering my love for learning new words. This isn't to say that it's the best way but certainly better than not teaching kids how to sound out words.
Thank you, Dr. Brozovsky! As a non-native speaker, I had to learn English as a second language during my teenage years. I spent six years being tutored by native speakers (yes, it did cost my parents a fortune), and often times i wouldn't know a word they were saying, so i would guess it, I'd do the same with written text as well. Turns out, it's an entire learning system! I wouldn't recommend it though - sometimes I was very wrong lol. Now I have a masters degree in linguistics and work as an interpreter but surprise! translators and interpreters are trained to guess words and phrases they're unfamiliar with. So it's a working strategy for those who already know the language to a certain extent
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 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.
@@Stratelier It's not just about being self-taught - it's limiting people to early-elementary level vocabulary. Once the books come without illustrations, students will be completely lost as to context. I can assure you that elite schools did not leave phonics behind - cueing just helped reinforce the divide between who is deemed "worthy" of a quality education and who doesn't.
Now im just wondering... Just how hard will learning to read AND speak chinese be????!!!
@@cactus2260 from my limited experience with Japanese, logograms make it extremely difficult for me to read texts with unfamiliar words because I can’t sound them out. I imagine Chinese second language learners with an European first language will find reading difficult as well. But native speakers of both those languages are apparently capable of sounding out completely unfamiliar words fairly accurately, so idk if it’s actually hard in general.
English is barely phonetic. This is the reason why the English speaking world was the focus of this debate.
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.
Emily is the best! I am so glad you brought her up along with her fantastic bit of investigative journalism!
I was taught both (and reached a college level of reading comprehension in middleschool)...
*phonics* are a MUST!
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.
It was adopted earliest by districts looking for cost-savings, unfortunately. A phonics-based curriculum usually meant subdividing the homerooms into small-groups by reading-level, each of which needed its own teacher (or paraprofessional) and its own set of materials & in-class / homework. Expensive! Look-Say, or Whole Language, meanwhile, put most of the onus for reading materials on the parents, and you could walk the entire class through a picture book or two as a group.
So much of the country got sold-out on this nonsense, and now we have at least 2 generations' worth of non-readers and many who are barely functionally-literate.
I was never taught cueing.
I'm only 27.
This is the first time I've heard of cueing.
I'm still confused as to how it's even supposed to work.
Same 😂
@@KonguZya how did you learn the meaning of the words in your language? You may have learned some by looking them up in a dictionary or by being taught their meaning, but the meaning of 99% of the words you know, you will at some point have inferred from the context in which these words were being used when you read or heard them. This is cueing.
When you first learn to read, you already know a lot of words, so first you should learn to read those known words by learning how to sound them out.
@@KonguZya I wrote a longer comment to someone else above going into more detail but as a teacher, short answer; it doesn't. We don't use whole language models to teaching reading, we used it to diagnose reading difficulties and then depending on which of the three they're struggling with, we then know what kinds of lesson will help them. I've literally never heard of this being used as a method to teach kids to read the way the video is implying until today, despite 2 decades of reseearch/study/teaching.
You may have been told to “look at the picture” or “think of a word that makes sense” instead of sounding out a word letter by letter. That’s cueing.
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)
Your writing is perfectly clear to me. Moving away from social media is probably a good thing anyway.
That's a pretty big stretch.
@@maniacpwnageking What's about it is a stretch?
My hypothesis is just that if a lot of people have poor reading comprehension, that could be why they often reply to written posts in a way that makes it clear they haven't understood the post
Also you could very well have been arguing with chatbots.
@@boraxmacconachie7082ironically I bet that person who said it's a stretch and the likes are those exact people with zero comprehending skills you discussed in your comment.
8:34 Glad to know I'm not the only one who sometimes struggles with 'movement' and 'moment' 😭
I taught myself to read before starting school using what I know recognise is Marie Clay's method. My mother read to me every day, and I was surrounded by books.
When I went to school I was taught how to sound out words I didn't know.
I had the best of both worlds. I've always been an avid reader, and now I'm a writer.
Very interesting, thank you!
I had trouble learning to read and was taught a lot of those "tricks" like looking at the pictures and was made to work on cite words. I remember being so proud because i could "read" a dr. Sues book... without even looking at it... I memorized a whole book I wanted to read so badly and was trying so hard. I will never forget the confusion I felt when the disappointed teacher told me that I was not reading, even though memorization/cite words were all I was taught to do.
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.
5:25 oh look! It's what reading with dyslexia feels like
Some people learn from context, others from decoding. When I was a student in the sixties, everything was phonics. I could read, with very high comprehension, but I didn't have the memory skills for phonics. Therefore, I had to stay in at recess every day with the phonics worksheet I had not done in the morning, which I still couldn't do. I got bad grades in reading. Meanwhile, I read every book I could get my hands on and wrote poetry for fun. When I was getting my master's in education everything was whole language, but the remedial classes were pure decoding. Why can't we comprehend that there are different styles of learning and stop condemning curriculum (and the students that benefit from them) as "wrong"?
We can and have. But NCTQ has products to sell! So they confuse people with the" science of reading."
That doesn't make any sense. How could you read with very high comprehension when you didn't know the phonics? The phonics are literally how you read unfamiliar words...
@@Andoxico nope, some of us are purely non-phonetical. I can attempt to make noises out of my mouth if I see a bunch of new letter groupings, the way a non-Russian speaker might ATTEMPT a Russian word, but it's not "reading."
Right on, phonics is torture. Everything I did in education was centered around verbal/language arts, and I had the opportunity to have it confirmed I could NOT PROCESS phonetically -- in undergrad, trying to read Riddley Walker for a literature class, and in grad school, trying to learn Ukrainian phonetically and failing miserably. I am curious, do you also have aphantasia? I have complete aphantasia... so much of these pro-phonics comments seem like it only works for people with visual imaginations, who may "hear" things in their head when they read.
@@mmybickers Just the opposite. I have a vivid imagination and I am a visual learner. I also have an intuitive learning style. I am very bad at memorizing, though.
cueing acts like kids haven’t heard words out loud before reading them written down
Sold a Story podcast radicalized me. It's an incredible listen
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.
"Connect reading to positive, happy feelings" is sort of the issue. At this point, we've got a solid two generations of non-readers. The kids in grade school now, have parents who had their reading ability halted somewhere in 4th through 6th grade (if not earlier). The main indicator of how well a child will read in early grades (barring actual disability) is how much reading their parents do.
Reading should not be work or burden to a young kids. It should be presented as fun, games, toys to be enjoyed at an early age!
I’m a decade older than you, but I also came from a reading family. We read long novels on summer road trips, passing the book around each of us to read a chapter (or more) aloud. We had “bedtime” stories at home well into our teens, too. My dad is a very theatrical reader, which got us engaged and kept us there. A parent having a true love of reading goes a long way toward instilling a love of reading into the next generation.
So, thanks Dad, for making my kid a genius reader, I guess? 😂
@@eiPderF It really makes a difference! Both of my parents had parents that read as well. Both sets of my Grandparents had large, prominent bookcases in their house.
I think the schools obviously can't replicate parental reading influence but they have to do better about encouraging the love of reading and not just focusing on learning to read.
Also I just want to say that my Mom was 16 when she got pregnant with me and still had a year and half left of highschool when I was born and my Dad had dropped out but went back as an adult learner to get his diploma and they still made it a priority to read to me. I'm very grateful for that.
@@williamlouie569 Amen!
It seems like the video, and perhaps also the science, are ignoring the possibility that this is a false binary?
What if both methods in concert are more effective? Or what if one method works for some children and the other works better for others? Why do we still assume that all children learn the same way?
True, although I don't know what that means for the teacher who is in front of a mixed classroom.
I mean, I do, because I taught a foreign language, and some people learn better by doing things, others learn better by visually, and still others learn better by listening. So you do have to adapt. I'm just not sure how you would do it at the elementary level
Even supposing it were a false binary, it seems evident that reading is so influenced by speach that it makes no sense to teach reading using methods that rely on the faculty which appears have such a negligible affect on literacy. The phonics method has been used for a long time and with superior results.
@@RuthvenMurgatroyd on the other hand, I see the advantage to using whichever method helps each individual the most, particularly when we are talking about students who are either neurodivergent or non-hearing. As a hole in the classroom, if you have to choose one approach, the sound does seem to be the most effective. But we have to be ready to adapt to every student
Yeah, I learned to read in the late 90s / early 2000s using mostly phonics with a smattering of cueing(?) and it worked well. Just being able to sound out an unfamiliar word and say it aloud can't teach meaning or grammar, whereas reading it in a sentence using those context clues can.
The"science of reading" people are the only ones trying to push the false dichotomy.
Whole language includes some phonics instruction.
I’m not surprised that a curriculum that reduced “tedious” study in favor of guessing caught on in the United States. 😂
My mom taught me to read by **gasp** READING TO ME. When the other kids in kindergarten told me that they didn’t know how to read I thought they were lying. And they thought **I** was the one lying! I had (undiagnosed) dyslexia; if I could learn to read before age 6, your kids can too. Just effing read to them and sound out the words as you do. Young minds are eager to learn. It’s what brains do.
Sadly, I was part of the great “New Math” experiment. Worst thing ever. I loved science, but I was hamstrung by this failed system of mathematical instruction.
I was taught using sounds (not in the US), and to this day sounding out words is one of my best methods for several things:
- remembering a word (it is part of my process for learning it when I look it up and allows me to repeat in my head and stuff. I couldn't remember words half as well if I wasn't sounding them out)
- reading (when I have trouble concentrating, sounding out words helps me forcus on the meaning rather than having my eyes just gloss over the page, and hence helps me realize when I'd been reading a sentence wrong)
- remember the spelling of words by associating sounds to letter groups (k sound could be k or c or ck or ch, and those associations become actual items in my head that allow me to remember words better by linking them together by spelling - lose vs loose, duck vs dock (which look decently similar), etc
I ca't imagine reading, writing prose, writing poetry, singing, or anything else really, without the sound part. To this day, I still pronounce certain words correctly (in English as a non-native speaker) thanks to stuff I learned first when I was learning to read, and am able to easily correct people when asked (it vs eat, bc ea is a long i sound, not the short one - sorry I'm not being very clear tbh I don't have the patience to explain what I mean right now, but I'm sure you can glean it)
I had no idea it was taught differently in the US. The way I was taught to read stuck by me for the past 16 years and has never failed me. While it's a subjective feeling, I can't fathom being told to just guess the meaning of words, especially when there are some words (like 'wince') that I got wrong definition-wise for half a decade at least because I hadn't looked the meaning up
Ylnow that "would you be able to read an entire book like this?" portion feels very accurate to two things I do with video games especially: Playing them to learn another language, and using dumb joke mods to make all the text change Ls and Rs to a W. It takes quite a moment to read new words in those sentences even with context, although for the latter one it did take me quite a bit to realize even in context that word "wuwew" was "ruler" 😂 Just what this whole concept reminds me of. While I can't say I remember what it was like entirely when I was learning to read (I have bad memory and just remember always reading as a kid, always absorbed in books and ahead of my level in them and not understanding what being "good or bad at reading" meant) my time earning both Portuguese and Japanese in my adult years has really been refreshing in regards to the difference between sight and phonics. Definitely leaning towards phonics, but both can be important especially depending on the language you are learning (for English I would say phonics with memorizing the rule breaking words with gentle correction and discussion. My little brother wrote "iland" yesterday and I explained the silent s makes it "island" and we laughed about it but he did it did look right when he fixed it lol)
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.
I got taught phonics in early childhood and it got changed over in late primary school to the NZ lady's method. I never really understood phonics well, and just memorised all the shapes of the words I learnt. I always had a disconnect between words I read and speech, until I saw and heard them at the same time.
One thing I've noticed is that the quality of older writing (pre 2000's) is better for decoding meaning from context. A lot of writing these days is simpler to make it "easier" to read but I find that it lacks ways to clarify meaning within itself a lot of the time.
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.
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
@@LindaC616 Do you think that your mom taught you with phonics? My mom doesn't speak English so I doubt that happened in my case.
@@Michelle_Wellbeck I said above that I did phonics workbooks for fun
I'm 31 years old and I also don't remember being taught to read. I have enjoyed reading pretty much my whole life. It was frustrating in middle school and high school when we took turns reading out loud. At least half of the students read the books as if they were in lower elementary school.
@@schuylarlangston745 Relate, but then again, they could say the same thing about me on how I can't play sports to save my life lol.
A few remarks:
1) AFAIK, studies on phonological recoding show that people retrieve the phonological representation of a word when reading complex texts but not when reading simple texts. The interpretation of this is that: Activating the phonological representation is not necessary to comprehend meaning but it can support it. Focussing on a written word will automatically trigger the phonological activation; it's something we can't suppress. If the word is easy to understand from context because the text is simple, the semantic interpretation will be activated BEFORE the phonological representation. If the word is hard to understand, the phonological representation will be activated first and the semantic representation follows. Hence, when reading very simple texts, our attention doesn't linger on one word long enough to activate the phonological representation. We understand the meaning very fast and move on to the next word before we can "sound it out" in our inner voice, and that is why people don't do phonological recoding in simple texts. But in more complex texts, we need to pay longer attention to each word, such that the phonological representation will inevitably come up - and once it comes up, it helps speed up the activation of the semantic representation. So that's why the speed readers have it backwards; they see that when people easily and quickly understand texts they don't subvocalize and assume that subvocalizing slows them down when the truth is that the causation is inverse: texts that can be understood easily and quickly don't need subvocalizing.
2) This video talks a lot about universal human cognitive abilities but only looks at English as if studies with English were representative of human cognitive abilities in reading in general. Human writing systems range from logographic systems like Hanzi to scripts with an extremely consistent and two-way predictable phoneme-grapheme mapping such as Turkish. I can't imagine phonics would be equally useful for Turkish and Chinese; it must be way more useful for Turkish. English is kind of in the middle of the two.
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
Okay, this response is going to be complicated and, to be honest, a little weird:
I'm an autistic adult with "hyperlexia," which is the accelerated acquisition of reading & language skills (maybe at the expense of some others). In fact, according to my mother, while most kids walk at 10 months of age and talk at 14, I was *exactly the opposite,* talking at 10 months and walking at 14 . . . by which time I had already started basic reading. (Since I do not remember anything before the age of 2, this technically means that I do not remember not being literate.) Now, because Mom never actually explained how I was able to pick up reading so quickly, the "cueing" hypothesis sounds extremely tempting.
Instead, however, it falls flat as I look back on my life, as I realize how I've never been able to learn anything else that way, especially social skills. On the contrary, autistics like me are notorious for not being able to learn or pick up on anything without explicit instruction or information: I can't figure out what to do at my job until my boss assigns me something, I needed books and videos to teach me fashion tips I couldn't pick up through observation, and it can take me a long time to realize that I even appreciate something socially or aesthetically . . . like the fact that it took me so many Storied videos to figure out how beautiful Dr. Brozovsky is. "Context," my eye.
Moreover, if I wanted to teach someone to read from scratch, I would never think to use anything other than a phonics-based approach. So how can a theory that runs so counter to my experiences and my impulses explain how I picked up a basic skills at a prodigious level? My belief is that cueing's founders mistook reading for a kind of social skill, rather than a technical skill, and expected us to pick it up the same way: socially, recreationally, and essentially through osmosis. Unfortunately, this doesn't work very well in the first place, being geared mostly towards the naturally gifted, and leaving everyone else behind even when it comes to social behavior. (I can attest to this first-hand.) It's more like the kind of advanced learning that you'd expect from someone who already knows what they're doing, so that while I *can* do many of the things that Whole Language Theory describes, that's probably because I have both talent and prior experience.
Overall, this theory was a product of its times and of the culture that produced it: a culture that values extroversion, social awareness, informality, and fun, fun, fun while disdaining studiousness and intellectualism. That isn't the way I roll, and I don't think that it serves the human brain well, either.
I like your take very much. Your point about mistaking reading for a social skill when it's actually a technical skill is, I believe, very relevant to technological skills as well. My Millennial peers were explicitly taught how to use computers and word processors in the 80s and 90s, and we were able to build on those skills as teenagers so that it looked like we - the young people - were just naturally good at technology. But then with the generation after us, everyone was fooled into thinking that children are just "digital natives." Kids just KNOW how to use computers, Word, email etiquette, etc. So those skills were taught less and less, to the point that college professors are finding a lack of computer skills among their Gen Z students!
@@courtneyandkavita7703 Yep: youngsters today are addicted to using their phones for everything. Back in the days when I still worked at H&R Block, I remember one, rather difficult and higher, who actually insisted on doing all of our computer-based training on his phone, when it clearly wasn’t appropriate to the task. (He didn’t last long.)
I was very lucky to have involved parents who intuitively taught me phonics, and an older school teacher in 1st grade who switched to using phonics with me when I was clearly struggling. I eventually became really good at reading because of those early influences. I always wondered why so many of my classmates in high school struggled when we were forced to do roundrobin reading, after all, you just sound it out, right? Now I know!
6:09 not to be THIS guy, but I think the fact that the parents getting involved in their kids lives illuminated the issue was the problem the whole time🤷♂️ Idk, maybe talk to that thing you made every now and again lol
I volunteered in my son's classroom in 1985 and observed the use of "whole language" instruction. It didn't work and my son fell behind. That's when I started researching the subject and found lots of research supporting phonics. When I confronted the superintendent with the results of a governmental study that found phonics was the best way to teach reading, he replied that the authors relied too heavily on phonics. I ended up sending my son to a private school that used the phonics method and he caught up in no time. I have had this debate with educators over the years and they always defend their curriculum, sometimes saying they use a mix of cueing and phonics. I have found the old "rules" (i before e except after c, short vowel followed by double consenants, etc...) to come in handy with not only reading but in speaking and spelling as well.
I learned by reading a ton of books before, but I would've learned words a million times faster with Dr. Brozovsky around!
she is amazing isn't she?
@@Maplehandso She is strident in her opinions. It makes her money.
I really wish Otherwords was it's own channel with more frequent content!
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!
Either your a genius or you have the ages completely wrong, 9 months old can't even properly pronounce syllables and have limited vocabulary let alone read
Whst do you think should be done with the teachers who worked so hard to oppose phonics instruction? True enemies of the American people,them.
I taught English a few years ago. It’s insane. In places with state tests, they’re teaching kids to learn a test so the schools can get good scores and benefits from it. The people who make the tests are the ones who sell the department of education the materials and then ship it to the schools. My kids were struggling with vocabulary and when I brought it up to the Academic Coach that we need more focus on fluency to help with comprehension, she asked me if I had properly taught them how to guess context clues from the multiple choice formula. I quit and teach Art now. Now, I combat media literacy and critical thinking skills. Which is also a huge issue.
Random clue from the example at the start of the video: I had a pretty easy time with the jumbled words, and a somewhat more difficult time, but I could make it work, with the example where the words were blurred out except for the first and last letter. That suggests to me that my brain is using more information than just the first and last letter, but that brains are pretty amazing, and a brain that has been trained for about 35 years to read can make do with reduced information to put things together, even if it makes things more difficult. Later on in the video, as you make the jumbled passage more complicated, your brain, amazing as it is, is having to work even harder. As you mentioned, this can lead to frustration. There's a lot to be said for the idea that children should find joy in reading, and that teaching with this in mind can be helpful, but, as you note, experience with these simple examples seems to point to the idea that it's very difficult to find joy in reading when you're bogged down by the mechanics. But to avoid getting bogged down by the mechanics, you don't avoid the mechanics, you just get so proficient that you stop thinking about them explicitly most of the time, because without that solid foundation, you won't be well equipped to handle new words and phrases from which you're trying to learn new ideas. If you need to understand the idea of the passage in order to have enough context to decode new words, you'll have a very hard time learning new ideas from reading.
Interestingly, it feels to me like math education may have learned the wrong lesson from reading education here. In recent decades, math education has leaned more and more into wanting to help children love math and avoid painful drills, but I've sometimes seen elementary curricula that veer too far away from teaching the basics. Now, math education of the past may have been able to benefit from helping children enjoy math more and avoiding as much pain as possible in learning arithmetic, but, as someone with an extensive math background, I couldn't get to the fun part of math, science, and engineering without first building up expertise in the basic mechanics of arithmetic, basic algebra, and so forth. We shouldn't make our curriculum so onerous as to scare children away or make it painful, but there does need to be an emphasis on learning the basic mechanics, making sure that kids can sound out their words or know how to interpret the math problem in front of them so that they have the tools they need to appreciate and enjoy Shakespeare and Tolkien, Newton and Euler. I guess there is a certain balance there, where you need children to be able to see the joy in and on the other side of what they're learning, but really make sure that they get the basics they need to get to that joy.
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
I'm glad you mentioned this. As a dislexic child who learned in the UK, and has grown up loving to read, I was taught phonics and I'd never heard of this alternative method. Even in adulthood, I might have to sound-out a word if I have never seen it written, I have no idea what I would do if I were taught this context based reading.
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.
@@carultch I believe in French you can usually figure out the sound by reading, but not the other way around (going from what you hear to how to spell it.)
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 grandpa (a US History teacher) did the same with all of us! Dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopedia - if you don't know, go to the shelves. But now we all - mom, aunts & uncles, all us grandkids - have an incredible breadth of language, and a fair bit of resilience & humility. There's nothing wrong with not-knowing! We're all of us learning new things, forever, and the experience of knowing how to find out what you don't know is more important than the spelling of some particular word.
The real problem here was thinking of these as being an 'either or' situation. Either you learn phonics or you learn cueing. Curing is a very advanced reading technique which needs the underlying ability to sound out unfamiliar words to work.
To me this whole thing sounds like trying to teach kids algebra without first teaching them arithmetics or their times tables.
Genuine question- why does the “guessing” work in second languages and/or when you’re older? Correct me if I’m wrong, but in french class for example, sounding out the words would never help me figure out what they mean… I take the root of the word and look at the context to figure it out- or figure out the idea of it- and that works a lot better
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 :)
@@jmhorange But at the same time, if people hadn't jumped on the trendy new way to teach reading before it had been researched more thoroughly, we wouldn't have had to unlearn it now. There's a balance that should be reached where you hold a more traditional course against the choppy waves of progressive ideas, while still being open to change once those ideas have been thoroughly vetted and tested.
@stevenjones8575 I disagree on two accounts.
1) "refuse to try the new thing until it's been proven better" has historically been used as an excuse to never change no matter how much evidence piles up. People with an invested interest in the old way will always insist there's not enough evidence. This is the same entrenchment we are seeing from people who don't want to shift back.
2) research on a new method is impossible without employing the new method on a large enough scale to be able to differentiate the norm from the statistical noise
However, I do agree with you that uniform replacement with no strong evidence was hasty.
@@stevenjones8575 There's jumping on a trend and then there's doing something across generations for 6 decades until research proves it's not very effective. Who would even waste years of their careers researching cueing if it wasn't adopted? Where would they even gather enough multi year data on cueing to reach any conclusions if the method was invented and then no schools adopted it for 6 decades while it was tested if it actually worked? Why would the proponents of cueing even care about the method and not move on to something else if the length of time to test something to make sure it has no flaws is more than the length of their career?
I will just say, I did not learn cueing. As an orphan born in the early 80s in a poor city with underfunded schools, perhaps they didn't think it was worth teaching people like me things like cueing. They just taught us the pre 1960s way of reading. My heart goes out to my wealthier American counterparts. Hopefully they will one day find it in their hearts to forgive the teachers that led them astray. They are not unlike the children of Einstein's generation who unfortunately wasted their science classes learning about Isaac Newton's incorrect theories of gravity. Unfortunately Einstein's theories say time travel is impossible. People do the best they can at the time, and learn from their mistakes. No use blaming people of the past cause they didn't have the knowledge you currently possess...until Einstein's proven wrong and we can time travel. Nobody is perfect.
But in all seriousness, if learning cueing harmed you in any way, I'm sorry. But reading is a learned skill, you still have time to learn new ways of reading :)
Frustrating that the switch to cueing doesn't seem to have been based on scientific evidence.
I'm not mad that it was given serious consideration as a better learning model. But I am mad they didn't actually vet the process before mass implementation.
Cueing is based on scientific evidence. It is the original reading methods.
There was never any "mass implementation"
"Evidence" and research findings can be tweaked and gamed. There is more nuance to this issue than some would have us believe, though attempting to sound out a word is generally first and foremost.
I feel that it should be common sense that cueing is not the way to go. What is the point of using the Roman alphabet in writing our language if we’re not going to use its phonetic component.
At one point, I had learned 400 kanji (Chinese pictographs), but I can’t say how many I still remember. It took a lot of effort to memorize these 400 symbols. It’s definitely an interesting writing system, but compared to alphabets or syllabaries, it’s just not efficient: it takes many years to be functionally literate.
@@ashram12 Those shouldn't be learned by pure memorization. A lot of the radicals function similar to prefixes and suffixes.
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.
Homeschool Mom here👋
It's phonics. Teach your children phonics.
Steps:
1. Have them watch Letter Factory from Leap frog every day for a couple weeks-a month. Consonants and short vowels✅
2. Use Explode the code curriculum. It's perfect IMHO. I used as a kid and all my kids have used it. You learn every vowel and consonant blend in a logical order ✅
3. Start reading with Bob books. Slowly. Cover the pictures so they don't guess words based on the images. Repeat each book until they are comfortable and layer reading a new book and old book so they don't feel overwhelmed.
4. Get the phonics readers by Nora Gaydos. They are colorful and fun. And follow a phonetic progression.
5. Make sure they are reading books they enjoy! I highly suggest Mo Willems Elephant and Piggie books.
6. Read to them!!!
As someone who grew up being homeschooled using phonic it blows my mind ever child can't read. Heart breaking 💔
Looking at the paragraph example with the mixed up letters made me think of my daughter's difficulties reading. As they said, she uses so much energy decoding that meaning is lost. And it's not enjoyable! I was an avid reader as a child (1970s). My oldest started out loving reading - until she "had to" - you know, that "encouraging" to read that required charting it all! The youngest had more trouble learning to read - partially from having an older sister sharing my reading time so I didn't read as many basic books to her before she got to school - at which point, "whole language" teaching kicked in and she struggled all the way. She did a little better when I got Hooked on Phonics (and was encouraged to use it by her teacher that wasn't allowed to). But working full time combined with a tired, stubborn child didn't lend itself to much time on Phonics. I thought it was highly likely she has dyslexia. But maybe it's just the school system letting her down.
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 TH-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)
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.
Research shows that so called "sight words" or "trick words" -- irregularly spelled high-frequency words -- are learned and retrieved by the brain the same way that regular words are: matching sounds to letters and letters to sounds. Students develop a "set for variability" that lets them try different sounds when their first attempt to sound out a word isn't quite right. Kids can learn that the sounds in "said" -- /s/ /e/ /d/ -- correspond to the graphemes , even though spelling /e/ as is unexpected. Pretty soon, it's not that unexpected! Kids can also understand that is built with + , just like is built with + and is built with + (where then suffix indicates that the saying and paying happened in the past). Spellings really do make sense. There is no need to teach students that some words can't be sounded out and need to be memorized as whole words. That's not an efficient way for students to learn large numbers of words, both regular and irregular, so that they can recognize them instantaneously. The efficient way that matches how the brain reads words is to match sounds, letters, and meanings.