To be fair to this debunked method, whole word is how many (? all ?) kids learn Cantonese Chinese. The language itself is decoupled from sounds: some characters might give you a clue, but not all,...
Exemplary
Goodman and Clay believed that letters were the least reliable of the three cues,
To be fair to this debunked method, whole word is how many (? all ?) kids learn Cantonese Chinese. The language itself is decoupled from sounds: some characters might give you a clue, but not all, and even those won't provide you with which of the 8 tones to use when you read it out loud. I was just taught to repeatedly write it out, listen to it being read, then repeat what I've written to link text to sound. New characters on text must be acquired whole: use graphical cue of a word's radical, use syntactic cue to figure out word separation and parts of speech, then use context cue to grok a fuzzy definition, store in brain and refine fuzzy definition cloud as I come across it next time. Or look it up in the dictionary by breaking the physical shape into radical and stokes: you cannot look up words by phonics. The language pretty much demands to be learned this way, as characters are largely unrelated to sound, and sound unrelated to meaning. Meaning <--- character ---> sound : connection arrows go one way.
The skilled readers could instantly recognize words without relying on context [...] It turns out that the ability to read words in isolation quickly and accurately is the hallmark of being a skilled reader.
The problem isn't using three cues or phonics to learn whole words, the problem is that most kids who struggle didnt get to a competent level to use those whole words without need for cues or phonics anymore. It's like when someone is learning math, if they don't have the multiplication table memorized, every time they see x = 4 * 12 they have to work out the math of (12+12+12+12) instead of being able to instantly see 48. The speed delay wears out the child, and they're simply too tired to sustain the activity or go further in depth.
No competent reader is sounding out long strange word letter by letter. A phonics learner isn't going to be able to sound out sudden foreign Latin phrases or a Greek concept vocabulary or French word without relying on three cues either. It's not the method: whichever route they used go get good, the "kids who read at least three times as good" eventually move past the scaffolding into competency.
But Rodney said: "My dog likes to lick his bone."
Rodney didn't become confidently wrong in a day. Whole Word would have worked for him as a younger child if there had been immediate corrections along the way. "Okay that's a good guess but let's verify: the last word starts with an M so it can't be Bone. Let's try again. What other words do we know already from the text?" Even if no method has been taught at all, just listening to someone read for years should have given enough time for Rodney to pick up the word "me".
I'm very highly skeptical that the failure lies in method, instead of lack of earliest childhood one on one guidance. How busy were his parents as a toddler? How many kids were in each of Rodney's preschool class?
By the time some of the Kindergarteners and first graders realised they were in trouble, their peers who could read had already been confident reader for years. They are separated by hundreds of hours of reading competency. No wonder they have no patience for looking stupid sounding out words doing A B C: they want to hide and fake competency as quickly as they can, not restart with "baby" steps linking sounds to print.
Venn diagram
What concepts go in the intersections of these three cues? I'm confused by the diagram.
(A) That requires an awareness of the speech sounds in words and an understanding of how those sounds are represented by letters. (B) In other words, you need phonics skills. (Brackets mine)
B does not necessarily follow A. Again, speaking as someone who learned English as a second language, from a language that cannot be learned phonetically, I learned plenty of new English words by sight long before I finally hear the word out loud to make the phonetic connection. You don't need phonics skills to obtain A: there are other ways. But whatever way you use, you do need sheer time to form A. Maybe phonics is the fastest for English, and maybe spending what little time Rodney has exposure to literacy instruction on Cues is backwards, but my point is that it's sheer time, not method.
American kids are being shortchanged by massive class sizes and poverty. Rich American kids being taught whole words after their nanny retired from ASL aren't gonna have trouble, I am willing to bet.
I lost patience with the article about here. I scanned for phrases like socio-economic differences, poverty, class sizes, early childhood education opportunities, and didn't see any. Maybe I'll jump back in if I missed this discussion further on.
...i can't speak to current academic sources but three decades ago my american university absorbed the student population of its japanese sister-campus and i learned quite a bit from the cultural...
Exemplary
...i can't speak to current academic sources but three decades ago my american university absorbed the student population of its japanese sister-campus and i learned quite a bit from the cultural exchange, part of which was the stark contrast in literacy of lexigraphic (kanji) versus phonemic (kana) writing systems, which resonates across unrelated linguistic cultures including deaf populations who must necessarily learn english lexigraphically...
...i think the data pretty resoundingly demonstrates a correlation between literacy rates and phonetic versus word-recognition approaches...
I've always been weirdly jealous of my East Asian neighbours who grew up with hiragana/katakana or Taiwanese phonetic symbols or Korean script which sounds exactly as it looks :) it must be so...
I've always been weirdly jealous of my East Asian neighbours who grew up with hiragana/katakana or Taiwanese phonetic symbols or Korean script which sounds exactly as it looks :) it must be so much easier to learn
Friggin' Spanish has 100%-consistent orthography. (Ten-year-old me loved that. The irregular conjugations and arbitrary ser/estar distinction, not so much.) English is, to the best of my...
Friggin' Spanish has 100%-consistent orthography. (Ten-year-old me loved that. The irregular conjugations and arbitrary ser/estar distinction, not so much.) English is, to the best of my knowledge, somewhere between the only language with the problem of incredibly inconsistent pronunciation, or the only language where it's so severe that it's directing educational policy.
(Yet another surprise consequence of being Actually Five Other Languages In A Trench Coat, I guess.)
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages...
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
I wouldn't say 100% consistent. The first time I saw the word "guion" I did not know the stress is on the o. Some people write it "guión", but as I understand it, that is a nonstandard spelling. I...
I wouldn't say 100% consistent. The first time I saw the word "guion" I did not know the stress is on the o. Some people write it "guión", but as I understand it, that is a nonstandard spelling. I will accede to 99.9% consistent orthography.
The downside, of course, is that it's harder for modern readers to tackle Cervantes because the spellings have changed. Even if Shakespeare uses words which are weird to modern ears, the spelling is generally the same we use today, though the pronunciation has changed.
I get your point, but, to be a bit pedantic: Although Korean script (Hangeul) was intended and designed to be very phonetic, in practice in modern Korean, there are a few pronunciation rules that...
I get your point, but, to be a bit pedantic: Although Korean script (Hangeul) was intended and designed to be very phonetic, in practice in modern Korean, there are a few pronunciation rules that need to be memorized. These rules alter the pronunciation of a given character when it's in certain contexts. e.g. ㄱ would be a "k" sound in word-initial position, but a "g" sound intervocalically.
Okay, yes, kanji has so many different readings it's got its own difficulties. But for small children (and weebs) I love that they have furigana / katakana readings on top of them....
Okay, yes, kanji has so many different readings it's got its own difficulties. But for small children (and weebs) I love that they have furigana / katakana readings on top of them....
This is fascinating - I can’t conceptualise coming across an unknown word in text and trying to parse it without being able to hear it in my mind. From everything you’ve said, I wonder if the...
This is fascinating - I can’t conceptualise coming across an unknown word in text and trying to parse it without being able to hear it in my mind.
From everything you’ve said, I wonder if the better effectiveness of phonics is partly because it makes it harder to hide an inability to read? If the teacher is focusing on phonics, the “bone doesn’t start with an M” conversation kind of has to happen, it can’t just be left to slide. Tie that in with the issues around class sizes, lack of resources, etc. etc. and I wouldn’t be surprised if “more effective” often translates to “makes mistakes easier to spot” rather than “makes learning easier” per se.
It's a just a new instance of an object of Character class where the property Pronunciation is unknown/inaccessible for now. Your brain can still fill in all the other known information, and maybe...
I can’t conceptualise coming across an unknown word in text and trying to parse it without being able to hear it in my mind.
It's a just a new instance of an object of Character class where the property Pronunciation is unknown/inaccessible for now. Your brain can still fill in all the other known information, and maybe even assign a temporary pronunciation like "foo" or share it with the closest looking character for now. Very similar to ordering from an unfamiliar language cuisine menu: you can probably guess the ingredients and style of food from the description, or what type of dish from menu location context and price.
I think phonics really is amazing, and three cues should NOT be used instead of actually being able to read, and certainly too late as primary teaching tool by the time kids are in mid elementary. But yeah, phonics could much sooner unmask hiding.
Teacher would call on names randomly and we had to stand up and continue reading the next sentence from the text. There was certainly no hiding possible when a kid is behind. What's going on with North American schools that a child could fake it for that long?
Edit:
I'm not suggesting the system I grew up with was better. It was not. The kids would be sorted by grade 1 assesment and children from the lowest quartile were basically discarded. They couldn't hide, but I'm not saying they would have recieved more humane treatment or better literacy remedial assistance.
The thing that crosses my mind is that for English at least, learning phonics better equips an individual for becoming a good reader unassisted later on even if for some reason a high level isn’t...
The thing that crosses my mind is that for English at least, learning phonics better equips an individual for becoming a good reader unassisted later on even if for some reason a high level isn’t achieved earlier.
Once you know how to sound out words, even with the wildcards thrown in by English’s notorious word-pilfering, learning to recognize them quickly is simply a matter of frequency and volume; the reader simply needs to make a concerted effort to read more and improvement will come along naturally. You’ll probably get the pronunciations of a lot of words wrong until someone corrects you in spoken conversation, but that’s a much stronger position to be in than misreading or being entirely unable to read some large percentage of encountered material.
I don’t know if that’s borne out in reality, but that’s what makes sense in my head.
As an aside, I’ve been working on learning Japanese and the frequent (though not as often as in Cantonese w/hanzi) disconnection between kanji and their sounds has made learning interesting as someone who was taught English as a first language via phonics. What I’ve found to be most effective is to learn whole words rather than individual characters or radicals, since that’s how they’re always spoken, heard, and read.
Race and socio-economic: https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2020/08/06/what-the-words-say Has more sources/links all the way at the bottom under subscribe as well.
He brought up the example of a child who comes to the word "horse" and says "pony" instead. His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept.
I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn't the same thing as a horse. Second, don't you want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ says "pony"? And different letters say "horse"?
He dismissed my question.
"The purpose is not to learn words," he said. "The purpose is to make sense."
What an incredibly stupid thing to say considering that the majority of languages today work with alphabets, i.e. letters that represent a particular sound. Even most languages that do not use the...
"The purpose is not to learn words," he said. "The purpose is to make sense."
What an incredibly stupid thing to say considering that the majority of languages today work with alphabets, i.e. letters that represent a particular sound. Even most languages that do not use the latin alphabet still work this way, like the Cyrillic or Arabic scripts. Sure, ultimately writing conveys meaning, but that's only step 3 out of 3. Step 1 is reading, and step 2 is translating that into the language you speak in your head.
It's such simple thing to get. Kids learn speaking first, you then teach them what sound each letter represents, and you let them speak out loud each letter of a word until they get it. I really don't understand how you could ever think that trying to jump to step 3 could be a good idea? Does he think that children that grow up just sort of magically gain step 2 along the way? Most people don't figure stuff out by themselves on a topic they are not interested in. That doesn't change between kids and adults.
These motherfuckers are teaching kids to read like English as if it were using Chinese characters. What the fuck.
To be fair, a spelling reform of the English language, by which I mean the introduction of spelling rules which are actually based on words’ pronunciation, would be both long overdue given the...
To be fair, a spelling reform of the English language, by which I mean the introduction of spelling rules which are actually based on words’ pronunciation, would be both long overdue given the numerous consonant and vowel shifts of the past couple hundred years, as well as useful to learners of English as a second language.
However, with that all said…, kids not knowing how to read should and most likely will not be the reason which drives such a hypothetical major, major spelling reform.
Such comprehensive spelling reform would also be impossible, at least without deliberately favoring certain Englishes over others, because those shifts happened very differently in different...
Such comprehensive spelling reform would also be impossible, at least without deliberately favoring certain Englishes over others, because those shifts happened very differently in different places. Spelling reform that allows the same system or even a mostly-similar system to be used between even just "standard" General American and "standard" British English would not be able to be a good phonetic representation across both dialects. The vowels in particular are so, so different -- even more different than you think if you haven't tried doing this (which I have in my free time before.) With spelling reform like this, you either need to force everyone to write in one dialect, which will force speakers of other dialects to write in ways that deliberately don't reflect how they pronounce those words and involve memorizing how to spell many words as a result, replicating the current issues, or you come up with a system that reflects dialectical differences and speaker write how they talk, in which case standardization goes out the window even within the US and definitely within the UK, much less between the two countries, and the systems for different dialects would end up being so divergent that you'd need to learn them separately.
And that's before getting to the practical issues with reprinting everything ever written in English, physically and digitally.
I agree that English spelling is a mess and its inconsistencies when it comes to pronunciation make literacy harder, but I've tried to make even pretty conservative spelling reform proposals for fun in my free time because I have that flavor of autism, and it's very difficult to make a system that doesn't require a large subset of speakers to write differently than they speak even if you focus on just US American English -- doing so in a unified way for English as a worldwide language is pretty much impossible.
It would be neat to hear more about your efforts. Also, if we currently don’t write the way ¿any of us? speak isn’t it still an improvement to write the way ¿some of us? speak? I’m generally...
It would be neat to hear more about your efforts.
Also, if we currently don’t write the way ¿any of us? speak isn’t it still an improvement to write the way ¿some of us? speak?
I’m generally anti-spelling reform even if I think English spelling is silly because {waves in the direction of English language hegemony}.
If huge subsets of American English speakers still need to memorize how to write certain vowels in certain contexts because the spelling reform reflects vowel splits they don't have, it's hard to...
If huge subsets of American English speakers still need to memorize how to write certain vowels in certain contexts because the spelling reform reflects vowel splits they don't have, it's hard to argue it's that much of an improvement for them, is the thing. Especially since these splits affect huge swaths of the language, not just rare or obscure vocabulary -- the cot-caught merger is incredibly widespread throughout the US but far enough from universal that not distinguishing the two in writing will also alienate plenty of speakers. Do we distinguish merry, Mary, and marry in spelling? Different speakers distinguish different subsets of those words. And that's just changes that differ regionally within the US. Include even standard Southern British English and you've got the father-bother distinction, the trap-bath split, and many more differences that speakers without those distinctions would simply have to memorize.
And, of course, the main issue is that choosing one dialect to base a standardization on inevitably privileges that dialect and its speakers over others (especially in the educational system -- we see this often enough already in that context). And of course the prestige dialect is not chosen in a vacuum. If more educated, richer speakers are able to "write how they talk" but poorer speakers with histories of discrimination and less access to quality education are forced to memorize how to spell words based on how those privileged speakers talk, we're widening the gulf that already exists there compared to now, when everyone has to memorize a bunch of weird arbitrary rules.
I think most of the good arguments against English spelling reform are fundamentally more practical than this -- it's just not politically or socioculturally feasible to actually accomplish that switch even with the perfect system. But the perfect system also doesn't exist, in large part because of English's being such an influential, global global language.
EDIT: forgot to address my efforts, but I'll scrounge around for my notebook. my spelling reform efforts were principally based on frustration with a famous conlanger's similarly lighthearted non-serious spelling reform proposal, which I disliked a number of the principles of because they didn't take advantage of methods common among other Germanic languages to indicate certain vowel quality/length distinctions through context (i.e., the existence of rules like doubled consonants indicating the previous vowel is short, or things like the silent -e rule in English). These rules make it much easier to handle the huge vowel inventories in Germanic languages and are present even in much more phonetic systems (like how Standard German is currently written, which is quite regular), though a unified approach to vowels still really isn't possible if you don't want US and British English to have separate systems. I gave up when trying to finagle vowels got more annoying than fun lol
Instagram and YouTube and Tiktok comments are full of much more phonetic typing. But in my experience, people typing how they talk, especially if it's AAVE or "u no wat i mean" is derided not...
Instagram and YouTube and Tiktok comments are full of much more phonetic typing. But in my experience, people typing how they talk, especially if it's AAVE or "u no wat i mean" is derided not supported. And imo that's the way spelling is more likely to change, especially without an academy of (even American) English
Would you be happy with a simplified spelling that doesn't reflect how you speak at all but reflects how others speak?
Yeah, needs of the many and all that would be worth it if it happened. But I suspect the improvements in day to day written communication wouldn’t be enough to offset the disparity it would...
Yeah, needs of the many and all that would be worth it if it happened.
But I suspect the improvements in day to day written communication wouldn’t be enough to offset the disparity it would create. Post-reform access to scientific literature, etc. would necessitate learning post-reform English and pre-reform English. I can’t see inequity decreasing if kids need to learn to read pre-reform English on top of all the other socio-economic and systemic bias barriers we’ve got now.
I learned German first at school, and despite that language having the reputation of being more difficult and with lots of rules, it is also phonetic. I imagine that when it comes to reading, it's...
I learned German first at school, and despite that language having the reputation of being more difficult and with lots of rules, it is also phonetic. I imagine that when it comes to reading, it's something the child profits off a great deal. With English you have the difficulty of spelling being very inconsistent as it relates to sound of the words, while in German every word makes sense from a spelling perspective. That makes learning to read by speaking the invidiual letters out loud much more powerful.
Not quite every word (as someone who learned German first at home :P), but the exceptions prove the rule; and it’s vastly less deviation from the expected sound than in English, or French’s rules,...
Not quite every word (as someone who learned German first at home :P), but the exceptions prove the rule; and it’s vastly less deviation from the expected sound than in English, or French’s rules, for that matter – with the caveat that I never studied French so I don’t actually have authority to say anything about it that’s not based on vibes and snippets I’ve come to known, c’est la vie.
ever since I learned about three-cueing I've developed infinitely more patience for replies on social media. mfers literally do not know how to read. people are walking around conjuring random meanings into words they don't know, and they don't know a lot of words. it's crazy.
Maybe it's because I read the snippet about "pony" and "horse" before reading the article, but one thing that kept popping into my head is that parts of the three-cueing system sound more like......
Maybe it's because I read the snippet about "pony" and "horse" before reading the article, but one thing that kept popping into my head is that parts of the three-cueing system sound more like... inferring definitions than reading?
I don't know if that's the right word to use to describe it, but two of the principles—using the sentence structure (e.g. is it a noun/verb) and potential context—feels similar to how I occasionally approach figuring out the definitions of new words. These days when I come across unfamiliar words they tend to be more obscure and highly specific, so I usually end up needing to look them up. But there are times I skip past words if I can figure out the meaning from context, especially if it's a word I won't likely use or encounter again.
I did it just now with "promulgate" in @myrrh's comment: I don't remember ever seeing that word before, but the context gave me enough clues to figure out it means some grandiose-sounding variation of teaching/promoting some idea. Sure enough, the definition is about making some idea/belief known or declaring it.
I wonder if that's why three cueing/MSV initially makes sense to so many people. We do that as advanced readers for definitions of unfamiliar word, so the process described is familiar enough. But inferring definitions is different from the act of reading. I think people forget that because those two parts are usually closely intertwined in how we learn and teach reading, and it's not like many people remember how we learned to read. I remember the first word I read on my own was "Cast" on a film's credits, and I had no clue what that meant so I guess I learned the phonics system, but I have no memories of practicing sounding out words.
...Side-note, I think this actually makes Dr. Seuss's books even better for teaching reading than I thought. He made up all sorts of words, so kids can't really use cues from the illustrations to guess what's written. Huh. I guess kids' books need more gibberish.
Your remark about Dr. Seuss' gibberish words exactly sums up my biggest concern with this learning system, which is that it doesn't give any method for reading words that the reader doesn't...
Your remark about Dr. Seuss' gibberish words exactly sums up my biggest concern with this learning system, which is that it doesn't give any method for reading words that the reader doesn't already know. How is someone who learnt to read like this supposed to read any proper nouns? Can they read someone's name and pronounce it?
Surmising the word from context sounds like a sort of word game rather than actually reading.
...ye gads, what a train-wreck: they promulgated quick-and-sloppy text scanning as a substitute for the foundational skills of meticulous reading... ...somehow that feels like a just reward for...
...ye gads, what a train-wreck: they promulgated quick-and-sloppy text scanning as a substitute for the foundational skills of meticulous reading...
...somehow that feels like a just reward for our modern information landscape, though; a natural evolutionary strategy for navigating the ever-diminishing signal-to-noise of text in our daily lives...
Maybe those kids simply don't know any better and imagine everyone is guessing at words too. A kid who grows up in a household that doesn't wear glasses won't report fuzzy vision, they'll just...
Maybe those kids simply don't know any better and imagine everyone is guessing at words too. A kid who grows up in a household that doesn't wear glasses won't report fuzzy vision, they'll just assume everyone also sees blurry blobs.
...oh i don't fault kids for how they're taught; i had absolutely no idea that letters represented sounds until my first grade teacher explained the concept one spring afternoon, then i went home...
...oh i don't fault kids for how they're taught; i had absolutely no idea that letters represented sounds until my first grade teacher explained the concept one spring afternoon, then i went home and excitedly devoured all my textbooks over the next week...
(a decade later, my mind was blown by my first pair of eyeglasses when i discerned indiviual leaves on trees and couldn't stop giggling with glee for days)
Wow that must have been quite the Discovery! You taught yourself how to read! And you could see leaves finally! A young person told me they thought bird watching was a pretend hobby, that people...
Wow that must have been quite the Discovery! You taught yourself how to read! And you could see leaves finally!
A young person told me they thought bird watching was a pretend hobby, that people just listen to bird sounds and imagine a cute bird in the tree. They got glasses now.
Reading your comment reminded me of my friend who was born with a non-functioning olfactory nerve and has never been able to smell. He told me that when he was a kid he thought people just put...
Reading your comment reminded me of my friend who was born with a non-functioning olfactory nerve and has never been able to smell. He told me that when he was a kid he thought people just put things close to their face to better appreciate the look of it and somehow inhaling in your nose would help you see the colors better, and then you would say "this smells nice".
I should ask him about that again. I remember us sitting around and chatting about it over a few beers, since smell is such a component of taste and him lacking that means he is missing part of...
I should ask him about that again. I remember us sitting around and chatting about it over a few beers, since smell is such a component of taste and him lacking that means he is missing part of that experience.
I know he responded that he tasted foods just fine, and we got in to how it would be hard for him to describe in detail how he experiences taste different from the rest of us, since that is the only way he's ever known how things should taste.
If he has anosmia, his sense of taste is likely incredibly weak. Ben of Ben & Jerry's has it, and it's why their ice cream has so many mix-ins compared to other brands. He needed extra everything...
Toxic shock syndrome pamphlet!! Wow that's a blasf from the not so fondly remembered past. It makes me sad to think about how many brilliant and wonderful people led less than optimal lives...
Toxic shock syndrome pamphlet!! Wow that's a blasf from the not so fondly remembered past.
It makes me sad to think about how many brilliant and wonderful people led less than optimal lives because they didn't have such simple tech advances.
I know exactly how you felt about being able to discern individual leaves. I'll occasionally go outside for a bit without my glasses and then put them on and try to not take for granted the...
I know exactly how you felt about being able to discern individual leaves. I'll occasionally go outside for a bit without my glasses and then put them on and try to not take for granted the ability to see so clearly.
I'm not sure why, but it took me multiple years of mentioning to my parents that I thought I needed glasses before they got me some. I would even put on their glasses and say "I can see better wearing this, it is still blurry but less blurry than before". The day I got my own pair was amazing!
There should be a rule that any time someone claims to have found a revolutionary way to teach a core subject (reading, writing, math), we look at it with extreme suspicion and require years of...
There should be a rule that any time someone claims to have found a revolutionary way to teach a core subject (reading, writing, math), we look at it with extreme suspicion and require years of study before introducing it. Those core subjects have had their teaching methods distilled down over hundreds of years across every single culture. We're obviously not perfect, but the chances of a revolution instead of an evolution is quite unlikely at this point.
I don't understand the whole "look at the picture" thing. OK, sure, in a first grade book for students who are learning how to read, I'm sure there are a lot of pictures. But in higher grades --...
I don't understand the whole "look at the picture" thing. OK, sure, in a first grade book for students who are learning how to read, I'm sure there are a lot of pictures.
But in higher grades -- and not even that high, like maybe by 4th grade -- most books, especially novels, stop using pictures. What then? And how about the adult world of forms, instructions, contracts, etc? What pictures should a reader use? That's crazy.
The more I read about this whole thing, the more angry I get. I'm not one of those affected by this (though I entered K-12 in 1993). I've always been a strong reader, and I think a big chunk of that is because my mom taught me how to read before I entered Kindergarten. Through phonics and sounding out words.
I'm angry because we've failed millions of people. And in the face of scientific evidence, we're still refusing to change the methods. Because three-cuing is easier to teach. And maybe it's cheaper to do it this way. Cheaper now, but more expensive in the future, anyway. Feel like this is another of those "socialize the losses, privatize the gains" examples.
I think a similar look should be taken at the way mathematics is taught as well. From what I've seen from my nieces' and nephews' homework, they are taught 5 different ways to do long division...
I think a similar look should be taken at the way mathematics is taught as well.
From what I've seen from my nieces' and nephews' homework, they are taught 5 different ways to do long division with decimals, for example: using partial quotients, scaling, expanded notation, area model, and the standard algorithm in sixth grade. Thus it seems they understand nothing, short-term memorize 5 different algorithms instead of one and can't do it two weeks later and are unconfident and confused.
To be quite honest, I am and was very good at elementary mathematics (Montessori), but I would struggle to understand what is being taught. These are all different ways to approach a problem when doing mental math, but someone's preferred route should be individual. Not to mention, they don't do any mental math - there were numerous sixth graders that didn't know what 3*4 was. A calculator was the solution.
...i've been honestly shocked by the innumeracy of people entering my profession over the past decade, shored-up by such blind faith in calculators that they have absolutely no awareness of...
...i've been honestly shocked by the innumeracy of people entering my profession over the past decade, shored-up by such blind faith in calculators that they have absolutely no awareness of catastrophic errors until their repercussions are made self-evident...
...i strongly suspect that they're vicitims of the math wars...
I don't get it: I've used the same strategies (#1 and #3 exactly like that, plus a variation of #2), but it never hindered me. Instead, reading always has been one of the things I am good at, be...
I don't get it: I've used the same strategies (#1 and #3 exactly like that, plus a variation of #2), but it never hindered me.
Instead, reading always has been one of the things I am good at, be it for my job or entertainment or when I took foreign language courses.
I think that likely no learning method is applicable to everyone: A good teacher might be able to identify what is good for whom.
I don’t think there’s any issues with using those strategies once you know how to read words. As in, you can see a string of letters in isolation and understand it represent a particular word....
I don’t think there’s any issues with using those strategies once you know how to read words. As in, you can see a string of letters in isolation and understand it represent a particular word. Like if you see the word “pony” spelled out for the first time you could say or think “pony” rather than “horse.”
But this is something like vibe reading. You might recognize very common words or phrases but if you come across a new word then all you’ve got to go on is vibes. Because you weren’t taught to actually read words.
Additionally part of the problem is not teaching phonics, which is a pretty core part. You can do the three steps (most do), but if you don't have a backing of phonics then you don't read words,...
I don't get it: I've used the same strategies (#1 and #3 exactly like that, plus a variation of #2), but it never hindered me.
Additionally part of the problem is not teaching phonics, which is a pretty core part. You can do the three steps (most do), but if you don't have a backing of phonics then you don't read words, you see words and make and attach meaning. In the three-cues you don't learn to read p--o--n--y and then link that to pony, you learn to see the image of the word 'pony', and link that to an image of a pony.
The problem is that the three-cues was supposed to remove the need for phonics because it is easier, but its turning out that just because its easier to teach does not mean that its easier for the future adults to read and most importantly, understand.
I am assuming1 you likely have a backing in phonics and then apply the three cues.
1. (as you are old enough to be on this forum, and properly used the word whom)
On the subject of learning to read, we were taught to read (my mother tongue is phonetic but not English) as follows: p-o-n-y (read the letters one by one) -> po-ny (convert to syllables) -> pony...
On the subject of learning to read, we were taught to read (my mother tongue is phonetic but not English) as follows:
p-o-n-y (read the letters one by one) ->
po-ny (convert to syllables) ->
pony (get the word).
After a little while (for me AFAIR, within 1-2 years), this process converges to #1 (you read the word as a whole sequence of letters). It makes sense that way, as it is very fast and also helps with correct spelling (ever worse on the internet nowadays, implying that people might not be learning to read in this way).
Anyway, #1 leads to problems when you don't actually know the word. Then comes #2 and #3 to help the reader infer the words or general meaning, but these can only work only if you don't know only a few words on each sentence. If you don't know many words, it will be a problem.
Also, beyond these, one can infer the meaning of an unknown word by thinking of known words sharing a similar root (+context).
In the end, I'd still think that such problems come not from the method but its application in schools. Of course no method can be perfect.
Btw I have no backing in phonics as a field of knowledge (as you see i was taught to read in the phonic way) but I still find the subject interesting (linguistics in general).
I recognized that in my last sentence, yes! But I do keep the notion that kids will converge into the same reading mode (little of both?) as they become more experienced.
I recognized that in my last sentence, yes!
But I do keep the notion that kids will converge into the same reading mode (little of both?) as they become more experienced.
To be fair to this debunked method, whole word is how many (? all ?) kids learn Cantonese Chinese. The language itself is decoupled from sounds: some characters might give you a clue, but not all, and even those won't provide you with which of the 8 tones to use when you read it out loud. I was just taught to repeatedly write it out, listen to it being read, then repeat what I've written to link text to sound. New characters on text must be acquired whole: use graphical cue of a word's radical, use syntactic cue to figure out word separation and parts of speech, then use context cue to grok a fuzzy definition, store in brain and refine fuzzy definition cloud as I come across it next time. Or look it up in the dictionary by breaking the physical shape into radical and stokes: you cannot look up words by phonics. The language pretty much demands to be learned this way, as characters are largely unrelated to sound, and sound unrelated to meaning. Meaning <--- character ---> sound : connection arrows go one way.
The problem isn't using three cues or phonics to learn whole words, the problem is that most kids who struggle didnt get to a competent level to use those whole words without need for cues or phonics anymore. It's like when someone is learning math, if they don't have the multiplication table memorized, every time they see x = 4 * 12 they have to work out the math of (12+12+12+12) instead of being able to instantly see 48. The speed delay wears out the child, and they're simply too tired to sustain the activity or go further in depth.
No competent reader is sounding out long strange word letter by letter. A phonics learner isn't going to be able to sound out sudden foreign Latin phrases or a Greek concept vocabulary or French word without relying on three cues either. It's not the method: whichever route they used go get good, the "kids who read at least three times as good" eventually move past the scaffolding into competency.
Rodney didn't become confidently wrong in a day. Whole Word would have worked for him as a younger child if there had been immediate corrections along the way. "Okay that's a good guess but let's verify: the last word starts with an M so it can't be Bone. Let's try again. What other words do we know already from the text?" Even if no method has been taught at all, just listening to someone read for years should have given enough time for Rodney to pick up the word "me".
I'm very highly skeptical that the failure lies in method, instead of lack of earliest childhood one on one guidance. How busy were his parents as a toddler? How many kids were in each of Rodney's preschool class?
By the time some of the Kindergarteners and first graders realised they were in trouble, their peers who could read had already been confident reader for years. They are separated by hundreds of hours of reading competency. No wonder they have no patience for looking stupid sounding out words doing A B C: they want to hide and fake competency as quickly as they can, not restart with "baby" steps linking sounds to print.
What concepts go in the intersections of these three cues? I'm confused by the diagram.
B does not necessarily follow A. Again, speaking as someone who learned English as a second language, from a language that cannot be learned phonetically, I learned plenty of new English words by sight long before I finally hear the word out loud to make the phonetic connection. You don't need phonics skills to obtain A: there are other ways. But whatever way you use, you do need sheer time to form A. Maybe phonics is the fastest for English, and maybe spending what little time Rodney has exposure to literacy instruction on Cues is backwards, but my point is that it's sheer time, not method.
American kids are being shortchanged by massive class sizes and poverty. Rich American kids being taught whole words after their nanny retired from ASL aren't gonna have trouble, I am willing to bet.
I lost patience with the article about here. I scanned for phrases like socio-economic differences, poverty, class sizes, early childhood education opportunities, and didn't see any. Maybe I'll jump back in if I missed this discussion further on.
...i can't speak to current academic sources but three decades ago my american university absorbed the student population of its japanese sister-campus and i learned quite a bit from the cultural exchange, part of which was the stark contrast in literacy of lexigraphic (kanji) versus phonemic (kana) writing systems, which resonates across unrelated linguistic cultures including deaf populations who must necessarily learn english lexigraphically...
...i think the data pretty resoundingly demonstrates a correlation between literacy rates and phonetic versus word-recognition approaches...
I've always been weirdly jealous of my East Asian neighbours who grew up with hiragana/katakana or Taiwanese phonetic symbols or Korean script which sounds exactly as it looks :) it must be so much easier to learn
Friggin' Spanish has 100%-consistent orthography. (Ten-year-old me loved that. The irregular conjugations and arbitrary ser/estar distinction, not so much.) English is, to the best of my knowledge, somewhere between the only language with the problem of incredibly inconsistent pronunciation, or the only language where it's so severe that it's directing educational policy.
(Yet another surprise consequence of being Actually Five Other Languages In A Trench Coat, I guess.)
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
--James D. Nicoll
I wouldn't say 100% consistent. The first time I saw the word "guion" I did not know the stress is on the o. Some people write it "guión", but as I understand it, that is a nonstandard spelling. I will accede to 99.9% consistent orthography.
The downside, of course, is that it's harder for modern readers to tackle Cervantes because the spellings have changed. Even if Shakespeare uses words which are weird to modern ears, the spelling is generally the same we use today, though the pronunciation has changed.
I get your point, but, to be a bit pedantic: Although Korean script (Hangeul) was intended and designed to be very phonetic, in practice in modern Korean, there are a few pronunciation rules that need to be memorized. These rules alter the pronunciation of a given character when it's in certain contexts. e.g. ㄱ would be a "k" sound in word-initial position, but a "g" sound intervocalically.
Oh I didn't know that, thank you for giving me the example! :D
There's a fair number of silent letters, too, as I'm learning. Not as bad as English but it's not quite as straightforward as something like Spanish.
Yeah kanji are so much easier to learn.. /s
Okay, yes, kanji has so many different readings it's got its own difficulties. But for small children (and weebs) I love that they have furigana / katakana readings on top of them....
This is fascinating - I can’t conceptualise coming across an unknown word in text and trying to parse it without being able to hear it in my mind.
From everything you’ve said, I wonder if the better effectiveness of phonics is partly because it makes it harder to hide an inability to read? If the teacher is focusing on phonics, the “bone doesn’t start with an M” conversation kind of has to happen, it can’t just be left to slide. Tie that in with the issues around class sizes, lack of resources, etc. etc. and I wouldn’t be surprised if “more effective” often translates to “makes mistakes easier to spot” rather than “makes learning easier” per se.
It's a just a new instance of an object of Character class where the property Pronunciation is unknown/inaccessible for now. Your brain can still fill in all the other known information, and maybe even assign a temporary pronunciation like "foo" or share it with the closest looking character for now. Very similar to ordering from an unfamiliar language cuisine menu: you can probably guess the ingredients and style of food from the description, or what type of dish from menu location context and price.
I think phonics really is amazing, and three cues should NOT be used instead of actually being able to read, and certainly too late as primary teaching tool by the time kids are in mid elementary. But yeah, phonics could much sooner unmask hiding.
Teacher would call on names randomly and we had to stand up and continue reading the next sentence from the text. There was certainly no hiding possible when a kid is behind. What's going on with North American schools that a child could fake it for that long?
Edit:
I'm not suggesting the system I grew up with was better. It was not. The kids would be sorted by grade 1 assesment and children from the lowest quartile were basically discarded. They couldn't hide, but I'm not saying they would have recieved more humane treatment or better literacy remedial assistance.
The thing that crosses my mind is that for English at least, learning phonics better equips an individual for becoming a good reader unassisted later on even if for some reason a high level isn’t achieved earlier.
Once you know how to sound out words, even with the wildcards thrown in by English’s notorious word-pilfering, learning to recognize them quickly is simply a matter of frequency and volume; the reader simply needs to make a concerted effort to read more and improvement will come along naturally. You’ll probably get the pronunciations of a lot of words wrong until someone corrects you in spoken conversation, but that’s a much stronger position to be in than misreading or being entirely unable to read some large percentage of encountered material.
I don’t know if that’s borne out in reality, but that’s what makes sense in my head.
As an aside, I’ve been working on learning Japanese and the frequent (though not as often as in Cantonese w/hanzi) disconnection between kanji and their sounds has made learning interesting as someone who was taught English as a first language via phonics. What I’ve found to be most effective is to learn whole words rather than individual characters or radicals, since that’s how they’re always spoken, heard, and read.
Race and socio-economic: https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2020/08/06/what-the-words-say
Has more sources/links all the way at the bottom under subscribe as well.
Goodman is ridiculous:
What an incredibly stupid thing to say considering that the majority of languages today work with alphabets, i.e. letters that represent a particular sound. Even most languages that do not use the latin alphabet still work this way, like the Cyrillic or Arabic scripts. Sure, ultimately writing conveys meaning, but that's only step 3 out of 3. Step 1 is reading, and step 2 is translating that into the language you speak in your head.
It's such simple thing to get. Kids learn speaking first, you then teach them what sound each letter represents, and you let them speak out loud each letter of a word until they get it. I really don't understand how you could ever think that trying to jump to step 3 could be a good idea? Does he think that children that grow up just sort of magically gain step 2 along the way? Most people don't figure stuff out by themselves on a topic they are not interested in. That doesn't change between kids and adults.
These motherfuckers are teaching kids to read like English as if it were using Chinese characters. What the fuck.
To be fair, a spelling reform of the English language, by which I mean the introduction of spelling rules which are actually based on words’ pronunciation, would be both long overdue given the numerous consonant and vowel shifts of the past couple hundred years, as well as useful to learners of English as a second language.
However, with that all said…, kids not knowing how to read should and most likely will not be the reason which drives such a hypothetical major, major spelling reform.
Such comprehensive spelling reform would also be impossible, at least without deliberately favoring certain Englishes over others, because those shifts happened very differently in different places. Spelling reform that allows the same system or even a mostly-similar system to be used between even just "standard" General American and "standard" British English would not be able to be a good phonetic representation across both dialects. The vowels in particular are so, so different -- even more different than you think if you haven't tried doing this (which I have in my free time before.) With spelling reform like this, you either need to force everyone to write in one dialect, which will force speakers of other dialects to write in ways that deliberately don't reflect how they pronounce those words and involve memorizing how to spell many words as a result, replicating the current issues, or you come up with a system that reflects dialectical differences and speaker write how they talk, in which case standardization goes out the window even within the US and definitely within the UK, much less between the two countries, and the systems for different dialects would end up being so divergent that you'd need to learn them separately.
And that's before getting to the practical issues with reprinting everything ever written in English, physically and digitally.
I agree that English spelling is a mess and its inconsistencies when it comes to pronunciation make literacy harder, but I've tried to make even pretty conservative spelling reform proposals for fun in my free time because I have that flavor of autism, and it's very difficult to make a system that doesn't require a large subset of speakers to write differently than they speak even if you focus on just US American English -- doing so in a unified way for English as a worldwide language is pretty much impossible.
It would be neat to hear more about your efforts.
Also, if we currently don’t write the way ¿any of us? speak isn’t it still an improvement to write the way ¿some of us? speak?
I’m generally anti-spelling reform even if I think English spelling is silly because {waves in the direction of English language hegemony}.
If huge subsets of American English speakers still need to memorize how to write certain vowels in certain contexts because the spelling reform reflects vowel splits they don't have, it's hard to argue it's that much of an improvement for them, is the thing. Especially since these splits affect huge swaths of the language, not just rare or obscure vocabulary -- the cot-caught merger is incredibly widespread throughout the US but far enough from universal that not distinguishing the two in writing will also alienate plenty of speakers. Do we distinguish merry, Mary, and marry in spelling? Different speakers distinguish different subsets of those words. And that's just changes that differ regionally within the US. Include even standard Southern British English and you've got the father-bother distinction, the trap-bath split, and many more differences that speakers without those distinctions would simply have to memorize.
And, of course, the main issue is that choosing one dialect to base a standardization on inevitably privileges that dialect and its speakers over others (especially in the educational system -- we see this often enough already in that context). And of course the prestige dialect is not chosen in a vacuum. If more educated, richer speakers are able to "write how they talk" but poorer speakers with histories of discrimination and less access to quality education are forced to memorize how to spell words based on how those privileged speakers talk, we're widening the gulf that already exists there compared to now, when everyone has to memorize a bunch of weird arbitrary rules.
I think most of the good arguments against English spelling reform are fundamentally more practical than this -- it's just not politically or socioculturally feasible to actually accomplish that switch even with the perfect system. But the perfect system also doesn't exist, in large part because of English's being such an influential, global global language.
EDIT: forgot to address my efforts, but I'll scrounge around for my notebook. my spelling reform efforts were principally based on frustration with a famous conlanger's similarly lighthearted non-serious spelling reform proposal, which I disliked a number of the principles of because they didn't take advantage of methods common among other Germanic languages to indicate certain vowel quality/length distinctions through context (i.e., the existence of rules like doubled consonants indicating the previous vowel is short, or things like the silent -e rule in English). These rules make it much easier to handle the huge vowel inventories in Germanic languages and are present even in much more phonetic systems (like how Standard German is currently written, which is quite regular), though a unified approach to vowels still really isn't possible if you don't want US and British English to have separate systems. I gave up when trying to finagle vowels got more annoying than fun lol
Instagram and YouTube and Tiktok comments are full of much more phonetic typing. But in my experience, people typing how they talk, especially if it's AAVE or "u no wat i mean" is derided not supported. And imo that's the way spelling is more likely to change, especially without an academy of (even American) English
Would you be happy with a simplified spelling that doesn't reflect how you speak at all but reflects how others speak?
Yeah, needs of the many and all that would be worth it if it happened.
But I suspect the improvements in day to day written communication wouldn’t be enough to offset the disparity it would create. Post-reform access to scientific literature, etc. would necessitate learning post-reform English and pre-reform English. I can’t see inequity decreasing if kids need to learn to read pre-reform English on top of all the other socio-economic and systemic bias barriers we’ve got now.
Absolutely agreed on this re: the disparity in learning pre-reform English.
Great point I hadn’t really considered, thanks! Was hoping to see your input somewhere in the thread :-)
I learned German first at school, and despite that language having the reputation of being more difficult and with lots of rules, it is also phonetic. I imagine that when it comes to reading, it's something the child profits off a great deal. With English you have the difficulty of spelling being very inconsistent as it relates to sound of the words, while in German every word makes sense from a spelling perspective. That makes learning to read by speaking the invidiual letters out loud much more powerful.
Not quite every word (as someone who learned German first at home :P), but the exceptions prove the rule; and it’s vastly less deviation from the expected sound than in English, or French’s rules, for that matter – with the caveat that I never studied French so I don’t actually have authority to say anything about it that’s not based on vibes and snippets I’ve come to known, c’est la vie.
There are a few exceptions, but I think most of those are loanwords from other languages.
Literally 1984
Respectfully, Mr. Goodman (or not):
Sounds like the purpose is to make sure people make no sense of it all.
sarah jeong on bluesky
Maybe it's because I read the snippet about "pony" and "horse" before reading the article, but one thing that kept popping into my head is that parts of the three-cueing system sound more like... inferring definitions than reading?
I don't know if that's the right word to use to describe it, but two of the principles—using the sentence structure (e.g. is it a noun/verb) and potential context—feels similar to how I occasionally approach figuring out the definitions of new words. These days when I come across unfamiliar words they tend to be more obscure and highly specific, so I usually end up needing to look them up. But there are times I skip past words if I can figure out the meaning from context, especially if it's a word I won't likely use or encounter again.
I did it just now with "promulgate" in @myrrh's comment: I don't remember ever seeing that word before, but the context gave me enough clues to figure out it means some grandiose-sounding variation of teaching/promoting some idea. Sure enough, the definition is about making some idea/belief known or declaring it.
I wonder if that's why three cueing/MSV initially makes sense to so many people. We do that as advanced readers for definitions of unfamiliar word, so the process described is familiar enough. But inferring definitions is different from the act of reading. I think people forget that because those two parts are usually closely intertwined in how we learn and teach reading, and it's not like many people remember how we learned to read. I remember the first word I read on my own was "Cast" on a film's credits, and I had no clue what that meant so I guess I learned the phonics system, but I have no memories of practicing sounding out words.
...Side-note, I think this actually makes Dr. Seuss's books even better for teaching reading than I thought. He made up all sorts of words, so kids can't really use cues from the illustrations to guess what's written. Huh. I guess kids' books need more gibberish.
Your remark about Dr. Seuss' gibberish words exactly sums up my biggest concern with this learning system, which is that it doesn't give any method for reading words that the reader doesn't already know. How is someone who learnt to read like this supposed to read any proper nouns? Can they read someone's name and pronounce it?
Surmising the word from context sounds like a sort of word game rather than actually reading.
...ye gads, what a train-wreck: they promulgated quick-and-sloppy text scanning as a substitute for the foundational skills of meticulous reading...
...somehow that feels like a just reward for our modern information landscape, though; a natural evolutionary strategy for navigating the ever-diminishing signal-to-noise of text in our daily lives...
Maybe those kids simply don't know any better and imagine everyone is guessing at words too. A kid who grows up in a household that doesn't wear glasses won't report fuzzy vision, they'll just assume everyone also sees blurry blobs.
...oh i don't fault kids for how they're taught; i had absolutely no idea that letters represented sounds until my first grade teacher explained the concept one spring afternoon, then i went home and excitedly devoured all my textbooks over the next week...
(a decade later, my mind was blown by my first pair of eyeglasses when i discerned indiviual leaves on trees and couldn't stop giggling with glee for days)
Wow that must have been quite the Discovery! You taught yourself how to read! And you could see leaves finally!
A young person told me they thought bird watching was a pretend hobby, that people just listen to bird sounds and imagine a cute bird in the tree. They got glasses now.
Reading your comment reminded me of my friend who was born with a non-functioning olfactory nerve and has never been able to smell. He told me that when he was a kid he thought people just put things close to their face to better appreciate the look of it and somehow inhaling in your nose would help you see the colors better, and then you would say "this smells nice".
Oh, is food very different for them as well?
I should ask him about that again. I remember us sitting around and chatting about it over a few beers, since smell is such a component of taste and him lacking that means he is missing part of that experience.
I know he responded that he tasted foods just fine, and we got in to how it would be hard for him to describe in detail how he experiences taste different from the rest of us, since that is the only way he's ever known how things should taste.
If he has anosmia, his sense of taste is likely incredibly weak. Ben of Ben & Jerry's has it, and it's why their ice cream has so many mix-ins compared to other brands. He needed extra everything to taste anything.
...nary a shampoo bottle nor toxic shock syndrome pamphlet was spared for the next decade, i assure you...
Toxic shock syndrome pamphlet!! Wow that's a blasf from the not so fondly remembered past.
It makes me sad to think about how many brilliant and wonderful people led less than optimal lives because they didn't have such simple tech advances.
I know exactly how you felt about being able to discern individual leaves. I'll occasionally go outside for a bit without my glasses and then put them on and try to not take for granted the ability to see so clearly.
I'm not sure why, but it took me multiple years of mentioning to my parents that I thought I needed glasses before they got me some. I would even put on their glasses and say "I can see better wearing this, it is still blurry but less blurry than before". The day I got my own pair was amazing!
There should be a rule that any time someone claims to have found a revolutionary way to teach a core subject (reading, writing, math), we look at it with extreme suspicion and require years of study before introducing it. Those core subjects have had their teaching methods distilled down over hundreds of years across every single culture. We're obviously not perfect, but the chances of a revolution instead of an evolution is quite unlikely at this point.
Chestertons fence
I agree with you.
I don't understand the whole "look at the picture" thing. OK, sure, in a first grade book for students who are learning how to read, I'm sure there are a lot of pictures.
But in higher grades -- and not even that high, like maybe by 4th grade -- most books, especially novels, stop using pictures. What then? And how about the adult world of forms, instructions, contracts, etc? What pictures should a reader use? That's crazy.
The more I read about this whole thing, the more angry I get. I'm not one of those affected by this (though I entered K-12 in 1993). I've always been a strong reader, and I think a big chunk of that is because my mom taught me how to read before I entered Kindergarten. Through phonics and sounding out words.
I'm angry because we've failed millions of people. And in the face of scientific evidence, we're still refusing to change the methods. Because three-cuing is easier to teach. And maybe it's cheaper to do it this way. Cheaper now, but more expensive in the future, anyway. Feel like this is another of those "socialize the losses, privatize the gains" examples.
Fortunately, some US states have adopted better teaching methods and hopefully that will continue. (Also in California.)
I think a similar look should be taken at the way mathematics is taught as well.
From what I've seen from my nieces' and nephews' homework, they are taught 5 different ways to do long division with decimals, for example: using partial quotients, scaling, expanded notation, area model, and the standard algorithm in sixth grade. Thus it seems they understand nothing, short-term memorize 5 different algorithms instead of one and can't do it two weeks later and are unconfident and confused.
To be quite honest, I am and was very good at elementary mathematics (Montessori), but I would struggle to understand what is being taught. These are all different ways to approach a problem when doing mental math, but someone's preferred route should be individual. Not to mention, they don't do any mental math - there were numerous sixth graders that didn't know what 3*4 was. A calculator was the solution.
...i've been honestly shocked by the innumeracy of people entering my profession over the past decade, shored-up by such blind faith in calculators that they have absolutely no awareness of catastrophic errors until their repercussions are made self-evident...
...i strongly suspect that they're vicitims of the math wars...
I don't get it: I've used the same strategies (#1 and #3 exactly like that, plus a variation of #2), but it never hindered me.
Instead, reading always has been one of the things I am good at, be it for my job or entertainment or when I took foreign language courses.
I think that likely no learning method is applicable to everyone: A good teacher might be able to identify what is good for whom.
I don’t think there’s any issues with using those strategies once you know how to read words. As in, you can see a string of letters in isolation and understand it represent a particular word. Like if you see the word “pony” spelled out for the first time you could say or think “pony” rather than “horse.”
But this is something like vibe reading. You might recognize very common words or phrases but if you come across a new word then all you’ve got to go on is vibes. Because you weren’t taught to actually read words.
Additionally part of the problem is not teaching phonics, which is a pretty core part. You can do the three steps (most do), but if you don't have a backing of phonics then you don't read words, you see words and make and attach meaning. In the three-cues you don't learn to read p--o--n--y and then link that to pony, you learn to see the image of the word 'pony', and link that to an image of a pony.
The problem is that the three-cues was supposed to remove the need for phonics because it is easier, but its turning out that just because its easier to teach does not mean that its easier for the future adults to read and most importantly, understand.
I am assuming1 you likely have a backing in phonics and then apply the three cues.
1. (as you are old enough to be on this forum, and properly used the word whom)
On the subject of learning to read, we were taught to read (my mother tongue is phonetic but not English) as follows:
p-o-n-y (read the letters one by one) ->
po-ny (convert to syllables) ->
pony (get the word).
After a little while (for me AFAIR, within 1-2 years), this process converges to #1 (you read the word as a whole sequence of letters). It makes sense that way, as it is very fast and also helps with correct spelling (ever worse on the internet nowadays, implying that people might not be learning to read in this way).
Anyway, #1 leads to problems when you don't actually know the word. Then comes #2 and #3 to help the reader infer the words or general meaning, but these can only work only if you don't know only a few words on each sentence. If you don't know many words, it will be a problem.
Also, beyond these, one can infer the meaning of an unknown word by thinking of known words sharing a similar root (+context).
In the end, I'd still think that such problems come not from the method but its application in schools. Of course no method can be perfect.
Btw I have no backing in phonics as a field of knowledge (as you see i was taught to read in the phonic way) but I still find the subject interesting (linguistics in general).
Based on that description, you were taught phonics.
I recognized that in my last sentence, yes!
But I do keep the notion that kids will converge into the same reading mode (little of both?) as they become more experienced.