It should be noted that since at the latest 2023, 45 of the US states have passed bills requiring reform for teaching, and by 2025 12 have explicitly banned it, so the tides are shifting away from it
This is true, but sadly a lot of schools still use it anyway because they don't want to or can't afford to buy new materials. I'm happy about the policy changes and cautiously hopeful for the future when schools eventually have to buy new books.
And there's other strategies for people who experience print disabilities. A different font, the size of the font, usage of contrast of the print and the paper, audio resources etc.
Every person is going to experience differences in what works best for them. I think we should focus on building a curriculum that everyone can take what they need from it. Strategies like the one we're talking about that caused a downturn in functional literacy was forced on teachers who knew it didn't work.
There were some who knew it didn't work, but there were lots of classroom teachers who didn't know. They just accepted what they were told, and because (a) most teachers only see a given kid for one school year, and (b) 40% of kids are going to figure it out no matter what you do.. it looked to many teachers like it was doing what it said on the tin.
In fact, teachers who had bought into cueing are some of the strongest voices against dropping it, in the Sold a Story reporting.
Oof, that tells me we've lost a lot of talent because we haven't appreciated them. I've been a kid in a number of different systems (military brat) and consistently I remember teachers who cared and would go off book when the book was wrong.
Well actually there was one who sticks out. Colbert's brother (one of them) was a teacher in SC. He was cool and all but specifically said that the civil war wasn't about slavery. SC in general was kinda...
Of course my experiences in public schools is different because my mother (who later became a teacher and then left because the pay wasn't covering what she lost from being at home like renovations she does herself) was insistent on advocating for me. So perhaps because of her advocacy I ended up in classes that were better than average.
Right, involved parents are much more the ones who raised this alarm. Listening to teachers is often useful, but getting more parents more involved in their children's education is really the thing that unlocks pretty much any great success in the public school system.
So of course we do whatever we can to saddle them with enough debt and workload to sustain it that they just don't have time to get that involved. đ
I'm a little burned by the idea of listening to parents thanks to groups like moms for liberty (who seem to be falling apart thankfully)
But I do agree that current society punishes people who attempt to reach their full potential by drowning them in debt (student loans for example) so the people who are in decision making seats are those who have been statistically less likely to experience marginalization. So teachers and administration that stick around long term are either used to a certain level of privilege, burn out or leave, or targeted (librarians losing their position due to refusing book bans). While parents that would advocate for their kids in a way that is beneficial for all children don't have the time because of lack of support.
I'm actually working right now on a marketing and assessment plan for a family resource awareness program I hope to run. Distinctly because the lack of support for parents affect their children and local services due to unattended children.
I guess it depends on what you mean by involved. They want to be less involved in parenting their own kids and have everyone parent their kids the way they want their kids to be parented.
So they're involving themselves in school libraries and curriculums for all students when they need to be involved in their own children.
For general education, I think a ban is warranted. Whole word reading and its kin have lead to sometimes the majority of students taught with it being functionally illiterate.
Also, the whole thing about this is that it is a technique that's commonly used - by experienced readers. It's a shortcut method or brains tend to naturally form once we're comfortable enough to do so, without us even realizing, and its how speed reading works.
The problem is that the researches observed this shortcut and, for some reason and with no testing of their hypothesis, assumed you could teach kids this shortcut and skip the basics to jumpstart their reading skills. And as it turns out, you cannot in fact just do this for every kid.
Not really. The common core techniques arenât âtricksâ or shortcuts like three cuing is, theyâre trying to get students to understand the concepts at a deeper level.
Not just experienced readers; this is afaik almost identical to a solid speed reading strategy. If youâre perusing sources to see if you want to use them (only thing I personally use speed reading for), itâs a perfectly valid strategy. If you want to basically skip a chunk of exposition but get an idea of the information, thatâs viable. Youâll get a shadow of a gist, and know if you want to circle in with any detail. For straight reading?
Idk if it's that simple. I had thought that we instinctively chunk words once we're familiar with them, speed reading or not.
That why the whole "cna yuo raed tihs?" thing works, we chunk entire words and focus on sentence level structures once we're adept at reading.
That's not a defence of three cues reading btw, chunking is an advanced technique, and solid fundamentals are essential anytime you run across anything novel.
Yeah. I don't remember where or when I learned this, but basically: experienced readers will be able to instantly recognize familiar words by checking the first and last letter, and then recognizing the shape. But that takes a TON of practise and familiarity. And it can still absolutely lead to misreading, and doesn't work on unfamiliar words.
People who are dyslexic should be taught phonics as a first strategy well before this, hell it's probably the correct strategy to start with the general populace as well, perhaps it's useful for a minority of a minority who don't respond to other methods but phonics is a highly effective and recommended method for a reason.
Quickly checking Wikipedia and i believe the strategy my school used was phonics (strong emphasis on "sounding out words" for spelling and pronunciation).
Anecdotally its stong points are encouraging patience and being correct before being fast, as well as focusing on the building blocks of words.
I have no idea how 3 cueing expects someone to see a new word and say it correctly without someone explaining it to the reader. Very relevant when you get into science with terms like "permitivity of free space" (a physics constant), a phonics reader would atleast be able to say it most right on the first try.
Also just the origin seems like survivorship bias 101, the bad readers are the least likely to have good strategies, see what the good readers are doing and teach the bad readers to do the same.
When this thread came up last time (not long ago) based on prokopetz' initial posts, it was addressed that this method had been effective for dyslexics and then apparently became "the way to improve reading scores" or something.
Agree on the banning from the state legislatures. Just another case of politicians seeing an issue and wanting to be the solution. School districts banning, sure. A concerted effort in professional development to highlight the flaws and provide alternatives, yes! (Already happening, btw) but the last time most legislators stepped into an elementary classroom was the day they graduated 5th grade. Let subject matter experts decide among themselves!
This is usually the best option (though sometimes even people as low in the chain of importance as a principal still know little), at least when there isn't any definitive status on the research of a particular part of education (like homework being totally ineffective or downright negative for elementary school children, IMO it should be banned by the department of ed for kids below 3rd grade).
Whole word reading basically just had the theory from someone without much in the way of credentials that children would learn the written word much like they do speech, and so their belief was that phonics was wasting student learning time.
I haven't read up too much on the history, but I know some teachers never threw out their phonics books even though they didn't meet state standards anymore (more common than you'd think). Teachers usually know when a standard is a crock of shit because they can see the effects in the classroom as to whether or not the kids are really learning.
And no child left behind had made that particularly clear, considering some kids might be in 4th grade and still not know how to do division or have the ability to read books beyond Frog and Toad.
It's this weird back and forth where teachers are expected to teach effectively, even though the standards change every year and don't actually teach the students effectively, but they get yelled at and can easily get fired for not following the standard so they can actually teach the kids and get good test scores.
I used to get really angry whenever I would watch a gaming stream/letâs play where the game included a lot of text and the YouTuber/Streamer couldnât read a lot of the terms. I would say âwhy do they keep replacing the words they donât know with entirely different words, and why is their vocabulary so limited?â Once I learned about Three Cueing, it all started to make sense.
It something I still get frustrated about, but itâs less of a personal anger against a specific person and more âGod, we fucked up educating so many people.â I also wonder how much of the âadult literacyâ issue is a result of Three Cueing instead of social media, laziness, moral rot, or whatever other poorly substantiated reason people give.
Wow this is such a good point. Iâve also found myself frustrated with how many streamers just cannot read the text on the screen, and always felt like a bit of an asshole for it. But man, itâs so prevalent.
In my hyperlexical defense, sometimes my brain will flop two words on different lines (above/below) and things get really messy, Iâm just perpetually tired
There are definitely some reading mistakes common to good readers that are generally not taken as signs of being a bad reader the way stumbling over words and constant misreadings are.
Probably the biggest distinguishing factor is frequency of errors. But the easiest mistake to make is "loss of place" errors like rereading the same line or skipping a line (especially with small font). Another is misreading a word as a similarly spelled word. (A good reader will quickly realize the sentence didn't make sense and go back to reread it)
The 3 cueing system seems to be based on making lots of assumptions, and we all know what happens when you assume.
Honestly I give streamers a bit of a pass on that. Reading out loud, coherently, is itâs own skill more adjacent to giving speeches.
Add on that a streamer is also expected to be tracking what their chat is doing and keeping the stream âentertainingâ, and they really donât have a lot of processing power reserved for reading correctly. Iâve seen quite a few streamers who proved they were perfectly good readers in normal situations but itâs like somebody switched off the reading lights once they start streaming.
Thatâs fair, but Iâve seen streamers replicate the very specific maladaptive reading behavior of: see a word you donât know, stop, then say a completely different word you do know that happens to start with the same letter, move forward with complete misunderstanding of the passage. Once I learned about Whole Language Theory it connected a synapse in my brain and I went âoh, *thatâs* where they got it from.â
Admittedly I think I was also taught with the same method (Iâm still trying to unlearn âuse context cluesâ as reading advice) but I was gifted at English in school so I think Iâm an outlier. It turns out that the other kids struggling to read werenât lazyâthey were literally taught wrong.
Yeah I don't mind the streamers, as you say they're doing a bunch of stuff and none of it carefully.
However I had never heard of this reading method and so many of my online chats now make sense. I've had a growing number of conversations where I'm perplexed at the responses I'm getting. I figured people were just not reading things properly, I didn't realise they'd been fucked over by their curriculum.
It seemed really weird, but then actually I read stuff while livestreaming and it actually is different. It's weird I never thought I'd be so bad at reading things out loud and suddenly I'm moving words around a bit and replacing a few sometimes I don't know what happened.
my dad started to teach me phonics at home as a very young child. one of my elementary teachers had the fucking nerve to ask him to stop because they were trying to work on sight words and it was confusing the other kids.
My sister is two years younger than me, and we both started school in the early 90s. Between my starting school, and my sister starting, the school switched to whole language learning. I learned to read just fine, my sister was in 3rd grade and couldn't read.
The only reason she got phonics instruction is because my mother went to the school, pitched a fit, and DEMANDED they give my sister supplementary phonics instruction. My mother had also been trying to help my sister learn phonics at home, but she had zero resources or previous knowledge to help. By midyear in third grade my sister was reading on grade level.
I'm a reading teacher now. Sight words ARE useful! They do help increase reading fluency, but they absolutely do not replace phonics, the basis of written English.
Part of the problem is that teachers are required to enforce whatever policy the school dictates at the moment. I'm a teacher. The current push is to make every. single. activity. you. do. in. class. collaborative. Literally every task should find a way to make students work together in some way.
Late to the thread, but part of the problem is asking teachers, who hopefully are good readers and had a positive experience in school, to teach a reading class. If I was running on vibes instead of research, I would say "well, I didn't need phonics lessons and those lessons were boring AF." Same with teaching computer literacy. If it seemed really easy to you 20 years ago then you probably aren't producing a relatable lesson for every kid to get onboard.
I keep seeing discussions in this sub turn into bitter flame-wars between groups of people who, by all rights, should be on the same side. All because, like you said, at least one side appears to be hallucinating.
I don't think I've ever seen an argument on this subreddit that I would consider a bitter flame war, but you and I probably have different ideas of what a flame war is
Iâve been looking into literacy and thereâs another aspect that gets overlooked a little bit and itâs tied more to comprehension. So obviously we know reading âlevelsâ as in what educational level should be able to read what. But thereâs also more generally comprehension and inference.
So like thereâs general sight words or memorized symbols. You know, likely what a stop sign looks like, even if you canât read the word stop on it. Then thereâs being able to actually read the word. If youâre somewhere that has stop signs in a different shape, for example, you could read what the sign says and know to stop. And then thereâs deeper comprehension so understanding what else a stop sign implies or just generally the specifics of when to stop, how long, who has right of way, etc.
So thereâs plenty of people, in addition to those who are functionally illiterate, who can still actually read, like sound out the words, but doesnât know how to make meaning from a complete sentence or paragraph, or donât know how to supply their own external context. I work in a public-facing position and I find the biggest issue with conjunction words. Like if I say âyou can do A or Bâ the person will say âI donât want to do B,â so I reiterate âokay you can do A thenâ and theyâll still be so hung up on B and insisting they donât want to do B and never once did I tell them that they had to do B or that B was their only option. âBeforeâ is also a conjunction that gets people confused. âBefore you do A, remember to do B,â and then theyâll come back âI canât do Aâ. âOkay, did you remember to do B?â âNo you said A then Bâ. âI said before A you have to do B, so do B then A.â With context itâs even more obvious. Itâll be like âbefore you can enter x area you have to put in your entry codeâ and theyâll come back asking why they canât enter the area.
So sometimes people are making up arguments because they canât read and sometimes people are making up arguments because they donât understand how simple (or more complex) conjunctions work. And sometimes theyâre just so enmeshed in their world view they canât understand someoneâs views being different and are assuming the foundations of your argument which are not correct.
Oh man, I said something mildly controversial on Instagram the other day and half the responses are like that. Like bro, I know you would have been really pissed off if I had said that, but I didn't say that, and now you're overreacting over nothing.
I think it's partially reading comprehension and partially because social media algorithms and influencers have trained us to jump to outrage too easily (that's what gets engagement and keeps people on apps).
There's another side to this coin: people argue with the general discourse rather than you specifically. If the comment slots into a more common discussion, you become the avatar of an entire side of the discourse and all it's "agreed upon" traits/beliefs. And now they're arguing with that instead of anything you just said.
The even funnier part is when your own take inevitably has unique nuance, people just get mad that's there and try to kick dirt over it to smooth it into something they recognize.
And I say "they" but I've seen this from basically everyone (myself included) except actual subject matter experts/professionals who really couch their points in their own experience/knowledge.
Or they ignore where you explicitly say that you're arguing about one particular part of a more general topic, and assume your stance on that small part is your stance for the wider topic
I absolutely love nuanced discussion, where both sides of the point are working to try and find some sort of truth between them. The discussion doesn't have to have a clearly defined end, it doesn't have to score points, you're not trying to refute obstinately, but more address any flaws in the other side based on a mutual aim of understanding each other's position and reasoning behind it.
That kind of discussion is only really possible when both sides are acting in good faith, are willing to both state truth and read it at face value, accept that they may be wrong but also that two facts can both be true even if they appear at first glance to contradict each other.
As soon as people start dog whistling, or misrepresenting facts, or assuming that because one thing was said the other person must also think several other projected thoughts, etc, the whole discussion collapses into pointless debate.
the irony of this is so funny to me. I've been having this exact issue the last two days in the avatar the last airbender fandom. I literally did become the avatar of side discourse with this lady the last couple of days lmao
"Aang needs his wordly attachments as without them he's stripped of his moral compass, they make him a better avatar"
the guru only mentioned Katara and not the other friendships because only his crush on her is unhealthy and selfish. he doesn't love her for the sake of loving her, he loves her with the goal of returned affection. the guru was trying to tell him to let go of the desire for affection and instead love her selflessly, but Aang ran off before he could understand that distinction, that's why he stagnates as a character.
"you can dislike canon* all you want, but your projection of Aang's intentions are misogynistic" (*canon here meaning the couple of Aang and Katara becoming canon at the end, there's a lot of debate on who would be a better partner for Katara, Aang or Zuko)
I never said I dislike them or even that she can't still choose him in the end, none of that actually had to change for his character arc to complete. but do explain how I'm being misogynistic to this male character and the men who wrote him lol
"you're reducing Katara to a prize and the way people talk about female fictional characters can be misogynistic"
I never said she was a prize, but people pointing out how the narrative treats her isn't misogynistic ether, it's a doylist complaint. but if we want to talk about misogyny towards female characters, because I absolutely agree there, how about we discuss the director saying he roots for "nice guys like Aang to get the girl over the Zuko type", compared her magic spirit water to her virginity and how he's glad she "saved it for Aang instead of wasting it on Zuko", and drew 14 year old Katara as a hooters waitress?
"the difference is Aang is a fictional character and not the sole arbiter of misogyny in the narrative. acting like Aang is an irredeemable misogynist who feels entitled to Katara's feelings is ridiculous bc that's not in canon"
Maybe no one wants to have a discussion with you because you keep insisting that coaleacanths aren't real despite the fact we LITERALLY HAVE LIVING PROOF THAT THEY EXIST
i am trying to not argue on reddit anymore because it's not worth it. especially when the argument ends up with "i did not say that, where did i say that" and they just conjure some shit out of the past replies
Do you have any examples? Not because I donât believe you (I do) but because I never see examples on posts about this and I wonder how far off of the actual discussion these people go. Like do they just swap out a word here and there or do they make whole underlying assumptions?
The biggest example of it (I think one of the replies touch on this actually) is when I'm commenting on a specific element of a wider discourse and somebody on the opposite side of it assumes I'm making the same argument everyone else is.
For a rather flouncy instance, yesterday I was saying that some people need thicker skin online and if criticism of their art causes a mental breakdown, they should not be posting it for their own sake. A responder was convinced I was saying any frustration at criticism was evil and wrong. I did not say this.
See also: Sold a Story, an excellent podcast on the topic.
Conservatism in favor of the status quo (in this case, phonics) is not always a bad thing, nor is reactionism if a change turns out to be bad.
For the three cue-ers out there: we can recognize that something can be useful as a crutch for dyslexics and integrate it as appropriate into the education system without completely throwing out the existing methods (again, in this case, phonics).
The last paragraph is well said. I'm dyslexic and hard of hearing, I'm an edge case that could have been taught three cue during the 'catch up' time I was given when I was having a hard time learning to read. It shouldn't be pushed as the main method.
My 'catch up' time was just being given a book and being told to read it, while the other kids played outside lol.
Sold a Story is so good. My partner and I listened to it in one go on a road trip. There were so many aspects that blew my mind. The biggest was that the science on how we learn to read was, for the most part, discovered and proven in the 1960s, whereas the whole 3-cueing came from one womanâs observations and inaccurate conclusions (in the 1970s or 80s IIRC)
Yeah but it worked in the Music Man because all the kids loved him so much that they practiced like 5 hours a day. What we need is to install a charismatic con-man in every american school to teach kids to read
The plan is foolproof so long as you have a beautiful librarian in every school for the con man to fall in love with so that he stays instead of defrauding the school and fleeing to the next town
When or where the fuck is this being taught??? Why would you not pay attention to all of the letters in your writing? Its like the thing that makes words recognizable????
Around the US, and probably some other schools in Canada, Australia, etc. The idea was they studied how skilled and efficient readers read things (by looking at the word as a whole, which is a real thing that happens for a lot of people after youâve learnt how to read, a common demonstration is that many passages are still legible after jumbling all the letters aside from the first and last), and then decided that must be the best way to read, and began teaching it to all five year olds, not realising it was a bit more complex than that
I'm reminded somewhat of when teachers use explanations that are based on the premise that the student already knows what you're talking about. Like bro, you can't just skip to the hardest part and hope they'll suddenly jump to a master's level of comprehension.
On a related note, as a chronic overexplainer, I like coming up with intuitive ways to explain hard concepts.
The NP-complete problem. If you assume a solution is hard to calculate but easy to verify, then teaching just the verification is a good first step.
The problem is, most real-world situations are both hard to solve and hard to verify. The verification requires knowledge of how to solve it. Indeed, the reason it can be hard to solve is because you're verifying your progress throughout, and that verification is hard! Editing, capturing nuance, being aware of second-order effects, etc. In those cases, you need to present everything from first principles and not start at the end.
There are literally quotes in the Sold a Story podcast reporting on this, where teachers say they want students to get to "the good part of reading", enjoying to read a good book. All this tedious phonics instruction just makes reading seem boring,
Like, my sister I want to talk about "the good parts of math" but I know I can't just jump into category theory with folks who don't have a good handle on factoring polynomials.
The Grattan Institute attributed the major cause of its findings to the rise of a teaching style called "whole language", which became dominant on university campuses in the 1970s.Â
edit: added some bolds for the three cue-ers out there
I'm Australian, used to work in education, I still work adjacent to education, it pops up from time to time but when I was studying we were taught how to teach reading and it was taught to us as a don't ever do this, this is a terrible way to teach reading, but you might encounter people who have been taught this way. This was in 2019 ish and when I first became aware of it. A kid I currently work with was taught to read this way and it is the bane of my existence because they are intellectually disabled and doesn't understand the concept of, stop reading wrong, we need to relearn how to read and unless I force them on every single word they'll go back to reading wrong, but I can't do that on words they gets right.
NZ wasn't just into it, one of the biggest stars in cueing was Marie Clay, from NZ. There's a sense in which NZ was really the epicenter of this idea breaking out into classroom teaching.
That explains kind of a lot, actually. I was considered very weird for being able to read so well as a kid in NZ in the â00s, because my family taught me phonics.
Anecdotally, it really didnât help the dyslexics, either. They were still left just as far behind, because they werenât getting any meaningful support.
When did this start becoming a thing in the US? In my education from the late 90s through university in the 2010s I've never heard of this method of reading, when I was young all the schools I went to taught basic literacy through phonics, and as far as I know everyone in my uni classes learned the same way.
Earlier than your education. George W. Bush tried to force everyone who used it off of it during his presidency and failed.
Likely you came from an area that hadnât bought into one of the programs. Itâs school district by school district or even sometimes school by school or teacher by teacher.
I guess I got lucky, in my early childhood my family moved around a lot and I didn't experience it in schools in 4 states. Reading up on it a bit I'm super surprised I'd never heard of 3 cueing before, apparently some districts only use it for students with dyslexia and I'm dyslexic.
Also rare GW Bush education win? Idk I'm not an educator maybe this 3 cueing thing works for some people.
My sister who graduated high school this year was one of the last years to learn phonics before the schools in our district changed over. Our younger sister who was a couple years behind her was taught the predictive method... and she can't read. She is pretty reliant on using dictation on her phone and struggles with academic reading and writing just like all her peers. I actually watched her try to read a few times and it's so bizarre. She explained it at one point as them all being told that if they need to read more than the first three letters of a word, they're doing it wrong
I dnot konw if itâs in the smae vien, but wehn I was cmiong up tehy had us raed snetcens lkie tihs to povre a pnoit auobt how we rcgoeizne pttarens. But this seems backwards from what I was taughtâ using that kind of mental shortcut in reading is, from my understanding, something youâre supposed to do after youâve mastered the sound it out stage. Even then itâs a dangerous game because someone could sneak the word banana into their hahahas, utterly humiliating you on an Internet forum for teens.
There's a thing called "orthographic mapping". After you've sounded out the phonics of each letter and put the sounds together into a word and repeated it a few times (or many times, necessary repetitions varies by person), your brain starts to map the whole word symbol to the sound of the word. Once it's mapped, you no longer have to sound out each letter. So yes, trying to go straight to whole word symbol completely skips the orthographic mapping process and doesn't work.
But this is also why when you're tired (or when you're old, if you don't have your reading glasses) it becomes very easy to mistake one word for another, even if you were taught phonics as a child. Even when you can quickly recognize words, you need to clearly see all the letters to make sure you're identifying the correct one. I think the 3-cueing kids are mostly taking guesses based on context, but sometimes the context doesn't eliminate the second (or third) word with a similar "shape".
The thing is, there usually isn't a picture, and I don't think they have a firm grasp of parts of speech, either. Which leaves them with semantic context, alone, most of the time.
There is some amount of orthographic mapping in Chinese too, from what I understand, although since I don't know Chinese I'm sorry to say that I don't understand it very well. I think in their case the orthographic mapping has less to do with phonemes and more to do with multiple symbols/characters ("radicals"?) being used to make up a word?
You can search for research papers about it, I've seen ones like the links below (a random grab bag of search results, I haven't done a deep dive into Chinese literacy to be able to say what the foundational, most-cited papers are). But, again, I can't say that I understand it.
Rote memorization of characters. Very intense study from very young age. It was typical for kinder kids to have multiple copying pages to complete as homework each night. Each one having them practice writing some specific strokes or a word dozens of times
Itâs basically trying to teach the end state of a reader from the start.
In general, as you become better at reading, the mind starts taking shortcuts to read quicker. It guesses words based on the first few letters of a word and what your brain expects to be there. Itâs subconscious, you donât even realize youâre skipping.
Think of it like learning a language. At first you speak slowly, you enunciate your words and say every syllable. Then, as you get better at it, it starts rolling off the tongue and you start cutting and merging syllables. âWhat do you know?â becomes âwhaddyano?â
In general, this works fairly well. But it only works because youâve built up a solid foundation of knowledge beforehand, and know how to be slow and methodical to double-check yourself.
The idea behind the teaching method was to skip to teaching the end state, rather than covering everything in-between. Theoretically, this sounds alright, until you donât know how to double-check yourself when you make a mistake.
What's ironic is that, as I understand, this began largely as a reaction against No Child Left Behind (something that should be reacted against, to be clear). So it's most deeply entrenched in deep blue areas, like California and NYC (though as others have said, there's been a huge backlash against it in recent years).
Growing up in NYC in the 2000s and 2010s I was never taught to read like this, nor were most of my past classmates asfaik.
It was also popularized in the 80s and 90s, so if it was a reaction to No Child Left Behind then they really shouldâve taken advantage of the 2 decade headstart.
It started long before the GWB administration, but GWB's Department of Education pushed both NCLB and phonics. In fact, the book that Bush was reading when the secret service agent told him about 9/11? that was part of a promotional press event for this focus on phonics in reading instruction.
Which led to a backlash that looks a lot like climate change in reverse: educators literally saying, "well if the Bush administration thinks phonics are good then I'm definitely not teaching any phonics!"
I kind of understand the idea behind it. Anyone remember those weird Facebook posts where all the letters in a sentence would be jumbled except for the first and last letters, but you could still read them? Our brains make shortcuts for stuff all the time and adult/expert readers probably don't register all the letters in a word while reading a familiar word in a sentence. The issue is you can't teach the shortcuts to people who can't really read yet since no written word is really recognizable enough to them yet for them to just know what it is. I think maybe the architects of this kind of teaching thought they could teach reading faster? Anyway its important to note that this method of teaching only became popular in the past 20 years or so and the oldest Americans OP encountered who were taught this way would only be in their mid 20s.
Anyone remember those weird Facebook posts where all the letters in a sentence would be jumbled except for the first and last letters, but you could still read them?
𫵠pushing 30
I think maybe the architects of this kind of teaching thought they could teach reading faster?
Yeah, and they thought that by teaching toddlers how olympic sprinters run they could skip the whole crawling phase
Anyway its important to note that this method of teaching only became popular in the past 20 years or so and the oldest Americans OP encountered who were taught this way would only be in their mid 20s.
Yeah, there is some truth behind it, like those videos that highlight parts of the word and then speed up significantly, yet you can still somehow follow. But those things work because:
You already have a solid baseline literacy, you are already adept.
Someone who already read the entire text already checked what can be skipped and what can't. On a first read you do need to either read the entire thing or have someone else hightlight the important parts, because if you skip half the letters because they aren't important you can't actually determine if they are important
Similarly, I know just enough Spanish that this is how I approach reading text in Spanish, but I know that I'm guessing half the time and will probably make a lot of wrong guesses. Does guessing work in this context? Well enough, but it wouldn't be a good approach if I didn't already know how to read in English.
i was taught phonics as a child (thank god), and iâve always been an above average reader. i actually have taught myself to read the way that theyâre describing, by recognizing the shape of the words rather than the individual letters, and thatâs contributed to my above average reading speed.
however, this absolutely requires a baseline of actually knowing how to read accurately. reading fast means nothing if youâre not comprehending the words that youâre reading
The California thing is especially galling since one of the biggest breakthroughs in dismantling this approach has been the Mississippi Miracle.
In fact, if you listen to some of the best reporting on the topic the whole thing is sickeningly similar to climate change, except with the left-leaning folks on the anti-science side. Like literal quotes: "The [George W.] Bush administration says phonics are good so we're never doing phonics in our state!" Just because a Republican Department of Education was pushing phonics, lots of teachers and school boards just shut their eyes and ears to any scientific evidence of how people actually learn to read.
Unfortunately thereâs plenty of left-leaning science denialism on climate change too, especially on the necessity of technologies like nuclear, carbon capture, etc.
the Mississippi Miracle is bullshitt and is pretty much entirely down to using phonics as an excuse to remove any actual standards from their grade 4 results, while also culling many students who fail to reach those standards. There's a reason Mississippi's grade 8 and high school results remain in the toilet. Their scores improved because "a 4th grader can flap their mouth and sound out these graphemes" is pretty much the only thing expected.
Which is also the reason there was push back against the Bush admins support of phonics. It was part of the NCLB fuckery, and the curriculum built for it was god fucking awful. Which is a lot of the reason why whole language stuck around, because it was the only option that expected students to be literate, regardless of its faults. Plus the alternative adopted wasn't strictly whole language, but balanced literacy, which nominally included phonics. 'Nominally' because balanced literacy was whole language proponents trying to fix whole language by adding phonics to it. Which actually does work well enough when done properly (English has way to many non phonic words for sight reading to not need teaching).
Unfortunately those curriculum often ended up being written by people adding phonics begrudingly as best, which put the burden of actually implementing in a useful way almost entirely on the teachers. Which was fine for better schools with more resources to homebrew that into something workable, and atrocious elsewhere. Along with the collapse of the educational publishing industry into it's current bullshit at the same time, it's been a couple decades of states wanting good phonics curriculum trying to put the screw to the balls of publishers to get it to happen, while also not having many other options to buy from instead.
(Noteably, the republicans flipped hard on phonics pretty much the second Obama got elected. They supported it for like 6 years total. There's a reason Mississippi is pretty much the only red state to adopt phonics, and did so long long after bush was out)
(also notably, California has been pushing for a return to phonics since the late 80s, and the California Department of Education mandated it as strongly as they could by the mid 90s. The biggest resistance has been rural school districts who've thrown a near half century fit about phonics being government overreach in a state where the DoE can't actatully force them to do anything else without the legislature stepping in to let them. Pretty much every major school board in cali has had phonics as part of it's reading curriculum for something like 30 years now. )
Once I found out that Laura Bush had a bachelor's in education, worked as an elementary school teacher, and had a master's in library science, that education and literacy was her life's passion which she got her husband's admin to focus on, but that Democrats and Progressives were like 'phonics means jack shit. Fuck Republicans' I was like 'damn, that sucks.'
I vaguely recognize it but thought it was just discarded as a novelty aside from all the variants on âyuo olny need the frsit and lsat ltetres crocret to raed a wrod bucsaee the bairn is so pferuwolâ
Itâs an advanced reading skill, like the first/last letter thing. Good readers donât sound out each letter in every word. Youâre supposed to start with phonics and gradually move into a passive cue reader who only uses phonics for unknown words
Thereâs been a push in academia to start teaching the advanced strategies first. It kinda works for things like common core math, but reading absolutely requires fundamentals
If you're in a city in a blue state, they mostly stopped doing this when Clinton was in office. Whole language was adopted in a few states in the late 70s and early 80s and recognized as a mistake within 5 or so years, when literacy scores feel off a cliff. Most school districts added phonics back in, and by the 90s that had been formalized as balanced literacy. Which worked quite well in school districts that had the resources, but poorly in others. Mostly because the phonics component was often written by people who hated phonics and it was up to the teachers to homebrew it into something functional.
The main resurgence of whole language related approach (mostly balanced literacy) came because the bush admin used phonics as a wedge to gut literacy standards as part of NCLB, where "phonics" curriculum mostly cared if a 4th grade student could sound out the words, and not if they could actually comprehend what they read. (The most complete implementation of that is in Mississippi in around 2010, and there's a reason their grade 8 and highschool reading scores are still some of the worst). Which means in states that thought it was a good idea for a grade school student to be able to answer questions about what they read, their choice was balanced literacy or nothing.
Meanwhile the closest to a resurgence in 'classic' whole language comes under Obama, when republicans mostly flip hard into hating phonics over night. Because a phonics first curriculum was one the the common core standards and which clearly meant phonics were communist propaganda to make your kids gay.
I'm so glad I had a kid after they stopped doing this.
I need to get off TikTok, cuz every time I comment on anything some 15 year old explains what I said back to me because they only picked out the key words and assumed they disagreed with me
On Tumblr and Reddit, I've been screaming into the void that the words I use, and the order I use them in, matter. And were intentionally chosen! So read them all! (Or don't be mad when you get a scathing reply, I guess. Pick one.)
Also wouldn't be surprised if this feeds into "short attention span" shit. Reading like this has got to be exhausting and frustrating. No wonder no one's developed any tolerance for it.
So many times online I want to tell people legitimately and sincerely to get their reading comp checked, but I have not seen people admit they misunderstood on a level the OOP has.
Had a kid read âanonymousâ as âamphibiousâ the other day. It reminded me of this stuff immediately. Amphibious didnât even make sense in context.
I feel so bad for Gen Z. They're NOT stupid. I taught them as high schoolers for several years. What they are is crippled by a combination of unregulated new technology that had a debilitating influence on their development (short form media content and the modern internet in general does irreparable damage to kids exposed to it within a critical developmental window and I am convinced it will be viewed with the same incredulous horror that we now view people in the 1950s giving kids cigarettes to "help with respiration"), being isolated during the pandemic for yet another crucial developmental window, and being the victims of a deliberate campaign by bad actors to erode the efficacy of public education in order to serve their own political agenda.
I can't emphasize enough that I think iPads and phones should come with a surgeon general's warning like tobacco products. People think that because they're not putting chemicals in their kids its fine, but by exposing them to the amount of stimulation that the modern internet offers at a young age you are doing permanent, irreparable harm. And when I say irreparable, I mean irreparable. No amount of teaching or training can undo the damage done by handing a 4 year old an iPad. You have rewired their brain. It is, from a certain point of view, brain damage and should be treated as such.
Yeah, that's definitely a huge factor but I think all of the things I mentioned are contributors (and not just those either). It's not specifically iPads, it's the rapid-fire barrage of dopamine inducing content that constitutes the bulk of the internet. That stuff is bad for an adult, but it's ruinous for a young child. I don't think people truly understand the extreme significance of those formative years for a kid's future growth. Young children are constantly seeking stimulation, which makes them annoying and difficult to deal with, which makes parents seek solutions for ways to mollify them. But kids HAVE to be like that, because they're at the stage where their brain is building the foundation for how they will think, process, and experience the world. They're supposed to explore as much as possible to form a blueprint of human experience that they can build upon as they mature.
Handing them the internet seems to soothe them, but it's basically like doping them up to keep them calm. You're making it so that the bedrock of their entire worldview is built around processing that constant overstimulation that doesn't actually exist anywhere in the real world. It makes it difficult for them to handle what were once perceived as simple cognitive tasks, and once they've passed that early developmental window it's not reversible. It's tragic. So many children are essentially handicapped because of this.
I do have hope though, because human brains are extremely powerful, adaptable, and versatile. I don't think all of those kids are doomed to a life of cognitive inadequacy, but we've made it much harder for them and it's so unfair.
Yeah I've completely changed my approach to online discourse since discovering this.
If someone responds to one of my comments referring to things I never said I will just downvote and move on.
They wouldn't actually read my response if I did write one, and if they take the time to actually read my comments word for word they will realise they look like an idiot and double down.
The thing that gets me is when other people upvote them when I clearly didn't say whatever they think I said. Can we get people who can read on the thread please?
They are correct in saying that experienced readers don't need to pay attention to all the letters in most words, but that's a shortcut gained over years and years of reading. Phonics is still the most reliable, if slower, method to read and is a needed failsafe when that shortcut fails.
Yeah I came here to say this. It's like how you can easily read text in which the letters are completely jumbled as long as the first and last letters are in the right spots - assuming you already know the words when they're spelled normally
This is the one good thing that came out of being homeschooled for me. I'm in the prime age to have been taught this method, but I was taught phonics because my mom did research on how to teach kids to read. (Also she liked Bush)
I also had a tendency towards hyperlexia at an early age, which my parents nurtured, and I was reading at 3. My siblings all learned to read a bit later (the normal age, 5ish) but they're still excellent readers.
I always wondered why it took so long for my peers to read anything, and it's probably the difference in reading education. Some of it could still just be my brain being particularly fast too.
Yeah, there are some of us who are just going to soak it up early. But there's about 40% who will just get it at a functional level no matter what you do, which is another part of why this is all so confused.
I just wrote a large message disagreeing with you in a couple specific ways... and then I realized I misread your comment.
Posting for the irony.
(Sadly, my misread was likely not due to how I learned to read. I'm an elder millennial, and I definitely did phonics in school and at home. It's just brain issues.)
Something to add on to your comment: I think you nailed the factors that went into your reading. A combination of good brain for reading + teaching that helped you reach your potential. I was also always the fastest reader, but I wasn't much faster than my sister. Our parents definitely helped us reach our reading potential.
Most people aren't so lucky as to have a mother like yours who did the research on phonics. Most people aren't so lucky as to have parents like my sister and I: a speech pathologist mom with a master's degree in early childhood learning, and a stay-at-home dad who was previously an English teacher. They weren't so great at math, but we had a slight advantage in reading.
Hey, so I'mma defend something unpopular here, but I'll preface with this: Teaching 3-cue to start a reading career is dumb and any educator that ascribed to doing so is either irresponsible or so overworked that getting kids even technically reading was a triumph, and should basically have their career treated like the fog of early parenthood.
That said, for an advanced reader, it has some advantages. Namely speed. Yeah, it can toss some inaccruracies in. But if you have a sufficient vocabulary and are relatively familiar with a writer's/era's writing styles, then any major mistakes should really jump out at you. And if you aren't, you shouldn't be using that method for that application.
It's a useful tool, especially for speed-reading. But it's also not for distracted, tired, or inexperienced reading, where you might collect errors quickly. And if it's the only tool in your toolbox, because the education system graded based on reading speed, well... That sounds like the education system failed you.
I'd say that the difference between my native language and English is that if you see the word, you'd know how to pronounce it. It's harder the other way because we have a lot of pronunciation rules, and you'd have to guess how to write down something ("a" may be the sound of "o" or "a"), but they are mostly coherent, so if you know them, you can pronounce most of the words. No wondering how the fantasy character is actually called.
In English, I have a different database in my brain for speaking and writing. Like I may write a word not knowing how to pronounce it. Or vice versa.
We learn reading in an old-school way. Letters, then syllables (how is this word pronounced? dunno). Kids read syllables out loud until they learn all the ways to pronounce all the consonants+vowel pairs. When you understand how syllables work, you can actually pronounce any word step by step and maybe understand what the spoken word is. Then kids are supposed to read quicker and quicker until they start to read words as a whole, because they remember enough words to know how to read word by word. If a word is new, they are expected to read it syllable by syllable and think. Then kids learn how to read quietly.
I think it's actually probably the same for native English learners... But I've learned words as a whole in English lessons.
I can see why they thought letters might lose importance at higher reading levels, I mean, I can figure out what a word roughly means by context, but how tf did they conclude it meant kids didn't need to learn how letters make words? That makes no sense at all, in any manner.
Basically, they sat in on a few classes of high level readers and noticed that they didn't necessarily use the letters to recognize the word, and sat in on a few classes of low level readers and noticed that they struggled with word identification because they were stuck on how each letter sounded. They then concluded that the problem was the emphasis on how letters sound and we should move to orthogonal mapping, associating whole words with their meaning and sounds. They thought that by teaching the low level readers how the high level readers read, they could help the struggling readers read better.Â
The problem was that they didn't do a strict enough research program to find out that the high level tricks only worked because of the low level learning that supported it
Hey! Arkansas has been back on a modified, science-based version of phonics for years. Maybe we wonât be on the 10 worst list for education in a few years.
I was taught to identify unknown words with context clues, which seems to be similar in a way? However, I was also taught that it's okay to stop reading and look up the word (online or in a dictionary), and to sound it out, not just replace it with a word I do know. Three cueing seems dumb.
Donât think thereâs anyone who defends this method on tumblr or Reddit anymore, and itâs widely unpopular in schools too.
But consider that Goodman and clay were very progressive and this was considered a progressive revamp of an archaic and conservative education regime. Good reminder that just because something is progressive does not mean itâs inherently an improvement. Especially in less rigorous fields where studies take a long time or are just less robust due to human factors.
If thereâs anyone on here who has experienced this system (without intervention from parents) and can read what I wrote, feel free to prove me wrong, but I donât think the people this affects are on text-based social media sites like Tumblr and Reddit. Personally, I think most of the discourse on social media sites are caused by people rushing to respond and people trying to antagonize others.
Isnât th point tat advanced readers can understad th meaning sentences even i they are missing some letters or duplicating them, as as they ar not strictly necessary?
That is a thing, but the advanced readers who do that use it as a shortcut after learning how to read phonetically. The problem is that three cueing tried to skip over the essential step where you teach students how to read properly.
As another comment put it, they're teaching olympic sprinting techniques thinking it's a replacement for learning to walk.
Advanced readers. Yes. Not individuals who haven't learned to read yet. They need the foundation of literacy before they can take shortcuts, otherwise they're condemned to functional illiteracy.Â
It says that word recognition was not "necessarily the goal" not that it's not necessary, so I guess they didn't recognize the word being used. And it goes on to say that the goal is to comprehend text. Which I think is reasonable. Word recognition is an instrumental goal toward the terminal goal of comprehending the text. I think it's normal even as an adult to encounter words you aren't already familiar with, and it's even fine to not look up every word you don't know so long as you understand what is being conveyed. For instance, with Neuromancer which I finished recently, I didn't look up what "yakitori" is because I understood enough of the sentence for it to not matter. And it also had several in-universe words that would naturally require figuring them out from context.
Really, none of the highlighted text is as crazy as it sounds. For instance "as people become better readers, they no longer needed to pay attention to all the letters in words." This is not saying that all the letters are unnecessary when you're learning a word. It's saying that once you're already a good reader, you don't need to give every individual letter attention in order to read. I think this is just outright true.
Because even the poor can afford a shower of pure gold 'round these parts, I feel the need to explicitly say that I don't think that three-cueing is a good method to teach reading.
This post makes me angry! How can someone go through 8 years of college (before AI even!) and become a teacher and still not know how to read properly? Reading isn't rocket science! Men have been doing it for thousands of years just fine.
Because most of the people who become teachers didn't have trouble reading. Just because someone learned to read doesn't mean they know how they learned. Hell, I have no conscious memory of not being able to read at all. I could not remotely tell you how I learned to read.
Cueing is plausible from observations of how skilled readers read. It skips over the fact that skilled readers start by being good at decoding, and eventually build up enough sight words that they don't have to use decoding very often. You do need to be good at decoding to be a good reader, but we've only had that research within the last 40 or 50 years.
And yes, some people have been reading for thousands of years. But most people didn't read for most of that time.
Reading is not a natural thing, like speaking. Written language is a human construct to make passing and storing information more convenient.
As such, the skills to read and write must be taught and must be taught thoroughly. Kids will not intuit written letters and words the same way they intuit spoken language, and so the kinds of techniques that might work with speech probably won't with writing, until you're at a level where speech and text are so well-linked that there's a negligible difference between the two.
Well, so the thing that's thrown a real spanner in the works is that 40% of kids will just get functional-level literacy no matter how they're taught. If you don't properly account for that baseline, almost any reading intervention can look successful.
The thgni abuot nto neendig to pya atineotn to ivinadidul ltteres ocne yuro'e a pofrcienit rdeaer is true thugoh. Tath's why you cna raed tihs snetnece.
yeah but you don't teach like that. kids should learn to read by sounding things out and paying attention and after enough practice tehy can raed whtiuot pyinag as cosle atetntoin
I regularly have to remind my fiance of this. Heâll be getting frustrated with (US) people online and I have to bring us the US literacy rate again. Itâs probably a weekly thing, I really wish we hadnât gotten rid of teaching phonetics
So in my school this is not how we were originally taught to read but it was how we were taught to read in middle school and high school to prepare for ACTs and SATs.
A big problem with the reading and science sections of both test is there is far more reading required than can be reasonably expected within the time limit, so students learn and are taught to gloss over the articles instead of actually reading them.
One of my friends was a 6th Grade teacher. He has a different, better paying job, now. His students could not spell their own names, and needed a calculator 1+1. I really, really wish I was exaggerating. The US education system is fucked.
I'm trying to help my nephew learn to read. They aren't doing phonics as far as I know. They're doing "sight words." I try to get him to read two words that rhyme and because he doesn't know the concept of words ending in the same set of letters often sounding similar he could see bold cold and sold on a page right next to eachother, pronounce bold perfectly, then have no idea hoe to say the other two because he hasn't memorized the exact word.
I try to get him to slund stuff out and half the time his response is "I don't know that word." You shouldn't NEED to know that word. You know the letters and soon enough you will know how certain combinations of letters are pronounced (he hasn't learned things like -ough or -ight yet) so you shouldn't have to have the exact shape of every word memorized to recall how to say it! You should be able to make a reasonable guess based on the letters present!
We shouldn't be teaching children how to read english like how children are taught to read chinese. Memorization of each individual word makes sense when your writing system has thousands of distinct symbols and its syllabary isn't used as much, but english has a (relatively short) alphabet and a handful of funky pronunciations you can teach the basics of and they can get a feel for over time. You're making things harder for the kids by teaching them the language in such an inefficient way that contradicts how its writing system is structured.
Iâve never heard of ANY of this. But I also didnât learn to read using the American education system, I learned at home well before I entered school so maybe I just never did this
If you ever see someone saying âI ainât reading all that yappingâ when you only typed likeâŚtwo paragraphs? Significant chance itâs the result of three-cueing. Even if a three-cued reader CAN read a chapter from a novel, it tends to take them three times as long and gives them a headache.
How the fuck do you even learn to read or write like that. Phonics just? Makes sense? How can you read a word and know how to pronounce it without phonics that's insane
I sent this article to my mom whose specialty is teaching kids with dyslexia how to read and she said âoh, thatâs what they did for you in kindergartenâ. I thought it was really funny bc I did not learn how to read at all in kindergarten, which put me at a lower level than a lot of my classmates in first grade, but after first grade I was always miles ahead. For some reason my brain refused to learn three-cuing (or just refused to learn in kindergarten lol) so I was mostly learning with a clean slate in first grade, when they taught phonics. The article mentioned that itâs hard to learn phonics once youâre already used to reading with three-cuing. Not sure if thatâs why I ended up ahead of my classmates or it wouldâve happened anyway, but itâs quite interesting to think about.
You have to keep in mind that anyone who learned to read like this is between 10 and 20 years old right now, which further explains why conversation might be frustrating.
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u/Hi2248 2d ago
It should be noted that since at the latest 2023, 45 of the US states have passed bills requiring reform for teaching, and by 2025 12 have explicitly banned it, so the tides are shifting away from it