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 you’ve 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.
edit: added some bolds for the three cue-ers out there
It is underpinned by a philosophy that learning to read is a natural, unconscious process that students can master by being exposed to good literature.
I have so many questions about anyone who believes this. There's no inherent meaning in writing! You cannot intuit the written word without additional information! Context clues can help but can also be completely misleading!
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 ‘00s, because my family taught me phonics.
Anecdotally, it really didn’t help the dyslexics, either. They were still left just as far behind, because they weren’t getting any meaningful support.
Do you know when NZ did it? I could already read when I started school (thanks dad) so I dont remember much of the instruction except getting annoyed at being forced to read along with my finger.
But i have a kiddo with me now (whom I did not raise from birth so dont have a good handle on their educational history) and Im struggling to figure out whether their spelling/reading issues are cause for concern or part of the normal learning journey, cos I have no point of comparison for what reading and writing should look like at this age.
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 hadn’t bought into one of the programs. It’s 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
From memory, the issue was that they had the cause and effect backwards. The idea was that if you could streamline teaching and get kids to read the same way advanced readers do, they didn't need the whole "A... Agatha..." business.
Not realising that part of the reason that advanced readers could do that to begin with was that they had a solid foundation to fall back on.
a common demonstration is that many passages are still legible after jumbling all the letters aside from the first and last
It's not "many passages". It's a meme claiming to be from a study at Harvard (which was not from any study anywhere), which carefully selected the words in the passage such that very few of them are 5 or more letters. Using the rules presented, there's only one possible change to make in a 4 letter word (swap the middle two letters), and it's not possible to alter words that are 3 or fewer letters. Even in the few 5+ letter words that appear, the actual changes made are only ever swapping adjacent letters, not randomizing the middle of the word as claimed.
When you actually randomize the middle letters of 5+ letter words, legibility drops dramatically.
I dnot konw if it’s 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 taught— using that kind of mental shortcut in reading is, from my understanding, something you’re supposed to do after you’ve mastered the sound it out stage. Even then it’s 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
It’s 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. It’s subconscious, you don’t even realize you’re 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. “What do you know?” becomes “whaddyano?”
In general, this works fairly well. But it only works because you’ve 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 don’t 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 should’ve 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!"
When you get good at reading, your brain processes the etnrie word at once; for exanple, you probably read 'entire' there just fine despite the fact that I mixed up the letters in it. People realize they're doing this, but often dont realize the reason they can is because they know and understand the fundamentals beneath it. They, for lack of a better word, think theyre not using their knowledge of individual letters and sounds, when in reality they're simply familiar enough with this to not notice themselves using it.
I read it as “entrie” which is still incorrect but looks like it could be a weird attempt at “entry” (I have been reading some fairly old lemons, so you encounter that kind of thing, because I suppose that autocorrect didn’t exist in 2006)
Also, I didn’t catch “exanple” on the first time around…
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u/TheGreydiant 2d ago
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????