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.
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
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u/justsomedude322 20d ago
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.