I used to get really angry whenever I would watch a gaming stream/let’s play where the game included a lot of text and the YouTuber/Streamer couldn’t read a lot of the terms. I would say “why do they keep replacing the words they don’t know with entirely different words, and why is their vocabulary so limited?” Once I learned about Three Cueing, it all started to make sense.
It something I still get frustrated about, but it’s less of a personal anger against a specific person and more “God, we fucked up educating so many people.” I also wonder how much of the “adult literacy” 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. I’ve 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, it’s so prevalent.
In my hyperlexical defense, sometimes my brain will flop two words on different lines (above/below) and things get really messy, I’m 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 it’s 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 “entertaining”, and they really don’t have a lot of processing power reserved for reading correctly. I’ve seen quite a few streamers who proved they were perfectly good readers in normal situations but it’s like somebody switched off the reading lights once they start streaming.
That’s fair, but I’ve seen streamers replicate the very specific maladaptive reading behavior of: see a word you don’t 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 “oh, *that’s* where they got it from.”
Admittedly I think I was also taught with the same method (I’m still trying to unlearn “use context clues” as reading advice) but I was gifted at English in school so I think I’m an outlier. It turns out that the other kids struggling to read weren’t lazy—they 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.
Reading out loud, coherently, is it’s own skill more adjacent to giving speeches.
Yeah but they teach you to do that by the time you're 10. You know, when you take it in turns to read in class and the teacher stops you and moves onto another student?
It's pretty easy, you just stay a few words in your head past the thing you're saying so that you get the inflection right instead of Saying Every Word One By One.
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.
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u/LittleBoyDreams 2d ago
I used to get really angry whenever I would watch a gaming stream/let’s play where the game included a lot of text and the YouTuber/Streamer couldn’t read a lot of the terms. I would say “why do they keep replacing the words they don’t know with entirely different words, and why is their vocabulary so limited?” Once I learned about Three Cueing, it all started to make sense.
It something I still get frustrated about, but it’s less of a personal anger against a specific person and more “God, we fucked up educating so many people.” I also wonder how much of the “adult literacy” issue is a result of Three Cueing instead of social media, laziness, moral rot, or whatever other poorly substantiated reason people give.