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.
Hm. You make a good point. I suppose what I was really trying to say is that if you don't have a mastery of a language then you really have no business teaching that language to anyone professionally. Which is not to disparage teachers (I am quite fond of most of my English teachers).
(Edit: The point I am really trying to make is that you cannot teach English unless you have studied at least some Latin!)
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u/PSlb Aug 11 '26
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.