Englemann, along with another educational researcher, Douglas Carnine, authored a word call Theory of Instruction, which is as disciplined and scientific a work as you can find in a "soft" subject like education, and expounds the theoretical basis behind their effective methods.
I taught my 4 year old to read English through the book. She's far ahead in reading amongst her peer group (English is not our native language). I know sounds cheesy, but please count me in for exchanging ideas or fixing education using his methods.
You have valid point on his work being assessed and valorized in studies, but parent's point also stands stronger in my mind. The ratio of actual experience in the field vs spending time telling people what to do is pretty surprising.
I'm just stating that this particular book, in a 1:1 parent:child setting, has a great track record. 100 days of spending 10-15 minutes with your kid doing these lessons is a low risk intervention with tremendous upside. You don't have to have a teaching background to utilize it (the intro for parents is fairly extensive and important pre-reading), you just follow the parental directions.
>While working as a marketing director in the early 1960s, Engelmann became interested with how children learn.
>[...]
>In 1964, he left his job in advertising and became a research associate
>[...]
>In 1970, he moved from the University of Illinois to the University of Oregon in Eugene, becoming a Professor in the University's College of Education.[2][3]
He was never a public school teacher, although he may have taught students as a research associate. He was apparently teaching as a hobbyist, including homeschooling.
The kerfuffle about whether he was "actually teaching", however, actually misses the point. While you can, at least in principle, understand the experience of a student by experimenting on students, you will never understand the experience of a teacher by experimenting on students. Whatever method you come up with or promote must ultimately be implemented by real flesh-and-blood humans working under real constraints (including the limits of their own abilities and emotions) with realistic organizational and community dynamics. This is what I interpreted the original complaint about researchers versus engineers as analogized to software development to mean.
> you will never understand the experience of a teacher by experimenting on students
I'm not sure to follow, wouldn't you at least understand your own experience as a teacher by actually teaching to students ?
It didn't even remotely occur to anybody in the family that learning to read was special, or that there might even be any way to teach it other than phonics. English has a phonetic alphabet after all, right?
Moreover, learning to read at home was just part of our culture. When kids were deemed "ready," they learned to read. It wasn't a special thing.
I think my parents learned from whatever material they could lay their hands on. I learned from a 18th century reader that my mom found somewhere. My first word was CAT.
Both of my kids "took" to reading and were voracious readers. Lucky? Yes, but we also felt that letting our kids learn to read at school was leaving too much to chance.
That's both the quietest and the most brutal condemnation of the public education system that I've ever heard.
I was home-schooled from 2nd grade onward, so I never really experienced the public system. But one of the small towns where I grew up had one of those revolts while I was in college. My mom because she had been homeschooling for a number of years and knew by experience how to teach a phonics based approach ended up helping a group of parents learn how to teach it to their children. A non-trivial number of families just pulled their kids out of the school and home-schooled them. I remember thinking at the time that the school was oddly hostile to updating their curriculum and approach despite concrete evidence that the phonics method substantially improved the students reading ability in part due to the training my mom gave parents and the tutoring she provided for some the students. You could see dramatic before and after results right there.
Show a parent that there is a simple method to improve their child's reading and they will fight tooth and nail to get them access to that method. Unfortunately not every town or school district will have someone who knows and can share the information.
Your story is a good reminder that there may be more than one way to do it, I often think the way I learned to read (in school, in first grade) is clearly the right way to do it, since it had such good results. (In particular, i still think that earlier than kindergarden is too early for reading).
On the other hand, the thing we had in common was the family culture of reading, everyone in my family were big readers. And my parents read to me a lot before I could read.
I think you're right on the culture thing. My kid loves new books and understands that they contain stories. A household without that is far more likely to cause issues with reading because the motivation will be missing.
Because we read with our kids, all of them were reading by late 3/early 4 years old, by their own desire. While none have had a propensity for George Orwell at the third grade, they do read things beyond their age levels.
I was lucky, and my kids are lucky.
I wonder, are there any organizations that folks can volunteer at to help kids at your and my age in elementary school learn to read?
I think this is the huge thing in common here. If kids are read to from a young age some might pick it up almost "on their own" while others may wait and learn in early elementary school "on schedule", but I think will largely see similar outcomes. But the ones coming at it for the first time from _not_ having experienced reading, even if only from being read to, are starting from a perspective lacking both background and motivation.
By the time they were in kindergarten they could read on their own. By the time they started learning to read in school they could bring their own books to read during lessons so they wouldn't get bored.
Kids at that age learn by emulating what they see. If they do not see their parents reading, learning to read in school is going to be hard. No silver bullet technique will reach all the kids, especially ones from homes where reading is bitterly condemned.
>> By the time they were in kindergarten they could read on their own.
> We tried that with our first and it didn't work. Some children require more direct support. Knowing what works for those who need it is pretty huge.
Yeah, I think the GP is making the same error has the "whole language" approach people--making the faulty assumption that mere exposure is enough to educate. That works with some, but clearly fails a lot. And even for the kids it works with, I'd be afraid it would leave gaps that would be much better addressed with some explicit instruction.
My kid is tiny and loves to "read" (i.e. memorize and recite books). At this rate, he'll probably learn to read on his own, but I definitely want to make sure he has the tools to successfully tackle difficult and unfamiliar words, so he doesn't self-limit to the stuff he knows well.
My oldest was reading little books by 3. It was zero effort other than reading to him. Suddenly he just took over and didn't need mom and dad to read to him anymore.
He's 8 now and can plow through the Harry Potter series in a week. Some days I think he might read better than I do at 31.
My youngest is 5 and still struggling. He never really liked to be read to. As soon as he could get up and do something else, he did. He's getting there though, and we'll get him there.
It's weird how different things can be for kids even in the same family and environment.
As usual, it's much fuss about nothing. Same goes for financial discipline. There are no special techniques, unless one are dealing with special needs kids.
You may not know your child is neurodivergent until you are at or beyond this stage of development.
> Moreover, learning to read at home was just part of our culture. When kids were deemed "ready," they learned to read. It wasn't a special thing.
> I think my parents learned from whatever material they could lay their hands on. I learned from a 18th century reader that my mom found somewhere. My first word was CAT.
Can you be more explicit about the resources (and kind of resources) your parents used? I learned to read in school, so I'm not very aware of them. Articles like the OP make me think I may have to get acquainted to fill in deficits in the school curriculum.
They were very interested in books / reading and were pretty motivated to practice the books and flash cards.
We also used the free version of starfall.com occasionally.
Still in print almost 200 years later.
I would like to say that English is most definitely not phonetic. But this is not really true. In any particular word, there are usually some phonetic landmarks. If there are enough of these that you can identify you can try to use them as fingerprints against your entire oral vocabulary filtered by context to identify that word. Then you rote memorize it.
As I write this I'm listening live to a British person saying things like "no-us" and "repo-uh" (I don't know phonetic symbols well enough to represent this properly). I understand these words to be "notes" and "report" in very much the same way. I pick out phonetic landmarks and filter my vocabulary by context to find words that have matching landmarks. There is an American in the conversation using words like "thanegs" which I understand to be "things" because "thanks" doesn't fit in the context.
It's a good little lesson about "ideals" or something too, eventually. It's fun when you get to joke with your kids about how strange the spelling of some words are.
I just watched Megamind for the first time with my two kids yesterday, and some of the humor is based on Megamind constantly mispronouncing words ("school" becomes "shool", "Metro City" is pronounced as one word, like "atrocity", etc). My older son thought that was funny, my younger son didn't get it.
That's a really good point, and also a good lesson for adults thinking about education.
Oftentimes it's actually a pretty bad idea to teach something based on the "ideal" understanding of someone who's already mastered the subject. Teaching a somewhat useful but ultimately faulty method as a stepping stone to mastery is often much better. That can be difficult, though because someone who understands those faults often gets hung up on them, and can't avoid the temptation to reject the stepping stone, in favor of pushing for the learner to take a too-big leap to the "true" understanding.
"Well, you see, the universe can be thought of as a quantum foam..."
Without going phonics thereafter I would probably have ended up as completely illiterate before middle school.
No, it doesn't - if it used IPA, it maybe would, but English has very inconsistent pronunciation for otherwise similar words written in Latin alphabet, a matter that many English native speakers seem to overlook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw
There's no debate about it, unless you want to debate what makes a script "phonetic" in the first place.
The fact that English uses Latin letters for writing doesn't mean that it uses any other properties of Latin script. Compare English-the-language to Latin-the-language; the latter is highly phonetic whereas English is not.
Or, in other words, in English individual letters neither represent phonemes nor carry meaning; it's only clumps of letters, or individual words, that have both meaning and pronunciation assigned to them. Unlike in Latin.
It has nothing to do with the spoken language at all. Written English uses a script that has symbols which represent individual phonemes. English uses a phonetic script. Yes, spoken English has diverged from written English. The script is still phonetic.
What the symbols look like is beside the point.
According to your definition all spoken languages are phonetic.
> No, it doesn't
Yes, it does.
This isn't about the language, it's about the script. English is written with a phonetic script.
> According to your definition all spoken languages are phonetic.
I said nothing about spoken languages in my comment.
A computer program written with knowledge of a few dozen of the common special cases would pronounce >90% of English words correctly and be close on most of the rest, "cupboard" notwithstanding. Indeed, look at how well 80's-era speech to text did with this exact approach.
If English doesn't use a phonetic writing system, then what kind does it use? Ideographic? Syllabic?
In a phonetic language, you can pronounce a word just based on its written representation.
Just compare current and paste tense of read. It is spelled the same but pronounced differently.
You can argue it is an phonetically inconsistent language. However, you will find most of inconsistencies occur in the most frequently used words, making it hard for a beginner.
Even looking up the definition of "alphabetic" shows that that is often for phonetic languages. :D
If English was truly phonetic, to name a few examples again: the pronunciation of "are" would most likely be a prefix of "area", since the graphemes for "are" are present in "area"; "read" and "read" would be read the same, since the graphemes for "read" and "read" are identical; the words "freak", "steak", and "break" would end with the same phonemes, since the graphemes for "eak" suffix are identical... and so on.
I now suspect you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a phoneme is.
What does the symbol “c” represent, if not two different phonemes?
The letters in the English script represent sounds. Do you disagree?
English is phonetic in that way. Sometimes the phonetics are applied with exception-cases and alternatives.
The former point can be debated. The latter, not. The English script is phonetic. Graphemes represent phonemes.
The English script (its writing system), which is based on the Latin alphabet (the graphic symbols) is phonetic because the symbols represent sounds and have no intrinsic semantic meaning. I think that's fairly un-debatable unless you want to make the case that emoji are part of the English script.
"t" represents a sound in the English script, a phoneme. It does not represent a thing, an idea, or anything more than an aspirated consonant sound.
Yes, there are special rules and outliers that you need to learn in English, but it seems absurd to not classify it as phonetic because it's not purely phonetic. This is doubly so when discussing phonetic vs whole-word learning systems, as is the topic with "Sold a Story".
As said in other threads, you are not wrong that there are more direct 1:1 scripts to phonemes. You are wrong to think that is what phonetic means.
I think you're greatly understating it. It's most of English, it's present everywhere as you try to learn the language. It's present from the very beginning, when you need to figure out why "are" and "area" are not pronounced the same, until the very end, when you have mostly mastered the language but now need to be able to understand everyone else's pronunciation while also accounting for them most likely pronouncing some words incorrectly.
Yes, exactly.
If the English alphabet wasn't phonetic, it would be impossible to even try to "sound out" words. Everything would be pictograms or logograms (e.g. icons).
English has a phonetic alphabet, but history and cultural contact* have made the phonics complicated and inconsistent, but it doesn't mean they aren't there.
* Including the garbage practice of adopting foreign words with literally no spelling changes whatsoever, which in modern times has been taken to such ridiculous degrees as adopting Pinyin spellings in favor of other Chinese romanization systems that are more suited to English phonetics. Why write "ts" when you can write "c" and have every Englishspeaking person mispronounce it?
In other words, if you need to read the whole word in order to know how to pronounce it (and there are plenty of English examples in the aforelinked video), then, by definition, you're not doing anything remotely phonetic.
English is "[very] loosely phonetic"
Hieroglyphic systems are "non-phonetic"
Wasn't there at least one that just encoded letters almost identical to the alphabet we use?
Chinese ideograms are not phonetic, because seeing the written character gives you no indication of what the sound of the spoken word is.
The core phonetic rules of English are actually quite simple:
* Map consonant digraphs to phonemes where appropriate (e.g., [ch] goes to /tʃ/, [ph] goes to /f/).
* Map remaining consonants to a single phoneme, although note that [c] and [g] will map to /k/ or /s/ and /g/ or /dʒ/ respectively depending on the following letter.
* Map vowel digraphs to their monophthongs or diphthongs (e.g., [ai] goes to /ei/).
* Map vowel monographs to their "short" or "long" form depending on the following letters (e.g., [bet] is /bɛt/ while [bete] is /bit/, same as [beat]). Basic rule is vowel-consonant-vowel gets the "long" form, otherwise you get the "short" form. Doubling a consonant forces the "short" form without implying a doubled (geminate) consonant in pronunciation.
Those rules predict a large fraction of English pronunciation. You can get better by adding in rules on schwa reduction (unstressed vowels become /ə/) or rules to reflect the systematic sound changes of the past few centuries (e.g., how [-tion] becomes /ʃun/). There are still irregularities beyond that ("English" isn't justifiable by any spelling rules), and then you have the frustrating tendency of English to insist on using foreign spellings and foreign pronunciations of foreign words (e.g., "coup" is French and should be pronounced as in French and "onomatopoeia" is Greek and should be pronounced as in Greek).
Maybe I'm biased as a Polish native but I do not think the above is comparable to the mess of exceptions that is English.
The answer is of course, no, those symbols don't have an associated sound. They have an associated meaning and there are many spoken words for that meaning.
Phoneticity 20% (Chinese)
--
--
--
Phoneticity 75% (English)
Phoneticity 80% (French)
Phoneticity 90% (Spanish, probably most other writing systems)
With very few exceptions, Chinese characters are always pronounced the same way in the various Chinese languages (but not in Japanese), regardless of context, but if you're unfamiliar with a character, you'll have at best only a vague idea how to pronounce it. If you hear a Chinese syllable, you'll have several characters to choose from, and can only disambiguate them from context.
Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Your preparation gave your kids an opportunity they wouldn't have had otherwise.
There is quite a push to make parents feel that they are unable to teach their kids and that it needs to be left to "professionals." When COVID sent kids home and gave parents a view into what was actually being learned in the classrooms, I think many discovered that they as parents have quite a bit more skill in teaching their kids than they had realized.
I'm not trying to bash the public school system, but the kids that get the best education are the ones where the parents see the school system as an institution they are partnering with to educate their child instead of the place that is responsible for the education.
It's gone binary, and the actual real world is analog, as any expert will tell you.
Both my kids learned to read in school classes and read a lot.
And how do you explain "Loughborough"? Why not "Lowborrow", as in "low" and "borrow"?
Don't kids ask those things when you teach them to read with phonics?
I got similar questions for the French, btw. "Oiseaux"? Really, French?
“Oiseaux” is perfectly regular and involves no exceptions to the baseline rules of French pronunciation, though, AFAIK; if it were pronounced any way other than it is, it would warrant a question...
And anyway we all know that there's only one way to write "Mister oiseau" in french and it's "Mr Oizo" (french electro btw):
I guess you could argue that there is an "aah" after the "oo", so the "a" in "-eaux" counts, but the "aah" is not pronounced where the "a" is written in the word.
Btw, I can't make a good French accent on a keyboard but: oo-aah-zoh.
Each letter combination is a colour. You only have access to some colours, but not all.
Some colours (letter combinations) look good together, and others don’t. When they don’t, you try to see the “colour” as another one until it makes sense (looking for context). Kind of like “what colour is dress”.
To speak to your British English example, you also know that some places (i.e. regional dialects) don’t use a standard colour and only use one they “whipped up” at home.
If you have access to multiple palletes (i.e you are multilingual), you realize some colours might be similar but not always the same. If there are similar colours, they each have a different “shade”. Paint consistency might also vary.
This is also how you can learn to talk in accents. Instead of using native sounds to pronounce a word in one language, you “dip” into a “sound palette” of another language to try to get as close as you can to the original word.
1 - Don't get me started with German grammar, especially the way prepositions conjugate with the (arbitrary) gender of the noun, and the various types of prepositions reuse the same conjugations. It's clearly a language designed to detect foreign speakers and berate them.
2 - Why is electron charge negative? How many unnecessary minus signs has this poor choice caused?
3 - Or music notation vs piano keys - mapping keys to notes is needlessly complex, requiring both a flip and a rotation. (By far the best notation would be vertical, with frequency still increasing to the right in both forms - which takes into account right-hand dominance prevalence and musical taste that wants repetitive bass.) How many kids were and are turned off by this notational horror, and don't get into music at all simply because their (quite correct) aesthetics are immediately violated by arcane music notation?
Definitions don't require explanations because they already have the immense power of consensus. Consensus is rare and precious and if you try to optimize the object, you must fight the entire consensus battle again, and for only marginal gains. Some weirdos (I use this term warmly) get pretty far though, like with tau and 2*pi.
While I am not a experienced musician, there seems to be a clear trade-off here. The mapping to any single instrument's interface isn't immediately obvious, but it allows me to read music written for piano and play some of it on my cello without having to know how piano keys are arranged. Compatibility between music notation across instruments is IMO a really cool feature.
Edit: >Don't get me started with German grammar, especially the way prepositions conjugate with the (arbitrary) gender of the noun, and the various types of prepositions reuse the same conjugations. It's clearly a language designed to detect foreign speakers and berate them.
Even as a native German speaker, I agree that German grammar is ridiculous. At least Germany reformed their spelling though and made it more consistent. It was quite controversial, but allowed me to get decent spelling grades back in school. Till the reform, I always lost points in exams that weren't even about spelling because I made so many mistakes.
… true… and then it’s messed with by, for example Bb trumpets - a concept I didn’t learn about until adulthood.
raises hand
Just FYI, pretty much all Indo-European languages have gender-based noun declension. This is not special to German, it’s English that’s one of the few special ones that have lost it, no other European Indo-European language had.
German, if anything, has rather simple scheme, where only the preposition declenses. Compare it with eg. Polish, which has 7 cases (compared to 4 in German), and declension is done on the suffix of the noun itself, which is itself pretty irregular, partly due to the fact that even within a gender, different noun types declense differently, eg. there are masculine personal, masculine animate and masculine inanimate nouns, and these three can be seen as subgenders. I simply don’t have an idea how any non-native speaker can have any hope to learn all of this other than through many years of practice.
When I was a child trying to learn music reading for piano, it was incredibly arcane and difficult, but it was learnable with a lot of practice. The equivalent of "phonics" lasts well into college for composers and conductors, though, who have a lot more to learn to build a mental model of a score.
I should also add that young pianists and organists have the hardest job here - most instruments otherwise require you to read at most 4 notes at a time from one "staff" (a staff is like a line of text). Even professionals on other instruments can have trouble reading piano music, which can involve 10 or more simultaneous notes spread across 2 staves (or 3 for organ music).
I think "designed by power users for power users" nails it. Another way of putting it, is that there's a symbiosis between writers and players, if both are skilled in the same notation system, whatever it is. If you can read, you can find work. If you can write in standard notation, you can find people to play it. This creates a huge dis-incentive to explore new notations, except as an academic exercise.
Because the person who decided the sign didn't have a way of knowing a priori whether the stuff that was moving from rod to fur and from rod to silk was numerically a particular kind of charge carrier flowing in a particular kind of direction. At the point you're rubbing a piece of silk on a glass rod, you know some transfer is happening to make the silk attract the fur, but you don't know whether you're rubbing something off of the rod or onto the rod.
Of course Gradually tastes changed and Church music became polyphonic - adding a second (and third, fourth, fifth, etc) vocal line was a natural adaptation. Instrumentalists took it up outside of the Church, and the rest is history. We standardized on this notation because, even though it was originally for the human voice, it is convenient and good enough that everyone could make use of it.
Finally, I'll note that 20th century composers experimented endlessly with alternate notations, some more seriously than others: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/5-12-examples-of...
The articles (definite, indefinite) , prepositions and phrasal verbs are pure hell to learn.
And I don't undesirable what you mean by music notation and piano. The system is quite easy.
Yes, they will get it wrong a lot, too. But that is fine so long as you aren't ridiculing them for being wrong. Acknowledge the difference and move on.
For the specific examples you are using, the general idea is that we have a set of phonetics that can be applied to letters and letter pairings. Which one is used is often defined by the rest of the word.
Do kids ask questions? Absolutely. Get used to saying, "I don't know." Or "its complicated with and based on the history of the word." Even better if you can have time to go into the history some and explore it. Because that can be what gets kids interested. Exploring.
(And this is no different than many other things. Why do you have the name that you have? Why is it spelled as it is? In languages with genders, why are some words male and some female? There is no solid logical reason for any of those. Path dependence is a thing.)
Yeah, don't get me started on cricket :P
Pronunciation rules are taught along with the words that follow them and then you learn the many exceptions. Just in Chemistry class you learn the ideal gas law and then you learn the deviations.
Phonics is a strategy to deal with unfamiliar words and it works pretty well as a starting point.
English spelling and pronunciation has to be memorized, fortunately young kids have an enormous capacity for memorization so it works ok.
Many school programs use the opposite strategy now. They don't teach phonics and they don't teach spelling. "Inventive spelling" where kids just make up spelling and they aren't corrected is used for the first two years. At the start of the third year they are suddenly judged on spelling. But they just spent two years practicing incorrect spelling!
English is phonetic; but it's also bimodal.
To be fair, we did not use "phonics" as a formal procedure, but simply a loose term for taking advantage of the limited clues built into the written language.
And it doesn't help if you can pronounce a word but don't know what it means. My kids learned by rote words such as "allegiance," "republic," and "god," without anybody explaining the meaning of those words to them.
1. borough (-oh) 2. through (-oo) 3. rough (-uff) 4. cough (-awf) 5. thought (-aw-) 6. plough (-ow)
And in some accents it can be a schwa (uh). I associate this with Britain and some northeast American regions. There are probably other sounds too.
As a kid, I was just told that these are 6 sounds that it can make. I was given them in that order (ostensibly in order of most common use), told to memorize them, and when encountering it in a word, try them until one seems correct. For some other phonics I had some mnemonics. For "oo" I remembered: "Don't eat food that you took from the floor."
Check out the book, Finnigan's Wake, by James Joyce for an example.
Yes, that's why "right", "write" and "rite" all sound different.
Oh, wait...
That being said our eldest went to school at 4 1/2 in Australia and they had to learn 100 words in their first year (phonics), and we were a little worried that it seemed so intense, though she ended up learning 200 or so and went on to become a voracious reader. But then we moved to the US and our youngest started school at 5 1/2 and had to learn 20 words in her first year and is now 7 and can barely read. In hindsight it does seem so late, and I agree there is so much of the world and learning and curiosity they miss out on by not being able to read.
That sounds like very dubious advice to me, even if given with best intentions.
Surely if parents read books to their kids, with their kids, then it is a natural step for the kids to start learning the words and word sounds by reading too?
How does NOT teaching your kid to read help them? It's as if people don't have brains anymore.
Great success America, the nuclear family is nonexistent.
That's what happened with me. My teacher would give me zero on a math question if use the methodology my dad taught me.
As someone with Dysgraphia I often wished we reformed English to be more phonetic (I'm not sure if it would help me spell, but it wouldn't hurt)
And "two" isn't even a phonetic spelling!
I find (some) writings from that era to be fascinating insights into how the language actually sounded during the time the piece was written but the idea of returning to a system (non-system?) of spelling makes my head hurt. At this point, I can read an book or document written (in English) by an Australian, US Southerner, US Baltimore or Indian writer without needing to decode the writer's dialect. Sure, some of that comes out despite using a fixed spelling system, but that gives the text.. I guess I might describe it as _texture_ or _personality_ without detracting from the ideas, stories or info conveyed.
I think 'ou' is still in play in British English (colour, odour, etc) but was removed from the US standard (i think) sometime in the 1970s. It certainly wasn't minor in my 2nd grade teacher's pov when I spelled it `colour` (1978..I had some old comic books at home--I blame them) but from what I understand, such changes were made after a great deal of debate which included discussions on whether the obfuscation of _existing_ text is offset by decreased obfuscation in future writing. I think, rightfully (if you're into that sort of thing), they got it right. I do not miss `colour` but whether or not it is there does not impact my understanding of the sentence.
If there was a credible effort to revert or deprecate spelling, I would be concerned about knowledge and information dissemination reverting to the old pre-reformation model of jealously guarded silos of information/education.
We can reform English spelling to be the same - but it would require adding about 20 more letters. (I understand languages like French and Polish solve this by having rules of how every letter combination sounds, but I don't know enough of them to explain how it works - but they might be useful inspiration if you don't want to add letters). There should be exactly one way to spell a word, and it should be obvious what that way is by how the word is pronounced.
Of course we also need to reform English so that we all pronounce words the same (goodbye and good riddance to all the funky accents - they sound cool but they hinder communication), and a lot of other related reforms that will never happen.
IIRC, my kid was taught about 100 "sight words" that are usually common words that link stuff together or appear often. Stuff like "who", "the", "which", etc. The kids memorize those and sound out the other stuff. I think the idea is to avoid discouraging kids from getting hung up on common things or memorizing things wrong.
~~
Except from the novel (where "I" is the character Scout):
“Teach me?” I said in surprise. “He hasn’t taught me anything, Miss Caroline. Atticus ain’t got time to teach me anything,” I added, when Miss Caroline smiled and shook her head. “Why, he’s so tired at night he just sits in the livingroom and reads.”
“If he didn’t teach you, who did?” Miss Caroline asked good-naturedly. “Somebody did. You weren’t born reading The Mobile Register.”
“Jem says I was. He read in a book where I was a Bullfinch instead of a Finch. Jem says my name’s really Jean Louise Bullfinch, that I got swapped when I was born and I’m really a-”
Miss Caroline apparently thought I was lying. “Let’s not let our imaginations run away with us, dear,” she said. “Now you tell your father not to teach you any more. It’s best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I’ll take over from here and try to undo the damage-”
“Ma’am?”
“Your father does not know how to teach. You can have a seat now.”
I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my crime. [...] I knew I had annoyed Miss Caroline, so I let well enough alone and stared out the window until recess when Jem [Scout's older brother] cut me from the covey of first-graders in the schoolyard. He asked how I was getting along. I told him.
“If I didn’t have to stay I’d leave. Jem, that damn lady says Atticus’s been teaching me to read and for him to stop it-” “Don’t worry, Scout,” Jem comforted me. “Our teacher says Miss Caroline’s introducing a new way of teaching. She learned about it in college. It’ll be in all the grades soon. You don’t have to learn much out of books that way—it’s like if you wanta learn about cows, you go milk one, see?”
~~
Contrary to this approach in teaching, in my university courses, my professors in math and the Spanish language always encouraged additional reading and study outside of class (oftentimes, this was written directly in the syllabus or part of class discussions). So, I haven't heard much about professors being concerned about students learning the "wrong way"—I suspect that many educators are happy in general when students seek to learn from additional materials outside of what's presented in class.
I can see now how this was taken given the way I wrote it.. I believe the intention was more "Don't pressure your kids and stress yourself trying to get them to read before even starting school". An example of kids being confused was being taught the upper-case alphabet, whereas the school starts in lower-case. But I don't think the advice was meant to be anti-intellectual.
Yeah, I think this is actually the right approach. A lot of children will learn reading without specific training if you read picture books with them in your lap and they're looking at the pictures and the letters. If they do, that's great; if they don't, that's fine too. Structured reading practice and development can happen later.
I learned French by immersion (my parents sent me to a French school aged six, and for six months I was miserable). When I went to an English school, and took French lessons, I was marked down for using the subjunctive before I had been taught it.
How do people blindly trust random figures of authority? It's mind boggling.
Trusting authority figures generally is easy and works out well. 'Till it doesn't. But that's an unknown ways into the future, and you'll have plenty of social acceptance & sympathy for your "perfectly reasonable" misfortune.
Being marked as an oddball is a very minor downside compared to your kids not being able to read well.
It's called "common sense" and you're arguing against it.
The goal of "authorities" are always to harm you as an individual and the more you follow them, the more harmed you will be. There is really no limit to how bad they are willing to make your short existence on earth, including - but not limited to - putting you in a muddy trench to be slaughtered by the enemy's artillery.
I'm like you. I started reading as a 4 year old because my parents pace was too slow. IIRC, I was usually 3-4 grade levels ahead of whatever was expected in school. My son is not. He plateaued on reading in first grade and didn't really advance -- until he did towards the end of grade 2. Funny enough, he is and remains way ahead of the class in math - he sat down one weekend and completed his math book for the year in October.
The key thing is that parents need to be engaged. If there's a problem, be the squeaky wheel!
That plus my Dad's SF book collection were the primary influencers of my early reading education.
By sixth grade, I was reading at a college level, and the teachers had no idea what to do with me.
I'm only a single person, but I think for some of us, this immersion method works well. When the kid has a question, teach them to look up the answers themselves. Also make them provide references for the answers they provide later, so that you can be reasonably sure they're not lying.
My daughter took to reading and spelling like a natural - the same processes just worked for her, and engaged with the way she thinks and acts. She's the type of kid who will write a small essay in each birthday card she writes, where-as my son (like me) will have to be coaxed to write any more than the name and his name.
But get me on a keyboard and I can write for hours - I just hate writing with a pen - total blocker for me to get words on paper. As an adult I do LOVE reading though, and can have a pretty good go at spelling, though still plenty I get wrong.
But I can remember clearly the exact moment my daughter wanted to read for the first time. I read a book to her every night and one particular evening it dawned on her that the stories I was reading to her came from the writing on the page instead of the pictures in the book. From that moment on, nothing in the universe could have stopped her from wanting to read.
Teaching reading in England may have been less successful since the adaptation of the synthetic phonics approach rather than more.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p...
Despite challenging the statistics in the original paper, it doesn't provide evidence that phonics actually is better than the teaching techniques prior to that.
In any case, the issue in the linked article seems to be a classic case of Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
Which is to say, phonics is very important, and a great tool in a balanced approach to learning to read for fun and profit... However, it's not so great to focus on phonics as a lonely and narrow target in a national reading programme, or to justify Departmental failures.
Recognising a bunch of high-frequency words is very much the foundation of reading.
Historically reading was taught by learning words with some very basic rules for pronunciation. It worked pretty well for a long time. But the pronunciation of non-trivial words - and some trivial words - has to be heard to be learned.
For example: it's not unusual for bookish people to mispronounce obscure words because they've never heard them. They know what the words mean, but the correct pronunciation just can't be worked out from the spelling.
The only way to learn it is to hear someone saying it.
Just because there are exceptions doesn't mean the rules are nonexistent. We're just rarely or never explicitly taught these rules.
Let's keep kids' achievement measures out of the cynical distrust of our teaching staff.
Edit: Yes, I am biased. And, TheOtherHobbes made better and clearer points than me in my sister comment.
Phonics based reading instruction is response to the massive scandal that already happened in the US where they tried the whole language approach, balanced instruction, three cueing, and the like with no evidence of positive impacts on literacy. Even the founder of the three cueing method accepted it is a failure. Teachers and education researchers with new books to sell don't want to accept that the boring way works better, especially for students with less support at home (where parents often use phonics to teach kids at age 2 or 3). Someone like Lucy Calkins is potentially responsible for 25% of the illiteracy in the US.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-no...
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/is-this-the-end-of-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/education/learning/school...
https://localnewsmatters.org/2022/03/13/richmond-school-find...
It doesn't say phonics doesn't work, it suggests phonics is only effective for a subgroup of pupils. Everyone has their own learning strategy and phonics doesn't appear to work for everyone.
You might be justifiably angry that no one showed you or your child the easy way.
1: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Advantages-of-the-...
2: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Ameliorating-Early-Rea...
3: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-effect-of-phonics-...
I'm not saying there aren't bad teachers, and I agree that's a problem and that the solution (get good people to be teachers and give them the autonomy to be good) depends on addressing it. But using bad teachers as a reason to strip all teachers of their autonomy is a huge step back.
So many teachers at this point have been falsely taught that phonics doesn't work, that many skip thinking they are doing the right thing. We need them to try to teach phonics. Yes, there are some students it won't work for, such as those with hearing problems. However, those students should be in specialized programs already. For everyone without hearing problems, we need them to try.
Maybe. There's a lot of guessing about what teachers are doing in this thread; I'd be interested in a survey of what they're actually doing.
> For everyone without hearing problems, we need them to try.
Maybe. The UK has been going hard on phonics and while scores went way up for the next couple years, the effects on the years afterwards were real bad.
If that subgroup is 90+%, is it worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater? (I don't know the % here, I'm making one up as a thought experiment.)
[1] https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10152356/1/Wyse_The%20...
My mom was a public school teacher in a poor district, and the main problem with her kids learning to read is that they did not actually know English. This would make it much more difficult to figure out how to read properly, since they'd never be able to correct 'wrong' pronunciations. I believe a lot of focus on reading is mis-placed when the children cannot speak English properly. Better to focus on diction and vocabulary.
Big picture, irregular pronunciation in English might encourage educators to use different strategies for learning the outlier words or for reinforcement. It could still be optimal to learn with this additional instruction, even if it's a secondary concern for rudimentary learners.
This article compares Scotland with England: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/jan/19/phonics-ch...
One thing I've never seen addressed is the difference in accents between Scotland on the one hand, and England and Wales on the other. Scottish pronunciation of Standard English is in general closer to English spelling (e.g. "good" and "food" rhyme, and "r" is always pronounced).
https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2018/09/10/hard-words-why...
https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/12/582465905/the-gap...
From the transcript:
"She didn’t come away with an understanding of how children learn to read. She didn’t really learn about the science of reading. Other teachers told me they did. They say the training they got during Reading First opened their eyes. Changed their lives even. Some of them still use the materials they were given. But for Christine Cronin and many other teachers, Reading First represented a change they didn’t like. They were told to follow a curriculum. With structured lessons like the one you heard when Bush visited the second-grade classroom in Florida. To Christine Cronin, it felt traditional and old-fashioned."
And from a later episode:
"Like Christine Cronin. She’s the teacher in Boston who tried to get on board with Bush’s Reading First program, but said the curriculum she was given felt old-fashioned. She remembers looking at the pictures in books by Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins and thinking – that’s what I want my classroom to be like.
Christine Cronin: They framed a picture of reading instruction that seemed beautiful. Like, softly lit rooms. Kids were gonna have cozy nooks where they were curling up with a good book. It got your heart, along with your mind."
This teacher wasn't worried about the science, she was sold on the 'look and feel'.
Where do you live?
My son started preschool at 2.5. I guess anywhere between 2.5 and 3 is typical here. Then pre-k at 4.
Where I live it’s private. So parents send their kids to pre-school at 2.5-3. But by 4 the public schools will take them in.
Kid #1 was and still is an oddball in a number of ways. Learning to read so early seems to have given her some advantages, like being able to consume volumes of information at a young age, but she'll have a harder time in other ways.
It is not the only way: getting other students to teach. Yes it has a bootstrapping problem of quality and requires QA on the delivery but it is still definitely doable at scale.
It so often goes off the rails, though.
I'm not trying to be all hippy about it - kids still need assessment and evidence that learning occurred and there needs to be accountability. And teachers aren't going away. Human leadership is important and someone needs to be accountable for what a kid has learned, etc. A dystopian implementation would be no teacher and a parent just gets a daily report.
One thing that always perplexed me is his spelling/writing. He does very little reading on his own. But he spells and writes incredibly well. He can spell words he has never seen before - I think he can apply implicit rules after seeing relatively few examples.
> Anecdote: it worked for my kid.
It worked for my kid, too. And it's worked for my friends' kids. And for at least one stranger who read a previous HN comment I wrote.
If you have a child who is 3, 4 or 5, today (or whenever Amazon delivers) is the best time to start.
The source is corporations which sell curriculums which are mandated by regulation. These curriculums are designed to be easy to sell to governments, which means they tick all the regulatory boxes, but don't actually teach.
Our public education system is not designed to educate, it is designed to return profit to a few corporations which supply it.
How do I know this? Sister is a professor of education and has to fight against this stuff all the time.
There is a huge resource imbalance with the amount of money spent generating hype/misinformation targeting USGov acquisitions vs how much is spent on the other end doing research and fostering expertise.
Maybe the way contracts are written/awarded could also just be overhauled for a similar effect.
[0]: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting...
So they learned to read without really trying. It would take a few weeks of evening 'spelling time' and that was it.
Where these academics are most prominent is probably art. Opinionated opinion alert, but these are near the root of the reason why academic art has become utterly annihilated as a viable cultural source. The continual pursuit of novelty and reconstruction above all took them from anything beautiful, useful, or indeed even merely interesting into fields so far disconnected from anything beautiful, useful, or indeed even interesting that they are now irrelevant, despite their firm beliefs to the contrary.
Education... are pikers compared to them, honestly. But it does seem to be a consistent pattern that some education ideas are proposed and generate excitement precisely because they run contrary to experiences, the expectations of those doing it for years, precisely because they are different from established methods and curricula... and that is enough. Not because they can show better results. Not because of better outcomes. That they are different and heterodox is enough.
Unsurprisingly, when "better" is not part of the evaluation criteria, "better" is not what you get. And that's me being generous; at times "better" would also constitute a strike against the methodology... or at least, what you would consider "better".
Education is strangely bimodal. On the one hand you get savaged at the slightest suggestion that the curriculum is not perfect as is, and we have amazing stasis on what can be taught in most subjects, frozen around a hundred years ago. On the other hand you get crazies who think the solution to math is to start kindergartners out on college-level number theory (the original "New Math") or who want to redo education on the hippie drum circle model and teach math based on how it makes you feel (not thinking of anything in particular here, just a cynical pastiche of what I see out there lately). The one thing you can not do is incrementally improve the existing systems.
In the latter case it astonishes me how these people can zoom straight up to the Federal level sometimes, powered by the sheer academic excitement at a new theory, before anyone can hardly even formulate the thought of maybe running some tests on the new theory before pushing it out to millions of kids, and how this has happened over and over to greater and lesser degrees over the past 60-70 years.
2) What's an example piece which you think has helped "annihilate" academic art?
The lesson I took from all of this is that kids learn things, even basic things, very differently from each other or from their parents. Any school that insists on a single way to teach a particular basic skill is going to leave some non-trivial number of students behind.
Thats a great book and one i've used with my kids. My only issue with it is the pages are so 'busy' and jammed with content that it's hard for kids to focus, even with parent's guidance pointing at the word segments.
I snagged a used copy for $70 because I wanted to compare it to the newer 2nd edition which is way more affordable [0].
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Lets-Read-Linguistic-Clarence-Barnhar...
Definitely a top 10 all time purchase.
EDIT: Also, I would be remiss for not mentioning this, but if you are the parent of a kid stuck in a horrible reading program like the ones in this program, you can take matters into your own hands with this phonics-centric, well researched book: "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons". You don't have to be great at teaching, either. It gives you the exact prompts and feedback to use with your kids on every exercise. Lessons are short, repetitive, and you need to do it daily or near-daily. Anecdote: it worked for my kid.