I'm disappointed that nowhere in this interview is there any actual indication of what is done badly, or what teachers should do to improve how kids are taught to read. I get that there is apparently a gap between how kids are taught to read and the science behind how kids should be taught read.<p>I would much prefer a single understandable, actionable insight. Without it, this interview seems rather hollow. From this interview, I'm led to expect that the real insight from the book is that "teachers should study behavioral science, congnitive science, and brain development," which is too loose a central thesis to capture my interest.<p>I suppose what I've really gathered from this interview is two things: firstly, I would like to know a bit more about the gap is between how kids learn to read and how they should learn to read; secondly, I do not intend on reading Seidenberg's book (i.e. the book this interview is centered around) to find out.
I think this is the thread where I should recommend the best book to teach reading: Let's Read, a Linguistic Approach
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Read-A-Linguistic-Approach/dp/0814334555" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Read-A-Linguistic-Approach/dp/081...</a><p>I got the recommendation here in HN and I used the book with my 2 daughters. I started with my first daughter when she was 4.5 years old. I started with my second daughter at an older age because she was showing a slight case of dyslexia. It took 2 years to finish the book with each of them. After they were done they could read everything. My second daughter is 9 and is almost done with Oliver Twist.
Read this comment by tokenadult:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4665466" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4665466</a>
"The reasons are numerous, but one that Seidenberg cites over and over again is this: The way kids are taught to read in school is disconnected from the latest research, namely how language and speech actually develop in a child's brain."<p>This is almost certainly wrong and even logically absurd. I am sure there are more optimal ways to learn to read but any kind with a fair IQ who aren't dyslexic can learn to read.<p>My son isn't a genius, but he have been practicing reading since he was 5 and today at 8 he reads Harry Potter.<p>The trick (as with almost any other field)? Practice, practice, practice. That's it. There is no magic sauce there.<p>One thing that we found that actually increased his lust for reading (he definitely would rather play soccer, Minecraft or Rayman) is to give him a Kindle which has a kids app with achievements and daily reading goals.<p>It's sad that so few kids read at their grade level but it's not because of sub-optimal teaching methods that much is for sure.
I want to share the experience I had with my daughter Greta (now 5 yo). She learned to write and read independently. At 3 she was already able to write simple words (not memorized, you cold say "write <any-4-or-5-letters-word>"), and at this point at 5 she can fluently write. All this without spending more than, maybe a total of a few days once she were already capable of basic reading/writing. The question is, how she figured out how to write and read independently? I'm not sure, but my wife and I read she books since she was 1 month old, every night before bed time, and often she wanted to look at the books, so I guess she became accustomed to the shape of letters. Later she played a lot in one of these rubber carpets where there are the shapes of the letters (<a href="https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/PCwAAOSwM5JZma4a/s-l500.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/PCwAAOSwM5JZma4a/s-l500.jpg</a>), and my guess is that this also helped. At some point when she was like, 2, she became obsessed with "A". This is letter "A" she could say during a few weeks. Later she started to compose the "A" with three sticks, and so forth. Basically with this process she learned all the letters and the sound. Btw what I was able to observe was: 1) It is a lot of work for kids to learn to write and read. Greta succeeded in doing so only because without we even noticing much, he basically spent a lot of time thinking about letters, drawing them, reading them. 2) When we tried to teach her better, like sitting together, we almost stopped this process... because it started to be annoying, so we avoided it if not for 10 minutes every month to say like, how groups of letters sounded. 3) I believe that one of the key point was reading a lot of books, because her language skills where very impressive already at 1.5 yo or alike, and I believe this is potentially the result of reading books.
I have seven kids, and they are all voracious readers. One of the kids read all of the Harry Potter books when he was 8 years old. I honestly didn't think he could comprehend what he was reading (i.e., I thought the books would be beyond his reading comprehension level), but when we asked him questions about the books he always knew the answers.<p>What we learned works is:<p>1. Take them to the library a lot. Let them check out whatever they want. Let them check out as many books as they want (up to the limit allowed by the library - ours only allows 100 books per library card and we frequently run up against that limit).<p>2. Let them get their own library card as soon as the library will let them. When they are older let them ride their bikes to the library (obviously this depends on your location and situation) so they can check out things on their own.<p>3. Read to them from the time they are young, a lot.<p>4. Check out audio books from the library and let them go to bed listening to stories when they are too young to read. When they are older make sure they have a flashlight or two so they can read after lights out.<p>5. Greatly limit access to TV and game systems. We don't have cable or streaming subscriptions. We only use our TV for movies or TV shows on DVD from the library which they can watch on occasion when their chores and homework are done (unless it's a nice day outside then they have to be outdoors playing or reading in the hammock).<p>6. Fill the house with books. We have thousands of books across all age groups and topics. There are books everywhere in every room just in piles. The kids beds are covered in books.<p>7. Don't be a book snob. If they want to read comic books, let them read comic books. It doesn't matter what they are reading, as long as they are reading. Like any skill, the more you do it, the better you will get at it and the greater success you will have at reading more advanced material when the time comes.<p>8. Let them see you reading. Talk to them about what you are reading. Recommend books to them.<p>9. When they are older, get them jobs at the library. Libraries always have a need for people to help shelve books! One library in our area has a service night when the library closes early and volunteers help clean the library. There is pizza and soda and the kids absolutely love this night.<p>10. Listen to books on "tape" in the car. Get them used to both reading and hearing things being read to them.
Once you get past phonetics, symbol/sound relationships - the only metric that really matters for basic literacy is # of words read.<p>Should it be challenging? Yea, sure - but ten short books or two long ones doesn't matter a bit. They just need to read more.<p>Source: I'm a k12 English teacher. The data that makes it into my hands almost always comes back to this point.
It is amazing how irrational even smart people act about learning to read. Maybe specifically smart people. Please, read the current research.<p>Kids learn to read best out of interest -- with reading material they are interested in and when they are ready to learn. And it makes them better.<p>My parents fought not to teach me to read. I didn't learn to read until I was 11. When I was 12 I went to school for the first time (unschooled) and was the top reader in my academically inclined private school.<p>Everyone else learned phonics and other permanent reading crutches and I read shapes because I wasn't told how or when to learn when I was little.<p>I still read weirdly fast compared to classically trained people who are otherwise smarter than me. What is faster I/O worth to your future?<p>All it involves is not ramming phonics and other Prussian nonsense down your kids throat and waiting for intrinsic motivation to kick in.
<i>What I point out in the book is that in order to grasp the research, [teachers] need basic scientific literacy to be able to understand it....</i><p><i>The political solution was called "balanced literacy," which called on teachers to use the best of both approaches. But it left it up to teachers who had been trained to dismiss phonics and brush off the science.</i><p>There's the key. Teachers get their educational ideas from their education and spend the rest of their career defending them from parents, administrators, ideological "reformers," and other random bystanders who are mostly well-meaning but who are all convinced they have a magic trick to fix everything if the teachers would just stop being dumb about how they do their job. Everybody's got an easy answer, 99% of them are just arrogant bystanders, and teachers very quickly start tuning out. And the teachers are <i>not</i> scientifically literate, so they don't know the difference between a scientist who does research on reading and a random yahoo.<p>Plus the calls for educational "reform" usually have a partisan tinge. Republicans say just drill harder and longer and keep the desks separated in 90º grids instead of circles and other commie bullshit; Democrats say give kids books that connect to their unique cultural heritage and respect their cognitive differences and they will magically know how to read. All the more reason for teachers to ignore all outside input and assume they know best.<p>Not to mention the educational companies that have to manufacture excitement about new teaching fads every year so they can sell new classroom materials.<p>With all this bullshit going on, you can't blame teachers for being closed-minded and cynical. Most of them receive an idea of what progressive, smart teaching looks like in college, when they're still optimistic and open-minded, and cling to it for the next forty years. So I think this guy will be pleased by the response of teachers who are currently in college. They'll take in the current consensus and run with it.
The main gem of wisdom that I took away is that we need an army of reading tutors at a very young age, like K-3. The Reading Partners group that I belong to in Dallas, TX is exactly the prescription that the doctor ordered. We allow the children we tutor to pick a book to read to them, we do some phonics teaching as to pronunciation, word meanings, and then have the student read to us. 45 minutes, usually twice a week. The only thing I'd change, if we had enough tutors, would be to make this a DAILY one-on-one until we got the child up to proficient. Nonetheless, if you want to help out in a big little way, check out Reading Partners and help a child get that reading edge... incidentally, many third world countries have already realized that we need an army of tutors to make sure no kiddos are left behind.
For anyone interested in this topic, there's an education documentary covering three teachers who resort to leveraging brain science so as to break through the boredom and disinterest of their students: a great exploration of the personal journeys that led three teachers to use a neuroscience-based teaching model, and showing that model in action within their locales and student age brackets (Roland Park Elementary/Middle School in Baltimore, Maryland; a high school in upstate New York, and a community college in Western Pennsylvania). What really struck me in this documentary was the intimacy with which some students and teachers respond to the model- and it's a very human showing of the personal factors that drive education - both from a teacher and a student standpoint. Told more from the human-experience standpoint, it also covers practical aspects of using brain-based teaching.. worth a look for professional development credits. <a href="http://www.greymattersdocumentary.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.greymattersdocumentary.com/</a>
The best way to teach kids to read is to have their parents read to them, and sit with them individually and work with them on sounding out words.<p>Then you just read with them over and over and over. Every night you read with them, and then you provide them with access to books. Take them to the library check out as many books as they want and then you sit and read with them every single night. That is how you teach kids to read.
> Mark Seidenberg is not the first researcher to reach the stunning conclusion that only a third of the nation's schoolchildren read at grade level. The reasons are numerous, but one that Seidenberg cites over and over again is this: The way kids are taught to read in school is disconnected from the latest research, namely how language and speech actually develop in a child's brain.<p>I presume that at some point in the past most kids could read at grade level, because presumably when it was initially decided what grade level was it was based on how kids actually performed at the time.<p>So how was reading taught then? They certainly did not know today's latest research on language and speech development in a child's brain.<p>Did they just stumble into the right approach, and so a reading program based on the latest research would end up being similar to how reading was taught in, say, the 1920s?<p>Or was the 1920s (or whenever kids were at grade level) approach also flawed, and it is just that today's approach is even more flawed, and so if we based reading programs on the latest research most kids would end up above grade level?
Larry Sanger's essay on Baby Reading may be of interest:
<a href="http://larrysanger.org/2010/12/baby-reading/" rel="nofollow">http://larrysanger.org/2010/12/baby-reading/</a>
(I taught my daughter to read, my wife currently working on our son, both with a phonics based curriculum, but more in a Vygotsky style)<p>One of the motivations we have used is comic books. (Yes, that death of classic reading!) Both of our kids are My Little Pony fans, so we read a lot of those comic books for story time and gave them the books as they were learning to read. Wanting to read is a requirement for learning to read.
Two Paragraphs in the interview are actually talking about the topic area / science, the rest is devoted to a political discussion and isn't terribly helpful / insightful. I was pretty disappointed in what I thought would be a more meaningful piece from a relatively reputable news source.
Does anybody have any insight into the "reading wars," why phonics has fallen out of favor, and why it might still be important in certain contexts? All of this intrigued me in the interview and I was very disappointed that none of it was explained.