The flawed three-cueing system for teaching reading

I came from a big family, and I have 6 children.<p>I have taught all my children to read using McGuffey. I helped many of my siblings learn to read. Much of the discussion around phonics is missing the point.<p>It is a caricature to say that &quot;phonetic&quot; reading is completely phonetic to the exclusion of sight reading. This is binary thinking. Nobody teaches it that way.<p>The goal is not and never was to read phonetically ever after. In fact, from very early on, the concept of &quot;sight words&quot; is introduced. The phonetic method is a bridge and a tool to internalize words. The goal is to recognize words effortlessly, without thought.<p>So what is the difference between the old phonetic methods, the later sight methods, and the modern (debunked) contextual methods?<p>It&#x27;s all about where you start. The phonetic method uses phonics as its foundational concept. You begin with the sounds, and you learn the exceptions as you go. But even the exceptions are aided by phonetics. Most &quot;sight&quot; words still have enough of a phonetic component to clue the reader into what&#x27;s going on.<p>Sight reading, on the other hand, assumes the reader will pick up enough phonics as they go along, contextually. But with this method, everything must be learned by rote. The &quot;bridge&quot; of having phonetic tools at your disposal is not taught.<p>Now some children are simply sight readers, and do poorly with phonics. Not all minds are alike. But even sight readers benefit from having a foundation in phonics.

Having been taught with phonics, or at least having seen my classmates taught this way, I&#x27;d never imagined the world could be this fucked up. If you&#x27;re going to teach this way, why not throw out the language and write with Chinese characters? The Japanese have a whole set of phonic letters that they use to teach kids.<p>If a kid can&#x27;t sound out supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, fire his teachers. &quot;Sound out.&quot; Now there&#x27;s a word I haven&#x27;t heard in a long time.

My brother in law was taught to sight-read (recognize words on sight and not to analyze phonemes) and he always struggled and regretted it!!!<p>Phonics is the #1 advantage of ALL western languages. The idea that teachers would not leverage the #1 advantage of the entire language just shows how foolish our teacher education system can be!<p>Don&#x27;t let teachers screw up your kids with educational FADs! We didn&#x27;t! We taught our kids at 3.5 - 4.5 to read using phonics before kindergarten! We used:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.headsprout.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.headsprout.com</a> .<p>Our kids loved it! The risk of these FADs damaging your child&#x27;s entire education would make this program cheap even if they charged $1000 (it&#x27;s $200 - a small 10% increase over the last 14 years!)

Phonetic spelling is probably the greatest invention in written languages since paper.<p>I am constantly amazed that teachers on the front lines fail to recognize this. I&#x27;m saddened that UI designers keep replacing phonetically spelled words with icons and emojis.

&gt;For example, a child who says &quot;horse&quot; when the word was &quot;house&quot; is probably relying too much on visual, or graphic, cues. A teacher in this case would encourage the child to pay more attention to what word would make sense in the sentence.<p>WTF? Wouldn&#x27;t you just tell the child to slow down, look at the letters that make up the word, and speak the word out loud? This makes zero sense whatsoever

It&#x27;s very funny looking at this discussion from a mostly-phonetic writing system POV.<p>In Polish the system is regular (even the exceptions) and nobody considers trying to teach kids not to exploit that. You just remember how each letter sounds and then the dozen of so special combinations (which are still mostly regular). And you can read.<p>Yes you learn to read slow at first, and then you develop fast reading by yourself, it&#x27;s natural and comes with reading a lot. I don&#x27;t know anybody reading sound-by-sound past the age of 10, and usually kids learn to read whole words after they read their first long book (traditionally it&#x27;s &quot;Kids from Bullerbyn&quot; here).<p>I wonder how much longer it takes to teach kids reading such complicated writing system like English. Here it takes about 1 year, usually when they are in the first class of school.

I sometimes wonder if we need a better phonics. Doing it by letters feels crude, it requires a big gestalt moment when the kid puts the sounds together, and overemphasizes our very malleable vowels.<p>Something based more on syllables would seem better to me. Consider a simple work like “back”: kids sound out buh-ah-kuh which is a completely crazy version of the real word. You can’t say a B without a vowel, but instead of using the actual vowel (a) consonants usually get an “uh” added to them.<p>Learning syllables means learning maybe 5-10 times as many sounds, but then it’s also easy to add “ing” and “sh” and all the many combinations of letters that can’t be individually decoded.<p>The second problem is the kid has to pick out those letter combinations even though words are just a stream of letters. I wonder if it would be supportive to write the words in multiple colors to show the internal structure?<p>I feel like this must all exist already in some curriculum...?

Reading is both one of the great pleasures in my life, and an invaluable tool for acquiring new knowledge. It horrifies me to think that millions could be denied those pleasures and tools because of easily-remedied educational failures.

That chart for reading proficiency among 12th graders is rather... shocking.<p>Is there similar data for other countries available? It&#x27;d be interesting to know if this is an issue unique to America (among developed nations), shared among English-speaking countries, or if it&#x27;s a problem equally distributed across the world.

I like to recommend a kids video called &quot;The Letter Factory&quot;. Start around. Age 3. Then move on to &quot;The Word Factory&quot;. The 3rd in the series is not nearly as good in my opinion, but those two gave my kid a great start on reading. And they&#x27;re fun.

Nobody teaches to picture the story though. Mostly what we read are some actions, almost always. Actions need to mentally pictured to get involved and have a superior understanding. Without lack of this skill, we are distracted by our vision.<p>Half the time my brain is thinking of other things while I am reading something. There is too much distraction in your while you are reading something. Even your own eyes will give you unnecessary visuals like &quot;wow look at the font and the color and how the corners of the phone is rounded, the url of chrome changed to a new round url bar&quot; &quot;https is just a symbol of lock in black color&quot;

My kid’s school did mostly phonics with a fair amount of sight reading for common words. What a weird thing to be an absolutist about.

So, it all makes sense, but by this theory, it seems like the english words &quot;through&quot; and &quot;tough&quot; and &quot;benign&quot; should be really hard to learn, compared to &quot;true&quot; and &quot;stuff&quot; and wine&quot;. Also, English ought to be harder to learn to read than, say, German or Spanish. But I don&#x27;t know of any evidence that English-speaking countries have lower literacy than Spanish- or German-speaking countries.<p>I don&#x27;t mean that phonics isn&#x27;t useful, but the idea that having multiple strategies can kill your ability to read sounds fishy.

&gt;a third of fourth graders can&#x27;t read at a basic level<p>Academia&#x2F;education in America needs to move past this &quot;can&#x27;t fail&quot; philosophy.<p>Bad schools need to fail. Good schools need to grow.

I haven&#x27;t noticed this so much with reading, but it seems like the same misguided strategy is also being used for math. Instead of teaching the fundamentals (like algorithms for long division) and instead they teach all the mental tricks for doing quick math.<p>This should be especially concerning for software developers -- it seems they no longer teach (at an early age) the very things that made me like math and eventually computers.

I&#x27;d say the pathway to fluent reading is:<p>1. no concept of reading, context is not helpful<p>2. start to read, use context to cover any weaknesses and gaps<p>3. become fluent reader, no longer need context to cover weaknesses and gaps.<p>As an experienced educator, I would say there is no process of learning (anything) that doesn&#x27;t follow this path, whether using context is formally taught or not.<p>It&#x27;s an important part of teaching to understand where weaknesses are being papered over and support fixing that. It may be that one teaching method or another makes certain weaknesses easier to identify or fix, but in the end, enough dedicated practice is going to sort out these weaknesses either way.<p>The article presents this as though context is bad - but you need context to bridge from the start to the end of the process.<p>The article repeatedly says &quot;poor reader&quot; when it is really talking about a stage of learning to read (the anecdotes describe people stuck on this stage).<p>In my opinion: This is a really dangerous way of representing the problem of educating people, which denies agency to learners.

&gt; For Goodman, accurate word recognition was not necessarily the goal of reading. The goal was to comprehend text. If the sentences were making sense, the reader must be getting the words right, or right enough.<p>That&#x27;s like saying &quot;if the code compiles, it must be correct enough&quot;. Seems like a terrible idea.

Such a long article on reading and teaching and no mention of syllables. Is this completley unrecognized concept in eanglish reading teaching?<p>Teaching kids to read in polish goes like this: letters -&gt; syllables -&gt; words -&gt; sentences (with an overlap of the steps).<p>Known words and sentences are used throughout the process to illustrate the things you are learning at the moment and sort of tease what you will be able to do when you master current step.<p>I imagine in language where same letters can have so many different sounds the concept of syllables should be even more useful.<p>Teaching kids to read sentences before they can recognize what sound which letter bunches mean seems like telling kid to swim before he learns to float or tread water.

The flawed idea in question are the following strategies:<p>&gt; memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don&#x27;t know<p>Personally I think the phonics vs. sight words debate in English pedagogy misses the point entirely. The problem is that English divides words sentences into &quot;words&quot; and not morphemes. This way words like &#x27;disambiguation&#x27; or &#x27;boustrophedon&#x27; appear as a hard to parse blob regardless of which strategy you use. In my experience, schools have already started teaching &quot;word roots&quot; and the strategies needed to break words down into those roots. This to me seems like the key strategy.

This article buries the lead.<p>TLDR: Phonics works, Current strategies don’t.<p>What actually works is the shortest part of the article. It’s infatuation with what doesn’t work puts what does work more than halfway into the article.<p>I would have appreciated the article to be structured as “Phonics works, MSV Doesn’t and here’s why they’re different”

In the early 80&#x27;s, my parents pulled me out of California&#x27;s public schools when the state&#x2F;county ditched phonics for some unproven nonsense, to a private school that was founded on proven teaching methods (name of the school was Challenger). When I reentered a different public school district in grade 3, I was ahead of other students by around 2 grade-levels. In retrospect, the private school was far superior to the public school system, even in an upper-middle class area because the public schools experiment&#x2F;ed arbitrarily with curriculum in unproven ways on a large scale and didn&#x27;t seem to be held accountable at a large-scale for playing with children&#x27;s futures. Instead, individual teachers are micromanaged with outcomes of BS standardized tests. And also, US public schools were further ruined by NCLBA of 2001, and now the head of Navient is in charge of the DOEd. <i>sigh</i><p>Bottom line: Find a Waldorf forest school that instills curiosity, excellence and basic subjects using proven methods, because US schools are rearranging the deckchairs while the band is playing... <i>glurg, glurg, glurg.</i>

The Indian private school educational system does teach phonics which might be why lots of Indian origin kids ace the spelling bee in the US.

I was taught with phonics (not English) and one of the reasons was that reading is taught at the same moment as writing. So you learn to write first letters at the same time as you learn to read them. Iirc the first two were M and A

I asked my teenager about this, and they described this method as how they read. Any advice on teaching her how to read properly, now that they are a teenager?

I think this article is missing some basics. I know, for example, that Lucy Calkins’ program has a phonics program in _addition_ to the parts referenced in this article.

So what is a good phonics system for my child? Advice?

There is a reading comprehension system[0] which combines visual association (pictures) with various forms of word identification (spelling, phonemes, sentence composition, etc.).<p>In short, associating pictures with the words which describe them in various comprehension exercises, increasing in difficulty based on progress, has shown to help students in their reading comprehension.<p>Perhaps this can help some parents out there.<p>0 - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.explodethecode.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.explodethecode.com&#x2F;</a>

so obviously a scam to destroy public schools and handicap the working class children. if you want to fix this just force the wealthy kids to attend public schools. the reason why the wealthy actively are destroying public institutions is because they are not using it.

This is a disturbing article to read after watching my son struggling to learn to read.

Thank you for sharing this. It was such a good read.

I&#x27;m a little confused, was Shakespeare taught phonics?

Oakland California. Wow. The bay area can&#x27;t even teach their kids how to read.

The reason for this debate is that different IQ levels require different techniques. Higher IQ students will be more able to apply patterns and systems from phonics to words seen for the first time.<p>Lower IQ students tend to struggle with mapping systems onto new material. So the more brute force systems, like memorizing whole words, tends to have more success.<p>We see similar things in learning mathematics.