In which I have totally expectedly strong opinions about reading pedagogy

[cahn]

A. has learned to read, and it has just really interesting watching him learning how to read. (More interesting than watching his sister E, who I think was somewhat atypical in how she learned; a little more on that later.)

What was so interesting to me is that he had four separate epiphanies (over a number of months) as he was learning:

(1) learn how to pronounce letter phonemes, along with combination-of-letter phonemes (like "oo") (ETA: conuly informs me that the correct word is "phonogram")
(2) realize that the letter pronunciations can be done run-together to form an actual word. This was a separate epiphany that came literally months after he knew how to form individual phonemes. (Over a course of about a week. It was really cool to watch.) This was the most surprising to me, that it required a separate and discrete understanding from simply understanding how to reproduce individual phonemes.
(3) learn that many English words do not conform to (1) and (2) and memorize those pronunciations. This was also a separate epiphany that came several months after (2) -- for a while he would laboriously and triumphantly sound out a word and I would say gently, "Well, you sounded that out correctly and it really seems like it should be pronounced like that! But because English is funny it is actually pronounced [like this]." The interesting thing was for a while that I would have to do this several times for the same word over the course of a week or two before he picked it up -- but several months after (2), he suddenly was able to pick up the word after I did it once. This may be less of an "epiphany" than a "now I'm comfortable enough with reading to memorize things," but I did get a distinct sense at one point that he actually did have the thought, "Ohhhhh, I need to sound out words sometimes but sometimes I just need to take the pronunciation and learn it!"
(4) Words are recognizable as patterns of letters, e.g., "ing" is always pronounced the same way. This came at around the same time as (3), and I'm not totally sure whether I should class it as a different epiphany (in fact it might be part of how one gets to (3)), but I do think it's a subtly different point.

I should append that his preschool has a "literacy-and-math" class that they go to for 15 minutes every day, where they talk about letters and numbers, do games with them, etc., and he's done this since he turned 3. This makes me strongly believe that when these epiphanies happen is highly individual, as obviously all his classmates have been doing the same thing, and very few of them have made the jump to actually reading yet. Of course at home we have talked about letters and putting letters together to form words. One of his favorite games (and E's favorite as well when she was that age) involved magnetic letters that we had from when I was a kid. We didn't use the magnet part (we have a sadly non-magnetic refrigerator) but A. would arrange random sets of letters on the ground (really random: bfkdqopcskwn, that kind of thing, only longer) and I would pretend to be horrified at them and then sound them out. This meant that although he didn't understand (1) or (2) at the time, he knew that I understood them, and he also knew I was doing something that mapped from the letters to some silly and fantastical word which he had control over and was nonsense, didn't have to be an actual word! And I would make up small nonsense consonant-vowel-consonant words ("vib," "mip," things like that) and we'd sound them out together. And of course we'd constantly read books to him (he loves being read to), and often I'd sound out words for him while reading, especially if it was a book with simpler words. So anyway, the point is that I feel that (1) and (2) were a sort of natural progression for him, and of course once you're reading at the (2) level, (3) and (4) come pretty naturally when you're reading books with English words that defy simple phonetic analysis :) So it was all fun and games to him, there was no stress at all, and it has been amazing to see his delight as he mastered each of those steps and saw the world open up to him. Seriously, he is LOVING reading cereal boxes and road signs etc. and realizing he can get all this information he couldn't before!

(When I say E was atypical, I mean that I didn't observe her having these separate epiphanies, certainly not in the very obvious way it happened with A. I feel as if her learning (1) through (4) was rather compressed -- I have something of a sense that it all kind of came together at the same time, or (probably more likely) that she didn't say anything to us about it until she basically understood all those things. We did do the same kinds of things with her, though.)

His slightly older (very bright) cousin O. has not yet learned to read. Of course perhaps her brain hasn't made those particular jumps yet. There are... several other things going on here as well, mind you . Thing #1: my parents live close to her and are Super Invested in their grandchildren Learning to Read Early. Because she who reads early wins, I guess?? *throws up hands* Thing #2: My sister is emotionally-if-not-intellectually invested in her child Learning to Read Early, partially I expect because she wants to please our parents. So even before getting out the gate, poor O. was burdened by the weight of all these expectations. And I don't know that it was presented as a game, as something fun. (Well, actually I do know. It wasn't.) And my sister would get stressed when O. was not learning things quickly enough. So she has a HUGE incentive to "guess the answer," is what I'm saying, where A. (who also likes to guess the answer, mind you) had rather less of one. (O. also by nature tends to be a people pleaser as well as highly emotionally intelligent and would easily pick up on things like her mom getting stressed, whereas I'm not entirely sure A. would pick up on that if I were stressed.)

Then there was Thing #3: My parents signed O. up for a reading class, one of those "guaranteed to teach your kid to read in two months!" kinds of things.

I wondered how the class could guarantee that, as my experience with A. had been that he had had to have these epiphanies, which happened at wildly varying, unpredictable times.

Well, I'll tell you: This reading class did BASICALLY ALL "SIGHT WORDS." (This is, like, flashcards with whole words on it. The class did very little phonetics.)

(Cynthia Voigt was writing about the evils of whole-word learning in the 80's! My school taught phonetics in the 80's! WHAT IS THIS??)

My sister, who doesn't have as strong feelings about reading pedagogy as I do but who knows a bad thing when she sees it, pulled O. out after a couple of sessions (my parents are still salty about this: "we even PAID for the class so our grandchild could learn to read and your sister just pulled her out!") but I think the damage was done. I think, mind you, that there are some children who can jump directly from (1) to (3-4) (I think E. might have been one of them, honestly; I was one of them, as my mom taught me via sight words before school; mildred_of_midgard, this must be you) because they have a lot of strong pattern recognition skills. But I believe strongly that not all children should. I think A. would have had a really hard time doing that. I also think it hasn't been good for O's reading skills. The problem is that if you do (3) before the others, it's easy to think the answer is to memorize everything. And that doesn't work for words you haven't seen before, unless you've also internalized (4), which is harder to do if you haven't yet done (2). Not impossible! But a lot harder.

When we saw them over Christmas I did the letter game with O. and she enjoyed the part where I had to sound out words a lot; the part where I tried to get her to sound out small words she was willing to do, but I'd put something down like "bim" and she'd sound out "bb... ii... mm... baby??" Really guessing, that is, and not having made that jump from (1) to (2) yet, but trying to skip to (3) and not really being able to yet.

Anyway, I don't mean to say that this is a big deal at all. O. will go to kindergarten this year and I think schools still do phonetics, right?? and she'll learn to read just fine, and my sister has about a billion books in her house and O. will grow up surrounded by books and the odds are 99% that she'll be more of a reader than E., who learned how to read super early. It's not a big deal at all, I just... feel like O. is a little frustrated right now, and that could have been avoided, and also I have strong feelings about whole-word/sight-word learning and why it sucks and stress on kids, is all :P

Comments

[thistleingrey]

Agreed, not all kids should, nor be expected to.

[hamsterwoman]

Watching my kids learn to read was very interesting for me, because I myself learned to read in a different language, which you ONLY read phonetically (I mean, there are some rules you learn, but even before you know the 'relax' your vowels and some consonants, at worst you will sound a little funny, not wrong). But also what I observed is making me think that:

"bb... ii... mm... baby??"

may certainly be due to the sight-words approach, but may also be due to the way an individual kid is wired. I taught L to read in Russian (i.e. phonetically) before she went to Kindergarten, and she could do it just fine. (She then had to learn that some of the same letters made different sounds when she was reading in English, which was legitimately confusing for a five-year-old, but I'm sure having a grasp of (1) and (2) from Russian helped her pick up English reading more quickly. I intentionally did not teach her to read English to avoid confusing her, though she got a bit of it in preschool, but she was the first kid in her class (minus the one-year-older girl who went into first grade after a few weeks) to start reading in English. BUT. As soon as she learned that in English you could sight-read words, she apparently decided that was the best approach, because she would keep trying to do that in Russian. Now, Russian words are quite a bit longer, and the endings have a lot of the important grammatical bits, but she would read the first part, and then try to guess the rest -- wrong, and wrong again, but she would keep trying, even though she could have just... kept reading phonetically and gotten it right. Even now that she's an adult (who reads Russian OK so long as she doesn't have to do it fast), she can't explain to me WHY she would do that.

Because I did see some letter confusion with L early on -- like, she spelled "nose" on her kindergarten spelling test with a C, which is the Russian S-sound -- I held off on teaching O to read in Russian until he was reading fairly solidly in English, i.e. first grade or so. And then he turned out to be the one to properly read Russian phonetically, even though he learned to read (English) via a mixture f phonetics and sight words.

So I think a lot of it is (as you say) a question of individual brains, and how they interact with the reading instruction they get. But getting both options presented to them is better than just one! (and I'm pretty sure learning to read phonetically helps with picking up another language later on, assuming the language is more phonetic than English. I remember how much trouble my American classmates had just reading Italian, without skipping sounds or getting things jumbled, and I didn't get it, but seeing how much learning to read in English is sight-words recognition, I understand that more.)

But yay for A reading! That's always exciting :D

[conuly]

Schools in the US primarily do not do either synthetic or analytic phonics programs. They do "balanced literacy" which, at the end of the day, is typically a little bit of half-hearted phonics mixed in with a whole lot of whole words.

(1) learn how to pronounce letter phonemes, along with combination-of-letter phonemes (like "oo")

The word you're looking here is "phonogram". English spelling is typically considered to have more or less 75 phonograms (depending, as always, on who does the counting) representing approximately 44-ish phonemes. Of course, many of those phonograms, such as /oo/, /ey/, /g/, or /ch/ can represent multiple phonemes, but at the end of the day English orthography is not quite as messy as many kindergarten and first grade teachers make out to the parents of the kids in their classes.

If your sister is particularly interested in teaching reading, she can do worse than look into a synthetic phonics program such as All About Reading or Logic of English. I personally favor the latter. If she wants to do it on the cheap I recommend Spalding, but using the modifications suggested here.

[luzula]

Interesting! This is not a subject I have ever really thought about.

[cahn]

Yes, exactly! I really think A. would have had a hard time if this had been expected of him.

[cahn]

but may also be due to the way an individual kid is wired.

Oh, absolutely. My older child E never guesses anything (even in cases where this would be beneficial), and I suspect that (my niece) O. is more on the other end of the spectrum of guessing. That's really interesting about L and (your) O, and that O turned out to be the one who can read phonetically, and I'm very glad to have those data points! (But I certainly don't think niece!O's reading experiences so far have been helping with that tendency, lol.)

I remember how much trouble my American classmates had just reading Italian

Wow! I find Italian so easy to read because the rules are so easy :) My high school language was French, which is possibly worse than English :)

ETA: Because of conuly's comment below, I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole of reading about American reading instruction. It sounds... pretty horrible, actually. I mean... that's a critical article, but it just boggles my mind that anyone even teaches that way!

[cahn]

ahahaha, yes, I wanted the word phonogram, thank you!

Schools in the US primarily do not do either synthetic or analytic phonics programs. They do "balanced literacy" which, at the end of the day, is typically a little bit of half-hearted phonics mixed in with a whole lot of whole words.

WHAT?? But... what?? How does anyone ever learn to read??
(I mean, I did see a lot of sight words coming home with E when she was that age, but I never paid it much attention because she already knew how to read and I figured there were phonics going on that I just never saw. But... maybe not.)
Wow, now I'm really glad that by the time A begins school his reading will be fluent and he won't ever have to put up with that mess :(

I'll pass that information to my sister, thank you!!

[cahn]

Well, I've only been thinking about it because I've been observing it over the last year :) But it is pretty fascinating to watch :)

[mildred_of_midgard]

I wondered if you were going to bring our Tillermans discussion into it!

My problem is that I learned to read before I was old enough to have memories, and so I'm going entirely on my memories of my mother telling me many years ago about her memories of things that happened many years before *that*. And having glanced at the baby book she kept when she only had one kid to look after and had time to write in a baby book, her stories of my acquisition of spoken language don't quite match up with what she recorded at the time.

I will say that I always had a working memory and pattern recognition skills that were well beyond my peers (and are still well above average), and so I could see a mostly whole word method, especially if it was indirectly phonetics geared, like doing a bunch of rhyming words at the same time, working for me.

As a linguistics major/PhD student, I took three phonology classes in college and grad school. And the bulk of the homework in all of them worked like this: Here's a data set consisting of the pronunciation of a bunch of words in a language you've probably never heard of. Figure out the conditions under which you pronounce a sound as 's' vs. 'z'.

And I was really really good at that. When I got to Greek 101 late in college, and the professor said, "Here are the rules for where the stress goes on a Greek verb. Here's a Greek verb. Tell me where the stress goes," and so many of the students couldn't do it, my mind was blown. I mean, they've told you the answer! Where I come from, they'd give us the verbs with stresses and tell us to to figure out what the rules governing stress were. If you can't do the mindless and deterministic job of applying rules that have been given to you, you'd never be able to make it in a class where you have to figure out the rules yourself.

So if you presented me with a bunch of Dr. Seuss type books that contain a lot of words with similarities grouped together, and I memorized them, I'd figure out the rules even at age three, I'm pretty sure. And I think some explaining was done, it was just heavier on the "teach the kid to memorize an entire book so she can read it on her own" approach than would work for a lot of other kids.

I would also point out that it was a low-stress approach. Reading time at age 2-3 was cuddle time on Mom's lap, and there was a game aspect to Mom reading most of the book, and me being responsible for one word whenever she paused. And though all the kids were read to, I was the only one who picked it up like breathing.

I have a lot of thoughts on how reading is taught in the high school/college/grad school world, by which I mean both literature in a familiar language and literature in an unfamiliar language, and at some point when I can brain again, and especially after I've had a chance to tackle some languages using a method I think will work much better and report on my results, expect a long post on the subject.

Meanwhile, I very much enjoyed yours!

Btw, I am not a guesser. I am a "refuse to open my mouth until I feel confident in my answer and have triple-checked everything" person. It meant I did really well in math class in school, and was massively crippled in math competitions where speed was of the essence. I still placed highly, but I'd get like second or third when I could have placed first if I'd given the answers I had as soon as I came up with them, but refused to give them in time, even when the penalties for being wrong and the penalties for silence were the same. I also think my GRE math score was like a 720 instead of an 800 because while there wasn't a single problem I couldn't have done in junior high (it was ridiculously easy), I resist being rushed.

Oh, linguistic trivia: "-ing" has two subtly different pronunciations that you intuit as a kid but no one ever points out explicitly until you're a linguistics major, which accounts for why "finger" and "singer" don't rhyme. ;)

[ambyr]

Huh, this is really interesting to me! I had vaguely heard of phonics as a literacy tool, but I don't think I've ever encountered it in the wild. My own learning-to-read experience was pretty much all, "Have parents read the same book aloud to me, while I look at the text, until I memorize it well enough to read it back to myself." So, whole word, basically, I guess?

[sophia_sol]

I've read articles before about the execrable lack of phonics in teaching-to-read in the US before, and it continues to baffle me that anyone thinks whole-word-memorization and guessing is in any way a useful tool to teach a person to be a strong reader able to read widely. Memorizing shapes of words teaches you how to read those specific words, and learning that the right approach to seeing a new word is guess what it is based on context leads you to not ever learning new words, but learning the rules of reading English (and of the various languages that contributed a lot of vocab, and of the ways in which English usually chooses to mangle those languages.....) means you have a very good chance of figuring out any new words you come across in your travels no matter how complicated or unfamiliar. It's so much more versatile and widely-applicable!

I have no idea what kind of reading education I received as a kid, but I can say as an adult that I use the guessing & memorization strategy approximately 0% of the time. Internalizing the spelling of a new word is vital to me in terms of being able to store it and read it fluently - which, I suppose, is not exactly phonics, because the pronunciation to me is a beneficial knock-on effect rather than where I start, but is like a close cousin?

[conuly]

A great many people don't learn how to read well.

One of my nieces, whom I've helped raise, is dyslexic, which is how I first came to know about the sorry state of literacy education in early elementary. It's a scandal, honestly.

[hamsterwoman]

Thank you for the article link! That was fascinating and eye-opening and also pretty depressing. I'm pretty sure I recall the cue things from the kids' kindergarten homework packets/stuff on the walls. I don't remember if I recall phonics beyond initial letters -- I think a little, yeah.

(It makes sense to me that a strong reader would use MSV cues to read FASTER when reading easy text -- the way you can still read words that are scrambled or have the middle portions blacked out. But it's mind-boggling to think that this is the ONLY way some people have been taught how to read...)

E never guesses anything (even in cases where this would be beneficial

My O is like that. He hates guessing even when the purpose of the question is to make an educated guess, and he even hates answering questions with no right answer (like, "What did you like best about the story?"), because he suspects there is actually a correct answer and he might not be giving it. Which, as a person who would rather stay silent than be wrong, too, I get, but it's still really frustrating. (This was also the child who went from apparent zero to full mastery with all kinds of things in young childhood, from learning the alphabet to becoming potty trained. I guess he just needed to reach a stage of development where he could be sure he was doing it right before he would even attempt it? SO WEIRD.)

Which is making me think that, in Russian, if you read phonetically, you will always get the right answer (or very close), but in English, the only way to be 100% sure that you're reading a word right is to recognize it and know how it's pronounced. So quite possibly different strategies work best for the guessing-averse child between the two languages. (Meanwhile, L is always happy to take an offered shortcut, and quite possibly learning in school, via English, that one could substitute the three cues for methodical reading, she was like, "Hey! excellent idea! I'm just going to do that in Russian, too" (even though it doesn't actually work in Russian...)

Wow! I find Italian so easy to read because the rules are so easy :)

Right?! You learn your "gn" and "gl" sounds, and the rules for "c" and "g", and THAT'S IT basically. But my classmates kept getting tripped up by the same 'simple' words.

(I totally think that French is WAY worse than English when it comes to phonetic-ness or lack thereof, as English went ahead and simplified a lot of the borrowed French words. I guess English draws on more different languages / distinct pronunciation system rules, but I think the net simplicity is in favor of English.)

[cahn]

Yeah, I was thinking a lot of our Tillermans discussion while writing that. Also, apparently it didn't make it into the edited post, but I am pretty sure that some of my strong opinions about reading pedagogy come directly from Voigt's strong opinions :)

But yes, I think you were(/are) extremely good at pattern matching, and it was easy for you to figure out how everything worked with a minimum of instruction.

I have very vague memories-of-memories (at this point) of my mom waving flashcards in front of me with letters and letter sounds on them, so there may have been some phonetics involved. My mom doesn't remember this at all, and if these cards ever existed she does not have them, whereas she does remember the sight word flash cards and they physically exist (I inherited all the "sight words" cards my mom made when E was that age -- and there were a bunch), so my memory may be faulty here. It is, however, true that in school we went over phonics and various phonetic rules (when to make long and short vowel sounds, etc.) in great and excruciating detail, and I was old enough by then that I do remember those. (I think they were called "SSS" workbooks?? They were different colors and I disliked them because they were so boring and I already knew how to read.)

I'm really interested in your method! I have had good luck with fairly traditional "here's the grammar" approaches combined with "now to review, let me translate this random piece of English into [language]," the only problem being that when learning on my own I can usually get myself to study the grammar but don't usually have the impetus to do the second (since I'm usually wanting to read in the language, not write in it). The thing I hate is the "now let's learn how to say 'how are you?'" as I invariably want to know how to, like, read an opera libretto or something and I don't really caaaaare about all that stuff. (The exception is numbers. Numbers are definitely important.)

Heh, yep, this is E right here: nooooot a guesser.

And heh to the trivia on "ing" :)

[cahn]

Heh, yeah! But as an adult I assume you are able to take a word that you haven't seen before, like "gwiferpoot" (which I just made up this second for illustration) and you could tell me approximately how it was pronounced. So at some point you must have internalized the structures... which is why it seems to me that it makes sense to teach exactly those structures! But also, as you demonstrate, not every child needs to be taught it explicitly :)

(now I think "gwiferpoot" OUGHT to be a word, lol)

[cahn]

I DON'T UNDERSTAND THE GUESSING THING AT ALL

Like, I am the poster child for mispronouncing words because I met them in books before I heard people say them! But it's not like I GUESSED at what the WORD was, just that I would guess at some vowel sounds and syllable stresses and sometimes pick the wrong one. I still knew what the word was! I don't understand how anyone can think a strong reader GUESSES words?? This makes no sense to me AT ALL. (And there's this article I linked above where teachers are actually telling children to do things like guess whether the word is "bear" or "fox" based on what letter it begins with and what the picture is on the next page. This is HORRIFYING to me.)

For me, as an adult, there is clearly some memorization going on, but I suspect... memorization partially in terms of memorizing aided by knowing things about letters and groups of letters. Which is kind of what you are saying, I think! BUT NOT GUESSING.

[cahn]

The story about how the teacher is trying to get them to guess fox or bear is HORRIFYING to me. Not least because the goal of being a strong reader is to read WITHOUT pictures... ugh.

because he suspects there is actually a correct answer and he might not be giving it.

OMG, you know my struggles!! This is exactly E. Her preschool teacher talked to me one day telling me that E had melted down for no reason. "All I did was ask her whether she wanted the blue glass or the red glass!" Me: "...yeah, that was the problem." And yep, she also went from just about zero to full mastery of a bunch of things.

So quite possibly different strategies work best for the guessing-averse child between the two languages.

That's a very interesting observation! Relatedly, E. never went through a period of phonetically spelling things -- it was either the correct spelling or nothing. A. went through an adorable period where he would write things phonetically or at least do his best guess (e.g., "I LIK DADEE"), although he seems to be coming to the end of that and now asks a lot more frequently how to spell things.

[cahn]

Yeah, this is a scandal :( I just don't even understand. Like, I feel that reading is something that... every teacher and administrator can do, presumably... and I feel like all one has to do is think "wait, I'm a strong reader and I don't guess at words I don't know by looking at the first letter!" (Your comment led me into a rabbit hole of looking at articles on teaching reading, and I was reading about "three cueing and I am HORRIFIED.)

[mildred_of_midgard]

The thing I hate is the "now let's learn how to say 'how are you?'" as I invariably want to know how to, like, read an opera libretto or something and I don't really caaaaare about all that stuff.

Same! This is why I never mastered German. If there had been four semesters of courses where we could get down to reading, instead of four semesters of asking when the train is coming, I might have learned what I need to know for this fandom. But there was only one course like that, and it simply wasn't advanced enough to teach you to read German enough to be able to keep it up on your own.

Most of my thoughts on the method are going to be geared toward the study of dead languages, because reading texts is the skill I'm interested in, that's where I have the most thoughts on pedagogy, and that's where I feel like we make many of the same mistakes we make in teaching literature in regular English classes. I have fewer opinions on how living languages are taught, because the goals are so different and the pedagogy is so different. Dead language courses don't do the "how are you?" thing, and I still think we're making massive mistakes.

Spoiler: part of the reason behind my strong feelings is that this isn't a case of "this method didn't work for me but might for everyone else," like phonics, it's a case of "I learned using the same method as everyone else, I was light-years ahead of my peers in terms of skill and motivation, and I *still* didn't learn enough to keep up my Latin/Greek/Old Norse/Middle Welsh/whatever after I left academia." And if I didn't, I know my peers didn't either. The only ones who passed me and continued being able to read Latin or Greek were the ones who either got their PhD in Classics, or went out and became Classics professors with a multidisciplinary PhD. IOW, either you become a specialist, or you're screwed. And I feel like the problem is not so hard that this situation is unavoidable; I feel like our method makes the problem harder than it needs to be. You shouldn't need a PhD to read Latin. I never stuck through undergraduate German, but I don't believe you come out of our educational system needing a PhD to read German.

But I would like to have some success with a different method before I start being too outspoken about it.

(I mean, I sort of have; one of my major epiphanies was that a great deal of my success in school, in languages, in literature, in history, and even in physics, was due to following a different method on my own time and using the official method only for school, and it was trying to use the official method after I left school that the effort-payoff ratio became so low that I gave up on it.

I want to go back to my method, improve it, and stop trying to do the officially approved method just because I had years of brainwashing that it was not only the One True Way of learning, but actually the metric by which success was defined.)

I'll stop here, because I need to go back to getting my Katte family posts ready for rheinsberg. :)

[rosefox]

This is super interesting! Kit has just reached the stage of pointing to words in books and asking "What's that say?" so it's probably time for us to start sounding words out more—we do it here and there but not in a focused way.

[rosefox]

I was going to link you to that if you hadn't seen it already. It's on my list of things to ask about when we do kindergarten tours.

[conuly]

They also don't think that they sound out each individual letter, and the bulk of their training in this area tells them that words like "sigh" or "the" or, in extreme cases, "red" and "say" cannot be sounded out. This is all false, of course, but people are capable of believing all sorts of contrary and bizarre things about language.

[hamsterwoman]

The story about how the teacher is trying to get them to guess fox or bear is HORRIFYING to me.

Yeah, I really couldn't believe that! /o\ That seems the OPPOSITE of the thing to teach in that situation...

OMG, you know my struggles!!

Yep XD (I'm sorry to say he has not outgrown this character trait, even at almost 17. Though I guess he's gotten better at convincing himself what right answer teachers are expecting from a subjective question, which I suppose is also a valuable skill....)

And interesting that in E's case this also correlated with zero to full mastery, huh!

Relatedly, E. never went through a period of phonetically spelling things

Same with O! Since he's the younger kid, I was really anticipating it, too! We had really enjoyed L's creative spelling phase -- she would blithely (and usually pretty decently) attempt fairly sophisticated words in both schoolwork and the "books" she was making at home. I remember a "how I spent my winter break" essay from must've been first grade, where she was writing about going to the beach and seeing "a homeless pirsen smokinge drugs" -- a friend pointed out that her spelling was very much like something out of the Canterbury Tales, and I was never able to unsee it XD -- and she would make "picture books" with animal illustrations and try to write words like "sugar glider" and "jaguar". That was so much fun! (And she would never ask how to spell things, that I recall, because I think she felt like as long as she could get her point across it was fine. Her spelling in Russian is still atrocious.)

We started missing that phase as soon as it was over, and I was looking forward to O taking up the mantle of creative spelling, but he never did. He would just... use the limited number of words he knew how to spell correctly. It was a bit like reading Up-Goer Five explanations.

[cahn]

Heh. E, at age just-about-10, has not really outgrown it, although there are areas in which she's much better than she used to be (e.g., she will do "free writing" and write D&D stories even though there isn't really a "right answer") -- but yeah, I have coached her with things like "when a teacher asks you to write about your favorite X, it doesn't actually HAVE to be your favorite X! Just name something that you like!" Because otherwise she would be all "I don't KNOW if it's my favorite! What if I think of something I like better?"

I LOVE this creative spelling phase and I'm always a little sorry when A. asks us how to spell something, although I know it's good in the long run.

[cahn]

I mean, I have a tiny amount of sympathy for this, in the sense that sounding out individual letters really is different from understanding that it all runs together into one word, and adults do tend to skip the former. But the former is also a stepping stone to learning how to do the latter, gah!

or, in extreme cases, "red" and "say" cannot be sounded out.

WHAT

I was actually charmed, when A. and I were sounding out words, by how many words could be sounded out with fairly simple rules that I didn't realize could be until I actually tried it, and now that you mention it those "y" dipthongs were one of them. Hmmmmph.

[cahn]

Right, I'm not really interested in speaking or writing. I mean, I'm mostly interested in live languages, so I probably should be, but I'm not :)

I'm interested in it when you get around to it. I feel like I've retained French relatively well for having had it in high school twenty-five years ago -- I could probably read the Fritz letters in French, it would just be really slow (and part of my diabolical plan to get you to print the French as well is not just for reference, which of course is the main reason, but also so that I have an excuse to practice reading a bit). So yeah, I agree you don't need a PhD to read French :) I don't really see why learning Latin should be any different and yet it seems like you're saying it is different. D had Latin in high school and I should ask him what his experience was.

[cahn]

Oh, so fun!

I didn't really sound out words in a super-focused way while reading, just sometimes when it seemed to make sense. Like, when we go to the library A. picks out somewhat random books off the shelf, and osmetimes they were early primer readers where it made sense to do it.

So yeah, I don't think it has to be a really big deal or anything.

[conuly]

Yeah, it's a bit sad because the diehard whole words - sorry, "balanced literacy" - advocates you meet online never seem to pick words that actually cannot be easily sounded out - like "two" or "one" - nor even ones that are tricky and use phonograms that have multiple conflicting pronunciations - like "key" or "they" or "read".

They always pick words that are trivially easy to sound out as examples, and that's... it's really sad.

[conuly]

With all this I feel I should say that though I do rec Spalding for teaching reading on the cheap, it's not a great fit for at least some dyslexic kiddos. For Eva, it was way too front-loaded, and frankly, it's a boring curriculum. It's what homeschoolers call a "get it done" program. If your nephew appears to have a learning disability you might want to consider a program designed with LDs in mind. Wilson and Barton are generally considered the gold standard Orton-Gillingham programs for dyslexics, but the ideal program is the one you can get insurance to pay for. In Eva's case she compensates very well while reading, but she can't write, and I went in a totally different direction and used a UK program (US edition), Apples and Pears. They also have a reading program intended for children with learning disabilities or, as they call it in the UK, learning differences. (In the UK, "learning disability" means what we mean when we say "intellectual disability".)

But let's not put the cart too far before the horse here. Among other things, it's your sis who's making the decisions here, right?

Edit: Sorry, this is a pet interest of mine and if people let me I can go on and on for hours, though eventually I start repeating myself.

[cahn]

Uggggh. It's hard for me to believe people actually DO THAT. I'm glad you're going to ask about it! I'm interested to hear what people respond -- like how widespread a thing this is.

[nineveh_uk]

When you say you don't guess words at all, do you mean you don't guess pronunciation, or you don't guess meaning? Because I guess meaning from context all the time - though as an adult, that is mostly when reading a foreign language or a historic text in English (or Patrick O'Brien!). As a child I think I'd happily have gone "That is a picture of a fox, so clearly that word is the word 'fox' " But I suspect really that when it comes to English, the language itself ultimately demands both phonics and memorisation of the completely random, so any method that introduces both will teach most kids who have an interest in reading, while kids who are more frustrated or find it more difficult will do better with a system that fits them individually better. And not putting pressure on kids before they are ready or making it a chore or frightening is most important, of course.

But for something much worse than any conventional method, have you come across the Initial Teaching Alphabet. I had a fellow university student whose school was a very late user of it - 15 years on, she still struggled with standard spelling.

[nineveh_uk]

Yeah, I spent 3 years at school learning German and I learned the basics, but never gave a damn about the language. And then many years later, I wanted to be able to read vampire musical fanfic in German. Amazing how my comprehension rapidly improved! My German is still rubbish because I don't care about the fanfic that much, but it is better than it was. Meanwhile, at school we might have listened to Les Miserables in French, but instead the exam board wanted us to memorise the word for carburettor. I don't even know what a carburettor is in English!

[cahn]

My niece ("O") as far as I know (from both my sister's report and my own observation) doesn't have any sort of dyslexia or other learning disability. It's possible her brother, my nephew, might (he is 2), as a result of early auditory processing issues -- fortunately my sister caught them and got them fixed this early, so we're pretty hopeful that there will be few or no long-term issues. But for this reason I'm very glad to have your thoughts on dylexia/LD programs as well. (And also because I'm generally curious as well, and because I belong to a parent email group where sometimes questions like this come up.)

But yeah, it's my sister who makes the decisions for her kid, as it should be, and I've presented her with the options and offered to help financially if that's an issue. (Ideally I'd help with time/training, which would be the most helpful for her, but we live too far away.) So... we'll see. (Very possibly she will just punt it to see how she does in K.)

And no need for apologies! I LOVE hearing about stuff like this :D

[cahn]

Oh, yes, I guess meaning from context and I think that's actually a good skill for kids to learn. It's guessing how to say the word that I don't do -- and, as I say above, I do guess parts of it, like the vexed vowels and where to put the stress, just not the entire word.

In the article linked above there's this horrifying story where the teacher says "oh, if you don't know the word, look at the picture." There's a fox and bear in the picture. "It starts with b, so is it a fox or bear?"

This is the kind of guessing I just don't do, and it seems appalling to me as a strategy to teach a beginning reader, just the kind of "guess the answer" that some kids are going to glom onto to their detriment. Now, to be sure, I might have mispronounced it "beer" and had to learn that it correctly maps onto "bear," but that seems different to me.

For an adult example, if my boss is talking to me about these companies "Vingtrox, Weebling, Pinteramo, and Roquill" (I just made these up right now, sorry if there are actual companies with these names" and he then sends me an email about "Pinteramo," I may say to myself, "Oh, Pinteramo, that's that company he was talking about earlier" but what I don't say is "...I don't know that word, let's see, from context it might be one of those companies he was talking about earlier. Is it Vingtrox? No, that begins with a V..."

But I suspect really that when it comes to English, the language itself ultimately demands both phonics and memorisation of the completely random

Oh yes! I don't dispute that at all. (See the four steps in the post above.) What I do think is that it's much easier for many children to go from phonics to memorization than the other way around.

Oof, yeah, I can see how that would muck up your spelling ability.

[conuly]

I certainly hope that O is like the majority and does not have dyslexia because it is a fucking bitch (excuse my language here, it's not nearly strong enough) getting schools in the US* to diagnose and appropriately remediate, no matter what the law says. (Especially so-called "stealth dyslexia", naturally.) That's a whole other scandal of rabbit hole for you to fall down.

But most likely she doesn't, because most people don't and unless you have a history in your family, it's improbable. It's just always near the top of my mind when talking about reading education because of my own darling niece.

* I can only speak for the US, but I believe the UK isn't any better.