Reading pedagogy, local edition

[cahn]

We technically live on county land, right between two nearby incorporated areas, Larger City and Smaller City. We happen to be in Smaller City's school district (and right now it doesn't matter anyway as both kids are at least temporarily in private school), but Larger City is currently having a contested school board election. One of the school board challengers is campaigning against the current reading program.

Which is how I learned that the current reading program that both school districts use is the Lucy Calkins program, which upon further investigation I found is a well-known and widely-used program (something like the fifth most widely used in the nation??) that has a lot of nice things in it like encouraging kids to love reading. But. As far as I can tell, it does not emphasize phonics as a fundamental foundation for reading and does emphasize GUESSING. GUESSING THE WORD. FROM THINGS LIKE PICTURES. BECAUSE THIS SO WORKS WHEN YOU GET TO UPPER-LEVEL TEXTS THAT DON'T HAVE PICTURES.

(I want to append that this sort of guessing is distinct from figuring out what a word means from context where you didn't know the meaning of the word before. Of course everyone does that! This is guessing to figure out how to decode a word from letters. Like, if I wrote down the word "gwiferpoot" (which I made up, but which I now think ought to be a word), you would know how to decode how to say it in English even though it is a totally made up word! You would not be like "...well... cahn likes shiny things... and the word begins with "g"... so maybe that word is 'garnet.'" You might think that maybe it means garnet, but you would know that the actual word is "gwiferpoot" and be able to say to someone else, "what does 'gwiferpoot' mean or has cahn just gone off the deep end??")

IDK, I know I only have experience with one kid really (the other kid is an outlier nad should not be counted) and I've started realizing he is fairly bright so could be taken as not representative of a not-as-bright child (though even so I think he actually is a good example; my perception is that he may make academic connections a bit earlier than other kids but he makes them in essentially the same way as other kids I observe, whereas E's mind either works a little differently or presents the results differently), but watching him make the phonics connections has been the coolest thing ever and has made me permanently believe in phonics as a fundamental part of a reading program, and when I read about the horrifyingness of this guessing thing I'm like... have these teachers ever actually seen anyone learn how to read?? Have they ever actually thought about how they, themselves, read??

gahhhhh conuly you were right about everything and I'm so glad my kid has already learned to read. (Also, you will be totally unsurprised to learn that this school board challenger is dyslexic, and her daughter is dyslexic and this is why she feels so strongly about the ways in which the school district has failed her child.)

I should probably ask A's teacher (at his current private school) what system she uses -- since he already knows how to read, this wasn't a priority for me as we were sort of hastily figuring out his schooling this summer -- although when I was in his classroom recently I saw some whole words floating around, and even under heavy prompting A. does not say anything about phonics taking place in the classroom (whereas it was very clear phonics instruction was taking place in his preschool). It is supposed to be gifted kids, so I expect they won't have too many problems and most of them know how to read already, but gaaaaaah.

I think this candidate is not likely to win (I think she is the only candidate who doesn't have formal credentials in the area of education... which... also says something, perhaps), but I am going to vote for her! (It looks as though I can, which is odd to me as we are not in the district, but I'm not going to complain.)

(In other news, according to my mom as of our last week's phone conversation, my now-6-year-old niece O. still guesses words. Sigh.)

Comments

[mildred_of_midgard]

LA LA LA I didn't see this post LA LA. :P

[cahn]

Heh. You have fandom stuff to do! Go do it! :D

(but sometime come back and talk to me, maybe this weekend because I AM ALL RANTY ABOUT THIS)

[mildred_of_midgard]

Well, I slept badly and I have a headache, so don't expect German quota, but here's an off-the-cuff ramble instead. :)

GUESSING. GUESSING THE WORD. FROM THINGS LIKE PICTURES. BECAUSE THIS SO WORKS WHEN YOU GET TO UPPER-LEVEL TEXTS THAT DON'T HAVE PICTURES.

Right? Long ago, in high school, I read a rant against what I see was called the Look-Say method, and I forgot everything else about this essay and who it was by, but the example of how to read stuck with me forever. Googling tells me it was Leonard Peikoff, "Why Johnny Can't Think", online here. I excerpt the part that stuck with me:

No one can learn to read by the Look-Say method. It is too anti-human. Our schools today, therefore, are busy teaching a new skill: guessing. They offer the children some memorized shapes and pictures to start, throw in a little Phonics (thanks to immense parental pressure), count on the parents secretly teaching their children something at home about reading — and then, given this stew of haphazard clues, they concentrate their efforts on teaching the children assorted methods of guessing what a given word might be.

Here is a Look-Say expert describing a child’s proper mental processes when trying to determine the last word of the sentence, "They make belts out of plastic.” The child must not, of course, try to sound out the letters. Here is what should go on in his brain instead:

“Well, it isn’t leather, because that begins with l. My mother has a straw belt, but it isn’t straw either. It looks like a root. I’ll divide it between s and t. There couldn’t be more than two syllables because there are only two vowels. Let’s see — p, l, a, s. One vowel and it’s not at the end of the syllable . . .” This goes on a while longer, and the child finally comes up with: “Oh, sure, plastic! I’m surprised I didn’t think of that right away because so many things are made of plastic.” The expert comments: “Just described is a child who was not about to carry out a letter-by-letter analysis of plastic if it wasn’t necessary, which is exactly right.”

Can you imagine reading War and Peace by this method? You would die of old age before you reached the third chapter.

I must add that the Look-Say educators demand that children — I quote another devotee — “receive praise for a good guess even though it is not completely accurate. For example, if a child reads ‘I like to eat carrots’ as ‘I like to eat cake,’ praise should be given for supplying a word that makes sense and follows at least some of the phonic cues.”

How would you like to see, at the head of our army, a general with this kind of schooling? He receives a telegram from the president during a crisis ordering him to “reject nuclear option,’’ proceeds to make a good guess, and reads it as “release nuclear option.” Linguistically, the two are as close as “carrots” and “cake.”

Tangentially, I laughed when I saw "die of old age before you reached the third chapter," because, as you know, that's my complaint about how dead languages are taught. There they have the opposite problem: you must analyze each word to 100% completion before moving on, and you never actually store anything in memory, because you're too busy looking everything up, to make sure you never ever guess anything.

Also, when I first read, "These kids were being taught my dirty little secrets," back in January when you first linked to that article, my immediate reaction was that surely that was a good thing? because my dirty little secrets were why I was *better* at reading dead languages than my peers. (I'm also now headdesking so hard that they were my dirty secrets. :P I should have been telling everyone!) Then I reread that section more closely and realized what the author was actually saying.

Anyway. As you know, I agree with the conclusions, but interestingly, not necessarily with all the arguments presented.

If you're a skilled reader, your brain has gotten so good at reading words that you process the word "chair" faster than you process a picture of a chair. You know tens of thousands of words instantly, on sight....But if a child is being taught to use context to identify words, she's being taught to read like a poor reader.

One of my recent epiphanies has been that the goal doesn't have to be the method. The problem with the way dead languages is taught is that curriculum designers start from the premise that the goal is that as an advanced reader, you should understand everything about every word as you come to it. And I'm with them so far! But then they decide it follows logically that as a beginning reader, you have to find out everything about every word as you come to it. And then this is called "rigor". Anything less is "laziness" and "shortcuts" and "setting the bar low."

I finally figured out that just because an advanced learner does something, doesn't mean the entire course of instruction for a beginning and intermediate learner has to be doing that same thing in slow motion. Possibly advanced learners play symphonies and beginning learners play scales, not symphonies in slow motion. Also, possibly advanced learners rely more on muscle memory and beginning learners have to think more about what goes where. But that doesn't mean the goal isn't to get them to *develop* muscle memory. Am I right?

Actually, back when I was taking my TESL methodology course, the instructor told us that the Skinnerian behaviorists [who are often misrepresented, so, a caveat that I'm passing on my instructor's impression of behaviorism here] decided that beginning learners of a language must be prevented from making mistakes, because then the mistakes would be reinforced, and the learners would *learn* mistakes. So you must teach them to speak perfectly from the very beginning, because the goal has to be the method!

And we were like..."Have you ever talked to a small child in your life?? Yes, you as an advanced speaker don't make those mistakes, but insisting that a learner has to do exactly what you as an advanced speaker does noooot make sense."

So I'm wary of arguments that go "skilled readers don't do X, therefore teaching beginning readers to do X is teaching them to be unskilled readers."

I spent too long being traumatized by "Did the Romans look for the subject or the verb first? Haha, obviously neither! Obviously, they knew comprehensively every possible way to understand a word as soon as they encountered it! So when we encounter a word, we must make sure we have all the knowledge of a Roman. Okay, so this could be a dative singular or a genitive singular of this word, or a nominative plural of this other word, or this adverb. Keep that all in mind while we move onto the next word. At the end of the sentence, we'll put together all the possibilities and figure out the only one that makes sense, just like a Roman!"

AND SO IT WAS THAT I NEVER LEARNED TO READ LATIN

Long ramble about me and actually learning to read German:

I am relying *heavily* on context and guessing for learning German: semantics, morphology, syntax, pragmatics. You know, the things selenak doesn't have to do. And, paradoxically, I'm doing this precisely because my goal is to develop that instant "chair" recognition of a word in isolation that fluent readers have. You know I've been talking about this constantly for months! I want to get to the point that I was never allowed to get to with any language, where words leap off the page at me and I don't have to read the entire sentence to figure out what they mean.

I am also giving myself credit for carrot/cake confusion. As I said to selenak recently, when she was asking me about the tone of Wilhelmine's memoirs in English vs. German translations: a nontrivial amount of the time, I'm thinking, "I know this is a compliment, but I forget which compliment. Good enough. Moving on!"

And part of what led me to realize this would work was thinking about (my admittedly rudimentary understanding of) cognitive science. Two points:

1. Mapping is key. Mapping happens through repetition. The shorter the feedback loop and more frequent the repetition, the firmer the mapping.
2. When the brain is learning something, it stores context whether you intend it to or not, and that context helps you access it later.

That means that when you encounter a word in the context in which you learned it, you'll remember it faster than if you encounter it in a different context. So encountering words in different contexts is key.

One of my linguistics profs, the one with a PhD in biology who switched to linguistics, became horrified at the lack of biological and cognitive understanding of linguists who'd only studied linguistics, and started doing quantitative modeling and cognitive linguistics experiments, told me that there is empirical evidence that if you teach someone a word in a room with blue wallpaper, and then you test them on it in a room with blue wallpaper, they will remember it faster than in a room with white wallpaper. In a way that involves fractions of seconds and is detectable in a controlled experiment and isn't detectable by a human being. For all *sorts* of different aspects of context, meaning the environment in which that word was learned.

So what I'm going for is maximizing the number of different contexts in which I encounter a word, maximizing the number of in-context repetitions, and minimizing the time elapsed between when I see a word and when I figure out what it means.

And it's working. The more I encounter words in context and use that context to create a very fast mapping to meaning, morphology, and syntax, the faster I recognize these words in a different context, or with no context.

This also, now that I think of it, explains why I learned almost nothing from and consistently hated flash cards and spelling lists in school and yet excelled my peers at spelling, vocabulary, concepts, everything: repetition without context does very little for me, and when I do manage to bang something into my brain that way, it doesn't stay very long. There's nothing to reinforce it.

The fact that child!me knew what words meant and could spell them (my parents still have all my spelling bee trophies) had very little to do with my having trained to recognize them in isolation or having sounded out the letters: it had to do with me reading books like my life depended on it. Train me on reading books silently, and you could put me on a stage and ask me how to spell a word I'd never encountered in isolation, and I'd have a better-than-my-peers chance of being able to spell it.

So, the goal doesn't have to be the method.

Now. Obviously, I agree with the conclusion that seeing the beginning of a word and guessing is inferior to learning to detect patterns (phonics), but that's less because I'm convinced by the arguments than because children learning to read a language they already speak are trying to solve a different problem than me learning to read a language I don't speak and have no intention of speaking, *and*, because learning a writing/spelling system is a different skill than learning a language.

I also, as you know, hated the way phonics was taught in my school, but by then I was already reading on a fifth/sixth grade level, so much of what they taught was irrelevant to my reading and was at a level that was inferior to my actual reading skills.

I...kind of have limited data on how I was taught to read. I was too young to have memories of my own, and while I've always parroted what my mother told me--that she taught me to read whole words by having me memorize one word at a time--some other memories have surfaced that have made it clear that she's not a reliable source on young children learning things.

I do know that I was, if not initially, at least at a very young age taught to pay attention to letters in a way that's essentially phonics, even if not the formal method that was called "phonics" in my school. I learned things like "rat" and "cat" rhyme because of the "-at", and "ing" is pronounced a certain way, and so on. So a big yes to that.

She knows that word because at some point she successfully sounded it out.

Thoughts:

- It's not clear to me that I'm learning to read German by sounding out words in my head. I'm sounding out the English translation, yes, but not usually the German word.

- I would like some data on how deaf children learn to read.

- What do you do when you're encountering a word where you *don't* know how to pronounce it based on its letters, e.g. when it's in a foreign language?

I feel like what I do is sample a few letters and store a pronunciation that I not only know is wrong, but that I know can't be mapped to the spelling, in my head.

For example, just now I went and looked at a list of Irish kings in Wikipedia, and I saw "Fínsnechta", and while I'm *capable* of sounding that out letter by letter if I have to, how I actually pronounced it in my head when first encountering it just now was something like "Fiksta". These abbreviated pronunciations (it doesn't surprise me that that one so heavily sampled from the beginning and end of the word, since there's so much cognitive evidence that our brains focus on the beginnings and ends of strings) often get stuck through repetition in my head even though I *know* they're wrong. I can still read these words, I can tell them apart from "garnet" ;), but I won't necessarily sound them out letter by letter unless I want to slow myself down.

I also encounter words where I *know* I can't map the word to a correct pronunciation based on the spelling, even if I go one letter at a time and try my hardest, because my knowledge of the orthography of that language is just too defective. And yet I can learn to read these words.

I'm also not convinced that there's no holistic *component* to how I recognize words that I know. Obviously, there's a letter-by-letter component, and that may even predominate...but if there's no holistic and contextual component, why was I consistently unable to read "causal" as anything but "casual" for the longest time? I'd always be jarred by context into realizing it must be "causal". Until I started reading philosophy heavily, at which point I started reading "casual" as "causal."

Oh, I should also add, when it comes to not reading the whole word linearly and instead doing some guessing based on the beginnings of the words, I do a fair amount of that when it comes to reading in German. For example, if you ask me about "König" and "Königin", I very well know the difference!

But I can tell you that, reading Wilhelmine, I'm likely to mix them up, solely because I'm reading too fast to be proceeding one letter at a time. Then I'll be jarred by context, or sometimes only by reading the English translation, into realizing I got it wrong. And you can imagine that with characters as different as FW and SD, the context can be quite jarring! Attributing an action or opinion of one to the other is a bit like the difference between rejecting and releasing a nuclear option. ;)

And yet I'm convinced that, when my brain has more bandwidth free that's now busy wrestling everything in sight, I'll stop making that mistake long before I'm a general at the head of the German army. ;)

(Fritz: Release the nuclear option!

Heinrich: Reject the nuclear option!)

Because the goal doesn't have to be the method, and perfect is the enemy of good.

P.S.: When I get around to learning Hebrew or Russian, I will pay attention to what I find the most effective method is for learning writing systems, particularly since I suck at writing systems (alphabetical and non-alphabetical), and I'm not sure why that is. It greatly limited me in graduate school.

[cahn]

One of my recent epiphanies has been that the goal doesn't have to be the method.

*nods* And I think this is in some ways the problem -- everyone who is designing these curricula is an advanced reader, so has not really thought about how a beginner would do it. Even watching A., I can see that now he is at a different stage than where he was a year or two ago when he was making all those reading epiphanies -- now he can just look at a word and understand how to say it, unless it's a word he's not familiar with, but even in that case he's progressed to for the most part be able to just say what he thinks the word is without thinking about the component parts of sounding it out. (Not 100% -- very rarely I have to tell him to sound out a new word.) (Also see below where I talk about this more.) It's specifically the process of seeing him learn how to read, and not thinking about my (adult, advanced) process of reading, that has made me such a strong proponent of phonics.

So yeah, I had the same little jerk of "hmm, that's not quite right" that you did -- that the way that a skilled reader reads is not in fact the way you want to teach a beginner. I honestly think that's the impetus behind whole word -- because skilled readers do kinda just look at the word! It's just that there's also other stuff behind it too.

That being said, I think there is some merit to saying "we should not teach kids what bad readers do." I mean, obviously, as a general rule ("don't teach a beginner at a skill the habits of a not-very-good user of this skill") there are going to be exceptions to it, but when "bad reader" is defined as "when I was a beginning reader, I did not learn to read well, and here is what I did," I think it's at least worth entertaining the hypothesis that maybe we shouldn't teach those "skills"!!

Leonard Peikoff, lol! I was wondering why the name sounded familiar and then I clicked through and he's that Objectivist guy who wrote all the Ayn Rand novel forwards/afterwords! Man, I haven't heard his name in ages. Hilariously, I entirely agree with him about phonics and for most of the rest of the essay was going, "yeah, okay, you may have a point in there, but it's couched in so many other things I disagree with," haha. I'd have to write a whole other comment about that, but let me just say for starters that I was charmed by his "history should be taught conceptually or at least chronologically!!" thing, because, uh, yeah, see how this last year, with no discernable organization or conceptual framework, has taught me more history -- an education for me not just in the historical facts of Frederick the Great, but also in culture, historical analysis, and source analysis -- than my entire conceptual/chronological-based school career in history combined, although I guess, now that I think of it further, that there is something of a conceptual basis underlying all of it: "We are HERE for gossipy sensationalism!" :P :D (Also: "But we can't even know that -- none of us saw the plane shot down," I think is an admirable display of logic! Though I speak as one who is generally too naive and usually falls into the opposite error of taking things at surface value that I shouldn't.)

Also, possibly advanced learners rely more on muscle memory and beginning learners have to think more about what goes where. But that doesn't mean the goal isn't to get them to *develop* muscle memory. Am I right?

Yes!

This also, now that I think of it, explains why I learned almost nothing from and consistently hated flash cards and spelling lists in school and yet excelled my peers at spelling, vocabulary, concepts, everything:

I had an awesome short-term memory as a child and I could easily memorize whatever list of whatever you wanted me to memorize. Then I'd promptly forget it :P (I've told you my story about subatomic particles, right? Memorized and then forgotten every year, because no context. Then I took chemistry, and had context, and never forgot again.)

- It's not clear to me that I'm learning to read German by sounding out words in my head. I'm sounding out the English translation, yes, but not usually the German word.

Well, like you say elsewhere in your comment, you're not tackling the problem for which sounding out is the solution. You're decoding German words to English words (so whole-word is in fact the approach you want), not consciously trying to decode the German letters into German pronounciation and in fact you don't want to because it's likely to be the wrong pronunciation. If you were simultaneously trying to decode into pronounciation at the same time you were trying to translate, you might be sounding out the words in your head the same way as in English. I do this with French, in fact, where I am at the level that I can sometimes read (very easy) bits without explicitly thinking the translation in English word by word; and also, relatedly, remember that my teacher made us constantly speak in French so a major part of our French communication involved decoding French words into pronounciation! (I mean, the opposite way from which French kids would learn to read, but it is still the relevant skill set.)

But for German I'm not conscious of doing any kind of sounding out (though it may still be happening subconsciously), at least partially I think because all available conscious brain cycles are being used to do the German-to-English part, and also because I haven't been exercising the decoding-to-pronounciation skills.

- I would like some data on how deaf children learn to read.

Hmm, interesting, yeah, I don't know that.

- What do you do when you're encountering a word where you *don't* know how to pronounce it based on its letters, e.g. when it's in a foreign language?

I store it in my head in an Anglicized pronounciation :P (And then it is troublesome when I actually do find out how to pronounce the language!) Possibly with some letters left out or transposed, the way that "Vorkosigan" was for a very very long time in my head stored as "Vokorsigan" until D heard me say it one day and was very confused :P

Like Irish? "Fínsnechta" would go into my head as something that sounded vaguely like "Finnekta." I have not the faintest idea how to pronounce Irish, and I know that's incorrect, but eh.

(I have been wondering whether French is stored in my head as vaguely French prononciation with a strong horrible American accent. I think it's very likely. Because I haven't been doing the German listening stuff, I know all the German is stuck in my head wrong right now and I'm going to be in trouble if/when I learn how to speak it.)

Hmm, I don't think I ever guess based on the beginnings of words. The whole gestalt of the word, yes, like your "casual" vs. "causal" example and my "Vorkosigan" example above. Also, in grad school choir (we were all a bunch of science dweebs) we had to sing a Latin text that went something something transitor, and for multiple weeks we all reliably sang "transistor," for obvious reasons! (There I think it was also a mouth-brain thing, because after the first week of course we knew the word wasn't transistor but we kept singing it anyway.) But yeah, I think this is an advanced-reader thing (or possibly a beginning-reader-plus-good-pattern-skills thing), plus which I am actually looking at all the letters, I'm just looking quickly so sometimes I miss one in the middle or transpose. "König" and "Königin" I don't think I would mistake for each other, although right now I keep forgetting what the latter means and have to be reminded by translation :P Of course, my German is very slow -- I should see whether this happens in French.

[dolorosa_12]

This was obviously in a different time and country, but I can remember my mother becoming increasingly frustrated about the way reading/spelling was taught to us at school (in Australia, in the 1990s), to the point that she actually paid a private tutor to teach phonics to both me and my younger sister. Both of us could read perfectly well by then, and my spelling was okay, because I read a lot, but she felt that this lack of phonics teaching had really done us a disservice. From memory, the tutoring only lasted about six months, after which point it was felt we were both fine (and given we both ended up in careers which required us to write for a living, I'd tend to agree).

I'm summarising a lot of pedagogical debate, but basically what happened in Australia was that educators in the 1970s decided that teaching phonics and grammar was oppressive, and that instead children learnt to read through context and creativity. By the time I was at school in the 1990s, we'd therefore had about two decades of this new approach. Most of my teachers were either my grandparents' age and nearing retirement, or baby boomers like my parents — they'd all been taught phonics and grammar, but instead of giving us spelling tests with lists of words containing similar phonemes but spelt differently, we got thematic spelling lists (I can still remember my mother being so incensed by an Olympics-themed spelling list in which one of the words/phrases we would be tested on was the name of Olympic swimmer Daniel Kowalski that she phoned the school to complain). This is, unfortunately, an appalling way to learn English orthography.

The situation is now approaching crisis point: by now most teachers who were themselves taught grammar and phonics have retired, and instead the teaching workforce is made up of people my age and younger who have no solid grasp of spelling and written expression themselves, educating the children of adults of a similar age (and who therefore can't pick up the pieces at home in the way my mother was able to do). It's got so bad that people are warning of a looming Australian literacy crisis. (The article talks more about written expression than spelling, but the two problems are related.)

The whole thing is really upsetting.

[cahn]

I was at school in the 80's in the US (in a not particularly distinguished school district) and I'm pretty sure we did phonics then! I'd already learned how to read, so mostly it was extremely boring for me, but I do remember doing things like "silent e" and "vowel-consonant-e means that it's a long vowel" that I replicated with my kids. Which is part of why I'm so upset by this whole thing, I don't understand how it can have backslid so substantially from when I was a kid!)

educators in the 1970s decided that teaching phonics and grammar was oppressive, and that instead children learnt to read through context and creativity.

Yeeeeeeah, unfortunately that seems to be the predominant educational philosophy around here these days too :( Read enough books to kids and they will pick it up themselves! And yeah, maybe that works for some kids. But not for others.

but instead of giving us spelling tests with lists of words containing similar phonemes but spelt differently, we got thematic spelling lists (I can still remember my mother being so incensed by an Olympics-themed spelling list in which one of the words/phrases we would be tested on was the name of Olympic swimmer Daniel Kowalski that she phoned the school to complain).

Okay, wow, that is really distressing. My older child's school at least did the similar-phonemes thing. (Younger child's school hasn't sent home spelling lists, so I don't quite know what's going on.)

That writing article was really scary. I remember liking grammar as a child, and it was soooo helpful when I took a foreign language! But yes, like the guy in the article says, how do you talk about writing when you don't have the grammar vocabulary for doing so??

While E was remote schooling the teacher said something like, "I'm sorry to tell you we're going to do grammar now. I know it's boring, but we have to do it," and I was like... okay, on one hand I'm so glad you're actually doing some grammar, but why predispose the kids to think of it as something to dislike??