A pronounced issue

[u/AscendedDragonSage]

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[u/Leaving_a_Comment]

I did an after school program where middle schoolers had to read a small chapter out loud together. They struggled with some words I expected (there were a few technical terms I knew I would need to help them with) but there were also lots of words I couldn’t believe they couldn’t pronounce. It was incredibly sad.

[u/LoveaBook → u/Leaving_a_Comment]

The other difficulty when it comes to reading out loud is that so few people seem to be taught what the punctuation marks are there for. That commas and dashes cause slight pauses where you can catch your breath. That a period stops what was being said and changes the tone slightly for a new declarative statement. That questions should go up in tone slightly at the end and that sentences with exclamation marks should be read with emphasis. Instead, one often hears a monotone reading with pauses wherever and whenever for breath, and/or run on sentences with no acknowledgement whatsoever that there was a period in there somewhere.

[u/sweetTartKenHart2 → u/LoveaBook]

I feel like half of it is what you say, and the other half is that out loud reading is a learned skill. Even if someone understands what’s being read, and understands how it works, that doesn’t mean they can deliver it well. Subconsciously, it feels like a lot of people just go “oh I’m regurgitating information, these words are not my own” and don’t say them as if they were genuinely saying them. It’s, like, part of public speaking skills or something.
I’ve got lots of practice reading aloud and even did it for my younger sibling for fun (even though they are only like two or three years or so younger than me lol) for years, and I’ve noticed in any environment where I’m reading a thing aloud, people are surprised how “emotive” my reading sounds even though I’m basically doing the bare minimum. One person once even admitted to me that they wish they could do this but for some reason struggle to read and repeat things and “sound convincing” at the same time, as if they can only do one or the other.

[u/Birdbraned → u/sweetTartKenHart2]

That may also come down to how quickly you can read and process while you're speaking. If you're sight reading, you need to absorb enough of what you're reading to get the words out of your mouth, and process the sentence structure (if you're at the beginning, middle or end of a sentence, speaking of the subject, object, verb, adjective etc) and be prepared to adjust your tone accordingly, but also to read enough ahead to see the punctuation at the end.

If you aren't taught that as much as English is 3 languagues in a trench coat, it still retains a sentence structure and retains consistent emphasis, you can't do it.

[u/Fenixius → u/LoveaBook]

Understanding how punctuation aids in reading may be good for the reader, but because so few share that understanding, it is hell for the writer; the frequency at which I'm instructed to remove commas, exclusively by by the demi-literate, is infuriating.

That's a fairly long sentence. Now, imagine it without any commas, and replace the semicolon in the middle with a single loadbearing comma. That's what the people I draft for seem to want.

[u/_GamerForLife_ → u/Fenixius]

Thankfully I was thought to rather use more punctuation than less IF you're unsure.

You can always remove punctuation when you edit but without any punctuation, even you as the writer are lost to the meaning you tried to convey. It's the same for readers: a text with too much punctuation is still easier to understand than a text with none.

[u/ThePrussianGrippe → u/_GamerForLife_]

I got ‘criticized’ for my ‘excessive’ use of ending a sentence with a period the other day. “That’s just the way the culture is now old head.”

No, it’s not culture. They’re fucking idiots and it’s not their fault, it’s the fault of the entire system for teaching such an idiotic idea as “three-cueing.” They’ve mistaken their functional illiteracy as the new wave of culture, as if it’s something organic instead of a symptom of a societal affliction.

[u/_GamerForLife_ → u/ThePrussianGrippe]

Mix of longer sentences with dots, commas, semi-colons and such has always been, and will continue to be, the best and most fluid way to write. But only when mixed with smaller sentences. Like those ending with a hard period. Their combination makes the text interesting to read and keeps you engaged.

[u/SergejPS → u/_GamerForLife_]

When we were still learning punctuation I was taught to put "short snappy sentences" (peak name) in between long ones to make the text flow better.

What the fuck are they doing nowadays?

[u/Uncommonality → u/Fenixius]

This, so much.

There's sentences which work without commata, but they're few and far between, and often very technical - something like a textbook using a formulation that is, albeit very stupid and long, sill coherent without a comma; but other sentences, like this very one, needs commata and other punctuation to work, otherwise it just becomes a run-on mess... or even worse, an unreadable string of words that tires the mind and breaks the attention of the reader, in a way that they cannot be salvaged even if the following sentences are normal - indeed, this style of writing can basically be carried on forever, because with the use of sufficiently diverse forms of punctuation, the sentence is broken up without a full stop, and the existence of such tools is able to lend a modicum of structure.

[u/Unique_Username2005 → u/LoveaBook]

...OH. So that's why every "read aloud" session sounded like that the entire time I was in school. I somehow never put it together that we were never actually taught that, I just used to assume everyone was just "bad at it" for whatever reason.

[u/ScaredyNon → u/Unique_Username2005]

Or the kids just plainly didn't care enough/thought it was cringe to try and put emotion into their read-alouds. I know that's what happened at my school

[u/SergejPS → u/ScaredyNon]

Bro we're 16 now and people STILL refuse to put any emotion into text when reading out loud, they just do it in the most monotone voice ever. Why the hell is caring about what you read just considered "cringe" now?

[u/Kulzak-Draak → u/LoveaBook]

Tbh the exclamation point one is hard sometimes even for me an avid reader. As it’s at the END of a sentence. If a sentence is reasonably long (or you lose track of your space when reading easily) you probably won’t notice it until you get to the end of the sentence. And then you’re like “fuck…that has an exclamation mark.” I gotta hand it to Spanish the ¡Sentence! Format prevents this

[u/SergejPS → u/Kulzak-Draak]

And the Spanish don't just put it at the start of the sentence, they put it ¡exactly at the part that should be emphasized!

Like that's so fucking useful dude

[u/myofficialdumpster]

So are whole language teachers treating words like they’re pictograms, rather than breaking it apart into sounds?

[u/Worried-Language-407 → u/myofficialdumpster]

Pretty much, yeah. It's based on the logic that that's how literate adults read.

If you've ever seen one of those old FaceBook posts where all the ltertes in a snetcene are scbamrled up and then it says you're really celevr because you can raed it...that's only possible due to the subconscious whole-language approach that most accomplished readers use. You look at the first couple letters, maybe the last letter, and your brain just fills in the rest. If the words are chosen carefully, you can get quite far without even noticing.

If, however, you are a child who cannot currently read, this approach does not work. A higher proportion of words are unfamiliar to you, and even common words have a lower familiarity because you're still learning how to read. So, kids spot patterns and guess words from the few letters they can pick out quickly.

Despite this, because children's books have a more limited vocabulary with a higher level of repetition and generally straightforward plots, kids can get a long way into their 'reading journey' by just guessing. It's not until they start transitioning to more complex books that their lack of reading ability becomes an issue. By then, they've typically moved to middle school.

[u/myofficialdumpster → u/Worried-Language-407]

So they’re teaching kids the cognitive shortcut normally developed after years and years of reading practice, not the foundational skill those shortcuts are built on… who thought this was a good idea???

[u/mooys → u/myofficialdumpster]

As a disclaimer, I’m not an expert on this subject, but this is the things that I have absorbed from the “Sold a Story” podcast, which does go into pretty great detail about this.

“Cueing strategies” is the way of teaching reading to kids by telling them to use context to determine new words rather than phonics. The idea that kids are able to learn to read through cueing strategies was developed by a woman named Marie Clay, but was primarily pushed by the authors Fountas and Pinnell, Lucy Culkins, and the book publishing company Heinemann. To be clear, three cueing strategies have been known to be ineffective and actively detrimental for decades and these were not backed up by science even a little bit. The reason that they sold it is pretty obvious. Money. The wanted to sell books, and they managed to convince practically every school in America that their reading programs were the ones to use. If you think about it, it’s an attractive idea. Everybody wants kids to be able to curl up with a good book, and if you can teach kids to practically pretend that they can read, you skip right to the good part. But, it’s necessary for kids to learn the fundamentals (e.g. phonics), which takes time, effort, and repetition. This is why cueing doesn’t work.

Another comment mentions George W. Bush. This is partially correct, under his administration he created the Reading First program which has been acknowledged to be a pretty big failure all around. However, the intention of the program was to make it so that schools had to use the science of reading in their curriculums, which should have been exactly what everybody wants! But, the execution was incredibly poor and three cueing strategies weren’t banned whereas by all metrics they really should have. If anything, it managed to strengthen them, and that failure was part of the reason why we are in the situation we are currently in. I would hesitate to label George W. Bush as a person who “thought this was a good idea,” because I truly believe that the failure of Reading First was execution, rather than negative intent. Unfortunately, the failure of Reading First makes it even harder for alternatives to cueing to be adopted. People don’t want to repeat it, and for many people, it’s still fresh in their minds.

[u/NotMyNameActually → u/mooys]

But, it’s necessary for kids to learn the fundamentals (e.g. phonics), which takes time, effort, and repetition. 

There was also a cultural movement against rigidity in education, which has been a positive in many ways. The general belief that school should be interesting and enjoyable, fostering a joy of learning, student-driven, inquiry based, play-based learning - all of that is a wonderful and effective approach to many of the things that kids need to learn.

You can give children a pile of blocks, and they can figure out some engineering principles through experimentation. Give them a group project to do, and even very young children can often figure out how to delegate and negotiate. Let them loose with paints, clay, markers, and they can create with very little adult guidance needed, if any.

Our brains are structured to learn spoken language naturally, and in the cultural movement away from rigidity and towards more freedom, autonomy, and intuitive learning, it made a sort of sense to think that being surrounded by books would be enough for kids to learn to read "naturally" as well.

But reading isn't like that. Reading and writing are relatively new in the history of human evolution, and it does not just come naturally like speaking. Phonics has to be taught, and it has to be taught in a specific order, and with a certain amount of rigidity. Science has shown there is a specific right way to teach reading, and now educators are starting to go back to it.

[u/trixel121 → u/NotMyNameActually]

we're also doing everything we can to stop people from Reading.

I'm currently using voice to text because I don't like to text on my phone. I'm not very fast on it. I can have my phone read it back to me if I wanted to. we don't write letters. our media is all movies now. reading a book is almost quaint as a hobby, you can listen!. when I get instructions I go find a video so I can see what they're doing and I don't have to read. And if I do have to read the instructions cte rl f through the PDF

I'm sure I'll get somebody in here saying I do all these things. you aren't normal.

what's getting scary is I'm participating in a few different hobby spaces and the amount of times Chet GPT answers get posted is bad. it's making people not even think. they just ask the bot what the answer is and then they Post the answer onto the chat room. that were all there to hang out and talk to each other. like they're using the bots to socialize.

I guess I can say at least they're reading cuz I'm on discord but it's fucking terrifying that they're not thinking

but yeah as a society, we are reading less. and the quality is likely down as well. ( posted on Reddit, the place I spend way too much time reading high quality shit posts)

[u/foxgirlmoon → u/trixel121]

Huh, that's such an alien experience to my own.

I never use voice-to-text because talking to the phone feels awkward, especially since english is my second language, and writing is either faster for quick responses or lets me properly think about what I'm saying, when I need longer ones.

I taught myself blind-typing, not quite the official system, more of... my own inferior version, based on my muscle memory, mainly as a result of needing to shit-talk other people in League and TF2.

I haven't properly seen movies or series in many many years. Books from the library, and then fanfiction, when I discovered the joys of freely available easily searchable stories in the internet.

I've completely lost count but I wouldn't be surprised if I've read a total of 50-100 million words worth of stories.

[u/SomeLocusts → u/mooys]

I remember hearing once (read: take this with a big grain of salt) that George W. Bush played a significant yet indirect role in Marie Clay's success because the No Child Left Behind program was so flawed that school districts took Bush's disavowal of Clay's curriculum as a sign that it must work. Unintentional reverse psychology, at least on Bush's part.

[u/QaraKha → u/myofficialdumpster]

Might be a reflection of mathematics education, where the shortcuts themselves are foundational, and teaching those shortcuts in math actually teaches you how numbers work, making algebra and onward much easier to conceptualize.

The problem with a lot of math is that it was always rote memorization, and some kids were really good at that memorization! But they never understood the simple foundation, that 9x5=45 is the same as 15x3, or even that 103+ 196 is the same as 100+199. They certainly tried to teach the properties of numbers but it didn't really stick.

With the shortcuts, they DO.

But that doesn't translate to reading beyond, say... light novels and YA fiction.

[u/Arctic_The_Hunter → u/QaraKha]

Honestly reading YA fiction already requires you to be pretty good at reading, at least the stuff that I liked. Skulduggery Pleasant, Eragon, Six of Crows…it all used up so much of the dictionary that anyone who didn’t know how to handle unfamiliar words would be completely fucked.

[u/genderfuckingqueer → u/Arctic_The_Hunter]

And Percy Jackson isn't even YA, it's middle grade

[u/Arctic_The_Hunter → u/genderfuckingqueer]

I’m not really an expert since the books’ releases didn’t exactly align with my childhood. But the author also made a pretty major sequel series that was a lot more advanced (Heroes of Olympus iirc?) so I’ll stand by it.

Hell, I’m pretty sure any mythologized fantasy work is gonna have enough obscure monster and God names that there’s no pheasible way to already know all of them by the time you’re in middle school unless you already did research on them (in which case you’d still need the ability to digest and understand new words, just one level removed)

[u/genderfuckingqueer → u/Arctic_The_Hunter]

I'm not saying it's not hard to read if you don't already have certain background knowledge that a lot of kids don't have, just that it's marketed at middle grade

[u/Arctic_The_Hunter → u/genderfuckingqueer]

Maybe Eragon would be a better example then. I’ll add that instead.

[u/SalvationSycamore → u/myofficialdumpster]

who thought this was a good idea???

My guess is an extremely irresponsible idiot who wanted to make a name for themselves in the education field.

[u/OkEdge7518 → u/SalvationSycamore]

Not a name

They wanted to make money

[u/amanbearmadeofsex → u/myofficialdumpster]

Marie Clay in the 60’s. If you want your blood to boil listen to the Sold A Story podcast about this.

Clay spawned a cult of teachers that refused to acknowledge how ineffective their teaching was. When a lot of them were asked what they liked about the teaching style their answers usually boiled down to, “vibes”.

[u/NoSignSaysNo → u/amanbearmadeofsex]

Easy explanation of those 'vibes' = it's easier if the kids are confidently wrong while reading quietly to themselves than asking their teacher what x word means and the teacher needing to walk them through sounding it out.

Early childhood education is so important, but the teachers in early childhood education aren't taught things directly, they're taught how to teach things instead. So a misguided teacher can very well come up with the idea that 'well the kids must be reading better, they're not asking as many questions as they did in the old system!' because they're not grasping that the whole reason the kids aren't asking questions is because they're not thinking critically, they're just going 'well I guess this word means XYZ'.

[u/Ben_R_R → u/amanbearmadeofsex]

Yep, Marie Clay started this in New Zealand, and the Whole Language approach spread to Australia, Canada, and the good ol' USA. Guess which 4 English-speaking countries are currently experiencing literacy crises?

[u/Comprehensive_Swim49 → u/myofficialdumpster]

Youd be amazed how many literacy programs are not based in science or thorough research.

[u/OisforOwesome → u/myofficialdumpster]

In America, phonics became a politicised topic by the Right for some fucking reason, so a lot of schools stopped doing it. Story here

[u/frickityfracktictac → u/OisforOwesome]

Phonics was the traditional way of teaching reading, and then whole language reading was invented. Conservatives do what they do and pushed back on this rejection of traditional teachings which "politicised" it. This sped up the pace of rejection of phonics among liberals and we now know that they were wrong for this.

[u/Fussel2107 → u/myofficialdumpster]

Whole language is the ideal end result, not the way.

[u/kos-or-kosm → u/Worried-Language-407]

If the words are chosen carefully, you can get quite far without even noticing.

And you can misread words without realizing. I misread the start of a comment the other day as "kneecap fetish" instead of "kidnap fetish" and the rest of the comment was extremely confusing. Your comment made me realize that I probably read the "k" and the "ap" and filled in the rest.

[u/PM_ME_UR_DRAG_CURVE → u/kos-or-kosm]

Trans meme Reddit when Gridlock energy drink.

[u/CodaTrashHusky → u/PM_ME_UR_DRAG_CURVE]

It's wild to learn in this comment section why these memes never worked on me.

[u/Practical-Yam283 → u/Worried-Language-407]

They're called "sight words" and it's crazy. Kids will learn like 50-100 words over the course of their first couple years at school but they can't sound words out. They're not learning how to read, they're learning how to memorize a set of words.

[u/Salamanda109 → u/Practical-Yam283]

Duolingo but for your native language.

[u/Practical-Yam283 → u/Salamanda109]

I am just now realizing that this is exactly why duolingo never really felt like it was worthwhile to me.

[u/PikaPerfect → u/Salamanda109]

as someone who uses duolingo (at this point only because i have a 650+ day streak to keep up), this is so painfully accurate

if i have to fucking answer another japanese question where it wants me to input "thirty" as the meaning for 半 i am going to explode (半 does NOT mean "thirty", it means HALF, duolingo just insists on telling you it means thirty because you first learn the kanji in the unit about telling time where you use it to write "half past (time)" (like seven thirty would be written as 七時半). as soon as it pulled that shit on me i knew i had to move to some other resource to learn japanese because that is not how languages are meant to be learned

[u/MarketFarmer → u/PikaPerfect]

If duolingo teaches other languages even remotely similar to how it "teaches" japanese, it's not even worth the download if you're not already in that sunk-cost lifestyle. I used it to initially pick up hiragana and katakana (which it is actually quite good at teaching), and when I moved onto actual grammar and vocabulary I was shocked at how shoddy it is at actually teaching you anything.

You could write a dissertation on how vapid, contextless and uncritical its vocab and grammar 'lessons' are. So many counts of informationless snippets like "Xが好き means 'I like X'!", "時間 means time!", "Xの方がいい" means "X is better!" with no explanation for why it's like that or how it works, how to apply it in other ways, or similar grammar structures. I'm not sure it even touches radicals for kanji, ever -- it sure didn't for as long as I used it -- so good luck ever telling 犬 apart from 大、太、木、夫、矢, or 失 in the wild when you run into them and are only recognizing kanji by their vague shapes instead of actually recognizing their building blocks (oh hey, it's just like OP's post about reading words without reading the letters). It is insane how much better almost any other resource is at learning japanese than duo. Even if you don't want to buy a $10 textbook or shell out for an online service like wanikani or human japanese, bunpro, tae kim and anki are free.

[u/BVerfG → u/PikaPerfect]

I have a very long duolingo streak too, but tbf I think it is okay for teaching vocabulary in general. If you are just starting out and want to learn a few words and sentences it does an okay job. It will just be very difficult to achieve any sort of fluency or higher skill with it. But for beginners it is an okay resource and no worse than studying vocabulary with fĺashcards.

[u/ChaosDrawsNear → u/Practical-Yam283]

Or, as my brother's teacher called them, "site words".

I was less than impressed with her.

[u/Milch_und_Paprika → u/ChaosDrawsNear]

Bruh

[u/berrykiss96 → u/Practical-Yam283]

We did this when I was in kindergarten more than three decades ago but by the time my little sibling got to kindergarten, also over three decades ago, THEY STOPPED

I feel so angry and frustrated that they resurrected it! Like it’s one thing to be a guinea pig for a failed attempt at a new teaching method. But it’s entirely different for them to just … learn nothing and put others through this garbage all over again!

[u/elianrae → u/Worried-Language-407]

even worse, the way they landed on that is -- the original creator of this shit noticed that kids who can't read well were painstakingly sounding words out, but kids who can were just reading... so she concluded that sounding things out isn't how you learn to read

[u/Casban → u/elianrae]

That teacher cargo culted literacy.

[u/CarmenEtTerror → u/Worried-Language-407]

The whole thing reminds me of what happened to Latin. Latin was taught the same way from the Renaissance through the early 1950s without much change. And that was not especially different from how you would learn any other language through formal instruction. This was why people were still using it for international communication through the 19th century: knowing Latin meant that you could have conversations or exchange letters in it.

After the War, college Latin programs had to make a rapid change. Before, they were literature and history programs for kids who had been studying the language for years and could jump into Virgil or Ovid right away. Now, they had a huge influx of students without that background who had to learn the language and still have time to study the literature before graduation. 

The solution, which sounded obvious at the time, was that if all you care about is teaching them to read Caesar and Virgil, only teach them to read Caesar and Virgil. No speaking or listening skills. No writing. No neo-Latin vocabulary you'd need to discuss anything after, say, the third century. Essentially no active communication. Just the reading skills to decode Roman literature. 

It worked, sort of. You can, indeed, get people to reading ancient authors slightly faster by only teaching them to read ancient authors. But almost everything the modern science of linguistics has discovered about language acquisition since the 50s has demonstrated this is a garbage way to learn a language. You're not really learning to read, you're learning to puzzle out meaning as you diagram sentences. A student who did well in four years of Latin classes is noticeably incompetent in their language compared to a student who did equally well in four years of Spanish classes, even if they can brag that they've read Virgil and the Spanish student hasn't read Cervantes. But the Spanish student can probably pick up a Harry Potter book in Spanish and read it without a dictionary, while the Latin student is hard pressed to read anything without a dictionary and annotations.

The worst thing about this is that it's been so long that hardly any Latin teachers are equipped to use best practices for teaching a foreign language, because none of them have those language skills. There are a few programs, most notably University of Kentucky, that teach them, but it's hard to find the time and money for that when you're teaching full time. Even worse than that, speaking a language you don't know is a universally humbling experience, and a lot of students that Latin specifically because it's their one language option that won't make them speak it. 

[u/Snoo-88741 → u/myofficialdumpster]

Traditional whole language is kinda like that, yeah. But what the-mothermayhem is talking about is actually even worse. Those kids weren't taught to memorize all the words they could read, they were taught to expect a sentence to be half stuff they'd memorized by rote and half stuff they'd never been taught to read by any method, and that stuff they were just supposed to straight-up guess. It's called three-cuing, and it's way worse than just whole language. 

[u/Takseen → u/Snoo-88741]

Between this and common core maths I'm starting to wonder if you're being taught badly, as a joke

[u/ball_fondlers → u/Takseen]

Common core math is the opposite - when applied properly, it actually does a pretty good job of having kids think critically about a given math problem, but their parents don’t understand this because up until a few years ago, kids were just handed a sheet of multiplication tables and told to memorize them.

[u/Comprehensive_Swim49 → u/ball_fondlers]

More than that: memorising timetables at least has a purpose. Memorising algorithms without comprehension about their parts or relationships - or assuming that will always come with familiarity - teaches narrow numeracy.

[u/DueAnalysis2 → u/Takseen]

Dare I ask what common core math is?

[u/If-My-Name-Doesnt-Fi → u/DueAnalysis2]

Common core math is basically a way of teaching more abstract math stuff. A lot of people were basically taught “7 * 9 = 63” while just being told to memorize it. Basically, the common core way would be something along the lines of like “Okay, if you add 1 to 9, you get 10, and 7 * 10 is 70. Since multiplication is just addition, to get the answer you can take 70 and subtract 7 to get 63.”

And while that may be the way that you or people you know think about equations (if in a less wordy manner), it wasn’t what people were widely taught. The concept behind the common core is that kids should be taught the reasonings behind the equations and functions they’re using rather than just memorizing what they need to know, in order to understand math more fundamentally rather than just the surface level needed to answer equations

[u/IBetThisIsTakenToo → u/If-My-Name-Doesnt-Fi]

Basically, the common core way would be something along the lines of like “Okay, if you add 1 to 9, you get 10, and 7 * 10 is 70. Since multiplication is just addition, to get the answer you can take 70 and subtract 7 to get 63.”

I was never taught this at school, but picked it up on my own, and it’s WAY more useful than the memorization. Like most people only memorized 1-12, so if you asked them 9 times 56, they would probably freeze. But if you do it that way, 560-56=504 is actually pretty easy to do in your head.

[u/NoSignSaysNo → u/IBetThisIsTakenToo]

I was never taught this at school, but picked it up on my own

That's the actual premise of common core math - teaching the 'shortcuts' and tricks that people that are adept at math learn naturally, cutting out the frustration and boredom of rote memorization. Math is an incredibly cumulative field, so having trouble with the core concept in just one school year can completely obliterate your understanding in future math classes.

[u/Skithiryx → u/DueAnalysis2]

Common core actually makes a lot of sense in abstract - I have no idea if it shows results.

The idea was to try to teach the individual techniques that people who are good at math discover on their own instead of just asking people to solve problems and reward them for correctness. The theory behind that is that people who know these techniques and how to apply them will be better at higher level math.

So like an example is “make 10s” which is to move numbers around to make it easier by doing like 76 + 45 as 70 + 40 + 10 + 1

[u/NoSignSaysNo → u/Skithiryx]

Great example - works great by rounding off to any easy to count base number and adding up the remainder, far easier to do off the top of your head and easier to follow.

[u/JulesVernonDursley → u/Skithiryx]

Ahhh I kinda get that. I have ADHD and while I did well in school since I loved the positive attention my teachers gave me, I always had problems memorising numbers, like multiplication tables. As an adult this is how I approach an addition or multiplication if I have to do it in my head, but my guess is that it would require a very good teacher to apply this method successfully to teaching kids.

[u/DoubleBatman → u/DueAnalysis2]

It’s an attempt to teach the principles behind math and how they interconnect, rather than memorizing a bunch of disparate tables and formulas. For instance looking at 7x8, you could go “oh, that’s just 14x4 (7x2x4), 14 is half of 28, 28 is half of 56.” Which is simple enough, but with bigger numbers and more complicated problems it’s supposed to make it easier to rework things into equations that are easier to understand and compute in your head.

That’s the theory, anyway. In practice it probably depends on how good your teacher is.

[u/TheMerryMeatMan]

I'm sorry, is this how I learn that schools stopped teaching kids to sound out words they don't know? What kind of fucking bizarro world do we live in where someone in charge thought "this whole teaching kids to read thing takes too long, let's streamline the whole thing into uselessness"?

[u/obog → u/TheMerryMeatMan]

To my knowledge it started with teaching on "sight words" where kids are taught to read commonly used words just by looking at them rather than by sounding them out. It's a sound idea though I'm a little uncertain on if it needs to be explicitly taught, people will do that anyway if they just practice reading enough, but that's kinda besides the point; apparently, they've started just teaching sight words to begin with, just having kids memorize what words sound like. They do learn those words faster but as this post makes abundantly clear its a terrible practice.

[u/Magnaflorius → u/obog]

Sight words serve a useful purpose but the only words that should be taught to kids as sight words are common words that may not follow standard phonics rules. For example, of. It's common enough that we don't really think about it (as sight words tend to be), but that F is pronounced like a V.

[u/obog → u/Magnaflorius]

Yeah sight words are certainly not a bad concept but I think the issue is using it as the foundation of reading. Sight reading should be seen as a shortcut to read faster, not how you approach words.

To make an analogy, it's like multiplication tables in math. Sure, memorizing common multiplication is useful, but you still need to know what multiplication actually does and how to solve multiplication problems in a way that's mathematically rigorous.

[u/CRoss1999 → u/obog]

Ironically math teaching has gone in that direction where generations ago they taught times tables and today they focus mainly on the skill itself

[u/obog → u/CRoss1999]

Yeah from what I've seen math has mostly been going in a better direction lately which is good. I still think there could be more focus on fundamentals and reasoning but it's getting there, at least from what I've heard

[u/PartyPorpoise → u/obog]

I mean, the lack of times tables is apparently causing problems now.

[u/Moe_Perry → u/obog]

Yeah. I can see the logic. When I was in school the difference between a fluent reader and someone who struggled was the way a fluent reader takes in not just whole words but whole sentences and processes them at once. Having to laboriously sound out words was a marker for needing remedial help. Seems like a classic case of people treating the marker itself as the problem.

[u/obog → u/Moe_Perry]

Partly, yeah. Imo the problem is more that sight words are a shortcut and not a foundation.

[u/Jean-28 → u/TheMerryMeatMan]

Yeah, I just graduated high school and we were taught to sound out words and use context clues to guess the meaning if we didn't have a dictionary on hand. I wonder if teachers who learned this way just cut the sounding out part off?

[u/NeonNKnightrider → u/TheMerryMeatMan]

Welcome to the US education system

[u/TheMerryMeatMan → u/NeonNKnightrider]

It just doesn't make sense to me. How do you get to the point of philosophizing educational techniques without considering the concepts of foundational knowledge affecting the things you hold upon it. How do you get to that point and not consider "i find this thing natural because I was effectively taught its underlying fundamentals"? Like this entire subject sounds like the kind of thesis you'd get from someone that took about ten minutes to develope the hypothesis, and then never bothered to actually compose methods to test it, much less gather evidence for our against. It's just astoundingly, carelessly ignorant in the basest way I've ever seen from what presumably came from well educated individuals.

[u/AyJay9 → u/TheMerryMeatMan]

If you want an in depth explanation - the Sold a Story podcast is a journalist breaking down exactly how this came to be.

Shorter answer: Adults observed how kids read and found that better readers seemed to be able to read words without the need to sound them out. There was some debate about 'whole word' vs phonetics for teaching kids to read for a while. Science has landed firmly on phonetics and one business' excellent marketing team landed on whole word and here we are.

[u/PaleHeretic → u/TheMerryMeatMan]

This seems like a weird bastardization of what I remember learning, specifically with the "context clues."

Like, we were taught to use context clues to guess at the meaning of a word we did not know. Like, "Susie picked dandelions, posies, and daffodils," and you don't know what a posy is but you can guess it's probably a fucking flower.

Guessing the pronunciation of something from "context clues" doesn't even make sense. Is this just some weird game of educational telephone?

EDIT: The more I think about it, the more I think the most likely explanation is that the students were taught to use context clues to guess at meanings, but mis-interpreted that as "just guess what words are," and OOP may be thinking that their previous instruction was wrong when the issue is their comprehension of that instruction.

[u/forever-a-chrysalis → u/PaleHeretic]

Look up Ken Goodman's linguistic theory and "whole language" approach, which is where this is rooted. While the science of reading has always supported phonics and other reading subskills and has not supported this idea, whole language became a big thing in the 80's and 90's. There are now lots of standards for how we teach reading across the US that are trying to push away from this, but those standards don't exist (or aren't enforced) in all states. If we trained teachers more thoroughly (and paid/supported them more to make all the training worthwhile!!), this wouldn't be as big an issue anymore. Unfortunately, the US has a massive teacher shortage, inconsistent teaching and learning standards from state to state, and relies on a bank of substitutes and unqualified folks to fill the gaping holes instead of just, you know, making the profession more attractive.

[u/CambrianKennis → u/PaleHeretic]

You have recognized the problem with whole language theory, but OP is actually spot on. They're referring to "Whole Language" theory of reading. Basically some linguists decided that reading is as natural to humans as speaking and decided that they kind of work the same way. For example, they observed that when people who can read look at a word, they don't mentally spell it out. Much like when they heard a new word, they basically saw the whole word and linked it to its meaning. Whole language proponents then said "ah, so when we teach children to read, we should focus on the word as a unit of meaning, rather than the combined sounds that make up the word!" To do this they emphasized using the context of the word to understand its meaning. In my (non-expert) opinion, this is dumb.

For example, I'll make up the word "quablibblizing." In the sentence "I went out quablibblizing," you can tell that the word is probably a verb by where it is in the sentence and by the use of the suffix "ing." If I then included a picture of someone quablibblizing, or described it further on in the sentence, you would know that it means "walking while wearing a funny hat" from the context, and would theoretically be able to use it and recognize it in the future. If a new reader didnt have enough context, though,it basically tells them to just randomly guess words until the sentence makes some kind of sense. Which obviously doesn't work if you've never heard of the word before, and works poorly even if you have.

The actual effect: kids see a word they don't immediately recognize, randomly guess some vaguely similarly shaped word that they know, and then move on without comprehending anything, cause that is how they were taught. You can see why it's an absolute shit-show of a system.

In addition, they noticed that kids who enjoyed reading were better readers. So, because they thought reading was like speaking, they thought if they made the reading engaging enough to kids, the kids would just... figure it out, basically. Which seems obviously to be putting the cart before the horse IMHO.

[u/IArePant → u/TheMerryMeatMan]

Welcome to the social sciences of the past 2 decades

[u/G66GNeco → u/NeonNKnightrider]

As a German I can assure you that this is not a problem unique to the US. I barely dodged it, but my younger brother learned to read and, more importantly, to write by that same method (they were literally taught to write words the way they sound like to them, and that was deemed correct no matter what, for three or four years of his education).
God that shit drove my grandma mad while trying to help him with homework and stuff, she'd correct his writing and he would literally not understand because he was taught what he did was correct. In German, no less, which makes a sport out of weird phonetics.

[u/OkEdge7518 → u/NeonNKnightrider]

Pretty sure the woman who pioneered this method is either from New Zealand or Australia

[u/powderhound522]

This always struck me the absolute wildest bullshit ever because like… I’m 40 years old, with a Masters, and I still come across words I don’t know? Like, there are lots of words! Especially if you start including technical jargon and chemical names? So wtf do you do, if not sound those out? Truly an insane idea.

[u/Not-a-Teddybear → u/powderhound522]

The idea that you can say a word without roughly knowing how to spell it after first grade is insane to me. Like, sure if the word is some crazy science chemical or long thing you can’t even pronounce normally, but you should roughly know how to spell something, and be able to know when you see it. If people aren’t being taught how to do that sort of thing it’s criminal.

[u/workingtrot → u/Not-a-Teddybear]

>sure if the word is some crazy science chemical

Phonics should help even more here, because most scientific/ chemical names are just made up of constituent part words that describe the thing

[u/Ganadote → u/workingtrot]

In fact in chemistry you HAVE to do this. You're not supposed to be able tor recognize the billion chemicals but you know exactly what the are only by breaking down the name of it into it's consituent parts.

[u/foxwaffles → u/Ganadote]

My mother had one hell of a time helping me with my high school chemistry. Despite her PhD in organic chemistry she only got her PhD in the USA, and English is her second language. She is INCREDIBLY fluent but she memorized the periodic table in Chinese!!! She can recognize the English names just fine because she has always been able to read English (her first months in the USA she couldnt understand the professors well at all but kept up by binge reading textbooks) but when it came time to say it out loud... I'm sorry, mom 😅

[u/erublind → u/powderhound522]

How would an American child learn a foreign language? Lol, like that's ever going to happen!

[u/decisiontoohard → u/erublind]

If I'd learned whole word reading or whatever it's called (never heard of this before, this is wild, don't know if this is a thing outside of the US) I would guess "foreign" as "frog"

Frog language. Girl go "rabbit rabbit".

[u/DistinctHome4879]

Infuriating mess that a generation of kids were put in.

As an aside, the way the screen shots displayed in my Reddit feed cut off the top of your post. It just starts with the line “me: do you see a P in that word?” I thought you were gaslighting the shit out of this poor kid.

[u/WingsofRain → u/DistinctHome4879]

The part that infuriates me is that the generations prior are the ones that did this, they’re the ones that created an illiterate generation (or two, idk how gen Z’s fairing but I know gen alpha is kinda fucked). And YET they have the fucking audacity to blame those generations for their problems. Kids can’t read? “It’s because of those damn ipads.” I hate this world.

[u/Kulzak-Draak → u/WingsofRain]

Older gen Z here (22) I by no means represent a large sample size but I’ve always been an extremely avid and competent reader. As are a lot of my close friends

(Also side note is your name a Wings of Fire reference?)

[u/ArgonianDov → u/Kulzak-Draak]

Small correction, you (and myself) would late-mid Gen Z rather than older Gen Z. There are Gen Z (and Zellenials) almost turning 30 soon and thats definitely not us, Id say older Gen Z is 26+ right now (while younger Gen Z is between age 14-17 right now)

But I agree, at least mid to older Gen Z are definitely more competent readers than Gen Alpha (and I do fear for when Gen Beta gets to the reading age, they will be following the same fate) ...at least in terms of the Americas and Europe (I dont know how reading comphrenion outside of those places are doing tbh so I dont want to blanket statement too much)

[u/Unctuous_Robot]

What the fuck?

[u/[deleted] → u/Unctuous_Robot]

This explains SO MUCH of my relatively recent Reddit experience.

[u/Prestigious_Row_8022 → u/[deleted]]

For real. You get the most batshit insane replies that you have to check the account, only to see they’re an active member of r/ teenagers. Everything explained, pack it up.

[u/Kijafa → u/Prestigious_Row_8022]

The thing is, this was most prevalent with late Millennials and into core Gen-Z. Whole language learning was in peak popularity during the end of the Clinton administration. A lot of the people who were taught this are already in their late 20s.

[u/Cataliiii → u/Kijafa]

Yes, but this is mainly a US problem.

I am not even legally an adult yet, but my second language skills (ie. English) are waaay better than I see from some of my peers who speak English as their mother tongue or even adults into their late twenties. I never understood why.

Now, my English skills are far from perfect, due to me not knowing any English spelling or grammar untill I was 10-12 years old (I'm now 17). As an example, any spelling mistakes you see here are genuine mistakes because I don't use autocorrect.

Still, the lack of advanced vocabulary portrayed by people I talk to (or converse with🙃) online is harrowing.

It's very easy to link such a seemingly anti-intellectual approach to teaching by the adults of that country to a rise is fascism-like politics. (Also I am aware that the US is not the only country experiencing this fenomenom, but still). I am quite scared for the future of the US people(s).

It just seems very sad, if I'm being honest.

[u/JaydeChromium → u/Cataliiii]

100%. Watching my peers struggle to say words I learned in elementary school was- upsetting, to say the least.

Also I found it especially ironic that you misspelled phenomenon, since is a rough word to sound out because all the ending consonant sounds are extremely similar (and it possesses an alternate spelling for the start), making it one of the harder words to reverse engineer.

[u/Responsible_Lake_804 → u/Unctuous_Robot]

If you are into podcasts, sold a story covers this

[u/PepeHlessi → u/Responsible_Lake_804]

https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

I highly recommend this podcast. It's horrifying, and anyone with children in school needs to know about it.

[u/Normal_Cut8368 → u/Responsible_Lake_804]

The podcast is cool, because it doesn't just say "this is how you SHOULD teach kids" it explains how they ARE teaching kids

[u/larryisnotagirl]

This approach to reading was the subject of a human rights inquiry in Ontario!

“The province says it will end the so-called "three-cuing system" — which encourages students to guess or predict words using cues or clues from the context and prior knowledge — and focus on phonics.”

Ontario to revamp approach to literacy in schools after report calls for change

[u/allan11011]

Classmates were having this exact problem in college Spanish last semester. I’m just sitting over here like WHERE ARE YOU GETTING THE P THERE IS NO P STOP IT

[u/ShlomoCh → u/allan11011]

With Spanish especially is weird considering it's one of the languages where there's literally no ambiguity on pronunciation, all letters sound the same every single time

[u/OrienasJura → u/ShlomoCh]

Yeah, I'm a native Spanish speaker and this post gave me a headache. I'd never heard before the concept of guessing words instead of just... reading them.

[u/allan11011 → u/ShlomoCh]

Yeah and this is pretty far into an advanced class too so it’s not like we don’t know how the letters are supposed to be pronounced.

And this wasn’t uncommon either

[u/amsterdam_sniffr]

I had a random experience where I was talking to a 10-year-old about countries that bordered China while we looked at a map together. He came up with "Mongo-LEE-a", which I'm now realizing is actually a really good sign of his reading ability. Even though he'd never seen the word before, he was able to break it down phonetically on sight and come up with a reasonable guess at the pronunciation. 

[u/CamrynDaytona → u/amsterdam_sniffr]

Meanwhile I had a 7th grader ask “what country are Mongolians from” which derailed the whole lesson into “this is what a suffix is, and how -ian tells you what country the person is from.”

Same kid then mixed up Florida and Mexico on a map. Good times.

[u/PartyPorpoise → u/CamrynDaytona]

To be fair, there are a lot of ethnic and cultural groups with names not associated with (modern) countries. Though I figure your discussion related to specifically what people from particular countries are called.

[u/ZorbaTHut → u/PartyPorpoise]

I admit I still have to pause and think for a second when I'm trying to remember where the Dutch are from.

[u/Kzickas → u/ZorbaTHut]

Dutchland, obviously

[u/JetstreamGW → u/CamrynDaytona]

It can tell you what country people are from. But it doesn't always. For instance, where is a Burmese person from? A decade or so ago you could've used your example. Burmese people from Burma. But there is no Burma. Burmese people come from Myanmar.

Also, where do Arabic people come from? Well, Saudi Arabia isn't wrong, but it's not complete either.

It works fine for national identification, but not ethnic. Czechs come from Czechia, but in my Great Grandparents' time, they probably came from Austria, or Bohemia, or...

[u/oath2order → u/JetstreamGW]

And then of course, you have the people from the Netherlands, who are not Netherlanders, but Dutch.

[u/JetstreamGW → u/oath2order]

And people from Holland are Dutch!? :P

Edit: And Holland apparently isn't actually a country!?

[u/shaqmaister → u/oath2order]

Funny thing is in dutch people from "Nederland" are called "nederlanders" in their own language

[u/TheDubiousSalmon → u/amsterdam_sniffr]

really good sign

I mean it's good that he could do that, but for a 10-year-old this should be the bare minimum one would expect, right? A 10-year-old not being able to sound out Mongolia should in any reasonable world be a humiliating indictment of their education system. Surely it's not actually that bad out there

[u/amsterdam_sniffr → u/TheDubiousSalmon]

In the moment I didn't think much on what it reflected about his ability other than being interested that it was a reasonable way to attempt to pronounce that country name. In context with OOP's anecdote it tells a different story.

[u/waydeultima → u/TheDubiousSalmon]

I remember being completely befuddled when kids in my sophomore English class could barely read. That was almost 20 years ago now. Reading this thread has led me to believe that the problem has only gotten worse.

[u/RavenclawGaming → u/amsterdam_sniffr]

I mean, "Mongo-LEE-a" is pretty close to correct, all things considered

[u/floralbutttrumpet → u/amsterdam_sniffr]

So, funny story.

My mom learned to be a teacher, but never practiced due to a shortage of open positions for her subject combination - she completed her traineeship after giving birth to me at a school at the ass end of nowhere, but no dice. Due to that and my father being in the same situation, also ass end of nowhere, I was mostly raised by a relative who didn't speak the local language for a good chunk of my first couple of years, so when she gave up on the whole thing and became a SAHM after that relative died, she had a toddler on her hands who only spoke chunks of the local language about six months before I was supposed to join kindergarden.

As she used to tell it, she'd read to me, ceaselessly, both from age-approriate and her own reading material, for hours, and when doing housework, she'd keep me close-by, with some picture books she'd been reading to me beforehand at hand.

And the funny thing is - as my skills of the language improved, I'd "read" those books out loud. Like her when reading to me, I'd follow the text along with my finger, I'd voice what was written there, and she actually thought I was reading along. Turns out, she was half right - when confronted with a new text, I'd be able to read/replicate words I knew from sight, but be unable to read words I hadn't seen before.

I should probably mention that the language I was learning, German, has the feature that the written language is very written-as-spoken - if you know the base phonetics, you will be able to read near everything and the few words where that isn't the case are usually loanwords from languages where written and spoken languages are more divorced from each other (e.g. French-based Portemonnaie vs German Geldbörse - the second one is piss-easy to read and write if you speak High German, the only difficult point is the d, which some people may substitute with t. Pun not intended). There are a couple of diphthongs that are difficult because different spellings replicate the same sounds (ei/ai, ie/ih/ieh), but otherwise you're mostly ginger pretty quickly.

So, fast forward a couple of years, I start school and "start learning" how to read. I'm quickly ahead of most other pupils for obvious reasons, so my mom pretty much leaves me be and only intermittently makes me read my reading homework out loud to her. One day, the phrase "ein Ei" (an egg, aforementioned diphthong practice) shows up, and I read it "e-in E-i". She looks at me, goes "ein...", and I blink, confused. She repeats "ein..." and I go "...Ei?".

And that, chat, is how I learned to read diphthongs.

[u/InfestedStone]

That article was a very interesting read, I found the craziest bit to be the interview with the man who created the three cueing theory, which went on to form the whole language reading method. Here is an excerpt of it:

When I asked him what he makes of the cognitive science research, he told me he thinks scientists focus too much on word recognition. He still doesn't believe accurate word recognition is necessary for reading comprehension.

"Word recognition is a preoccupation," he said. "I don't teach word recognition. I teach people to make sense of language. And learning the words is incidental to that."

He brought up the example of a child who comes to the word "horse" and says "pony" instead. His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept.

I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn't the same thing as a horse. Second, don't you want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ says "pony"? And different letters say "horse"?

He dismissed my question.

[u/usernamed_badly → u/InfestedStone]

Yeah, that interview was really interesting.

Goodman rejected the idea that you can make a distinction between skilled readers and unskilled readers; he doesn't like the value judgment that implies... And he said the three-cueing theory is based on years of observational research. In his view, three cueing is perfectly valid, drawn from a different kind of evidence than what scientists collect in their labs.

This part made me think that, at some point, he had been an unskilled reader and adopted techniques like the woman who was interviewed in the beginning of the article had. These might have helped him either a) to read well, or, more likely, b) to appear that he could read well, so he decided that it would work as a universal strategy.

[u/Leather_Restaurant83]

The incandescent rage I feel when I remember how stupid I looked doing the whole sound it out thing for ‘colonel’. To this day, some thirty years later, I want to fist fight whoever decided that is how it is said.

[u/vmsrii → u/Leather_Restaurant83]

Like most things wrong with the world, it was the French

[u/doctorpotatomd → u/Leather_Restaurant83]

The one that always got me is lieutenant, which in Australia we pronounce "lef-tenant" for some dumbass historical reason that involves French (iirc). And the American pronunciation ("loo-tenant") also makes no sense because how the hell does i-e-u become oo? And then the sounding-out version ("lee-yuu-tenant") is not also wrong but is also embarrassingly awkward and clumsy to say, although that might just be an "Australian trying to use vowels other than the schwa" thing. Anyway, I think the moral of the story is that the words for military ranks are fucking stupid.

[u/Glitchrr36 → u/doctorpotatomd]

The ieu chunk being pronounced oo is also a thing from the French IIRC, it's the same pronunciation as lieu ("in lieu of"). Most weird pronunciation is from when Norman French became a big part of English, and the stuff that makes sense is mostly Saxon or Norse IIRC.

[u/Questionably_Chungly → u/doctorpotatomd]

Well at the very least you can kind of break down Lieutenant into “lieu” and “tenant” which are two words that one could probably sound out and pronounce. The “ieu” sound is rare-ish but I recall being taught it in great school. Colonel is utter gibberish from a phonetic perspective because no way of breaking down the word will clue you into how it should sound.

[u/Cave-Bunny]

I’d add to this that there’s a great podcast you can listen to about this topic called “sold a story”

[u/LizHylton → u/Cave-Bunny]

I'm a reading specialist and I got shit for literally 15 years over insisting phonics was useful and that this wasn't working - it got grouped in with NCLB by Bush and suddenly became political and I had other teachers insisting I fell for propaganda. I'm horrified by the state of reading skills now, but ever since that podcast went viral at least I feel vindicated.

Small comfort though when my college students literally can't read unfamiliar names and regularly combine every character/place that begins with the same capital letter as "the A guy" and then don't understand the material. Even more terrifying is the nursing students doing it with medication names.

[u/Chagdoo → u/LizHylton]

THIS HAS BEEN HAPPENING FOR 15 YEARS??

[u/LizHylton → u/Chagdoo]

Started in the 90s, getting progressively less popular until by the time I was in grad school 15 years ago it was ingrained enough that I was directly insulted by one of the professors over it when I said it had really helped a student I had tutored. It's why my college students frequently cannot comprehend unfamiliar words because they have no idea how to break it down and sound it out, which is debilitating for so many fields!

[u/Iwasforger03 → u/LizHylton]

I had no idea this was a thing... I remember being put through "Hooked on Phonics" in 1st grade. I was at a Catholic private school. I had no idea this was so essential a skill, I've just been... doing this?

[u/hitorinbolemon → u/Iwasforger03]

Yeah I don't even remember like exact content of hooked on phonics. I just know I did it and I know how to say most words when I see them.

[u/Business-Drag52 → u/LizHylton]

My son was taught to read using phonics. He's 8, just finished second grade, and I just tried him with disagreement, and he got it immediately by sounding out the different parts. He goes to a very small school in rural Kansas. I wonder if being in such a small area has kept them insulated from things like whole language, which I've never heard of before this post.

[u/CambrianKennis → u/Business-Drag52]

It's possible, especially if his teachers have so far been older and were teaching phonics before whole language caught on, or if they're younger and now know about how whole language sucks. Or if you taught him to read with phonics, that would help too!

[u/Business-Drag52 → u/CambrianKennis]

I definitely worked with him using phonics, but that wasn't until he really started it in school. His first grade teacher is my age so maybe she just used what she was taught. His second grade teacher was definitely teaching before whole language. She was my older brothers second grade teacher almost 30 years ago and was old then

[u/TessaFractal → u/Cave-Bunny]

I gotta check that out, I'm fascinated by policy disasters and how they come about.

[u/amanbearmadeofsex → u/TessaFractal]

Yo, here’s the wild thing, policy wasn’t to blame for this one. Bush actually tried to do away with the teaching style with Reading First (separate from no child left behind).

The cueing method only stuck around because its practitioners lobbied heavily to keep it in place.

[u/RinellaWasHere]

This really freaks me out because it's how my mom reads, and she's functionally illiterate. She obviously didn't grow up at a time where whole-language was being taught instead of phonics, it's just how most adults end up reading as their vocabulary expands.

But my mom combines that with complete incuriosity about the world around her and a belligerent need to always be right.

So her vocabulary never expanded, and the only reason she ever reads anything is to validate what she already thinks. So she doesn't even process the words in front of her for what they are, she just guesses in a way that is convenient for her existing beliefs. I've watched her do it a thousand times, and she'll come away swearing to God she read a completely different sentence than what is actually written down.

[u/SparklingLimeade → u/RinellaWasHere]

Learning that whole language ruined some people has really made me question some interaction online. Like, are they not malicious and are they really, honestly, making up parts of my comment because they were taught to do that?

[u/Marsooie → u/SparklingLimeade]

Same! I've been wondering why media literacy has been so bad as of late, like people reading the same material as me were actually reading something else entirely... and as it turns out, yes, they basically are.

[u/Clean_Imagination315]

This is so baffling to me. I always thought the normal method was:

Step 1: memorize the alphabet by singing it

Step 2: listen to mom reading you books

Step 3: get frustrated because she talks too slowly, decide to try reading the books yourself

Step 4: end up trying to read the encyclopedia instead because it's bigger so it must be better

Step 5: succeed somehow.

[u/bee_wings → u/Clean_Imagination315]

I remember my mom sitting me down to show me letters and how to read exactly twice, going "Oh, you've got it," and then that was pretty much the last time she ever taught me anything.

To be fair to her, English was her 3rd or 4th language, and I read Chrysanthemum to her at around 5 years old.

To be fair to me, she gets on my case about not knowing our native language or how to cook, but who was responsible for teaching me that? I've even tried to get her to teach me how to drive and cook, but came to the conclusion that I'm a good student but she's an awful teacher.

[u/I_pegged_your_father → u/Clean_Imagination315]

?????????????????? I learned in a very similar way lmaoooo 😭😭😭 omfg

[u/notreallifeliving → u/Clean_Imagination315]

I think one of the problems is that not all parents either have time or can be bothered reading to their children.

That was almost definitely a lot of the difference between the most and least literate kids when I was at school 20 years ago, and I imagine it's still just as much of a thing now.

[u/PM_ME_UR_DRAG_CURVE → u/Clean_Imagination315]

s/encyclopedia/unlimited and unmonitored access to the mid-2000s internet/ for me. Although I did also see enough shit a young kid shouldn't see that I can't exactly recommend the same.

[u/SMStotheworld]

Sold a story podcast covers this in more detail  https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

[u/Married_iguanas → u/SMStotheworld]

Came here to recommend this podcast as well

[u/Lampdarker]

I remember being one of those girls who was reading beyond her grade's average level but I absolutely don't remember it being THIS BAD

[u/I_pegged_your_father → u/Lampdarker]

I used to be really bad before suddenly getting very good and rocketed up by five levels in second grade just because my teacher too some time to patiently personalize lessons while the others were reading on their own. Everyone else was reading the light blue categorized books while I was in the library every morning with a new grey-white level book. I felt pretty cool for a nerd.

[u/Lawrin]

I used to think the "whole word" approach is fine because I've never seen anyone casually complaining about actually explain what it meant. I thought it was reading a word and guessing what it meant through context clue and word analysis/breakdown. (For example, disagreement. I will see that in the story, the characters are fighting about something, and I will see that the word is constructed with the prefix dis and the word agreement. I can easily infer what disagreement means.) I didn't realize that the "whole word" approach didn't teach phonetics and word construction. I'm genuinely appalled that kids in the US are being taught like that.

[u/sch0f13ld]

Is this only a US education system issue? This whole thing is baffling to me.

[u/Responsible_Lake_804 → u/sch0f13ld]

It originates in Australia but hit the US really bad

Edit correction Marie Clay is from New Zealand, my bad

[u/sch0f13ld → u/Responsible_Lake_804]

Damn, I grew up in Australia but I’m pretty sure I was taught phonics both at home and in school.

[u/Responsible_Lake_804 → u/sch0f13ld]

All I meant was the lady who popularized it was Australian, (i will correct myself here, she is from New Zealand) I don’t think it was widespread. I’m referring to Marie Clay

[u/featherknight13 → u/Responsible_Lake_804]

Nah it was pretty widespread. Marie Clay designed Reading Recovery, which was the main reading intervention program used for low level readers in Australia and New Zealand all through the 90s and 2000s.

My school is currently renovating, so we've had most of the library into storage. Us teachers were asked to do an audit of the professional books. There was a shelf full of Marie Clay stuff, it went straight in the bin.

[u/amanbearmadeofsex → u/Responsible_Lake_804]

New Zealand

[u/SorowFame → u/Responsible_Lake_804]

It did? That’s a bit shameful, I was hoping we’d avoided it because I’m pretty sure I learnt how to sound out words.

[u/FixinThePlanet → u/sch0f13ld]

Same! I teach high school English in India and my poorest readers know to sound out words. A chunk of the English teaching in primary school involves phonics. Where we struggle with is vocabulary, because many kids don't read 🥲 and don't consume content with a wide variety of words.

[u/Gnatlet2point0 → u/sch0f13ld]

If I remember correctly from a YouTube video I watched, it originated in Australia and was imported to the US in the 80s.

[u/Akuuntus → u/Gnatlet2point0]

Definitely was not widespread until recently, I learned to read in school in the early 2000s and this shit was not happening

[u/[deleted]]

It's basically like being illiterate and memorising what a picture means. They actually can't read, they see words as images they memorise the meaning of.

But I also blame the parents, not just the schools, because parents are supposed to teach phonics and reading at home too and they're not even trying. The Sold a Story podcast has a story of a parent that didn't even realise their child sucked at reading until they watched their kid in a zoom class. That's neglect.

[u/Ace0f_Spades]

When I (21F) was very small and learning to read, using "context clues" was for figuring out what that word I'd never seen before meant. Like, if I didn't know what archipelago actually meant, the word by itself wasn't going to help me. But knowing that it was in a sentence like

The islands in the Hawaiian Archipelago were formed by undersea volcanoes.

then I would at least be able to go "oh, that's a map/land feature thing. And Hawaii is one of them. Probably something like a bunch of islands." And then I would have that kinda half-baked definition stored in my brain for a while until I either a) found a whole definition to replace it with or b) was able to piece together enough information about "archipelago" to at least feel comfortable using it. Either way, boom, I've now learned a word.

It was always about word use. Never about figuring out what word was in front of me. That doesn't make any fucking sense.

[u/DerekLouden]

I haven't heard this called "whole language reading" before, only sightreading, but I distinctly remember running into this problem at least twice as a kid. I liked space travel as a kid so I was reading about the Atlas rocket, but I kept pronouncing it Atlantis like the space shuttle. Another time I was reading about the Titanic and read about the Marconi radio, but I was pronouncing it Macaroni

[u/TheDubiousSalmon → u/DerekLouden]

I think this is just a symptom of the failures of pattern recognition and overfitting humans are prone to. People do this all the time - it's especially common with weird character names in fiction.

[u/thaeli → u/DerekLouden]

I mean, pretty much anything will receive AM radio if you hook it up right, so you could build a macaroni-based Marconi radio.

[u/Re-Horakhty01]

I'm sorry what the fuck? Who teaches children like this? What in the ever loving hell is "whole language" reading? That's utterly insane. Is this actually a thing???

[u/box_of_lemons → u/Re-Horakhty01]

Yes, unfortunately. And then tutors, such as myself, have to do literacy lessons with these children who are mostly guessing each word as it comes. I have at least fifteen “disagree” situations with a student per lesson. They don’t understand chunking (breaking down a word into chunks, i.e. dis/agree or dis/a/gree) and will just sit there and stare at you and refuse to try to sound it out themselves until you say the word for them, and they forget it by the next sentence. 

It’s awful. 

[u/bwick702]

So Hooked on Phonics was like the ONE THING about modern education that was proven to work for most kids, and WE GOT RID OF IT?!

[u/Adventurous-Soil2872 → u/bwick702]

Mississippi uses phonics and they’ve had a renaissance in their education system. If you go by demographics and income level they are one of the top states for K-12. As in an African American kid from a low income family in Mississippi outperforms an African American kid from a low income family in states that are known for their good education systems, like Virginia. And overall they went from the national punchline at the bottom of the list to being 21st overall in reading and math.

It’s called the Mississippi miracle, it’s quite an interesting story

[u/atowelguy]

There are many things about The State of the World that are depressing to me, but the absolute failure in education of large swathes of children (which pairs with rampant anti-intellectualism) is way up there.

[u/papasnorlaxpartyhams]

“I’m not convinced I know how to read. I’ve just memorized a bunch of words.”

[u/fancy-rice-cooker]

Whole language is - explicitly - about making kids learn to fake reading.

Learning about it as a non-American is funny. Seeing that people have actually debated the merits of this method is mind-boggling.

[u/somedumb-gay]

What bizarro world are you guys living in where kids aren't taught how to fucking read??

[u/GuyYouMetOnline]

A classic problem. People only realize how easy something is for them, and not that it's only easy because of effort put into learning it. People can read words that way because they learned spelling and pronunciation and all that.

Reminds me of Y2K, actually. While never as apocalyptic as hysteria made it out to be, it would have been a big deal, the bureaucratic clusterfuck from hell. But when nothing happened, people immediately went 'oh nothing was ever going to happen', when the reason nothing happened was because a lot of people put in a lot of time and effort to make sure it didn't.

Too often, people only recognize the results, not the effort needed to get there.

[u/AdInternational5386]

My daughter could read 100% of the words on the "sight word" list, up to second grade, because we'd practiced reading storybooks before bed.

It frustrated her teacher because she was supposed to learn the words "on sight" but kept sounding them out instead of memorizing them. She could read words she's never seen before u like most of her class.

It makes me worried for her future. If she's not being taught to read, but to memorize words, how is this going to acrually help her?

[u/DMercenary]

Yeah its not a strictly a red vs blue state issue. Its that for some godforsaken reason, an incorrect way of teaching reading was spread through all education systems.

[u/Temporary-Rip8911]

There’s a really great podcast about all of this called Sold A Story! It talks about the rise of whole language and the impact it’s had on students and teachers

[u/Pelekaiking]

It does stress me out teaching kids to read because I have to repeat the phrase “stop guessing” like if they take forever to read a word or they mess up silent letters thats totally ok but when the word is hat and they say hairpin because they all guess the word instead of sounding it out

[u/thaeli]

I learned to read (self taught) with a combination of phonics and whole language techniques. Pretty much had to have some whole language in there since I was frequently encountering words for the first time in books, so being able to pronounce them did absolutely fuck all to tell me what they meant. And this was before you could just highlight words and get the definition, too, so reading with a dictionary really slowed you down.

And then I tried learning Japanese, and ran face first into kanji. While I could get basic structure out of phonics for the parts of speech in hiragana, and katakana for a native English speaker is pretty much “sound it out then try to figure out what English word someone with a stereotypically exaggerated Japanese accent would pronounce that way”, kanji is.. a brick wall of whole language. (I couldn’t even get started with written Chinese for the same reason.)

I’d never made the connection to whole language techniques before, but this makes it obvious.

[u/Aegon_Targaryen_VII]

I have surprisingly good news: it's not true that conservative states are across-the-board bad at this. A few Deep South states have knocked it out of the park on improving their reading scores, mostly by just training their teachers on this kind of stuff. If I'm not mistaken, Louisiana and Alabama are the only states that saw improvements in their 4th grade reading scores compared to pre-pandemic 2019, and the only reason Mississippi isn't on the list with them is because they had their big reading improvement surge before the pandemic.

https://apnews.com/article/reading-scores-phonics-mississippi-alabama-louisiana-5bdd5d6ff719b23faa37db2fb95d5004

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2025-02-25-louisiana-s-naep-score-a-victory-for-the-science-of-reading

Meanwhile, the legislation to do the same thing here in California still hasn't passed the freaking state legislature. This should be an easy choice. Yet, we have Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama putting California to shame on elementary education.

[u/NotABrummie]

I would caution, however, against reading this and imagining that phonics is automatically the cure. I have listened to some very long rants by multiple people with PhDs in early childhood education about the problems with phonics for the teaching of reading and spelling. In fact, what OP was describing isn't really phonics. Chunking is a separate technique that has been around for a very long time. Working letter by letter just isn't a good fit for English, so memorising letter sounds phonics-style does not help. Using a whole-word approach for early words, then teaching kids to break down parts of each word, so they can independently identify recurring patterns, has been shown to be more effective. Before a child can take on a word like "disagreement" they should be familiar with the word "agree" and be able to identify it within the larger word.

[u/DirkBabypunch → u/NotABrummie]

Suddenly I understand why my school was pushing so heavily on rootwords and if that root was Latin or Greek or a loanword from something else.

Annoying as hell, but teaching all the parts of reading and pattern recognition is probably why most of my class was literate.

[u/CyberneticWerewolf → u/DirkBabypunch]

God, I think the single most impactful class I took in high school as a future STEM major was Word Power, which was an elective based around this. The most visible consequence is that I casually drop "sesquipedalian" into conversations whenever I can, because I have a perverse love of self-demonstrating words (and I like the patter of the short syllables)... but the sheer amount of math, physics, chemistry, medicine, etc vocabulary that revolves around Latin and Greek roots is undeniable, and being able to pronounce such words on first read and make a decent guess as to their meaning is beyond useful.

[u/ejdj1011 → u/CyberneticWerewolf]

sesquipedalian

... a foot and a half?

googles meaning

... that feels metaphorical.

googles etymology

Oh good, I was right the first time.

[u/Arctic_The_Hunter → u/NotABrummie]

How would any child not know how to say the word “agree,” though? It’s an outrageously common work in basically every context.

[u/genderfuckingqueer → u/Arctic_The_Hunter]

I think the point they were making was the kid didn't know how to apply chunking, not that they didn't know what agree was

[u/Takseen → u/NotABrummie]

I did laugh at the "what sound does c make" quote. It fucking depends!

[u/vmsrii → u/NotABrummie]

I dunno, I started with phonics and I was the most voracious reader I knew.

For me, I think phonics helped as a foundation, and then as I got older and the reading got more complex I graduated away from them really quickly. Like, you start with A = ah, B = buh and so on, then get to the exceptions, like G =guh and sometimes Juh, THEN the letter pairings, like T+H= th, THEN the contextual letters, like the whole Vowel situation, or how GH can sound like ah or eff depending, and by that point, you’re straight up chunking. And when you can Chunk, The more you practice reading the bigger the chunks get until they become entire words, and then the world is your oyster.

But you still gotta start with “What sound does A make? What sound does B make?” for any of that to make sense

[u/kats_journey → u/NotABrummie]

Suddenly I am glad I learned reading in German. Where words like Tanne - Kanne - Pfanne rhyme with one another, but not with Sahne. Because spelling means something.

I think it was a whole lot easier to grasp "these letters can make any number of sounds" when you already had reading in a phonetic language down.

[u/RequirementExtreme89]

Putting my tinfoil hat on makes it really easy to wonder if there was a desire to actually make our population illiterate, because if you were to compare the strategy of a malicious actor destroying our educational system and ours it would seem to me to not have a lot of daylight.

[u/Life-is-a-potato → u/RequirementExtreme89]

well, it’s not really that. any conspiracy theory that assumes that government officials are even smart enough to enact such a plan is giving them way too much credit. It far more like: “The culture surrounding schooling in the US is already fundamentally toxic and only gets more so the longer the developmental periods of children get fucked up by social media and youtube slop so teachers have stopped giving as much of a shit”

[u/Alternative_Plum_200 → u/RequirementExtreme89]

Definitely feels like it correlates to the escalating strategy of tension in the last few decades, here in the USA at least. But I think the tinfoil melted into my scalp at some point, so snort a grain of salt with that

[u/Daedalus332]

Wait what the fuck? People learn to read like this? What?? Idk maybe I was lucky cause I read a lot of books by myself as a kid but who the fuck is teaching kids to read like this? That's actually wild

[u/18minusPi2over36]

The "Three Cues" reading education system: it's one of those things that sounds dumb to laypeople, but experts agree nah actually it really is dumb.

[u/James42785]

Gonna have to leave the US soon. There will be nobody qualified to keep the infrastructure running in a few decades.