I feel it's worth noting that while the outcome of these changes to teaching reading is a huge win for childhood education, this does not mean that Mississippi has a great education system. They are still in the bottom 10 states annually for ACT scores and although they have improved learning outcomes for students the issues of equity within their schools still exist. It's also worth noting that the state is a net consumer of federal tax dollars year after year, using $2.34 in federal aid for every dollar they give in taxes. I'll give MS it's props when they deal with the hate crime in their colleges and set up a good free meal program that their state can fund on its own.
This is why literacy improved: "The states adopted reading curricula backed by actual scientific research.1 This led to them adopting phonics-based early literacy programs and rejecting ones that used the debunked “whole language” method that encourages students to vaguely guess at words based on context instead of figuring them out sound-by-sound." The fact that the debunked "whole language" method is being used seems intentionally destructive
I find the debate really interesting because I have 2 sons who were early readers and they taught themselves by more or less guess / check. I watched them bootstrap by recognising whole words and memorising them. They start noticing "EXIT" signs and words in environment, asking what words on the juice box say, see common words in books etc. Once they've seen enough of them (it seems to require a LOT) they seem to naturally figure out how to decode. I have seen the neuroimaging studies that claim ALL word recognition is phonetic "decoding" but I just don't believe they mean what phonics proponents claim. Some kids will recognise whole words before they've learned the alphabet. How are they "decoding" the sounds?? I mean, the whole existence of logographic writing systems contradicts these ideas. Chinese readers could not exist if what they say is true.
My daughter's brain does not work in this way and she absolutely benefited from explicit and careful phonics instruction in school. Whole word recognition does not come naturally to her.
All of them were read to for on average an hour a day up to age 5, so thousands of hours, nothing happens "magically".
I think I can understand why phonics would be the better method of instruction for schools. It's slower, but has less variance. The "old way" of teaching was more or less telling all kids to try to copy what kids who learn to read easily do. I've seen first-hand that this doesn't work well for everyone.
One thing I do wonder about is changes in culture and home environment, alongside demographic shifts. If children are not having as many books read to them or there are fewer kids with the exposure required to bootstrap "whole word" reading, then the old "YOLO methods" (do $whatever reading activities that mainly serve to focus attention on the topic) would appear to steadily decline in effectiveness.
My observation has been that phonics as a method of instruction doesn't do much for kids who learn to read by themselves or at home. BUT - those kids don't need any help to hit educational targets. So in a "phonics only" setting the method "gets the credit" for their success despite it being tons of classroom hours that don't teach them anything except that instructional content "doesn't apply to them".
It's an interesting tradeoff because you could extend this to all areas. You could target ALL educational content towards kids who are going to naturally struggle, using "remedial" methods. I think there are strong equity arguments for this. You could argue that the purpose of school is to help everybody meet minimum standards.
An unfortunate side-effect is that schools run on this philosophy become basically daycare from the perspective of children who don't need this. They are left to do ad-hoc activities (because there is no formal content targeted to their needs) or goof off, while teachers focus all attention on kids who are struggling. I don't think this is "wrong" but I do think it's a tradeoff.
I feel like this article is a bit too confident for the evidence provided.
I recall going to a Steven Levitt speech (Freakonomics) speech where he was talking about looking into what miraculous star teachers were doing to educate their students who scored incredibly well on standardized tests.
Turns out those teachers were cheating -- which they figured out when they saw the tests and they were covered in eraser marks (the teachers simply erased the wrong answers before handing them in!)
I'm not saying that cheating is necessarily happening state-wide here, but when you do create an incentive for teachers to cheat without any oversight, and an incentive for principals and districts to not notice.
Now its possible the teaching methods and incentives help too, that should be looked in to, but I don't think this is concluded until replicated.
[He estimated that a few percent of classroom may cheat in a high-stakes testing environment]
Illiteracy is a weapon. Get a critical mass of the populace to have no interest in Shakespeare, Goethe, Socrates, or Cervantes and these people will find other ways to amuse themselves. Eventually they will amuse themselves to death.
Phonics based reading is all about sounding out unknown words. The idea is that the student would understand if somebody else read the text out loud, so if we can teach the kids how to convert the written words into sounds, they can understand many new words they first come across. The core idea is to teach the kids that certain letters or groups of letters map to certain sounds (phonemes) at a start, and then gradually introduce more and more rules of English phonetics, allowing students to successfully learn to sound out even more complicated words.
The hope is that students will gradually learn to just recognize words by sight, which the overwhelming majority do eventually learn to do, and just need to sound out unfamiliar words. The fact that some students have struggled to learn to recognize words and need to sound most out is part of why people try to create alternatives, but those largely don't work well.
Of course, English does have some tricky phonetics. We have some words with multiple different pronunciations. We have some words with the same phonemes but different meanings that differ solely based on syllable stress. There are even some words whose pronunciation simply must be memorized, as there is no coherent rule to get from the word to the pronunciation (see for example Colonel).
8 comments
[ 60.9 ms ] story [ 89.7 ms ] threadMy daughter's brain does not work in this way and she absolutely benefited from explicit and careful phonics instruction in school. Whole word recognition does not come naturally to her.
All of them were read to for on average an hour a day up to age 5, so thousands of hours, nothing happens "magically".
I think I can understand why phonics would be the better method of instruction for schools. It's slower, but has less variance. The "old way" of teaching was more or less telling all kids to try to copy what kids who learn to read easily do. I've seen first-hand that this doesn't work well for everyone.
One thing I do wonder about is changes in culture and home environment, alongside demographic shifts. If children are not having as many books read to them or there are fewer kids with the exposure required to bootstrap "whole word" reading, then the old "YOLO methods" (do $whatever reading activities that mainly serve to focus attention on the topic) would appear to steadily decline in effectiveness.
My observation has been that phonics as a method of instruction doesn't do much for kids who learn to read by themselves or at home. BUT - those kids don't need any help to hit educational targets. So in a "phonics only" setting the method "gets the credit" for their success despite it being tons of classroom hours that don't teach them anything except that instructional content "doesn't apply to them".
It's an interesting tradeoff because you could extend this to all areas. You could target ALL educational content towards kids who are going to naturally struggle, using "remedial" methods. I think there are strong equity arguments for this. You could argue that the purpose of school is to help everybody meet minimum standards.
An unfortunate side-effect is that schools run on this philosophy become basically daycare from the perspective of children who don't need this. They are left to do ad-hoc activities (because there is no formal content targeted to their needs) or goof off, while teachers focus all attention on kids who are struggling. I don't think this is "wrong" but I do think it's a tradeoff.
I recall going to a Steven Levitt speech (Freakonomics) speech where he was talking about looking into what miraculous star teachers were doing to educate their students who scored incredibly well on standardized tests.
Turns out those teachers were cheating -- which they figured out when they saw the tests and they were covered in eraser marks (the teachers simply erased the wrong answers before handing them in!)
I'm not saying that cheating is necessarily happening state-wide here, but when you do create an incentive for teachers to cheat without any oversight, and an incentive for principals and districts to not notice.
Now its possible the teaching methods and incentives help too, that should be looked in to, but I don't think this is concluded until replicated.
[He estimated that a few percent of classroom may cheat in a high-stakes testing environment]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-life-expectancy-in-t...
The hope is that students will gradually learn to just recognize words by sight, which the overwhelming majority do eventually learn to do, and just need to sound out unfamiliar words. The fact that some students have struggled to learn to recognize words and need to sound most out is part of why people try to create alternatives, but those largely don't work well.
Of course, English does have some tricky phonetics. We have some words with multiple different pronunciations. We have some words with the same phonemes but different meanings that differ solely based on syllable stress. There are even some words whose pronunciation simply must be memorized, as there is no coherent rule to get from the word to the pronunciation (see for example Colonel).