I've learned English as a second (actually fourth) language, and it was definitely weird (the previous ones, including my mother tongue are almost fully phonetic, i.e. much easier to read) - I guess it must be different when learned as a first?
I don’t know about 100 years ago but 50 years ago, they were taught using phonics.
That’s the ridiculous part of this whole ordeal; this was already a solved problem before some idiots came to the conclusion that phonics was not good, and apparently had to be replaced across the US.
Luckily, most of the world didn’t catch on! They’re still teaching phonics in most of the world.
> Luckily, most of the world didn’t catch on! They’re still teaching phonics in most of the world.
The need for heavy-duty phonics instruction depends somewhat on the language. For example, languages like Spanish and Italian are quite phonologically regular, so once you learn what sound each letter makes, it's easy to read. In English, the mappings between letters and sounds is much more complicated, so teaching the various rules and exceptions is more important.
I have a feeling you’re talking about spelling here, not about reading?
IME, phonics (sounding out the letters as you read them) is equally valuable as a learning tool for beginners in a language with regular spelling as in English (which has irregular spelling).
The various rules and exceptions are necessary to have memorized when writing, though!
I'm talking about reading. Some kids who have a hard time learning to read in English would have an easier time learning a more phonologically normal language. They would also have an easier time spelling, but I was referring to the ability to sound out words.
All languages have "actual spelling rules". What makes English more complex is that it borrows from various different types of languages, so inherits different sets of rules. And of course, many English speakers are unaware of whether a particular word has Germanic or Latin roots.
As for whether phonics-based instruction is better than alternative systems for any language, I wouldn't be so bold as to make that claim (I work in literacy). It is quite possible that in some languages, the phonological rules are sufficiently simple that it isn't necessary to spend much time on phonics, and instead to do more of a "balanced-literacy" type approach. This does not work well with English, but it's possible the tradeoffs are significantly different in other languages.
Yes, I was being a bit facetious with the remark about spelling rules. I was guessing if I stated "English has an unusually defective orthography", people would not get what I meant. But since you work in education, you probably do.
If you have a language where a learner cannot derive spelling from phonetics, or phonetics from spelling, a learner instead has to memorize the spelling _and_ pronunciation of every word. This is highly unusual, and suboptimal! My hyperbolic statement was that, from the perspectice of the learner, there might as well not be any spelling rules because you have to memorize everything by rote.
I don't know why English spelling reform has never happened (AFAIK) but it's for sure making life a lot more difficult for dyslectics or people with learning disabilities.
Just a word of caution: comparing literacy rates from different times and places is difficult because literacy isn't really a binary and the way people are judged to be literate or not literate isn't standardized. To compare literacy rates from two different times or places you need to figure out how each was determined.
No it isn’t different as a first. Teaching people to read English isn’t difficult, and as you said was solved hundreds of years ago. There is something else going on. I wasn’t even taught to read, I just picked it up because my parents read to me before I even went to school and I wanted to read books. I made a perfect score on the ACT test reading component.
>Nearly half of California students can’t read at grade level.
This is a complete travesty in one of the most developed countries on Earth. I’m sure phonics would help, my Mom is a special ed teacher and teaches phonics to her students and never stopped.
Kinda like you, I was taught using what amounts to phonics. I learned words, then I was shown those words in a book once I knew how to say them. My reading and speaking were years ahead of my peers. I remember when Hooked on Phonics came around at my school it struck me that the way I was taught had a name and it didn't really occur to me anyone learned that differently.
I think the more modern problem is that a lot of parents offload things like this to the education system, so they become classified as emerging education issues. There's probably lots of cause and effect incentive system related reasons for that. I had three siblings that weren't served dinner unless they taught me to say a new word.
> I made a perfect score on the ACT test reading component.
This seems a bit out of place. How are ACT scores relevant to phonics-based instruction? Typically the ACT happens a decade after a kid learns to read, right?
Yes that’s certainly true, I didn’t do anything to really earn it other than have a desire to read and enjoy reading. I also didn’t have anything else to do to escape, so books were it. No phones, no tv shows, no video games, no YouTube. Not because my parents restricted them but just because they didn’t exist back then and especially in the rural area we lived. I remember turning the tv to snow and pretending I was playing Space Invaders, which had just come out. :)
But … phonics still needs other things to work, like committed teachers and parents who spend the time exposing their kids to books.
Phonics is necessary but insufficient. It is the best method, but it still requires a functioning classroom and/or household, which many kids don’t get.
what's old is new, even NYC where the war against phonics was started has given up on it. I guess having Mississippi and Alabama score better than them was the final straw
basically 30+ years wasted on a strategy with no scientific basis, I wonder what our school systems are teaching today that will be looked at as being just as dumb 30 years from now
Some phonics is probably fine, but it needs to simply be a vehicle to helping kids start reading and then they just need to be encouraged to read.
I taught my daughter the sounds of each letter, then we moved on to sounding out two-letter words, then three and four. I pointed out which words were weird and why and we moved on. I then started doing the Bob books with her before she was 5 and then switched to the little Disney short books and Dr. Seuss. Now she's in first grade reading chapter books meant for those in 4th-6th grade, while her classmates are still learning phonics instead of reading. Thankfully her teacher lets me pack her books and she can read those on her own instead of continuing the same tablet lessons she's done a dozen times.
I realize not all parents have prioritized reading like I have and that can be challenging to teachers, but a big push should be to teach them enough to get them reading very simple "see spot run" type books and then plenty of practice where things gradually increase in complexity with amount of words, vocabulary, and words with unconventional pronunciation. The human brain will pick up all the words eventually without needing to try to apply 50 different phonics rules. It's just like with common core math where they have a really neat concept to try to make math more intuitive (and it's great for some students), but to many...it means they're just hopelessly confused and never even learn what would have been common for students 30 years ago.
Personalized instruction (by a good-enough teacher) almost always beats out any kind of standard curriculum given to 20 kids at once, no matter how good that curriculum is.
Phonics may or may not be the best way to teach reading in a classroom setting to students of diverse skills, but it's a really hard problem to solve. Even agreeing on the evaluation of outcomes is difficult. (e.g: should your scoring function be about getting kids up to a minimum standard, average performance, or increase from beginning of year?)
There’s a real risk here to your daughter - your daughters’ teacher sounds at least reasonable, but ideally we wouldn’t force any kid to the lowest common denominator. Only reason to do so is cost, as it’s harder to manage more classes with different skill levels. When I was learning English and was well ahead of my classmates due to similar at home involvement, at school I quickly lost interest and wouldn’t bother with assignments, leading to poor grades. This phase passed and I ended up doing fine, but no thanks to the teachers involved. Could have gone the other way just as easily and then from an advanced learned I would have become a problem one.
Thankfully she seems to have a competitive drive to push the boundaries and learn more. Not everyone is like that of course. You still have to give them some incentives sometimes or just incorporate what you want to teach in the form of a game of some type.
According to [1] 26% of Americans with 'less than a high school diploma' have 'no books' at home. On the other hand, among Americans with a 'postgraduate degree', 42% have 'more than 100 books' at home.
En masse, it’s less common than should be and a lot less than one would hope for. OP sounds like a very responsible and caring parent!
This also requires spare time. In US at least, things aren’t as setup to support such allocating enough time for kids. Forget reading time, even basic sick time is tough for most.
If you'll permit me a generalization, well-off parents generally have more time, energy and money to spend on their children's development. For example, if you're a stay-at-home parent, you have more time to think about how to get your kid reading. Maybe you're teaching them directly, maybe you're buying books you think they'll like, or teaching by example by reading books in your spare time.
If both parents are working double-shifts to make rent, you might just be happy that your kid is being quiet watching TV, so you can get some sleep.
My wife and I are both engineers and work full time. I'm tired at night too, but it's worth going through the effort early rather than later when they're struggling.
I started with the sounds that each letter in the alphabet makes when she first turned four I would guess. It wasn't exactly easy, but we'd try to go through the exercise before she went to sleep each night. At first it would take over a half hour to get through it. After a few months of on and off she had it down pretty well to where sounding out letters was possible. Each step is a challenge that they have to get through and it's also a challenge on the patience of you the parent.
It really depends. Unfortunately a lot of parents don't read or encourage their kids to do so. However, as an engineer, all of my coworkers were reading to their kids at a young age and working with them and got them reading early and have generally set them up for success.
It's becoming a lot harder to push a love for reading. The modern world has a lot more competing for my kids time and attention than I feel like I had as a kid. For me, reading was a natural way to pass the time (and I caries a book everywhere I went!) while I feel like for them it's the last thing on their minds.
This is absolutely true. However, I've noticed that teaching them to get comfortable with reading and limiting the screen time (TV, video games) means that they'll shift to reading or physical activities when bored or when they run out of screen time... especially if you let them pick out the books they want.
I have a friend that has a kid that only wants to play Minecraft....she complains he won't do anything else...but then she enables that by giving him so much screen time. I think if you handle certain things the right way, the problem will sort itself outside certain disabilities.
One frustrating point is that the kids have school provided electronics as well these days.
While I'm not against that, it does prevent a challenge to screen time. They have homework to do and will be doing it until you look away, then suddenly they're back on youtube.
We had to restrict even the school devices to public areas of the home, which is unfortunate.
Yep. I was a little dismayed that my kid was using a tablet for hours at school. I think textbooks are probably healthier with the amount of screen time kids get at home now.
The issues with the California education system extend beyond reading.
Like medicine, the certification system being as long and expensive prices an entire group of candidates out of the market.
No k-12 teacher should need a masters, or a degree in education. An appropriate undergrad major should be sufficient.
Funnily, 1st year PhD (with no masters) students become defacto instructors for undergrads but K-12 needs degrees and certifications up the wazoo.
The wages for teaching (in CA) are only bad if you need a ton of qualifications to get there. When compared to other peer professions, it's hourly rate is alright. Except, those professions don't need advanced degrees.
That's where the other main issue comes up. Teachers' hours are a lie. They're expected to work long unpaid hours, especially in their first few years of setting up their coursework. Add the auxiliary role of being baby sitter, and it quickly burns them out.
I won't jump into issues around funding and over hiring for admins. That's a whole another can of worms.
This is what works, and we know that it works. The evidence says so. We homeschool our child and we've used a UK phonics program and now a UK grammar program. Kiddo is now a voracious reader. Finding suitable books to keep kiddo happy is the new challenge.
"The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says."[1]
This quote seems almost absurd on its face, but I've seen other articles that mirror the sentiment. Essentially, teachers didn't like the "robotic" and "dehumanizing" drilling in phonics, and some EdD's provided them with a comforting "progressive" alternative that was stamped with the authority of the academy.
Highly recommend the Sold a Story podcast (mentioned elsewhere) for a synopsis accessible to laypeople.
A big part was guilt by association with a behaviorist view of education. Phonics is very rote and mechanical, which clashes with notions of whole, meaningful problem solving. By analogy, think reps on Spanish flash cards vs speaking Spanish to solve a mystery or order lunch. At first blush mechanical drills feel divorced from an authentic lifelike context, which can lead to poor engagement and generalization.
Then there’s the affective layer—how you feel about the subject and your ability in it. If all you do is drill Spanish flash cards, you might worry that a lot of kids will hate Spanish instruction. Alternative reading methodologies put a lot of emphasis on kids falling in love with reading.
But it turns out that in all the well-intentioned holistic thinking they basically they forgot/missed that decoding phonetic information is just super important as a discrete outcome, and you can’t skip addressing it directly or many kids will fail to infer it on their own.
And turns out it’s not so boring for little kids, because it’s new to them, and decoding skills give them much-needed momentum to read literally any text they encounter in their daily lives.
That's right. Kiddo was grabbing everything around the house and reading all the labels. Everything. Bottles of hot sauce, recycling instructions, air purifier operating manuals, shampoo labels... The world was a marvel because everything could be decoded and understood. Reading is our first superpower.
That's probably multifaceted. One reason, and I know it's an unsatisfying answer, is that other methods were sexier.
Phonics seems really dry, and "schoolma'amy". "Here's a bunch of rules on how letters make words and a big list of apparent exceptions to memorise."
There's also the expert problem, where anybody teaching reading has long forgotten just how hard it is to learn. It seems totally natural to most people in the modern day to be able to read. But it's actually totally unnatural. Hence why you have a bunch of methods designed to get kids to start "naturally" reading, without all that nasty, boring, rule-teaching stuff that old stuffy teachers in boarding schools used to do. Not like us modern, cool, hip teachers who actually like kids, etc. Etc.
It's as much about identity as anything else in my opinion. Like many inexplicable things.
This is speculation on my part: It is harder to train teachers to teach phonics, it's harder to teach students, and it requires more effort both on the part of the students and on the part of their parents. But decades of evidence and multitudes of studies on reading comprehension tells us it works better for every student exposed to it.
Couple the higher effort with the financial interest in producing new materials aimed at the easy road and you get corporate interests using emotional arguments like the easy methods are "more equitable" (which is untrue). The political argument was used as a sales tactic, and it fell on ears already predisposed to hear it. The result was administrators across the country representing corporate interests under the guise of righteousness.
So no conspiracy but the usual profit motive couched in feel-good political language. But that's a guess.
A non-conspiratorial hunch is that the actual success rate of teaching reading wasn't considered good enough (perhaps far short of 100% literacy) and educators went looking for something different that might be better. "Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetency." I've also heard rumors that countries with pictographic languages have higher literacy rates.
Yet I'm still as puzzled as you are. I'm not homeschooled pe se, but learned to read at home, as did my mom. In our culture, it was just how things were done. You learned to read when you were ready. My mom taught my brothers and me from reproductions of some schoolbooks from the 18th century, plus stuff from the public library. Later on, my spouse and I taught our kids in the same way.
From my standpoint, "phonics" made sense, as it used a built-in feature of the language, and thus didn't really need any kind of formal method. Also, it lent itself to one-on-one with the kids because we were sitting and reading to them anyway. It was easy to stop, point to a word, and ask them to sound it out.
My kids went to a public school with a high population of educated parents, and the majority of kids were reading by the start of kindergarten, for many it was their second language.
My teacher friends say phonics doesn't work for maybe 25% of kids. I suspect that is caused more by parents not following up with reading at home than a failing of phonics itself.
From the articles I've read it's largely this. There are a percentage of kids that have other underlying issues that get in the way of learning in general, not just phonics in particular.
Dyslexia (which is often exacerbated by "whole word" methods), and ADHD (which is more often a food allergy than a real disorder that needs medication) do account for some. But in most of those cases it's a matter of... higher effort. Parents need to do more to provide the environment if they can, or hunt down and resolve the food allergy, or just push their children. School districts can spend more on qualified teachers.
I'd speculate that 25% could be knocked down to 5% if we as a culture sat up and worked at it. But it requires a consensus reality, and broad alignment. Difficult. The best we can do at the moment is to spread the evidence and do right by our own children.
(My mother was a K-12 school teacher in the Detroit school system for ~30 years. She's seen all the fads come and go. Phonics is not a fad; it works.)
I know you're making a joke, but the evidence isn't my anecdote, it's the multitude of studies across all demographics, comparing it to all other methods of teaching that are the evidence.
Other commenters here have already provided links.
I’m surprised this doesn’t mention the Sold A Story podcast and reporting series, which kicked off efforts like this. It’s excellent, and revealing: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
edit: whoah, can someone help me understand the downvotes here? I realize this was an issue before the series (I work in literacy), but it certainly raised the public awareness in a completely new way.
Just finished it the other month and second the recommendation.
After listening to it, I feel grateful to my father every time I pick up a book. He was dyslexic and spent most of his schooling in remedial reading classes, only to finally be taught phonics at a late age.
When our school asked him to volunteer to help teach reading, he completely ignored the method they presented him, which from the sounds of it was some kind of whole word or whole language method, and just taught us phonics.
Further, after listening to the podcast I've basically learned to recognise people who weren't taught phonics in the wild. Some of the reading errors other adults make that used to completely perplex me now make perfect sense.
I'm in Australia and not actually entirely clear what the current state of our reading education is, but it's clear that for about 50 years or so, at least, the trend ran against phonics, just as in the US. I'm unsure if this has been rectified or not, and it would probably vary by state I suppose.
Anyway, the podcast is very revealing not only about reading, but as a cautionary tale about pedagogical and other academic/professional fads.
We didn't really have widespread phonics in the UK when I was at school. We did a load of things that looked a bit like phonics but going through it with my first daughter showed me how effective it really is.
She picked it up really quickly, learned to read early —admittedly with a lot of support from me in lockdown— and can now, at 7, polish a proper book off in a couple of days. Far further ahead than me at 7.
Her spelling is pretty creative at times, which isn't surprising given that English is the literal bastard child of several competing lingual styles, but that's really not important for a seven year old.
So I was already completely sold, then my 3 year old sat next to me just yesterday and started sounding out words she was hearing, and writing them down.
All I'm really saying is I don't understand how this is even a question any more. It's silly that we have to legislate for it, but if people are going to neglect children for whatever unknown ends, why not.
Must everything be either required or prohibited? Wouldn't it be better to allow schools to try things their own way, observing each other's results and biasing over time toward what works, based on feedback from teachers and parents?
Fair point, in general. The difficulty is that certain strategies like cueing (using nearby illustrations to help guess what a word is) and relying on just the first letter of a word leads to improved outcomes at first, but worse outcomes when the kids start reading less-familiar words, and reading books with fewer pictures.
A kindergarten or first grade teacher might think that it's great to use cueing and other non-phonics based strategies since it improves her kids' reading ability in the short-run. But studies show that it is harmful in the long-run, and should be avoided.
Ages ago, there was an alphabet system which was phonetic in character, but worked by modifying the lower portion of the letters where necessary --- the idea being that most recognition is based on the upper portion, and that this eased transition.
The modification of the lower half was done to match how other letters which made the same sound were shaped, so again, an aspect which would transfer to normal alphabets.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find it since that first encounter, and I looked quite hard when my children were learning to read.
I mean, in my state the legislature already banned the old sort of instruction. The issue, as I understand it, more stems from the advocate for the failing system being the head of Columbia's literacy center. If anything, it seems like another mark against trusting our elite universities and the research they produce than anything at the government level. The more conservative states have been quicker to act, which to me wouldn't be expected given how we generally talk about education. I'd be interested to see some exploration of why AL and MS chose the more effective curriculum sooner. Their education rankings have even risen to middle of that pack as CA's own ranking declined. How does this go on?
Combined with the data on pandemic recovery, it's looking like my decades of priors about the education systems in each state aren't worth much anymore.
Phonics is for teaching them to read. Spelling English words is not helped, I think. It’s the single most difficult to spell language because it has no rules of spelling.
(Well, correction to the above hyperbole: It has rules of spelling but a broken orthography so "spelling cannot be systematically derived from pronunciation, but it also has the more unusual problem that pronunciation cannot be systematically derived from spelling" (wikipedia).
Phonics is a method that works fairly decently for dyslectic kids. The other method (whole-word reading) works really, really, REALLY poorly for dyslectics because it relies on recognizing the shape of words. A skill dyslectics are fundamentally unable to acquire before hearing the word. Sounding out words is slow but works even for dyslectics if applied patiently.
"Dick and Jane" books were specifically designed to NOT teach phonics. Rather, they tried to teach look-say reading. Phonics is effective and look-say is not. So these books were designed to make kids dumb.
Shouldn't that be a solved problem? How were English children taught to read 100 years ago? 150 years ago?
something scholarly-looking claims there was 90% literacy rate in England in 1870: https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/education-in-victorian-en....
I've learned English as a second (actually fourth) language, and it was definitely weird (the previous ones, including my mother tongue are almost fully phonetic, i.e. much easier to read) - I guess it must be different when learned as a first?