If you graduated before they implemented this or aren’t American, the system they started to use to teach kids how to read is called three cuing. They teach kids to identify unknown words by guessing based on clues in pictures with the sentences, what word would ‘make sense’, and whether the answer they came up with looks right based on the first letter.
As you may have noticed, none of that is reading a word. These are strategies that borderline illiterate people will use to try to understand words, and for decades it’s been the method used by many schools across the country.
So that person you’re arguing with online who keeps going off on bizarre rants barely related to anything you said might not be a troll, they might just be functionally illiterate due to having never been taught to read. Yaaay!
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I’m thankful every day for my kid’s Montessori school. 5 years old and I’m already to the point where we read together every night for fun, but I’m not really needed. Sometimes I see the reading light on after bedtime, but I let it slip. 🥹
good parent ☺️
montessori is crazy, we’ve been doing lovery and their toys are so well designed
My kids are in grade school and they are taught to sound out words. Stop making shit up.
Then your kids are going to a good school that, hopefully intentionally, uses evidence-based techniques to educate them. This was several years ago, but my elementary-aged niece’s parents were having to teach her phonics at home because the school district was using three cuing.
Many states have already enacted legislation promoting evidence-based early reading instruction, and requiring districts to stop using three cuing educational materials.
Decline of phonics is real. They either didn’t follow the trend, or switched. It wasn’t universal
So that person you’re arguing with online who keeps going off on bizarre rants barely related to anything you said might not be a troll, they might just be functionally illiterate due to having never been taught to read.
That sounds like a problem with reading comprehension rather than phonics. Critical thinking skills are in short supply nowadays.
The problem with three-cuing is that it teaches people to skip words they don’t know. Having people just not read half the words in comments they are replying to explains so much. No wonder people have bad reading comprehension.
I learned phonics (which is essential) but also ended up self-teaching myself visual reading. Unless there’s an unfamiliar word or unusual sentence structure I usually don’t subvocalize or “hear” what I’m reading. When I was younger teachers would be upset because I typically finished reading the novel they assigned in the first or second in class “reading time”.
So there is absolutely significant value in visual reading, skimming, cueing, etc – but skipping phonics is insane. It’s like teaching someone how to run before they can walk. It also ignores not everyone is great at running and leaves those people especially screwed.
I usually intuitively understand slovene text when reading it. It just makes reading books more boring - so I read more English books (well I can also do it with English text, but not as good).
It also infuriates some people I read to - since I just skim trough the boring parts, which then sound like groups of random letters.
i lived in california from ages 4-8 and we did phonics basically every grade level.
i moved to florida about 3/4 through 3rd grade and that was when i learned about educational standards at the ripe old age of 8 when everyone in my new third grade class read at a first grade level and even my teacher didn’t seem to know what she was doing.
i have a formative memory from my first day. i asked the kid next to me when recess is, and his response was, “what’s recess?”
I learn new words by searching for the definition. Is that not a thing anymore? You don’t have to go find a dictionary anymore. You can literally pull out your phone and type: “define xxx”. I really hate our education system.
Oh, this is worse than that: it’s not just about their vocabulary being stunted, it’s that they can’t even recognize words they know because they don’t know how to sound out a word. Grim stuff.
Oh fuck me, that is grim. No way to know what that which you’re looking at means. That’s fucking terrifying! “Huh. The bottle’s got some tall, red letter words and exclamation points. I bet it means that this shit’s gonna taste awesome!”
there is a limit to the utility of phonics and the idiot teachers should be forced to acknowledge it, however everyone should be taught some phonics.
It was called whole word learning in my location (PA) circa 90s. My kids had to do stupid shit like draw borders around a word over and over while repeating it. Their homework directions never made sense to me so we practiced sounding things out. They were not encouraged to learn sounds in school— just memorize the word. If you didn’t know the word you were to look at the first and last letters and guess what belongs in context. Of course if you can’t read any of the other words guessing context is impossible. When my son struggled to read, the reading specialist gave me a book of essential words for him to memorize at home. Multiple times a year the kids did collages to match pictures to letters or words. We were told to work on it at home so I had to sign up for and save magazines to use the pictures. It was a useless, time-wasting project. Then there were the stupid assemblies that occurred regularly—90 minutes of yo-yo entertainers who were invited back every year, fund raising assemblies to sell wrapping paper (mostly to myself and my parents), the obligatory follow-up assembly to distribute the shitty prizes.
My favorite was the year they gave my son an award for a poem he wrote (Yay! We were so proud) and then the school tried to sell us a book of poetry written by all the 5th grade prize winners in PA. Who tf wants a book of 5th grade poetry? We framed and hung his poem on the wall.
All this to say schools appeared to be focused on everything except reading comprehension. Complaining parents were assured THEY were the problem. My kids ended up in private school because I didn’t want them to be functionally illiterate as so many others have. I am not surprised by reading levels in the US.
Defunding US public education is possibly the most successful move republicans made early on. It has worked brilliantly for them.
Highly recommend the “Sold A Story” podcast
(I did make another comment but I was being a little silly)
It’s pretty insane to me that they don’t teach phonics, since that’s very important to actually reading a word, especially aloud. In my original comment I was ignoring that reading included determining the meaning of a word, but I was conflating reading with only reading aloud or simply identifying a word.
Three cueing can be important to reading and would probably help out on the spot, but is something I (and I assume many others) picked up naturally anyway from just reading a lot. I don’t expect it to be taught in school instead of phonics, and it should not replace just looking up a word in the dictionary. This just seems absolutely absurd to me.
Sadly, the generation was lost to the war on drugs. We were overzealous and refused to let them even get Hooked on Phonics.
Nah, my bizarre rants are just a feature of my neurology.
Parents are both overworked and lazy here in the States, are you surprised our education is faltering? This is by conservative design, the schools are defunded, teachers underpaid, schools are understaffed, under supplied and corrupt. The conservatives want the poor to be their new slaves, and the conservatives need them dumb enough to keep voting for them until the conservatives take that away too.
We’re a powder keg waiting to explode while being manipulated and having access to all kinds of guns, at some point things are going to explode, or we’ll just boil like the frog.
overworked AND lazy? make yourself make sense lol
Shouldn’t it be obvious I mean two different types of people?
Also being overworked makes you lazy at home, it’s called burnout, or if it’s drugs, it’s called being a functional addict. Overworked and burned out people also tend to miss details, get sloppier, and all these things compound.
But mostly what I meant by lazy parenting is the people that yell at or for their kids rather than going to them and speaking to them in a normal tone, or the parents that don’t want to do the hard work of disciplining their kids, so they let them become little entitled nightmares, and the parents that abuse their kids because slowing down and dealing with them in a more acceptable manner takes too much effort. Another horrible example is the lazy parents who use their kids as piggy banks or ruin their credit for the parents gain, or expect their children to support them while the parents are still able to work.
I’m a grandpa and I’ve seen all this shit in my almost 50 years of life, some from my own parents, friends parents, parents of my kid’s friends, grandkids friends parents, parents of the kids my family has fostered over the years, etc.
So yes overworked and lazy are the two problems, as well as impoverished and uneducated.
Makes sense to me. How does it not to you? Or are you arguing just to argue?
no, overworked and lazy are incompatible. burnout is not laziness. jesus lol covid cooked some of yall
Overworked and lazy are absolutely not incompatible. You’re right that burnout is a serious issue stemming from overwork and the general news/social media outrage cycle, and that being overworked and being lazy are different problems, but the fact is that lots of American parents are all three. Might take a look at yourself before accusing others of being ‘covid cooked.’
i would argue that “lazy” is a perjorative to put personal responsiblity as the issue rather than systemic failures leading people to have to make hard choices over what they can and can’t do. i refuse to use the term on people who are struggling to make it thru each day and keep food in their childrens’ bellies. call me crazy if ya want, but people have been systematically destroyed and then blamed for not being able to keep up, and that’s the vibe i am feeling from you and the person i originally responded to.
Is this some kind of
Americanjoke I’m tooEuropeanto understand?They teach kids to identify unknown words by guessing based on clues in pictures with the sentences
The fuck you mean guess? What if the text has no pictures? Wat!?
My mother was a learning disabilities teacher consultant and hated 3 cuing. Most students sent to her once it started were fine when taught not that way.
I’m in my mid 40’s and American, and I was taught to figure out word meanings from context clues back in elementary school. This isn’t a new thing.
If you were taught how to sound out words you weren’t taught the way a lot of kids are taught to read today. Being able to read the whole sentence and guessing based on context already puts you significantly ahead of kids who have been taught with the three cueing method.
The technique isn’t the issue, rather it’s the fact that American kids are taught to use context before they’re taught to differentiate the words from one another, apparently.
Yeah context clues are super important, but they’re not a replacement for phonics
These not context clues in text but in picture. Little different.
No, context clues are a part of it.
Graphic cues come from the letters used in the word, syntactic cues from what part of speech is appropriate for its location in the sentence, and semantic cues from what word would contextually make sense.
I miss this, thank you.
This isn’t about deriving meaning necessarily, but recognizing what word a word is. Take the example statement “the technique is ubiquitous across the nation.”
What you’re describing is using context clues to determine that ‘ubiquitous’ is an adjective to describe the technique and maybe that it has to do with how much it exists across the nation.
The technique described above is a counterpart to phonics. If you had never seen the word ‘ubiquitous’ before you could still phonetically parse out yoo(maybe “uh”)-bih-qui-tuss. With three-cueing, if ‘ubiquitous’ is a brand new word for you, you might pronounce it ‘all’ because that’s the word you already know that might make sense in that sentence. My understanding is that you’re not recognizing that those are two distinct but similar words, you’re just trained to guess at what the sentence is trying to say.
I’m also in my 40s and the wiki article sounded exactly how I read, so I did a little searching and turns out this was the method used in schools in Ontario in the late 80s and 90s although not a formal part of the curriculum until 1997. So no, not a new thing. It was reversed after an inquiry by the human rights commission in 2022.
That might explain why my spouse who grew up in a different part of the province uses phonics and I use… word shapes, idk? I read extremely fast with good comprehension, but can’t spell worth a damn lol.
