2026-11-03 16:00 UTC
Replies (30)
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@areakode@riskeratspizza.com 2026-11-03 16:07
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.
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@panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 2026-11-03 16:20
But it worked for AI with BERT, so it will work for kids, right?! /s I know phonics has issues but at least it creates an internal framework to figure things out. No idea how this new system works, but phonics doesn’t preclude contextual reasoning and it’s tried and true for ages. How do my symbolic writing languages work?
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@Jimbabwe@lemmy.world 2026-11-03 16:20
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. 🥹
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@cowfodder@lemmy.zip 2026-11-03 16:25
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.
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@jagermo@feddit.org 2026-11-03 16:31
Wait, this is a real thing? I was handing in a marketing copy and one of my us colleagues mentioned that I was using fairly complicated language that most Americans won’t understand. Is that the reason? I thought I had used normal level English that everyone who has learned it as a second language would understand. It never occurred to me that native speakers would have issues? Not in a business context at least?
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@PyroNeurosis@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-11-03 16:32
Sadly, the generation was lost to the war on drugs. We were overzealous and refused to let them even get Hooked on Phonics.
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@Warl0k3@lemmy.world 2026-11-03 16:36
These are strategies that borderline illiterate people will use to try to understand words … Children who are learning to read are borderline illiterate. That’s. That’s the whole point.
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@CubitOom@infosec.pub 2026-11-03 16:43
The media failed to load so I couldn’t read this
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@applebusch@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-11-03 16:59
tbh i dont really remember being taught how to read as a kid, other than i really struggled with lower case l vs capital I because they look exactly the fucking same half the time and autism. anyway i was taught to sound out words but i dont think it really made that much of a difference for me, other than giving me a mediocre ability to say words correctly after only reading them. the biggest thing was having things i was motivated to read. wanting to know wtf the words meant got me to look them up and wanting to know what happens next in the stories i was reading kept me going. the actual being taught how to read part of learning to read is such a tiny part. i think a much bigger issue is the structure of kid prison systematically beating the curiosity out of people.
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@CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-11-03 16:59
The counterargument is that English is uniquely bad for phonetical spelling. Never make fun of someone who says a word strangely. They may have only ever read it. I’m not sure that phonics is the underlying reason American people don’t learn to read. I think there’s deep complex reasons for that.
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@Ledivin@lemmy.world 2026-11-03 17:00
Must be regional, because my 13, 9, and 5 year olds all sounded/are sounding out words.
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@DigitalTraveler42@lemmy.world 2026-11-03 17:02
Parents are both overworked and lazy here in the States, are you surprised our education is faltering? This is by conservative design, they want the poor to be their new slaves, and they need them dumb enough to keep voting for them until the conservatives take that away too.
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@RebekahWSD@lemmy.world 2026-11-03 17:02
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.
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@azalea_flower@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-11-03 17:16
I’m gonna be honest here, I’ve read that Wikipedia article about 3 times already and I still don’t get what the hell that’s supposed to do with reading. Am I stupid or is this as outlandish as I’m assuming it to be? I guess some of that can help you guess what the meaning of a word is but it sure as hell won’t help you read it in the first place. From what I take it three cueing (or something like it) is something you would develop naturally from just reading more, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t taught that specifically but I do seem to use parts of it when I don’t just look up a word in a dictionary.
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@azalea_flower@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-11-03 17:33
(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.
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@CultLeader4Hire@lemmy.world 2026-11-03 17:39
I taught both my kids to read the way I learned to read, with phonics, they’re in their early 20d now but grew up as excellent readers
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@moonshadow@sh.itjust.works 2026-11-03 17:42
I genuinely believe that this and the ‘common core’ math stuff are intentional measures to dumb down a population. Not really sure what to do about it though
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@dumples@piefed.social 2026-11-03 18:04
If you are interested APM did a whole podcast about this. I haven’t listened but I hear it’s great. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
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@abbiistabbii@piefed.blahaj.zone 2026-11-03 18:32
That is…concerning. I kinda like to play with writing systems, like Avatarian (Script made for Avatar Legend of Aang and Seven Havens), where each glyph is mapped onto a sound in US English IPA rather than just redesigning glyphs in the Latin Alphabet and I sometimes wonder if it would’ve been better if we had this system (with glyphs for “ch” and “Ll” of course). Now reading that I think it might be a better system.
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@anewfox@lemmy.zip 2026-11-03 19:07
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?”
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@exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-11-03 19:11
I think you’re overstating the effect of this method of instruction, which mostly affected much older people. It was popular between 1960 and 1980, and waned after that. Whole word and three cueing was never as popular as phonics, and even when used, was mostly used in conjunction with phonics. This Wikipedia article collects quite a bit of history across multiple countries. By the 1990’s, pretty much every American school system was back to phonics as a foundation. And by 2020, there were pretty much no American schools discouraging phonics instruction and the foundation for teaching reading.
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@LodeMike@lemmy.today 2026-11-03 19:36
What’s the alternative??
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@taiyang@lemmy.world 2026-11-03 22:31
That’s simply not true, fortunately. All public schools are to follow common core standards and that includes phonics (sounding out words) over sight words and certainly over context guessing. Going contrary to the core is possible, I guess, but certainly not the norm. If you’re curious, the debate was mostly settled in the 90s, during what my PhD advisor called the “reading wars.” Well, mostly settled… sight words still have a place in reading, especially when a word is contrary to its phonics. But basically, policy has prioritized phonics since Clinton, with to only some revision under Obama. That’s not to say Americans aren’t dumb; doesn’t mean much if standards aren’t met. But it’s not as simple as saying we’re taught incorrectly. I could give a variety of reasons, although Lemmy users can probably guess poverty, politics and capitalism are pretty central to a lot of it.
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@Denfa@lemmy.world 2026-11-04 00:43
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.
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@NonconfrontationaI@lemmy.ml 2026-11-04 11:36
Holy fucking shit this explains so much!
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@TotallynotJessica@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-11-04 11:36
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.
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@DonkeyStar@lemmy.world 2026-11-04 12:28
Shully gully and mercy.
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@ApocolypticGopher@infosec.pub 2026-11-04 17:28
Highly recommend the “Sold A Story” podcast
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@mr_satan@lemmy.zip 2026-11-05 12:54
Is this some kind of American joke I’m too European to 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!?
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@AZEngie@lemmy.zip 2026-11-05 14:01
My kids are in grade school and they are taught to sound out words. Stop making shit up.