https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/us/science-of-reading-literacy-parents.html
The Revolt That Is Taking On the Education Establishment
Fed up parents, civil rights activists, newly awakened educators and lawmakers are crusading for “the science of reading.” Can they get results?

The movement, under the banner of “the science of reading,” is targeting the education establishment: school districts, literacy gurus, publishers and colleges of education, which critics say have failed to embrace the cognitive science of how children learn to read.

Research shows that most children need systematic, sound-it-out instruction — known as phonics — as well as other direct support, like building vocabulary and expanding students’ knowledge of the world.
...
Science of reading advocates say the reason is simple: Many children are not being correctly taught.

A popular method of teaching, known as “balanced literacy,” has focused less on phonics and more on developing a love of books and ensuring students understand the meaning of stories. At times, it has included dubious strategies, like guiding children to guess words from pictures.

https://www.apmreports.org/episode/...-why-american-kids-arent-being-taught-to-read
Hard Words
Why aren't kids being taught to read?

The basic assumption that underlies typical reading instruction in many schools is that learning to read is a natural process, much like learning to talk. But decades of scientific research has revealed that reading doesn't come naturally. The human brain isn't wired to read. Kids must be explicitly taught how to connect sounds with letters — phonics.

"There are thousands of studies," said Louisa Moats, an education consultant and researcher who has been teaching and studying reading since the 1970s. "This is the most studied aspect of human learning."

But this research hasn't made its way into many elementary school classrooms. The prevailing approaches to reading instruction in American schools are inconsistent with basic things scientists have discovered about how children learn to read. Many educators don't know the science, and in some cases actively resist it. The resistance is the result of beliefs about reading that have been deeply held in the educational establishment for decades, even though those beliefs have been proven wrong by scientists over and over again.

I taught all of my kids to read (using phonics) long before they started school. The old, Hooked on Phonics works. It's a damn shame the current teaching beliefs have overruled science and common sense.

 

Few people make the effort to correct abused English these days, its considered effrontery to call people out, even rather young people who say stuff like "send me an invite".

 

Few people make the effort to correct abused English these days, its considered effrontery to call people out, even rather young people who say stuff like "send me an invite".

I can handle (my own included) the grammar abuse but when new hires read like grade school kids, We Have a Problem Houston.

It's not like we don't know how to teach reading with little or no resources.
We used this series of books in elementary school in the old days of Texas racial segregation.
https://www.rubylane.com/item/559187-RL002135/Tip-Tip-Mitten-Big-Show-Practice

 

Had a differant version of that in school. The characters were Dick and Jane. I think the dogs name was spot.

 

Those books were sight readers, where whole words were memorized and repeated. Phonics instruction combined with that method was IMO very effective in building a foundation for good future reading habits.

 

even rather young people who say stuff like "send me an invite".

Down here on the coast of Georgia it's more often "I b lik snd me invit". All some kids can do is use shorthand text and are not even taught to use cursive now. Pigeon English rules and if you even bother to correct them you are labeled "Racist" and Xenophobic. Not all of my forefathers came to these shores speaking English but it sure didn't take them very long to learn how to read and write it. And they didn't have the luxury of being able to learn it in school either. For several decades now, the main requirement to get a job was a High School Diploma. Even that doesn't mean much anymore.

 

Now imagine that one's birth language has an almost perfect match between phonics and spelling. That's Spanish. That is, if you were to listen to a previously unknown word (at least for you), there's a chance of more than 90% that you will get its spelling right if you know the basic spelling rules.
English, on the other hand, is an entirely different beast. And although I find it to be phonetically more beautiful and pleasing to the ear than Spanish, it's a language that is a nightmare to learn spelling-wise. I'd almost say there are more exceptions than rules in that regard!

 

If they know proper English I don't have a problem with shorthand communications grammars. We had tons of quirky words, sentences and grammar in communications networks among fellow Sparky's. Some of it was specifically designed to obfuscate meanings to outsiders monitoring.

 

I never could understand why the idiots in the education system decided that the look-say method of learning to read was all you needed and phonics was not.

 

I never could understand why the idiots in the education system decided that the look-say method of learning to read was all you needed and phonics was not.

Some variation of "Look Say/Sight Read" is how most of the Boomers learned to read up to a few thousand words by endless repetition and practice to build a reading foundation. Phonic methods were used to allow self-expansion of the reading vocabulary as an adjunct to "Look Say"

Whole language teaching methods is IMO the problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language

Neuroscientists have also weighed into the debate, some of them demonstrating that the whole-word method is much slower and uses the wrong brain area for reading.[63][64] One neuroscientist, Mark Seidenberg, says "Goodman's guessing game theory was grievously wrong" and "the impact was enormous and continues to be felt". When it come to evidence supporting the whole-language theory, he emphatically states "There wasn't any". He is also especially critical of Smith's book, Reading Without Nonsense, which suggests the following recommendation to help a struggling reader: "The first alternative and preference is to skip over the puzzling word. The second alternative is to guess what the unknown word might be. And the final and least preferred alternative is to sound the word out. Phonics, in other words, comes last". He goes on to say that, although reading science has rejected the theories behind whole language, in education they are "theoretical zombies".[65][66] Cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene has said, "cognitive psychology directly refutes any notion of teaching via a 'global' or 'whole language' method." He goes on to talk about "the myth of whole-word reading" (also: sight words), saying it has been refuted by recent experiments. "We do not recognize a printed word through a holistic grasping of its contours, because our brain breaks it down into letters and graphemes."[67]

 

Phonics is a good start but grammar and spelling are essential to the equation. I never realized that a neighbor I used to go hunting with was basically illiterate until I came back to my Bronco on a deer hunt and found a note that said "gon sqarl huntn". It took me a few moments to decipher what it said as it was very poorly scribbled. No, it wasn't a joke. When I started working at the rosin refinery we had 1400 employees. Of which ~10% could not fully read or write, so we started a mentoring/tutoring program to give them these basic skills. That was after the mandated HS Diploma hiring requirement and yes, these were older employees who had been hired prior to 1970 for their manual labor skills. Don't even get me started on math skills...

 

I was very fortunate, though it wasn't luck, but rather my parents putting their children's education above all else.

I started kindergarten in 1970 as the "open-concept" approach to education was in full swing here. My parents saw what it was doing to my older sister, so they moved specifically to get us into a school district that was traditional "closed-concept" that educators were moving away from in droves in favor of the latest pop-psychobabble driven educational reforms developed mostly by people in ivory towers that had little or now actual teaching experience. In 1983, as my dad and I were going through some of my mom's things, we ran across the list of "outcomes" they had been given when I was in kindergarten at the former school and one thing that jumped out at us was that children were expected to know the entire alphabet -- but not until the end of second grade! We moved in February of my kindergarten year and I walked into a classroom of kids that sat around most of the day reading (yep, the Dick, Jane, and Spot books) but with a backbone of phonics. I had a LOT of catching up to do, but with my mom's help, by the end of the school year I was caught up and near the top of the heap.

At the end of first grade they had finished a new elementary school a few blocks from my house and, sure enough, it was open-concept. In those days, you went to your neighborhood school -- there was no such thing as "school choice". But my dad went to the school board and made it clear that he had moved his family to get his kids away from open-concept and that, if they didn't grant a waiver to keep me where I was (it didn't affect my sister, since she was now going into junior high), he would move us again. Surprisingly, they caved and granted the waiver.

By the time I graduated, there was only one path that a student could take through our district that had them in closed-concept for elementary, junior high, and high school and that was the one I went through. As I was packing up things before we moved shortly after graduation I ran across my first-grade class photo and more than half of the kids in that photo were among my graduating class's honor graduates. As best I could tell, more than half of the honor graduates came from my elementary school, which isn't bad considering that more than ten elementaries fed that high school and there were a fair share of honor graduates that had transferred into the district at some point. The glaring exception my my class's valedictorian, who had gone to an open-concept elementary (and then to my junior high). While a junior I was over at her house and I was talking to her dad about how poorly the kids from the open-concept schools were doing and he shared that, throughout elementary school, after supper he and his wife would spend the evening teaching their two kids the things that the school was supposed to be teaching them but wasn't, so in essence they were being home-schooled.

 

Phonics is a good start but grammar and spelling are essential to the equation. I never realized that a neighbor I used to go hunting with was basically illiterate until I came back to my Bronco on a deer hunt and found a note that said "gon sqarl huntn". It took me a few moments to decipher what it said as it was very poorly scribbled. No, it wasn't a joke. When I started working at the rosin refinery we had 1400 employees. Of which ~10% could not fully read or write, so we started a mentoring/tutoring program to give them these basic skills. That was after the mandated HS Diploma hiring requirement and yes, these were older employees who had been hired prior to 1970 for their manual labor skills. Don't even get me started on math skills...

I enrolled in an Airframe and Powerplant Mechanics course back in 1985 and the first block was math. This was almost entirely elementary school stuff -- starting with single-digit addition and subtraction and finishing with two-digit multiplication and division. There were also fractions and perhaps a couple other comparable things. No trig or algebra (beyond some simple algebra disguised as word problems). A huge fraction of the students were completely stymied and failed the block. You could only fail two of the twelve blocks; fail a third and you were gone.

 

Some variation of "Look Say/Sight Read" is how most of the Boomers learned to read up to a few thousand words by endless repetition and practice to build a reading foundation.

Nope, it was being read the weekly serials in the Saturday Evening Post while following along and my reading Comic Books! I was reading before I started 1st grade when I was 5. I spent my first two years in school mostly bored to death and scoring 90+ percentile and 3 grades ahead of my class on the yearly aptitude tests... I hated having to memorize my alphabet to recite it from A to Z as I already knew what the letters were. Might as well make them memorize it from Z to A for all the good it would do them. Always hated rote learning as a waste of time. I always told my Chemistry students I would not make them memorize the periodic chart (as many teachers do) but they would know everything about it from using it and gave them a notebook sized chart to use.

 

Nope, it was being read the weekly serials in the Saturday Evening Post while following along and my reading Comic Books! I was reading before I started 1st grade when I was 5. I spent my first two years in school mostly bored to death and scoring 90+ percentile and 3 grades ahead of my class on the yearly aptitude tests... I hated having to memorize my alphabet to recite it from A to Z as I already knew what the letters were. Might as well make them memorize it from Z to A for all the good it would do them. Always hated rote learning as a waste of time. I always told my Chemistry students I would not make them memorize the periodic chart (as many teachers do) but they would know everything about it from using it and gave them a notebook sized chart to use.

I was talking about school teaching. Like you, I was reading before before school but learned what I was reading in school. Don't underestimate the reading comprehension improvements that happened in that classroom for early readers.

 

English is my native tongue. Well into high school I knew that my reading and writing skills were very poor. I failed my high school English final exams twice before being able to make the grade for university acceptance. While still in high school I mentioned this deficiency to my math teacher. I said that I did not enjoy reading and did not read a lot. He asked me what did I like to read. I said I mainly read technical magazines, Practical Wireless, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, and Popular Electronics. He said that that was a good thing and that I should continue reading those.

End story, I made in through university and I ain't doing too bad in English now.
Now I am working on improving my Spanish and French.

 

A funny story, sort of about phonics.

We have a decal on the back window of our car (my parter's work):

Live

Laugh

F*** Around and Find Out

It's been mostly well-received, with many people laughing, smiling, telling us it's great, with many pictures taken.....and at least one seen circulating on internet.

One gentleman behind me in a drive-through line failed to see the humor in it. I noticed he was flailing his arm around outside his car window and apparently shouting something, so I rolled down the window.

"You pervert! My little girl is in the car! What am I going to tell her?!?" The answer I should have told him: "If she sounded it out, congratulations, you have a very smart little girl. If not, maybe you need to watch your mouth around her. She didn't learn it from me!"[/I]

 

A funny story, sort of about phonics.

We have a decal on the back window of our car (my parter's work):

Live

Laugh

F*** Around and Find Out

It's been mostly well-received, with many people laughing, smiling, telling us it's great, with many pictures taken.....and at least one seen circulating on internet.

One gentleman behind me in a drive-through line failed to see the humor in it. I noticed he was flailing his arm around outside his car window and apparently shouting something, so I rolled down the window.

"You pervert! My little girl is in the car! What am I going to tell her?!?" The answer I should have told him: "If she sounded it out, congratulations, you have a very smart little girl. If not, maybe you need to watch your mouth around her. She didn't learn it from me!"[/I]

I'm not seeing what is supposed to be sounded out in this. Nor seeing the validity of the conclusion that if she knows the word the dad assumed, that it was because he didn't watch his mouth around her.

I was a teenager with a full vocabulary of foul words and still of the impression that my dad had never sworn a day in his life. That illusion wasn't shattered until I worked for the company he worked for one summer and saw him interact with his fellows there -- at which point I discovered that he could make a sailor's wife blush.

There are contexts where it's just fine to be foul-mouthed and contexts where it isn't. I've never been one to accept that just because kids will hear it from somewhere else relieves me of bearing the responsibility for setting an example in contexts where it is not appropriate.

 

There are contexts where it's just fine to be foul-mouthed and contexts where it isn't.

I have an analogy between language and cooking. Sometimes a little spice is required to make your point stand out. But too much of it makes the dish (the message) overwhelm your senses and distracts in a way that the point of what you're saying gets lost.