HN Reader

The second lesson, the teacher says: 'Now we have to learn some hard words. The 'ti' is called a quarter note, and the ta is a half note'. Finally, the whole thing started to make sense to me. Then the teacher says: 'But don't try to understand that, these are very hard words for adults, just memorize them and do what makes sense from context.' Trough that lesson, the teacher kept stressing that same message: Too hard, adult words, do what makes sense instead and use the hard words only to impress the outsiders.

I've kept a deep distrust for teachers telling me to do what makes sense in context. I've always kept asking for the actual rules and correct words instead, however complicated they were. It happened a few times later in life too, like my economy teacher giving 'debit' and 'credit' guidelines based on vibes without telling they should be balanced, with subtraction being complicated math according to her.

The toughest thing was getting a reliable bit of time each day to sit down and do it. Routine, cajoling, and rewards were all involved. So was keeping it lighthearted; the kid has to be on board! Each lesson has straightforward exercises then a brief story, very short at first, longer later in the book. We'd do the exercises and one read of the story, then kid would read the story to my partner. We started in September, and I remember by Halloween the kid was reading candy wrappers. After finishing it, the next big thing was finding stories the kid genuinely liked to keep it going. Continuing to read together after the lessons ended helped: for a while, kids will keep running into lots of new exceptions to the usual rules, etc.

English spelling and pronunciation are a lot, and the book is also, implicitly, a catalog of the tricks English plays on kids and other learners. Part of the book uses a semi-phonetic alphabet where e.g. ee and sh/ch/th have distinct glyphs, but it all still looks enough like English that the jump to regular writing later in the book is doable for the kid. Even with that alphabet, the book has to teach common words like "is" and "was" as exceptions (with s sounding like z). Decades later one can forget little kids deal with all this and eventually handle it like second nature.

The book's originator thought that you could teach math with a broadly similar approach--breaking things down into very small steps and practicing them in isolation then in larger tasks--and doing that was part of his career, but I haven't found similar teach-your-kid book for arithmetic/basic math. If such a book did exist I'd've given it a try!

Glad to see a return to phonics.

https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.10...

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p...

I like how this sentence itself is an example where the MSV system falls flat: Neither graphic, nor syntactic nor semantic cues would help here to decide whether "house" or "horse" comes first in the sentence.

A link to the multi episode podcast this article is the basis of. Incredible reporting

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jan/opinion-phonics-teaching...

I initially struggled to pick up reading, as phonetics is a very difficult method if i cannot tell the letters apart half the time. Once my reading speed started to pick up, it was thanks to dismissing phonetics entirely and reading by whole word, but that leap took time.

Talking with others in adulthood, i seem to rely more on whole word than is typical. Others get tricked up by incorrect letters in words, yet i match the word anyway if it has the right shape. The below sentences read to me equally.

- I am unbothered by spelling mistakes to a much higher degree than others

- l ma unloethsred bs sqellnig mitsakes la a mucb hgiher degeee thna ahters

Another issue i encountered is finding reading fun. My parents read a lot for me to make me like stories (which is commonly given as advice to get children reading), but this backfired. My comprehension and appreciation of stories were years ahead of my capacity to read them. Being barely able to get thru "harry potter and the philosophers stone", but preferring "The Lord of the Rings".

I now work in a field where reading highly technical text is a major part of my day. Peculiarly, my lower reading speed from my inability to skip properly (something i struggle with because of aforementioned dyslexia) seems to raise my reading comprehension. I many times found details or explanations others don't because they skimmed over important words or phrasings in highly information-dense text.

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I really think foreign words should be read phonetically. Taking the first letter and guessing is an insane way to teach to kids to me. I could imagine they don't pick up new words since they learn to guess words they know instead. Using contexts may become important later as we learn to skim-read, but i don't think we should teach kids to guess anything as they first start to learn.

Good thing I learned to read (phonics) before that nut showed up.

> Picture Power!

This whole word nonsense must have been the motivation for icons promulgated by Steve Jobs, which have infected everything. The latest diseased device I bought was a new scanner, which has a touch screen overflowing with icons. Naturally, the icons are unique and invented by arteests imagining they are Susan Kare. It's all WTF do these things do, which you can only hope to discern by touching them and hoping the scanner does not go into paper-shredding mode.

Of course after some exposure and repetition you start to recognize whole words at a glance. That's just natural, but I never remember learning to read by memorizing whole words.

I know it's not popular to say it but my son learns anything I teach him, he might not enjoy the process very much but he never forgot anything I taught him because I make him work. His teachers don't make him do anything with the results you can imagine. If you point it out they say if they did parents would complain.

I assume it means the former is just one person theorizing from his personal experience as a teacher? That's what we call "observational science"?

Where as the cognitive labs, they tried to setup some experiments and did some double blind? Or was it more looking at brain activation?

Phonics is all the rage, and I was planning to make it central to my pedagogy, but it turns out the answer is a bit more complicated, especially if you want to work with children with reading difficulties.

Phonics is part of the answer, but it's only the first step. Introducing children to the explicit mapping of graphemes to phonemes (letter to sounds) teaches decoding, but skilled reading is not decoding.

Actual reading is developed through a process called orthographic mapping. The result of this process is storing the grapheme to phoneme mappings in long-term memory for immediate retrieval. The words stored in this way form a sight vocabulary that spans tens of thousands of words in fluent readers.

When taught only phonics, kids run the risk of plateauing in later grades. It's not evident at first because the material they are given is simple and deals with concrete subjects (e.g. "Mike got a bunny for his birthday"). Later material uses many more words that don't follow phonics "rules" and deal with abstract material. Under these circumstances, decoding is too slow and effortful and leaves little remaining capacity to deal with harder tasks like comprehension.

The main cause of issues in developing this sight vocabulary is phonological deficits, not IQ, motivation, intelligence, visual processing, or attention like one might imagine. Kids with these deficits have trouble understanding that words are made up of smaller sound units and cannot work with them. Because of that, they cannot store the mapping efficiently and their vocabulary and fluency is limited.

Thankfully, the best interventions that fix these deficits are not too complicated and can correct the issues with as little as a dozen of hours of correct instruction. The main drawback is that finding and targeting those deficits is time-consuming for the instructors, but my program deals with that through the practice engine, which automates all that work.

The bad news is that most teachers are not aware of this and are simply being moved to phonics, which will not work for all children unless those phonemics deficits are identified and remediated. Worse news is that most commercial products that claim to be evidence-based or backed by the "science of reading" still use phonics and make no mention of orthographic mapping, the actual process that produces fluent readers. Again, phonics instruction is part of the answer, but nowhere near the entire story.

You can look at my pedagogy document for more info. Although it's meant to be about my product, it still contains a primer of the actual research on how full literacy (not just reading, but writing as well) is developed: https://picturesareforbabies.com/home/pedagogy/

No. The most efficient way is to just drive the car with the pedal. Likewise, efficiently being able to identify words is, surprise surprise, the most efficient way to then read a series of words (sentence).

My wife and I both acquired reading very early -- age three or so. So I don't remember the details of how I acquired it, only driving some of my teachers nuts once I actually did enter school, because I didn't follow the timetable they learned in their expensive university education of when and how kids are supposed to learn to read, do math, or anything else really. But I suspect that one thing you can do to help kids with their reading skills is to read to them, starting very early. My wife and I have similar experience of being read to by our moms, eventually seeing the ability to read as a "magic power"[0] of sorts, and becoming determined to learn this skill, so that we could unlock the tremendous power of books and writing for ourselves. Contrariwise, the kids I've known who struggled with reading early on (even my own sister when I was younger) tended to get bored quickly, give up, and want to do other things.

Reading is an intellectually demanding skill, much like computer programming except for degree -- there's a bit at the beginning that's really hard, because it's based on insights that you don't have yet, and you just kind of have to bro through it. Those who think it just "comes naturally" or whatever are just really, really well practiced at it. You gotta keep your eyes on the prize in order to stay determined to power through the hard bits. Inspiring kids like this begins at home, though school and even television programs like Reading Rainbow (when I was growing up) certainly help.

[0] When the Cherokee silversmith Sequoyah devised a writing system for his people, the Cherokee reacted at first with horror: written material, or "talking leaves", was the white man's evil magic! Once he walked them through how it worked, however, they embraced it and the Cherokee became more literate than the surrounding white population.

For me: I've found that constantly moving towards more difficult things that you aren't quite prepared for is the most effective route. The foundational work I require to accomplish the task is the first thing that gets solidified for me, even if, in my opinion, I'm awful at it when I start. This is one of my criticisms of the modern educational institution and their focus on grades: it discourages this sort of exploration, since it will negatively impact your future (especially if you are the only one doing it). I've always thought that if you are getting an A+ on everything you do, you're wasting most of your time.

/{End of Rant}

Gaining the ability to read begins from birth, and by the time that kids are school age they should be clamoring for books if the parents did their job.

After time-worn basic reading instruction in first grade, it's a matter of parents enforcing reading-time at home for school mandated reading. Then providing access to the reading material that the child desires for their free reading. Whatever it is. Book-bound comic strips are an early popular grade-level choice, and are fantastic. If a child is behind, then go simpler. Everything else is a band-aid or less practical if not detrimental in comparison. Some kids need services if they have deficits, but that doesn't imply that the standard practice is flawed. All top readers came out of this type of early progression. So have most middling readers, often just separated by the amount of time they've chosen to put in. Or were compelled to put in.

Your brain tokenizes sounds into words. A beginner reader has to parse text into sounds and then into the token. An advanced reader can skip the middle step and parse text into tokens. But you still have to know how to parse text into sounds, there's no way around it.

It'd be like giving someone a French texbook, only instruct them in English, don't even mention the different sounds, and somehow expect them to learn conversational spoken French. It's nonsense.