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!
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.
(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.
If you are interested APM did a whole podcast about this. I haven’t listened but I hear it’s great.
I knew the kids couldn’t read because I have multiple English teachers in my family, but until I listened to season 1 of that podcast (working through season 2 now) I had no idea it was from them not even being taught the basics of how to read! One guy they interviewed who learned to read fluently as an adult was basically like ‘when I learned I was like, that’s all you do? Why the fuck didn’t anyone teach me this?’
I mostly read in chunks of words, which I think I learned in school. This also means I can barely spell anything.
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
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
Makes sense to me. How does it not to you? Or are you arguing just to argue?
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
Sadly, the generation was lost to the war on drugs. We were overzealous and refused to let them even get Hooked on Phonics.
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
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.
Three cuing is aggravating, but once I stopped trying to impose the way I learned on my kid when we were doing homework she figured it out. Also just getting her shit she is actually interested in reading did more than anything else. Not sure how to feel about it, trying not to yell at clouds.
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.
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.
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!”
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And yet, the people who chose to make that change were taught to sound aloud, so really it’s anyones game as to whichever outcome’s better :P
Three cuing, or at least something like it which I cannot be bothered to check the term for is a valid reading technique, the difference being that it requires a certain degree of reading skill beforehand.
Certainly, you’ve learned a few words off the page, or television purely through context, and that’s essentially ‘three cuing’. Issue is, it’s not an effective introduction to literacy, as it skips the foundational skills to reading. It was introduced based off studies of adult literacy, I believe.
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 more symbolic writing languages work? Like Chinese characters where there’s just a huge variety of characters vs English’s Latin alphabet.
