At a Loss for Words: A flawed idea is teaching kids to be poor readers (2019)
57 comments
·August 2, 2025hyperman1
I remember my first music (note reading) lesson. We got a paper with sentences, and the teacher replaced each word with either 'titi' or 'ta' and we had to repeat it. Our homework for that week was an A4 paper full of words and sentences, and we had to replace them with 'titi' or 'ta' as made sense from context. I somehow managed to get a good grade, but it confused the hell out of me, and made me think of giving up music as too hard. I remember it bothering me the whole week.
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.
xg15
> That's how good readers instantly know the difference between "house" and "horse," for example.
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.
camgunz
APM keeps pushing phonics, but the UK tried it and it's been a disaster: reading ability craters after a couple years. It's not the solution.
https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.10...
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p...
fn-mote
Education is a system that resists change.
Any time you research an educational innovation, part of the work is to measure to what extent the implementation is faithful to the intent. Education research is not like physics research.
I absolutely apply that understanding when I read research about major changes in the way reading is taught.
I actually think the only way to be confident is to do some kind of primary research yourself. Otherwise, tread lightly and skeptically.
naasking
Calling it a disaster seems like an exaggeration, the article literally says UK's PISA scores for reading have not changed. In fact, the experts cited in the article don't even seem to suggest moving away from phonics, but to give teachers more leeway adapt to what their students seem to respond to.
giardini
I learned phonics and became an excellent reader without hesitation. Later, some morons in the education system created "better" reading techniques, f*cking up my younger brothers and sisters.
Glad to see a return to phonics.
chrisgd
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sold-a-story/id1649580...
A link to the multi episode podcast this article is the basis of. Incredible reporting
bluesounddirect
As the husband of an Orton-Gillingham trained tutor , teachers and the industry supporting teachers , not OG ; are very much in the business of making money not making kids read . The entire economy around "services" like OT , Speech , etc is all about how to monetize it, not how do we do the most good for the children.
mrangle
SLP here. I hear you. But the reality is greyer. Yes, it's easy for anyone and everyone to see the financial layer of developmental services. But virtually 100% of working SLPs care about getting clients to their goals, even if that client's access to services is determined by insurance.
Money is an inescapable reality for every service in society. But most clinics are busy, and so there isn't a real incentive to try to slow walk clients. Which would be radically corrupt on a number of levels. Even if some backroom financial functionary in a clinic were to have that thought on occasion. I've never heard it verbalized nor seen any evidence of it trickling down from management.
Moreover, most (but not all) clients will be perpetually slightly behind if they start behind. Even if they catch up at a faster rate, with the help of services. Thereby justifying services if the family wants them. But that's not the same as clinic level corruption. It's just a fact of cognitive development. But there's no better advertisement for a clinic or clinician than graduating a client.
Although I can't speak to reading in the following regard, I agree that there are sometimes lesser supported therapy methods for some delays. This is where the art of picking one's therapist is important, as they differ and what they use is within their discretion. As is the case across the rehab field.
bombcar
A system can do something without any of its members directly intending it. Quite common, actually.
magicalist
The GGP's claim was quite a bit stronger than that, though.
mrangle
"Can do something" is carrying a lot of weight here. I explained how it is in practice.
worik
> Money is an inescapable reality for every service in society.
Yes
That is a problem
aDyslecticCrow
I am dyslectic (as my username suggest), and i was taught the method phonetics in school (in Sweden, not the us), and transitioned naturally to whole word (which i suspect is the intention in that method).
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.
---
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.
didibus
I'm curious what's the difference between "observational science" and "cognitive science"?
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?
Nevermark
Observational: watch kids, come up with correlations in behavior, then with controls identify causation.
Cognitive: watch kids, but pay attention to details and pair them with models of relevant psychological/cognitive models. Ideally, the models help explain the details, or the details help update the models.
Cognitive models have much more explanatory and prediction power. But are not much help, no help, or misleading, wherever there are no good models yet.
Given cognition is nowhere near a complete model, more a (not entirely consistent) patchwork of a great variety of models, both approaches remain important.
SoftTalker
This seems so weird. When I think about how I learned to read, in the 1970s, it was (as best I can remember) first learning the letters and the sounds they make. Then starting to read words by "sounding them out." I never remember learning about "context" or "what word would make sense here" or "what do the pictures show." Pictures were just there to make the pages more fun to look at for a 7 year old.
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.
Viliam1234
You learn to walk before you learn to run.
This should be obvious, but a surprisingly large number of people don't get it. They don't see "running" as the logical next step after "walking", but rather as an alternative to it. "Why are you teaching my child to walk, when you could teach him/her to run instead?"
They imagine that the fastest way to get to the advanced lessons is to skip the beginner lessons. Yeah, it's a good way to get fast to the Lesson 1 in the Advanced textbook... and to remain stuck there forever, because you don't know the prerequisites.
The article describes what happens when the people who don't get it are setting the rules for others to follow.
Someone noticed that the advanced readers read fast (correct), sometimes entire sentences at once (kinda correct), and concluded that the proper way to teach children is to insist that they do it from the start (utterly insanely wrong). You should increase your reading speed naturally, as you get lots and lots of practice; not because you skip letters - that's actually when we should tell the kids to slow down and read it again.
astura
>first learning the letters and the sounds they make. Then starting to read words by "sounding them out."
This is called "phonics" and was universal until recently. The 1980s had commercials advertising "Hooked on Phonics works for me." - Hooked on Phonics being a books on tape program to help children read.
TFA says phonics was popularized in the 1800s.
trhway
> in the 1970s, it was (as best I can remember) first learning the letters and the sounds they make. Then starting to read words by "sounding them out."
USSR, 70s, the same, my older cousin, 5th grader a the time, taught me to read that way before my first grade. (It was pretty normal to learn to read before starting the school. The writing though was taught at school.)
1718627440
Germany, 2010s: We learned the letters with pictures of animals, that started with that letter. Also complicated words were initially replaced with inline pictures.
cyberax
That's because the Russian alphabet is phonetic (in one direction). So you just need to learn the sounds corresponding to the letters and a handful of rules used to combine them. After that, you can sound out the words aloud, and then it's just a matter of practice.
English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach doesn't quite work well.
But at the same time, English teachers don't want to go the full Chinese route. Because if learning letter combinations is somehow "colonizing" ( https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers... ), grinding through thousands of words to memorize their pronunciation is probably something like torture and genocide.
Viliam1234
> English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach doesn't quite work well.
For each letter you can find a way it is pronounced most frequently, and then take a subset of English consisting of words that follow those rules completely. (For example, the word "cat" is pronounced as a concatenation of the most frequent way to read "c", the most frequent way to read "a", and the most frequent way to read "t".) You learn to read these words. Later you start adding exceptions, for example you teach how to read "ch", and then you add the new words that follow the new rules. Etc, one rule at a time. (You leave the worst exceptions for later grades.)
>> This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do
If you feel "colonized" by reality, I guess you can rebel, but you shouldn't expect reality to reward you for doing so.
Nevermark
> English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach doesn't quite work well.
I presume you mean it's not particularly 1-to-1 spelling <—> phonetic.
It is highly phonetic, but it does have alternate mappings between individual or adjacent letters and sounds. And silent letters or syllables.
But alternate rules are rarely random. There are usually many words represented by each rule. And those words often have similar overall spellings and phoneme patterns.
SoftTalker
Now that you mention it, yes we did learn some combination sounds, and rules about when letters are hard, soft, or silent etc. And exceptions, such as "ph" sounding like "f" but those came later. The first books were like "Dick and Jane" with very simple words.
stavros
What do you mean by "in one direction"?
trhway
>English is not really phonetic anymore, so this approach doesn't quite work well.
That seems to be one of the main components of Russian accent in ESL.
andrewstuart
I try to make sure there’s always age appropriate modern books around for kids to pick up and read. If they like one, and it’s a series, then I rapidly buy the remaining books in the series.
luckydata
As an immigrant to the USA teaching in this country is a mess. Teachers apply a lot of semi scientific mumbo jumbo to justify a completely inadequate amount of work required from students to learn.
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.
fn-mote
> I know it's not popular to say it but my son learns anything I teach him
1. Remember that you are looking at an experiment with n=1.
2. It sounds like you think the key to education is coercion. ("His teachers don't make him do anything...".) That's a grim world, too.
Also, I hope you are looking at your home country's educational system with clear eyes.
Not to say I disagree that the US educatonal system is a mess. If you stopped at your second sentence I would entirely agree.
As you went on, I started to wonder if you had an experience teaching your child something that was difficult for them. It's not just _forgetting_ that makes learning difficult.
bell-cot
(2019), and previously on HN (with plenty of comments) a few times: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=apmreports.org
dang
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
How a flawed idea is teaching kids to be poor readers (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41344613 - Aug 2024 (119 comments)
Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35599181 - April 2023 (508 comments)
Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34011841 - Dec 2022 (1 comment)
How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23981447 - July 2020 (225 comments)
https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/