last rechost: so i just learned about 3 cues/balanced literacy from an article @noelbwrites posted in the comments, and i feel like i have entered a nightmare dimension. i truly feel this is cursed knowledge, but also it is apparently extremely widespread in US schools at this point??? So uh, seems pretty important to know and also no one I know knows about it and it is so deeply unbelievable, the 3 cues proponents sound so utterly, comically wrong. Like literally saying "the words dont matter". i just. i am going. to hurl myself. into the sun
the article about 3 cues below the cut
Something interesting to me about this article is that the charts on illiteracy from 1988 to 2017 don't show. any actual substantial changes for better or worse. It turns out that the literacy rate in this country has been atrocious since before I was alive. I was lucky that my kindergarten exclusively used phonics, I was exposed to "hooked on phonics" at some point, and that I was a huge fan of Between the Lions which is a phonics based program. (We need those lions now more than ever apparently.)
Like, cueing seems to have been widespread during the millennial generation era, it's not just a Gen Z/Alpha thing. And the statistics in that article are pretty glib. 40% of people read below grad level/are poor readers, and 40% of people will learn to read no matter how they are taught. So that only leaves 20% of people who were lucky enough to get a good reading education, and were people who needed that education to learn to read.
Honestly I'm probably in the 40% who would have learned no matter what, even though I was also really into phonics. I stopped receiving a formal education after kindergarten but continued to develop my reading skills and vocabulary independently anyway, and came in the 97th percentile in SAT critical reading despite only technically having received a kindergarten level education.
Understanding 3-cueing makes a lot of stuff makes sense though, like, interactions I've had with people where I had had the rude thought "Can't you read?" No, they literally can't read at grade-level. Their misunderstandings came from using cueing. Every time a patron tells me "the computer says it's out of service" and the screen reads "Welcome, please enter your reservation PIN below" it's because they took only looked at the context cue of "this text is in a dialog box on a computer" and decided the text said "this computer is out of service" or something because they're used to error messages appearing in dialog boxes.
A lot of really hostile poor reading comprehension on the internet also makes sense. When people seem to respond to something that you simply did not say, but which uses similar Hot Words to what you did say, it's because they're using cueing. They saw a few words they recognize and some they don't, and filled in the middle with the opinion they think you probably would have if you're the kind of person who they think would use those words.
This also connects to a book I'm reading by Andy Clark called The Experience Machine which is about a cognitive theory called Predictive Processing, which is essentially that we do not manually process everything directly and fully all the time, but rather our brains are running a prediction engine to fill in much of our experiences, and use mostly sensory information to correct the model and fill in the parts that are unexpected. Because of this, if you are strongly expecting something enough, it's very easy to hallucinate it. Rather than using phonic and word decoding to give our model the actual sensory information of what the word is in order to correct for any prediction errors, we are instead teaching to rely entirely upon the prediction model, and teaching entirely the wrong ways to cue that model. There is a possibility that poor readers trained on cueing very strongly and genuinely believe that the words they saw are the words that mean whatever they think it meant, based on their guessing and predicting based on context cues, and that if challenged, would not even understand themselves to have guessed the words instead of reading them.
I also think that the models we use to evaluate national literacy statistics needs to be seriously re-evaluated. It's very clear to me that the United States' supposed 86% literacy rate is simply not true. An adult in the 21st century who cannot reliably read job applications, welfare forms, computer dialog boxes, emails, and signs on doors is not a literate person—let alone everything you lose when you are not literate enough to read even a rather light and breezy novel without pictures.
