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Plasma Ring

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I'm Ring ᐠ( ᐛ )ᐟ I strive to be your web sight's reliable provider of big scruffy guys getting bullied by ≥7-foot tall monster femboys


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JhoiraArtificer
@JhoiraArtificer
RiteGud
@RiteGud

How We Read and Why

In the latest episode of Rite Gud, we talk to @ChrisBookishCauldron about how we read and why we read. What’s the point of reading when there are other ways of getting information? Does reading make you a better person? And why are so many Americans so bad at it?

Listen here. Read a slightly janky transcript here.

JhoiraArtificer
@JhoiraArtificer

y'all there is not a "what the fuck" big enough for what I read in this and am starting to hear in https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

I mean. This makes a lot of things I've seen around the internet make so much more sense, and also, how do we get out of this?

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I haven't listened to the breakdown of the method yet, but I am just imagining the utter frustration of a child basically being told, "A horse is a horse, of course, of course" and that to grasp the most basic aspects of English, you have to be able to extrapolate from that when "horse" is the wrong answer.

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ring
@ring

This is WILD and it's very interesting that pretty much every non-English language I've tried to learn through self-guided online courses* has been taught kinda like this ("Here's a sentence, now guess the missing word that sounds/looks right. Having seen it in context, you know that it means ____. Now check to see if you remember how the word looks in context."). It mostly just led to me memorizing some vocabulary, but being awful at figuring out how to construct and read sentences. And I can recognize the description of how the adult reader tried to muddle through by identifying recognizable parts of words and then guessing, because that's how I end up trying to untangle sentences in languages I failed to fully study. o.O

(*Naturally, part of the problem is that this stuff is not really a good substitute for actual instruction, but it's kind of heartening to maybe get a sense of what to change about my approach.)

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MadRubicant
@MadRubicant

this is really striking to me because looking at words as whole units is how I read, but if I encounter a word I don't recognize (a rare thing indeed these days) I can fall back to phonics. It honestly feels like they took the shortcut that adults use to read and tried teaching it to children as the only way they can read, completely forgetting that it's a shortcut.

Oh gods, this is why people are always mixing up exacerbate and exasperate isn't it

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ring
@ring

Yeah, there's something interesting happening here around the value of context for understanding things, and as a kid I actually did learn a lot from techniques very like cueing. If I didn't know what a word meant, I could usually figure it out from the full meaning of the sentence; I remember learning that there was more than one meaning for the word "instruments" from a Bunnicula book because musical instruments didn't make sense. But the critical thing was that even if I had never encountered a particular word before, I could read it. I was trying to figure out the significance of the word from cues, not how the letters form a word and how the word fits in a sentence.

I did a bit more digging and see two concerns repeatedly coming up in the counterarguments against the phonics-based approach: 1) that exclusively teaching phonics will mean neglecting opportunities to teach kids critical thinking skills and explore the meaning of what they're reading, and 2) that phonics is so boring that it'll make kids hate the whole thing. In some ways I can see where the concern over the first one is coming from; it's not like there have been zero examples of an approach claiming to be based in Science demanding priority over anything grounded in compassion and emotion (along with treating those things as mutually incompatible with Science).

But also it seems like there's a disconnect over the meaning of "reading" here, where some people are taking it to mostly mean "comprehending the meaning of the text" and others are specifically talking about the thing your brain does where it looks at a string of letters and interprets it as a word you already know how to say. And seeing how dismissive one of the lead proponents of these methods is toward people being able to identify a writer's deliberate word choices...I don't think you actually can teach critical thinking skills through reading under those circumstances. At the very least, you have to be able to agree on which words are on the page before you can start to talk about what they mean in context.

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noracodes
@noracodes

While that story is indeed very interesting, it's worth taking with a grain of salt. Overall, the APM Reports story is part of a larger movement called "science of reading", which is pretty controversial in and of itself, not least because of proponents' inconsistent application of scientific standards. It's an incredibly complex topic that's been evolving over the course of the last half century or so and I would caution against the takeaway being "SoR good, Heinemann bad".

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JhoiraArtificer
@JhoiraArtificer

Totally, but the description of the pedagogy is what really threw the ??? for me. How can you say you're teaching kids to read when one of the lessons involves covering up the word you're supposed to be learning?

I'm definitely open to learning more about this, and I'm sure the perspective of the reporter influences how much information is presented, but I also don't understand how this strategy helps once, like, picture context clues aren't in the materials you're trying to read.

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noracodes
@noracodes

Yeah I mean there's definitely no place in the world for only teaching reading using Whole Language or other non-phonics techniques but there's also no place in the world for using only Structured Literacy techniques.

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JhoiraArtificer
@JhoiraArtificer

Okay yeah I think we're on the same page here—it seems like malpractice to use only these techniques but phonics-only also seems like a problem. After all, different people learn differently and I'm guessing having multiple strategies would help everyone take the useful bits from each of them (which may be different per kid).

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