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!
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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. 🥹
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montessori is crazy, we’ve been doing lovery and their toys are so well designed
You’re so lucky you can afford not only kids, but private school as well. I really hope you appreciate your privilege.
This reads like a bitter compliment (but you’re 100% right)
Always remember when discussing with US citizens:
Only 13% of the population is proficient in each of these three areas—able to compare viewpoints in two editorials; interpret a table about blood pressure, age, and physical activity; or compute and compare the cost per ounce of food items.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy -> second to last paragraph of the first part.
1 in 4 people you see walking on the street in America are functionally illiterate. More than half can only read at somewhere around a 6th grade level or below. The US glorifies and revels in ignorance.
When I was in the 6th grade I got called into a room after the reading/writing test we all took. I thought I was in trouble. They just didn’t want the other students to hear that I was reading/writing at a college level while they were all at 2nd-8th grade levels.
I am actually autistic/adhd and had a lot of trouble in early development with language. I had a speech impediment, and couldn’t read or write properly. There was a single teacher at my public school who was in a wheelchair and would take me into her office and would sit there and practice my words with me and tell me how to position my tongue, and would teach me how to sound out words, and stuff like that when I was in elementary school.
I think that woman is fully responsible for me being literate. It’s crazy to think about how a few hours of one on one time as a kid had such a big impact on my early childhood development.
I moved around a lot, and when I got to third grade I didn’t know cursive so my teacher decided I should be in Special Ed and sent me out of class to get tested.
After the tests, they put me in this thing called the “extended learning program” which was a little like a play room full of educational games and a bunch of really nerdy kids. It turns out my math and reading skills were high school level and though I had not yet learned cursive I was typing 22 words per minute on “Mavis Beacon”. So the conclusion was to send me to ELP and have the kids there teach me cursive.
Then I moved a hundred miles away in the spring and had to start all over for fourth grade when my teacher decided my bad handwriting meant I was illiterate and she sent me to get tested…
My handwriting is still ass though cursive or otherwise.
I can’t write in cursive either unless adding some fancy squiggles counts. Can’t read it either. And my handwriting is super messy. I’ve had it called doctor handwriting lol.
I’m very torn with that revelation. My nephew is in the second grade and he reads pretty good. My girlfriends child is in the 3re grade and she reads a lot. Like more than i do on average, and while my reading comprehension and speed is obviously much higher, she’s not that far behind overall. Thinking back, i read the same boojs as my mom when i was in 6th grade, i might not have understood them fully, because they were mainly political thrillers, but i read them. Si i don’t really know, how well does a 6th grader when it comes to reading?
Read some articles in Simple English Wikipedia. It’s at roughly a 6th grade level.
Edit: bear in mind when you do that even Simple English Wikipedia will be easily understood by only around 29% of the total number of literacy-challenged people in America. You and yours are probably not anywhere near either group.
yep. tis why my wife laments ever setting feet in turtle island. she knew she was part the 3% able to recite, sign, and localize curricula with goals, criteria, and pedigree for a generation that will never surpass her. Traumas are mitigatable, but not the isolation that no peer like her will ever exist.
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!”
there is a limit to the utility of phonics and the idiot teachers should be forced to acknowledge it, however everyone should be taught some phonics.
i lived in california from ages 4-8 and we did phonics basically every grade level.
i moved to florida about 3/4 through 3rd grade and that was when i learned about educational standards at the ripe old age of 8 when everyone in my new third grade class read at a first grade level and even my teacher didn’t seem to know what she was doing.
i have a formative memory from my first day. i asked the kid next to me when recess is, and his response was, “what’s recess?”
Meanwhile during my childhood I moved many many times and I remember arriving at a school in upstate New York for 7th grade, getting out of our life skills class which is like Home Ec for head injuries, going to lunch and then after lunch going out for recess.
The life skills class focused on important things like don’t talk to strangers which I thought was childish enough and then we went out for recess. We were in Middle School, and we had recess.
The kids I met there were the most behind of any kids at any school I ever went to. I was constantly accused of having my parents help me with my homework and projects. It seemed impossible to explain to them how little time my mother had to pay attention to me at all since she worked 2 jobs.
Sadly, the generation was lost to the war on drugs. We were overzealous and refused to let them even get Hooked on Phonics.
(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.
It was called whole word learning in my location (PA) circa 90s. My kids had to do stupid shit like draw borders around a word over and over while repeating it. Their homework directions never made sense to me so we practiced sounding things out. They were not encouraged to learn sounds in school— just memorize the word. If you didn’t know the word you were to look at the first and last letters and guess what belongs in context. Of course if you can’t read any of the other words guessing context is impossible. When my son struggled to read, the reading specialist gave me a book of essential words for him to memorize at home. Multiple times a year the kids did collages to match pictures to letters or words. We were told to work on it at home so I had to sign up for and save magazines to use the pictures. It was a useless, time-wasting project. Then there were the stupid assemblies that occurred regularly—90 minutes of yo-yo entertainers who were invited back every year, fund raising assemblies to sell wrapping paper (mostly to myself and my parents), the obligatory follow-up assembly to distribute the shitty prizes.
My favorite was the year they gave my son an award for a poem he wrote (Yay! We were so proud) and then the school tried to sell us a book of poetry written by all the 5th grade prize winners in PA. Who tf wants a book of 5th grade poetry? We framed and hung his poem on the wall.
All this to say schools appeared to be focused on everything except reading comprehension. Complaining parents were assured THEY were the problem. My kids ended up in private school because I didn’t want them to be functionally illiterate as so many others have. I am not surprised by reading levels in the US.
Defunding US public education is possibly the most successful move republicans made early on. It has worked brilliantly for them.
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.
That sounds like a problem with reading comprehension rather than phonics. Critical thinking skills are in short supply nowadays.
The problem with three-cuing is that it teaches people to skip words they don’t know. Having people just not read half the words in comments they are replying to explains so much. No wonder people have bad reading comprehension.
I skip words because I have attention deficit problems.
You skip words because you can’t read.
We are not the same.
I learned phonics (which is essential) but also ended up self-teaching myself visual reading. Unless there’s an unfamiliar word or unusual sentence structure I usually don’t subvocalize or “hear” what I’m reading. When I was younger teachers would be upset because I typically finished reading the novel they assigned in the first or second in class “reading time”.
So there is absolutely significant value in visual reading, skimming, cueing, etc – but skipping phonics is insane. It’s like teaching someone how to run before they can walk. It also ignores not everyone is great at running and leaves those people especially screwed.
I usually intuitively understand slovene text when reading it. It just makes reading books more boring - so I read more English books (well I can also do it with English text, but not as good).
It also infuriates some people I read to - since I just skim trough the boring parts, which then sound like groups of random letters.
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.
Shouldn’t really need parental involvement at all to be honest. The school system should be wholly responsible for making sure the kids coming go out the other end meet the educational standards to prepare them for life. Leaving the ones with shitty families to their fate is fucked. That does of course require that schools be properly funded with staff trained to address the various issues the kids may have.
Be Fn Fr, there is no way the state takes parental rights away from everyone completely, that just doesn’t seem right.
I agress on some of your points but you’re laying out some pretty extreme hot takes.
The parents should be involved, the parents should be forced into parenting, education and child psychology classes, the parents should be accountable for their little shit heads if they do things that warrant accountability. Sex Ed should be mandatory, condoms readily available in Junior High on up, school lunches should be free. Daycare/aftercare should also be free and include free snack/dinner.
Schools need to do better with mandatory reporting as well, right now they either report everything and it seems like an extension of bullying, or nothing and it also feels like an extension of bullying, same with police and the courts. Mandatory reporting is how we keep an eye on kids for abuse, but at times from a parents perspective, it just feels like another way you’re being fucked with by society.
There a lot of different stuff at play that we can do better or differently, but it goes back to the saying “it takes a village to raise a child” basically we’re all a team in raising this lil crotch goblin, and the parents are the primary members of that team they have to be involved and with the understanding of what is expected of them, then the rest of society that is involved is the rest of the team, and hopefully that yields a promising young adult.
Be Fn Fr, there is no way the state takes parental rights away from everyone completely, that just doesn’t seem right.
That’s not what I said.
The school gets them for 8 hours a day. Use that time to teach them the shit they need and send them home. If the parents aren’t doing their side of it put the kid in special Ed or counseling or whatever to make up that shortfall. There’s enough flexibility in school schedules to spend more time on that if necessary. The only time parents should fully lose their rights is if there’s abuse going on.
How do you propose we force the parents to do anything, specially considering in a lot of cases the problem is that they simply do not have the resources?
Apologies then I misinterpreted your reply.
Honestly as far as forcing parents, we have to do the hard thing, take it by a case by case basis, force the required classes and practices, then monitor those that are suspect based on how they handled those classes and trainings and whatnot. By monitoring I mean drop by visits, interviews with the family and those community members that interact with the children, as well as social services visits to discuss services and programs.
And on the flip side, we increase corruption and bias reviews on the schools, police, social services to ensure fairness and equality, because we need protectios from them as well. We would also want to have a more straightforward and streamlined appeals process for unfavorable judgements in these instances as well, to ensure the kids aren’t separated from family or removed from the abusive families as soon as possible.
overworked AND lazy? make yourself make sense lol
Shouldn’t it be obvious I mean two different types of people?
Also being overworked makes you lazy at home, it’s called burnout, or if it’s drugs, it’s called being a functional addict. Overworked and burned out people also tend to miss details, get sloppier, and all these things compound.
But mostly what I meant by lazy parenting is the people that yell at or for their kids rather than going to them and speaking to them in a normal tone, or the parents that don’t want to do the hard work of disciplining their kids, so they let them become little entitled nightmares, and the parents that abuse their kids because slowing down and dealing with them in a more acceptable manner takes too much effort. Another horrible example is the lazy parents who use their kids as piggy banks or ruin their credit for the parents gain, or expect their children to support them while the parents are still able to work.
I’m a grandpa and I’ve seen all this shit in my almost 50 years of life, some from my own parents, friends parents, parents of my kid’s friends, grandkids friends parents, parents of the kids my family has fostered over the years, etc.
So yes overworked and lazy are the two problems, as well as impoverished and uneducated.
Makes sense to me. How does it not to you? Or are you arguing just to argue?
no, overworked and lazy are incompatible. burnout is not laziness. jesus lol covid cooked some of yall
Overworked and lazy are absolutely not incompatible. You’re right that burnout is a serious issue stemming from overwork and the general news/social media outrage cycle, and that being overworked and being lazy are different problems, but the fact is that lots of American parents are all three. Might take a look at yourself before accusing others of being ‘covid cooked.’
i would argue that “lazy” is a perjorative to put personal responsiblity as the issue rather than systemic failures leading people to have to make hard choices over what they can and can’t do. i refuse to use the term on people who are struggling to make it thru each day and keep food in their childrens’ bellies. call me crazy if ya want, but people have been systematically destroyed and then blamed for not being able to keep up, and that’s the vibe i am feeling from you and the person i originally responded to.
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.
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.
This isn’t about deriving meaning necessarily, but recognizing what word a word is. Take the example statement “the technique is ubiquitous across the nation.”
What you’re describing is using context clues to determine that ‘ubiquitous’ is an adjective to describe the technique and maybe that it has to do with how much it exists across the nation.
The technique described above is a counterpart to phonics. If you had never seen the word ‘ubiquitous’ before you could still phonetically parse out yoo(maybe “uh”)-bih-qui-tuss. With three-cueing, if ‘ubiquitous’ is a brand new word for you, you might pronounce it ‘all’ because that’s the word you already know that might make sense in that sentence. My understanding is that you’re not recognizing that those are two distinct but similar words, you’re just trained to guess at what the sentence is trying to say.
The counterargument is that English is uniquely bad for phonetical spelling.
Never make fun of someone who says a word strangely. They may have only ever read it.
I’m not sure that phonics is the underlying reason American people don’t learn to read. I think there’s deep complex reasons for that.
There’s some truth to that, but it’s also important that phonics lay down the foundation for reading, and let young readers identify the complexities behind the rules, and then internalize the meta-rules governing which rules apply where.
It’s frustrating that tough doesn’t rhyme with though or through or bough (or that none of those others rhyme with each other). Or that many homographs aren’t homophones, to where you need to rely on context to know which pronunciation or meaning applies to words like “read,” “lead,” or “unionized.”
Still, how else are you gonna do it? Lay down the basics, then layer on some exceptions that generally come in as loanwords (entree) or proper nouns (Xi Jinping), but always building on a foundation where new words can be encountered and pronounced. We can read and pronounce newly invented words easily, whether it’s slang like “mogging” or fanciful corporate trademarks like “Reddit.” We can deal with the exceptions as they come up.
blowing in the wind.
wind the clock.
Definitely something I struggled with, perhaps due to ADHD/Dyslexia - a lot of words will lead you astray with how it sounds (such as colonel and squirrel).
Probably still a useful skill to teach, but probably not the pinnacle of teaching either.
Wait, this is a real thing? I was handing in a marketing copy and one of my us colleagues mentioned that I was using fairly complicated language that most Americans won’t understand. Is that the reason? I thought I had used normal level English that everyone who has learned it as a second language would understand. It never occurred to me that native speakers would have issues? Not in a business context at least?
As someone born and raised in the USA, like anything else in our country it’s a gradient and not black and white. There are plenty of people who speak eloquently and can engage with an expansive vocabulary.
There also are, I’d wager almost certainly more, people who are borderline functionally illiterate for whom reading is a chore and who actively try to avoid it.
Beyond that, the vast majority of folks can read and write but have a limited lexicon and have not attempted (and probably won’t) to grow their knowledge of English words. Most of us just get by and go along.
I don’t know why I still am constantly surprised by just how stupid my compatriots are. Maybe I just want to believe in a better world. The sad reality is Americans, as a whole, are pretty goddamn dumb and ignorant and like it that way.
How it was implemented is going to vary by state and even by school, but this system was used for years in every state. Anyone in their mid 30s and older doesn’t have that excuse, but kids being taught to read in the early 2000s and on were increasingly taught with three cueing alone and no sounding out words, because the theory was basically they just figure it out themselves.
A lot of them did not figure it out themselves.
kids being taught to read in the early 2000s and on were increasingly taught with three cueing alone
Um. I think you might have misread the wiki article, three-cueing stopped being taught exclusively in 2000. (Sorry, really not trying to be shitty here)
By the 1990s and early 2000s, research began to conclude that phonics was the necessary method of teaching reading to children, with an American congressional panel in 2000 concluding that the essential components of reading instruction were “vocabulary, comprehension and phonics”. Programs began to re-incorporate phonics around this time, although three cueing remained a part of curriculums in the approaches of balanced literacy and whole language.
The research has been there for decades, but it hasn’t been reflected in the way reading was actually taught for a lot of students. Some states are just now introducing laws to make sure students aren’t being taught exclusively three cueing.
Do you have a source on the prevalence you are claiming? Sincerely asking, I work in education and this is very much contrary to what I have seen.
Absolutely, check out the American Public Media (they’re the second largest public radio in the US after NPR) investigative reporting in Sold a Story: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/season-1/ They have links for supporting reporting under some of the episodes: https://www.apmreports.org/story/2022/11/10/heinemann-sales-by-school-district
I am sorry I cannot watch the vid at the moment, but what a good article. The vid may talk about the current prevalence of teaching queuing (I think I’m so funny), I didn’t see it come up beyond incidental mention in the article nor did it mention that the rate of teaching MSV has increased, but I overall agree with everything they’re/you’re saying there:
But Adams soon figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not just as the way readers construct meaning from text, but as the way readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary.
Teaching cueing and phonics doesn’t work, Sajous-Brooks said. “One negates the other.”
Yes absolutely, MSV is not a replacement for phonics.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with pictures. They’re great to look at and talk about, and they can help a child comprehend the meaning of a story. Context — including a picture if there is one — helps us understand what we’re reading all the time. But if a child is being taught to use context to identify words, she’s being taught to read like a poor reader.
Again, absolutely correct. The beneficial parts of MSV are in learning to derive meaning and infer context from non-textual cues, not the whole dowsing-for-phonics thing.
I’m getting the distinct impression this is an overloaded term and that we’re agreeing about phonics vs. MSV, I suspect it has (ironically) a fairly contextually-dependent meaning.
(edit: There’s a whole side-topic about the hell that is “whole language”)
I came to post that exact podcast. Such an eye opener.
Yes, if you are writing for the general public you need to keep it simple. A shocking number of people are barely literate, something like 1 in 5 adults in the US are illiterate.
It’s worse. From a search:
According to the 2023 Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) survey, 28% of U.S. adults scored at or below Level 1 literacy, meaning they struggle with multi-step instructions and complex texts. This represents a 9 percentage point increase in low literacy levels since 2017. Additionally, about 54% of U.S. adults read below a sixth-grade level, and approximately 21% are classified as functionally illiterate.
Slightly less than 1 in 20 (at least in 2019. Unfortunately the last time this came up I couldn’t find the PIAAC evaluations fully broken out more recently than that, and I have had no more luck this time)
In 2019, the National Center for Educational Statistics reported that 4.1% of US adults had literacy abilities below level 1, defined as “unable to successfully determine the meaning of sentences, read relatively short texts to locate a single piece of information, or complete simple forms”, and could be classified as functionally illiterate.
Oh yeah, Americans writ large read at a sixth grade level, even the ones with jobs. Hell, even the ones working in education!
I’ve been joking a lot with my coworkers that we need to go back through all our public facing documents and rewrite them for a fourth grade level, just to make sure their meaning can be near universally understood. If you’re writing for Americans, you need to be writing for children.
Without an example of the text in question it’s a pretty unanswerable stereotype, but it’s possible. The topic of US literacy is an extremely complex one, but overall it had been trending up (until the kids were kneecapped by COVID) and US advanced literacy L3+ among non-college grads tends to be heavily siloed towards jargon shaped by the prevailing regional industry with little mixing between areas. It’s a fascinating topic, really.
Anyways: minor criticism for OP as they’re kinda basing their complaint on the idea that MSV is exclusively what is taught in the US; this hasn’t been the case for decades. While they’re absolutely right that MSV as an exclusive method for learning to read is a horrible approach, it’s a very useful skill for inferring meaning from context, especially when combined with a foundation built on the standard vocab+definition+phonics framework.
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.
Chinese is a ton of memorization and figuring things out from context, mostly (source: am an adult learner, been learning for about a year now). I’d say it’s not directly comparable to learning spelling of any latin-alphabet based language (source: english is my second language, I had to learn it the hard way when I was old enough to remember the pain of it). But interestingly enough a lot of characters do have some clues in them, either for pronunciation, meaning, or both. You start to see the patterns after a while.
Basic example: 妈妈 (ma1ma - mother), 妈 character consists of 女 (nü3 - woman), and 马 (ma3 - horse). Woman part is related to the meaning, horse part is a pronunciation clue since it’s also a ma sound (albeit with a different tone).
But even with the clues you have to sit down and just memorize a ton of characters, which is not what the 3 clue system is doing.
