Why cueing (MSV) is a poor way to teach children to read

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

A fascinating article on the risk of whole language reading curriculums and why it is a poor way to teach children to read:

https://www.apmreports.org/story/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading?fbclid=IwAR033TDHBcdxTUAX_W9Ff07cnOyuxoLiTQx4Z2gnWf4EO24NPygmrsTHo1E
 

From the article:

Quote

For decades, reading instruction in American schools has been rooted in a flawed theory about how reading works, a theory that was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, yet remains deeply embedded in teaching practices and curriculum materials. As a result, the strategies that struggling readers use to get by — memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don't know — are the strategies that many beginning readers are taught in school. This makes it harder for many kids to learn how to read, and children who don't get off to a good start in reading find it difficult to ever master the process.2

A shocking number of kids in the United States can't read very well. A third of all fourth-graders can't read at a basic level, and most students are still not proficient readers by the time they finish high school.

...

So, in 1975, Stanovich and a fellow graduate student set out to test the idea in their lab. They recruited readers of various ages and abilities and gave them a series of word-reading tasks. Their hypothesis was that skilled readers rely more on contextual cues to recognize words than poor readers, who probably weren't as good at using context.

They couldn't have been more wrong. 

"To our surprise, all of our research results pointed in the opposite direction," Stanovich wrote. "It was the poorer readers, not the more skilled readers, who were more reliant on context to facilitate word recognition."13

The skilled readers could instantly recognize words without relying on context. Other researchers have confirmed these findings with similar experiments. It turns out that the ability to read words in isolation quickly and accurately is the hallmark of being a skilled reader. This is now one of the most consistent and well-replicated findings in all of reading research.14

 

 

 

 

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Needless to say we’ve raised a generation of kids and taught them to read using cueing.  Can this be reversed?

[Larry of the Lawn]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Needless to say we’ve raised a generation of kids and taught them to read using cueing.  Can this be reversed?

Wait why do you want to unteach people to read?  Sorry for being judgey but that's super fucked up, brainwashing a generation into illiteracy, wtf 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

3 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

Wait why do you want to unteach people to read?  Sorry for being judgey but that's super fucked up, brainwashing a generation into illiteracy, wtf 

The poor reading skills that we’ve given to a generation of kids... can that be reversed.  Can we give them better reading skills.

[argonak]

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

A fascinating article on the risk of whole language reading curriculums and why it is a poor way to teach children to read:

https://www.apmreports.org/story/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading?fbclid=IwAR033TDHBcdxTUAX_W9Ff07cnOyuxoLiTQx4Z2gnWf4EO24NPygmrsTHo1E
 

From the article:

 

Interesting.  I was taught to read phonetically.  This style of reading sounds insane.

[SkynJay]

I think it already is.  My 8 year old in public school was taught a combo of sight words and phonics.  I have not heard anything about context clues.

Math is going the same way, multiplication facts are being quizzed while unit work is still based around addition/subtraction.   

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

12 minutes ago, SkynJay said:

I think it already is.  My 8 year old in public school was taught a combo of sight words and phonics.  I have not heard anything about context clues.

Math is going the same way, multiplication facts are being quizzed while unit work is still based around addition/subtraction.   

If you read the article the author points out that “Blended Learning” cues and phonics is becoming more common but that cues actually undermine what the kids need to be learning:

But they didn't get rid of the three-cueing system.

Balanced literacy proponents will tell you their approach is a mix of phonics instruction with plenty of time for kids to read and enjoy books. But look carefully at the materials and you'll see that's not really what balanced literacy is mixing. Instead, it's mixing a bunch of different ideas about how kids learn to read. It's a little bit of whole word instruction with long lists of words for kids to memorize. It's a little bit of phonics. And fundamentally, it's the idea that children should be taught to read using the three-cueing system.

And it turns out cueing may actually prevent kids from focusing on words in the way they need to become skilled readers.

To understand why cueing can get in the way of children's reading development, it's essential to understand how our brains process the words we see. 

Reading scientists have known for decades that the hallmark of being a skilled reader is the ability to instantly and accurately recognize words.33 If you're a skilled reader, your brain has gotten so good at reading words that you process the word "chair" faster than you process a picture of a chair.34 You know tens of thousands of words instantly, on sight. How did you learn to do that?

It happens through a process called "orthographic mapping."35 This occurs when you pay attention to the details of a written word and link the word's pronunciation and meaning with its sequence of letters.36 A child knows the meaning and pronunciation of "pony." The word gets mapped to his memory when he links the sounds /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ to the written word "pony." 

That requires an awareness of the speech sounds in words and an understanding of how those sounds are represented by letters.37 In other words, you need phonics skills.

[ljkeane]

Interesting article. I was taught to read by sounding out words but I suppose as an adult if I encountered a word I don't know I'd probably work out it's meaning by the context so I can see why that has a certain appeal to people coming up with strategies to teach reading. Still, actively teaching kids to actually guess words does seem like a bad idea.

[HexMachina]

You know you read a very similar article and started a similar topic at the start of the year? 

 

(have no issue with this, but i got a weird semse of deja vu in the thread and had to look)

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

13 minutes ago, HelenaExMachina said:

You know you read a very similar article and started a similar topic at the start of the year? 

 

(have no issue with this, but i got a weird semse of deja vu in the thread and had to look)

It’s the same issue but this article does a much better job of explaining the problems with “Whole Language/Three Cues/MSV” and how it can damage kids ability to learn to read.

[Proudfeet]

I can't remember how I was taught to read, but what do we do when there are no phonics, like chinese? Rote learning is the way to go I guess?

Anyway, this probably isn't viable to people at that stage of learning, but in this age of smartphones, we can simply look the word up on a dictionary. We don't have to carry a brick or take notes and pore over the brick anymore.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

7 hours ago, Proudfeet said:

I can't remember how I was taught to read, but what do we do when there are no phonics, like chinese? Rote learning is the way to go I guess?

Anyway, this probably isn't viable to people at that stage of learning, but in this age of smartphones, we can simply look the word up on a dictionary. We don't have to carry a brick or take notes and pore over the brick anymore.

And if you read poorly how does the smartphone look up feature help you?

[Proudfeet]

2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

And if you read poorly how does the smartphone look up feature help you?

As I said, it isn't viable to people at that stage, but looking things up is useful to expand your vocabulary. Phonics is more to convert your spoken vocabulary to written vocabulary. It doesn't increase your vocabulary. You can get a very good guess from context but you might miss some nuance here and there.

The examples in the article are so outlandish that I can't wrap my head around them, but I guess that is appropriate for young children. If that persists after they are older or adults, they don't "read poorly". They are basically illiterate aren't they?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

43 minutes ago, Proudfeet said:

As I said, it isn't viable to people at that stage, but looking things up is useful to expand your vocabulary. Phonics is more to convert your spoken vocabulary to written vocabulary. It doesn't increase your vocabulary. You can get a very good guess from context but you might miss some nuance here and there.

The examples in the article are so outlandish that I can't wrap my head around them, but I guess that is appropriate for young children. If that persists after they are older or adults, they don't "read poorly". They are basically illiterate aren't they?

Essentially.  That's the point.  Reading is a decoding exercise and we aren't teaching children how to actually decode.  We're teaching them how to be reasonably accurate at guessing what the code means based on the totality of the message.  That works sometimes but is a lousy way to transcribe a message if it is nuanced.

[argonak]

22 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Essentially.  That's the point.  Reading is a decoding exercise and we aren't teaching children how to actually decode.  We're teaching them how to be reasonably accurate at guessing what the code means based on the totality of the message.  That works sometimes but is a lousy way to transcribe a message if it is nuanced.

Reading starts as a decoding method, but eventually becomes memorization of grouped symbols.  I ran into the same thing with morse code when I learned it years ago.  initially you have to remember each individual character, but given enough time and practice your brain just memorizes the sound combinations.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

45 minutes ago, argonak said:

Reading starts as a decoding method, but eventually becomes memorization of grouped symbols.  I ran into the same thing with morse code when I learned it years ago.  initially you have to remember each individual character, but given enough time and practice your brain just memorizes the sound combinations.

Understood.  But it seems with “cueing/MSV” instructors are skipping over that key first step.

[Proudfeet]

2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Essentially.  That's the point.  Reading is a decoding exercise and we aren't teaching children how to actually decode.  We're teaching them how to be reasonably accurate at guessing what the code means based on the totality of the message.  That works sometimes but is a lousy way to transcribe a message if it is nuanced.

And do you believe that there are that many people who are functionally illiterate? This has been going on for decades, starting from the 1960-80s. Unfortunately the data only goes to 1992 from what I see so we can't make a comparison, but this is what "basic 4th grader" and "proficient 12th grader" are expected to do.

 

Grade 4

NAEP Basic (208)	Fourth-grade students performing at the NAEP Basic level should demonstrate an understanding of the overall meaning of what they read. When reading text appropriate for fourth-graders, they should be able to make relatively obvious connections between the text and their own experiences and extend the ideas in the text by making simple inferences.

 

Grade 12

NAEP Basic (265)

Twelfth-grade students performing at the NAEP Basic level should be able to demonstrate an overall understanding and make some interpretations of the text. When reading text appropriate to twelfth grade, they should be able to identify and relate aspects of the text to its overall meaning, extend the ideas in the text by making simple inferences, recognize interpretations, make connections among and relate ideas in the text to their personal experiences, and draw conclusions. They should be able to identify elements of an author’s style.

NAEP Proficient (302)

Twelfth-grade students performing at the NAEP Proficient level should be able to show an overall understanding of the text which includes inferential as well as literal information. When reading text appropriate to twelfth grade, they should be able to extend the ideas of the text by making inferences, drawing conclusions, and making connections to their own personal experiences and other readings. Connections between inferences and the text should be clear, even when implicit. These students should be able to analyze the author’s use of literary devices.

 

The article is heavily bashing the basic word recognition skills of the two different methods, but "reading" goes beyond that. I don't doubt that the science as reported is accurate but the conclusions implied seem rather dishonest. We would probably see marginal improvements from switching to a better teaching method, but I don't think that adequately addresses the problem. At best it is just laying the foundations for the solution.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 minutes ago, Proudfeet said:

And do you believe that there are that many people who are functionally illiterate? This has been going on for decades, starting from the 1960-80s. Unfortunately the data only goes to 1992 from what I see so we can't make a comparison, but this is what "basic 4th grader" and "proficient 12th grader" are expected to do.

 

  Hide contents

 

Grade 4

NAEP Basic (208)	Fourth-grade students performing at the NAEP Basic level should demonstrate an understanding of the overall meaning of what they read. When reading text appropriate for fourth-graders, they should be able to make relatively obvious connections between the text and their own experiences and extend the ideas in the text by making simple inferences.

 

Grade 12

NAEP Basic (265)

Twelfth-grade students performing at the NAEP Basic level should be able to demonstrate an overall understanding and make some interpretations of the text. When reading text appropriate to twelfth grade, they should be able to identify and relate aspects of the text to its overall meaning, extend the ideas in the text by making simple inferences, recognize interpretations, make connections among and relate ideas in the text to their personal experiences, and draw conclusions. They should be able to identify elements of an author’s style.

NAEP Proficient (302)

Twelfth-grade students performing at the NAEP Proficient level should be able to show an overall understanding of the text which includes inferential as well as literal information. When reading text appropriate to twelfth grade, they should be able to extend the ideas of the text by making inferences, drawing conclusions, and making connections to their own personal experiences and other readings. Connections between inferences and the text should be clear, even when implicit. These students should be able to analyze the author’s use of literary devices.

 

 

The article is heavily bashing the basic word recognition skills of the two different methods, but "reading" goes beyond that. I don't doubt that the science as reported is accurate but the conclusions implied seem rather dishonest. We would probably see marginal improvements from switching to a better teaching method, but I don't think that adequately addresses the problem. At best it is just laying the foundations for the solution.

 

I think reading skills are something we shouldn't take lightly.  I think it offers some explanation for the decline in overall reading competence in the United States in the last few decades.

[Proudfeet]

Just now, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I think reading skills are something we shouldn't take lightly.  I think it offers some explanation for the decline in overall reading competence in the United States in the last few decades.

Way to miss the point. Also, the first result in 1992 was the high water mark. It has been remarkably consistent since then.

[Zorral]

It was just reported that US school kids' reading comprehension has fallen by 50% in the last ??? years.  I just saw that, but can't remember where.  Damn.  When I google the latest that comes up is the Atlantic from April.

However, I do know from my own experience that college kids' capacity to read, to comprehend in just the last three years has plunged drastically.  Moreover, they don't believe that they should be required to read at all.  And just point blank refuse to read a book.