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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35547 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Which is surprising, given that researchers almost uniformly agree that phonics is more effective. It's been settled all the way back in the 60's.

Even when summarizing articles, please avoid "experts agree that" in favor of a few sentences on who the experts are, what the evidence / research is, etc. Because the entire case and article rests on that, "researchers agree" communicates very little about what is agreed on or why, and mottzizens have a lot of experience in when 'experts agreeing' were very wrong. "The science is settled" was a mocking term - and while "the science" was often correct, and the skeptics wrong, saying "it's been settled" is not useful.

In particular, the comments here seem confident that phonics works and the alternative doesn't, and the progressives are so ridiculous for believing it - but with little discussion of the methodology by which they settled it! But before you move to "clearly these people are wrong and making a stupid mistake because they are progressives that's what they do", you should take a look at how precisely it is a mistake.

As for vague reasons why "immersion" isn't just feel-good vibes, consider how people learned spoken language historically and still do today ... immersion, just picking things up as they go listening in context, rather than 'phonics'. It's not obviously wrong.

[will read article now and edit]

In fact, the brain of a very young child does perceive letters differently than an adult brain: not as fixed, flat symbols but as three-dimensional objects rotating in space. That’s why kids who are learning to write so commonly exchange “b” and “d,” for example, or “p” and “q.”)

Absolutely no idea what this means, or how it can be true at all. Kids who are learning to write exchange b and d or p and q because they're similar, not because they "rotate". That's like saying if you confuse a and q, it's because the tail is morphing in your brain.

Absolutely no idea what this means

They mean to say that kids, presumably, learn those shapes in a transformation invariant way, just like they would for other things. For example, a dog is a dog whether it faces towards the left or the right. But p isn't p if it faces the other way, then it's a q, which is its own separate thing. For real objects out there we have some mental 3d representation that we can mentally rotate (if we are shape rotators) and manipulate. But the same strategy doesn't work the same way for letters.

Even when summarizing articles, please avoid "experts agree that" in favor of a few sentences on who the experts are, what the evidence / research is, etc. Because the entire case and article rests on that, "researchers agree" communicates very little about what is agreed on or why, and mottzizens have a lot of experience in when 'experts agreeing' were very wrong. "The science is settled" was a mocking term - and while "the science" was often correct, and the skeptics wrong, saying "it's been settled" is not useful.

Good point. I'll be more careful about the curse of knowledge in the future.

I don't have access to my notes, but wikipedia does a good job summarizing what I've found myself (source):

The whole-word method received support from Kenneth J. Goodman who wrote an article in 1967 entitled Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game.[127] Although not supported by scientific studies, the theory became very influential as the whole language method.[128][129] Since the 1970s some whole language supporters such as Frank Smith, are unyielding in arguing that phonics should be taught little, if at all.[130]

Yet other researchers say instruction in phonics and phonemic awareness are "critically important" and "essential" to develop early reading skills.[131][132][133] In 2000, the US National Reading Panel identified five ingredients of effective reading instruction, of which phonics is one; the other four are phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.[134] Reports from other countries, such as the Australian report on Teaching reading (2005)[135] and the Independent review of the teaching of early reading (Rose Report 2006) from the UK have also supported the use of phonics.

Furthermore, a 2017 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology compared teaching with phonics vs. teaching whole written words and concluded that phonics is more effective. It states "Our results suggest that early literacy education should focus on the systematicities present in print-to-sound relationships in alphabetic languages, rather than teaching meaning-based strategies, in order to enhance both reading aloud and comprehension of written words".[138]

The National Research Council re-examined the question of how best to teach reading to children (among other questions in education) and in 1998 published the results in the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children.[286] The National Research Council's findings largely matched those of Adams. They concluded that phonics is a very effective way to teach children to read at the word level, more effective than what is known as the "embedded phonics" approach of whole language (where phonics was taught opportunistically in the context of literature).

In 2000 the findings of the National Reading Panel was published. It examined quantitative research studies on many areas of reading instruction, including phonics and whole language. The resulting report Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and its Implications for Reading Instruction provides a comprehensive review of what is known about best practices in reading instruction in the U.S.[288] The panel reported that several reading skills are critical to becoming good readers: phonemic awareness, phonics for word identification, fluency, vocabulary and text comprehension. With regard to phonics, their meta-analysis of hundreds of studies confirmed the findings of the National Research Council: teaching phonics (and related phonics skills, such as phonemic awareness) is a more effective way to teach children early reading skills than is embedded phonics or no phonics instruction.

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