SO, we are again spending tens of millions to again reach the conclusion that alphabetic languages were obviously designed to be decoded, and that students do best when we teach them to decode. How insane.
Everything discussed here was fully revealed in 1977 by the largest instructional research project ever conducted ("Project Follow Through"), which demonstrated that explicit, "direct" phonics curricula overwhelmingly outperform all other styles of reading instruction, and that in fact a particular curriculum called "Direct Instruction" outperformed all other major curricula of that era. Not only did Direct Instruction teach phonics explicitly, but it massively incorporated the "Readable English" concept that is presented here as if it were something new.
Yet Direct Instruction curricula are virtually unknown in the public schools; I challenge you to find a public school district anywhere in your area that uses it. But strangely the "home" versions of it are immensely popular with home schoolers, consistently rating at or near the top of Amazon's "Parenting & Family Reference", "Language Experience Approach to Teaching" and "Family Activity" categories. How could this be? How could so many untrained home-schooling moms make such incredibly wise decisions when the public schools, decade after decade, cannot?
The answer is that public school administrators have a revolving door with curriculum publishers, and curriculum publishers don't make money selling proven curricula that schools would never replace until the pages wear thin. Curriculum publishers make money churning the schools through one ridiculous fad after another, which is why they're also in bed with quack university professors who are always coming up with yet more educational snake oil.
The never-ending saga of preposterous public-school reading instruction has been happening since well before 1955, when Rudolf Flesch published "Why Johnny Can't Read". We've known for decades, no centuries, that alphabetic languages were designed to be decoded. Non-indoctrinated home-schooling moms understand this perfectly; they don't need multi-million dollar research results to understand the obvious. The endless waste on researching what we already proved decades ago is absurd. Our real problem is the economic model of the public schools, which is immune to negative feedback from parents. So long as parents have no say over where their school tax dollars go, making the endless failure of the public schools immune from funding consequences, public school administrators will buy preposterous, faddish curricula from utterly corrupt publishers, with the expectation that they'll have cushy post-retirement jobs (with those publishers) selling more crap-o-la to their successors. READ AND WEEP: http://mychildwillread.org/the-problem.shtml
The correct spelling and pronunciation of a WHOLE REAL WORD lasting a LIFETIME in the brain is a core part of the patent pending Neuroscientific Reading Training System and Method I co-created. This article outlines issues that are non-issues with this new system and method. You see, the brain does NOT store non-whole, non-real words, with their partial spelling and their partial and different pronunciations. These bits of words simply FADE AWAY in short order leaving students as described in this article. All reading training programs need these simple, but essential neuroscientific exercises ADDED to all other language info introduced.
Interesting article. I know when teaching our kids to read I found the system in the book "Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons" to be incredibly helpful. Basically they did a dash over vowels to denote whether they had a hard or soft sound.
Even adding something simple like that to English as a whole would IMHO make learning to read MUCH easier (not that there wouldn't still be plenty of stupid spellings, especially anything with a French basis)
Thank you, Natalie, for introducing us to this approach. I shared your article with one of my literacy groups, and here are the comments:
1) I remember being concerned when it was first pitched to me that it masked the important morphological component of words in the attempt to achieve phonetic regularity. I don’t need to explain to this group why that could be a problem for reading comprehension and spelling in the longer term. I haven’t looked up the studies cited in Natalie’s article, though.
2) In addition to masking morphology, I was thinking about interference with even simple spellings like 'oo'. Is learning new notation for 'choose' actually simpler than learning the spelling, and does this interfere with orthographic mapping? I wonder what the notation for 'chew' is. If a word's spelling, pronunciation, and meaning need to be bonded in memory to achieve sight word recognition, does this approach accomplish this?
3) English students gained about nine months in reading comprehension after 45 to 60 hours of instruction; the control group gained three months. Is a six month additional gain after 45 to 60 hours of instructional a good return on that much investment of time? I wonder what the gains are for a morphology-based intervention program like Word Connections is.
4) I found this topic intriguing and I had a draft that I deleted and pondered across the day. I advocate morphology for older low-progress readers. To me, if a student is reading cat in education then they aren’t seeing the base word educate, much like I have observed readers pronouncing the mat in information. Kockler argued that it wasn’t a vocabulary issue but later argued for linguistic differences, which seem to include vocabulary. I was interested that this new program requires students to essentially learn a 21-glyph system, much like when I saw students taught blends as novel sounds. I have researched explicitly teaching older low-progress students how to decode using morphological units (and associated orthographic and phonological aspects when necessary) so they can access more complex words and understand what they mean. We found that RC improved without much explicit focus across the 20 hours of intervention and I think this is because they had also developed meaning at word level.
5) I agree about teaching morphological units. Teachers need a better understanding of what is involved than many have at present, however.
6) But the teaching point would be about the changes that can occur when we add the -ion suffix to a base word. To me, it isn’t about prior phonics instructions as older low-progress readers not being exposed to complex words, like education and information, in their reading, which I view is needed for learners to develop such understandings and apply them.
You're correct that finding proper materials to help older students with decoding is difficult. And attempting to explain that students *struggle* decoding gets you weird looks too. That said, thanks for the materials suggestions!
SO, we are again spending tens of millions to again reach the conclusion that alphabetic languages were obviously designed to be decoded, and that students do best when we teach them to decode. How insane.
Everything discussed here was fully revealed in 1977 by the largest instructional research project ever conducted ("Project Follow Through"), which demonstrated that explicit, "direct" phonics curricula overwhelmingly outperform all other styles of reading instruction, and that in fact a particular curriculum called "Direct Instruction" outperformed all other major curricula of that era. Not only did Direct Instruction teach phonics explicitly, but it massively incorporated the "Readable English" concept that is presented here as if it were something new.
Yet Direct Instruction curricula are virtually unknown in the public schools; I challenge you to find a public school district anywhere in your area that uses it. But strangely the "home" versions of it are immensely popular with home schoolers, consistently rating at or near the top of Amazon's "Parenting & Family Reference", "Language Experience Approach to Teaching" and "Family Activity" categories. How could this be? How could so many untrained home-schooling moms make such incredibly wise decisions when the public schools, decade after decade, cannot?
The answer is that public school administrators have a revolving door with curriculum publishers, and curriculum publishers don't make money selling proven curricula that schools would never replace until the pages wear thin. Curriculum publishers make money churning the schools through one ridiculous fad after another, which is why they're also in bed with quack university professors who are always coming up with yet more educational snake oil.
The never-ending saga of preposterous public-school reading instruction has been happening since well before 1955, when Rudolf Flesch published "Why Johnny Can't Read". We've known for decades, no centuries, that alphabetic languages were designed to be decoded. Non-indoctrinated home-schooling moms understand this perfectly; they don't need multi-million dollar research results to understand the obvious. The endless waste on researching what we already proved decades ago is absurd. Our real problem is the economic model of the public schools, which is immune to negative feedback from parents. So long as parents have no say over where their school tax dollars go, making the endless failure of the public schools immune from funding consequences, public school administrators will buy preposterous, faddish curricula from utterly corrupt publishers, with the expectation that they'll have cushy post-retirement jobs (with those publishers) selling more crap-o-la to their successors. READ AND WEEP: http://mychildwillread.org/the-problem.shtml
Great Article!! Very Informative
The correct spelling and pronunciation of a WHOLE REAL WORD lasting a LIFETIME in the brain is a core part of the patent pending Neuroscientific Reading Training System and Method I co-created. This article outlines issues that are non-issues with this new system and method. You see, the brain does NOT store non-whole, non-real words, with their partial spelling and their partial and different pronunciations. These bits of words simply FADE AWAY in short order leaving students as described in this article. All reading training programs need these simple, but essential neuroscientific exercises ADDED to all other language info introduced.
Interesting article. I know when teaching our kids to read I found the system in the book "Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons" to be incredibly helpful. Basically they did a dash over vowels to denote whether they had a hard or soft sound.
Even adding something simple like that to English as a whole would IMHO make learning to read MUCH easier (not that there wouldn't still be plenty of stupid spellings, especially anything with a French basis)
Thank you, Natalie, for introducing us to this approach. I shared your article with one of my literacy groups, and here are the comments:
1) I remember being concerned when it was first pitched to me that it masked the important morphological component of words in the attempt to achieve phonetic regularity. I don’t need to explain to this group why that could be a problem for reading comprehension and spelling in the longer term. I haven’t looked up the studies cited in Natalie’s article, though.
2) In addition to masking morphology, I was thinking about interference with even simple spellings like 'oo'. Is learning new notation for 'choose' actually simpler than learning the spelling, and does this interfere with orthographic mapping? I wonder what the notation for 'chew' is. If a word's spelling, pronunciation, and meaning need to be bonded in memory to achieve sight word recognition, does this approach accomplish this?
3) English students gained about nine months in reading comprehension after 45 to 60 hours of instruction; the control group gained three months. Is a six month additional gain after 45 to 60 hours of instructional a good return on that much investment of time? I wonder what the gains are for a morphology-based intervention program like Word Connections is.
4) I found this topic intriguing and I had a draft that I deleted and pondered across the day. I advocate morphology for older low-progress readers. To me, if a student is reading cat in education then they aren’t seeing the base word educate, much like I have observed readers pronouncing the mat in information. Kockler argued that it wasn’t a vocabulary issue but later argued for linguistic differences, which seem to include vocabulary. I was interested that this new program requires students to essentially learn a 21-glyph system, much like when I saw students taught blends as novel sounds. I have researched explicitly teaching older low-progress students how to decode using morphological units (and associated orthographic and phonological aspects when necessary) so they can access more complex words and understand what they mean. We found that RC improved without much explicit focus across the 20 hours of intervention and I think this is because they had also developed meaning at word level.
5) I agree about teaching morphological units. Teachers need a better understanding of what is involved than many have at present, however.
6) But the teaching point would be about the changes that can occur when we add the -ion suffix to a base word. To me, it isn’t about prior phonics instructions as older low-progress readers not being exposed to complex words, like education and information, in their reading, which I view is needed for learners to develop such understandings and apply them.
You're correct that finding proper materials to help older students with decoding is difficult. And attempting to explain that students *struggle* decoding gets you weird looks too. That said, thanks for the materials suggestions!
I've created a vocabulary App for such people who are interested in learning vocabulary. Try it out https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vocabulary-expert-learn-words/id6495368661