Two Thirds of American Kids Can’t Read Fluently
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/reading/achieve.aspx#2...
> When reading literary texts such as fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction, fourth-grade students performing at the NAEP Basic level can likely:
> determine the relevant meaning of familiar words using context within the same sentence or paragraph
They can pick out context clues.
> identify a specific detail to make a simple inference about the characters’ actions, motivations, or feelings, using a single point or multiple points in the text if they are in close proximity
They can determine that “Sally is sad” from the sentence “Sally was crying on the bus.”
> sequence or categorize events from the story
They can follow the flow of actions in a story.
> make a general reference to an appropriate section of the text or provide some support for ideas related to the plot or characters
They can answer basic questions about the text and what happened within it.
Perhaps the language used within the listed standards gives off an air of “difficulty”, but the fact is that none of these 4th grade students would be expected to understand that vocabulary. These are condensed and taught at an appropriate reading level for the students.
The sad reality is that students’ reading levels are down across the board. My wife has students reading at a "3rd grade level" in the 11th grade, while we have a son who read at a "3rd grade level" in 1st. That’s a huge problem.
This problem is systemic and should be taken seriously.
Edit: I wanted to note that these standards were confusing to me at first. My wife has a masters in curriculum instruction and had to break down how standards-based grading works. It's not explicitly teaching kids higher vocabulary—the verbiage is there to be extremely specific for teachers and curriculum boards to understand what to focus on when developing grade-level curriculum and adjusting their pace for each class (as every class will perform at their own pace)
> Based on these standards it still looks bad, but to an untrained eye they seem wildly high for 10 year olds. Scores haven’t meaningfully changed I think since they started testing with this rubric so really doesn’t mean much IMO.
Guess, not determine. Sadness is not the only reason people cry.
Those are taught very early as “sight words” in every school program I’m aware of—most of which are unfortunately still doing some whole-language crap, but that’s not why they do sight words, it’s because the author’s observation is trivial and already accounted for by any serious system for teaching reading.
Teaching time isn’t “minimized”, they do enough that the kids get it, then move on. If they didn’t, literacy rates would be far worse, since, as the author observes, these are most words on a page. I’m not aware of a single teacher of reading who doesn’t take these very seriously, but that doesn’t mean you need to spend tons and tons of time on them.
[edit] further, their ubiquity is precisely why they generally don’t take a ton of time: daily review of sight words happens naturally the whole rest of the kids’ lives. If they kinda get a set of sight words one week, they’ll typically really get them before long, with little or no further time dedicated just to them. Most kids can memorize a set of sight words just barely well enough to pass the quiz or whatever, then never need to formally review or revisit them because the knowledge will solidify due to being incidentally reviewed in practically all later reading instruction.
Wat? They're all easily sounded out, and only one word (the) is "non-content".
https://nypost.com/2023/09/17/columbia-quietly-closes-down-t...
It’s still hanging on in many schools, at least in part, so I’m glad everyone’s talking about it now (my kids have seen a bit of it, and the main effect each time has been to make them worse at reading, temporarily, for reasons that are obvious if you look at the work they have them doing) but it’s weird to see stuff I was hearing about from education students as fairly settled science in the ‘00s brought up like it’s a brand new finding.
This has been known to be bad for a long time, what’s news is a bunch of folks running schools and school districts won’t let go of it. Like the guy at your tech job who hung his hat on some bad database tech and just will not stop pushing the damn thing.
They do know what “the” sounds like, spoken, they just might not be able to figure out that “the” represents that sound (or may struggle with it longer than you’d expect). Other sight words are very straightforward, but lots are subtly tricky for early readers (“of”—that’s gotta be the word “off”, right? The sound the same letters make in “often”, surely? But no.)
Using students' poor post-Covid reading performance to support an argument against phonics is bad argumentation.
In addition, the article leads with an example of how phonics quickly improves reading skills in a school.
Not sure what happened. New management?
I think the reason schools do not use this is because it requires around 30 min of undivided attention per kid per day to make it work. So one teacher could handle maybe 10 kids with this system.
//facepalm
Speech is biological and has been with us for hundreds of thousands of years. We don't need to be taught to speak.
Reading and Writing (which are NOT the same skill) were accounting tools invented by temple clerics 10,000 years ago, that we only started trying to teach universally barely 100 years ago. They are not part of our biology or natural development.
No one would try teaching mathematics by handing a four year old a Good, Quality, Well-Written physics textbook and expect them to understand what they are looking at, much less that they would somehow learn addition in the process.
Kids already can read so the problem isn't teaching them to read, the problem is forcing them to ignore the simple regular rules from their native language and to memorize each new word twice. I refused to do that and only learnt the letters and tried to go by with heuristics+exceptions. It just doesn't work.
I wonder how long it takes for an average kid to learn to read in English vs a phonetic or close-to-phonetic language. Must be crazy hard to start reading with such insane language. Do you even have that point when "it clicks" when you learn reading?
I occasionally discover that a word I'd known for decades had a different pronunciation than I thought it had, since I'd never heard it spoken. Written language is a lot richer than spoken language.
Depends on the weather.
We have never decided upon how it is best learned and keep trying different methods. Speaking to a teacher at my child's school recently, she was all giddy about it coming around to being taught phonetically again. So, that is the current du jour (in that school, at least), but who knows what next week will bring.