OT How old are you and how were you taught to read?

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OT How old are you and how were you taught to read?

I heard a very interesting radio show tonight, and apparently the same fight about how to teach reading, that was going on at least since 1951 is still going on.

When I was 5, in 1952, (and of course they'd been debating it at the board of education for months or years before that), there was a contest between what was then called "Word recognition" and phonetics. Later these were known as whole word and phonics, and probably other names too.

Word recognition won, by the time I started first grade, but our first grade teacher, Miss Maxwell was 64 and entering her last year of teaching. She was not inclined to learn something new (which she probably had doubts about anyhow), so we learned phonetically. Everyone of us could read before we left for Xmas vacation, including the 2 girls who never knew the answer to questions. (and the one who stuttered, though I don't really think the two are related.)

Since then, a 3rd choice has reared its head, 3 cueing systems, where the reader tries to figure out the word from context: semantic, syntactic and graphophonic cues. I don't know what those words mean. On the radio they talked about the rest of the text, pictures, and something else. Did any of you get taught with a 3 cueing system?

Reply to
micky
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That's what the LA schools (and probably everybody else) used. When we read aloud I thought that we were supposed to do it with big pauses between the words like all the other kids did. It seemed dumb, but if that was the way it was supposed to be done...

Needless to say, that was NOT how we taught our kids to read. We figured it was too important to let the school muck it up so we did it ourselves.

Reply to
The Real Bev

I started school in '57 and was taught a combination of Phonics and word recognition. Word recognition also included some level of context. That 3 pronged method had me reading at a grade 3 level by the end of first grade. I became a voracious reader - both fiction and non-fiction - much of which was technical material. Without the phonetic component, it is MUCH more difficult to become fluent. My girls started school in 1987/88 and struggled until WE started teaching them basic phonics. Didn't help that we had them in French Immersion. I think they could read French better than English by grade

  1. Oldest daughter does a LOT of reading (has to for her postgrad course-work!!!) - and enjoys reading for pleasure when she has time - She moved several hundred pounds of books in her last move, and has a pretty fair-sized set of book shelves in the apartment
Reply to
Clare Snyder

Hmm, I started in 1957 too. Learnt phonetics, learnt word roots, breaking words into syllables, suffixes and prefixes. We learnt through semantics and syntactics as we went though we didn't know the words used to describe what we were doing. Graphonics is something you develop naturally as a voracious reader, which I was. I was always way ahead of my year level in reading - reading books for year 8 whilst in year 4, for instance. It helped that my parents were also voracious readers and there was always a library of books, magazines and the like in the house. Having a mother who was a university graduate was also a benefit.

My wife learnt English as a second language with whole word recognition. That relies on rote memory far too much and, as an adult, is not an appropriate way to learn a new language, especially when the script you learnt as a child was derived from Sanskrit. Try, for instance, to learn a new alphabet as an adult and you will get what I mean. The ability to do rote learning diminishes from the onset of the teenage years. Even now, some 39 years after my wife first learnt English, she still has difficulty breaking a word up into syllables and this hinders her pronunciation immensely.

Parents are the greatest influence upon children with regard to reading. When I took up teaching, I had a mixed bag of students, some very literate, some bordering on bare minimum literacy. I used to ask those students who had poor literacy levels if their parents were readers, had books and newspapers in the house, were regular visitors to the library, etc. In pretty much all cases, the answers were no to all the questions.

You can teach whatever you want in a school environment but that learning environment needs appropriate reinforcement at home. Without it, the learning withers.

Reply to
Xeno

I'm 62. I started reading before kindergarten, but IIRC I was taught using phonics. I recall being told to "sound it out".

Cindy Hamilton

Reply to
Cindy Hamilton

I'm a year older than you. My father was military, so we moved around quite a bit. My mother taught me to read before I even started school (she was an RN, and had the patience, I guess, LOL), but I would assume it was probably phonetics and word recognition.

I sat my girls on my lap and read to them, and eventually had them reading out loud along with me, and they were both reading before starting school (2 years apart). Granted, not at a middle school level, but I would say probably at an early 2nd grade level. I assume that would also be the phonetics and word recognition method.

Reply to
SC Tom

  1. Phonics. I had the same teacher twice, in 3rd and again in 6th grade. Grouchy old lady who didn't put up with any crap. She knew who was boss and made sure everyone in her classes did. Best teacher I had, of course.
Reply to
Dean Hoffman

Things are much different now.

With computers children are learning to read and spell much younger. About 40 years ago I had a radio shack computer. I made my son learn the letters and how to spell some things to get the games up on the computer. That was way before the 'point ad click' of the mouse system. All we had was a keyboard.

My grandson did much the same and also he watched much TV and learned how to spell many things off the TV shows he watched.

When I started the 1st grade I doubt I had even learned the alphabit. We did the old readers with 'Dick and Jane,. The 'See Dick run. See Jane run.

Reply to
Ralph Mowery

My mother was a "toddler" teacher. Her successes getting kids to read were much better than the rest. The method she used was a mixture of the old classic and new ones - but as this is Spain, they do not apply to English. She used figures of things that sounded similar to each syllable or letter (I don't remember which), each figure in a card. The kids had to put the figures on top of the corresponding letter (or syllable). The other method she used was to read, a kid a time, from a special book that had combinations of letters in appropriate order (La Cartilla). This is a lot of effort for the teacher, one kid a time, and all kids, each one at his/her own pace.

What she said, is that most kids had a day when they suddenly discovered that the words joined in phrases and that they meant things. At that instant they started to read everything they could and enjoy it a lot. She said it was a wondrous moment of joy to see, and we supposed, for the kids. Their faces were amazing.

However, I remember some of my pals at school read haltingly.

Reply to
Carlos E.R.

I learned by the lap method too. My father would read the funny sheets and books to me. One day he was busy so I started reading one of my favorite books. My parents thought I was just playing until they asked me to read it out loud.

Word recognition, I guess, but I really don't know. I do recall the 'Look, Dick, see Spot' literature was intensely boring.

There were a lot of books around the house and I read anything I could lay my hands on including Frank Yerby's 'The Foxes of Harrow'. Loved the book although it raised some questions about how I could correctly use 'octoroon' in seventh grade. Persons of color were more finely categorized back then.

Reply to
rbowman

Although it's rusty my other language is German. It is also straightforward in pronunciation. The challenge is the fondness for compound words but once you figure out which words were pasted together you can pronounce it.

English is a mongrel language, a product of diversity.

Reply to
rbowman

I remember learning German compound words such as Luftkissenfahrzeug (hovercraft - "air cushion travel thing") and Fernsehapparat (TV - "far see apparatus"). My grandpa was a member of a model railway society and they had dealings with a similar society in Germany. They sent my grandpa (who was editor of his society's newsletter) a piss-take of their own language, as a story in "German" with English translation. The word that they translated as "cab" was "Herrlokomotivdirektordonnerundblitzenhaus". So Germans *do* have a sense of humour after all.

Reply to
NY

NY snipped-for-privacy@privacy.invalid wrote: [...]

You mean like:

Leichtmetallhochdrukdampfkochkesselmitautomatischemshreianlage

(kettle with a whistle)

Eisenbahnknotenpunkthinundhersteller

(the person who changes the switches in a railway track)

Ineinemverdecktenkastenaufgestellte....

(Can't remember the rest, but it's a souffleur in a theatre.)

No, I'm *not* German! :-)

Reply to
Frank Slootweg

I've often thought that it must make a typesetter's job a nightmare, especially when full-justifying text in narrow newspaper columns ;-) The first one would take several lines of hyphenated text.

I'm sure a lot of the longest ones are not in common use. I was rather miffed, after learning Luftkissenfahrzeug, to discover that Germans usually use das Hovercraft.

I remember many years ago in an edition of the Guinness Book of Records, under the section "longest word", that the record was a Fijiian word which translated as "Father-in-law, don't look now, I'm bending over". It is their word for... mini-skirt ;-) Yeah, right. I'm sure it is.

Reply to
NY

Leave it to Wiki to have an article on the world's longest words:

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No mention of Fijian.

I concur as a retired chemist that the longest words would be chemical names.

I had also studied German when studying chemistry and while I am not fluent in it, I did publish a short communication in a German journal.

Reply to
invalid unparseable

First grade in 1950. Phonics and the Dick and Jane readers.

See Spot run. Run Spot, run. Jane likes Dick. Jane was a slut.

Reply to
Ed Pawlowski

Oooh, You've introduced a new word in the last line. Expand their vocabulary. And it's got that complicated "sl" combination :-) "Mummy, mummy, what's a slut?"

In my case it was:

Tip is a dog. (the picture gives the game away) Mitten is a cat. (ditto) Tip likes Mitten. (good) Mitten likes Tip. (ah, good, no unrequited love)

Reply to
NY

See little blonde white children in all your school books run & play & be happy. See your black & brown & asian neighbours be bullied and excluded .. in your neighbourhoods .. John T.

Reply to
hubops

At least that one is pronounceable. Try ‘cyfrwngddarostyngedigaethau’. That's a real word. I think 'Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch' was made up by the tourist bureau.

Reply to
rbowman

Yes Welsh looks very alien to non-Welsh-speakers. It doesn't help that "w" is treated as a vowel (or at least, a vowel sound) and that it has diphthongs such as "dd" ("th" as in "this"), "ll" ("hl", blowing air past your tongue which is placed between your teeth), "ff" (four) but "f" (vat).

By the way, what does cyfrwngddarostyngedigaethau actually mean? Google translate says "medium subventions", whatever that means ;-)

Pronunciation: I'll have a go - I don't mind being shot down in flames...

Kuvroong THarostun gedig-eye-th-eye

(TH=this; th=thin)

In England, we have nothing to compare to Lllanfair PG. The longest placename (and strictly speaking, it's hyphenated) is Sutton-under-Whitestonecliffe:

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(without hyphens) or
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(with hyphens).

Reply to
NY

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