https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading
Discussion
Thank you for sharing this ❤️
Yeah, I read this article some time ago and felt terrified:
https://mises.org/mises-daily/why-do-students-regard-reading-torture
More people should become aware of this tragedy. It's pretty sad
Great article, and I agree with pretty much every point.
It is, unfortunately, not the whole picture.
Both my pre-teen boys are well grounded in Phonics, but they choose to research on YouTube and Tiktok rather than books.
This leads to less time invested reading, and lower reading ability than previous generations, even if they are properly taught starting in preschool.
I feel video is a slow and inefficient medium compared to long-form reading, but one must invest a lot of free time up front in long-form reading to excel at it, and competition with YouTube makes that unattractive.
Your thoughts?
Yeah text is now competing with well produced video and probably AI chat bots. It’s gonna get even worse.
I saw an app that displayed the eBook like a few words at a time on just a black screen background... It was called something like focus reader maybe? It reminded me of captions on a YouTube video, but without the distracting video... Yes, video is detracting from book learning... I find myself wanting to listen to an audiobook rather than read. It's sad, but even the book of Kells is another example of reading detractors. And those picture books! 😁
I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum. I'm native Spanish speaker and to learn spanish you need to focus constantly on spelling because vowels don't change their sounds based on their containing word, they're stateless. Also, the way I learned English was by playing old videogames without any talks on them, just pure text 😂.
I always thought why I couldn't understand English pronunciation and talks integrally. That generated me a lot of anxiety. At least reading that article relieved a little my concerns
My recommendation is to read the transcripts of videos and podcasts. Anyway, not even native English speakers are able to capture significant amounts of information from podcasts or videos at all
Phonics is also essential to scientific literacy, I think.
As much as people rag on English, it *does* have coherent pronunciation rules, and they can be applied to new words. If you're not taught those rules, as you would be in phonics, you'll never be able to even pronounce scientific vocabulary, much less understand its meaning.