If you were taught how to sound out words you weren’t taught the way a lot of kids are taught to read today. Being able to read the whole sentence and guessing based on context already puts you significantly ahead of kids who have been taught with the three cueing method.

The technique isn't the issue, rather it's the fact that American kids are taught to use context before they're taught to differentiate the words from one another, apparently.

These not context clues in text but in picture. Little different.

I'm also in my 40s and the wiki article sounded exactly how I read, so I did a little searching and turns out this was the method used in schools in Ontario in the late 80s and 90s although not a formal part of the curriculum until 1997. So no, not a new thing. It was reversed after an inquiry by the human rights commission in 2022.

That might explain why my spouse who grew up in a different part of the province uses phonics and I use... word shapes, idk? I read extremely fast with good comprehension, but can't spell worth a damn lol.

This isn’t about deriving meaning necessarily, but recognizing what word a word is. Take the example statement “the technique is ubiquitous across the nation.”

What you’re describing is using context clues to determine that ‘ubiquitous’ is an adjective to describe the technique and maybe that it has to do with how much it exists across the nation.

The technique described above is a counterpart to phonics. If you had never seen the word ‘ubiquitous’ before you could still phonetically parse out yoo(maybe “uh”)-bih-qui-tuss. With three-cueing, if ‘ubiquitous’ is a brand new word for you, you might pronounce it ‘all’ because that’s the word you already know that might make sense in that sentence. My understanding is that you’re not recognizing that those are two distinct but similar words, you’re just trained to guess at what the sentence is trying to say.