If you graduated before they implemented this or aren’t American, the system they started to use to teach kids how to read is called three cuing. They teach kids to identify unknown words by guessing based on clues in pictures with the sentences, what word would ‘make sense’, and whether the answer they came up with looks right based on the first letter.

As you may have noticed, none of that is reading a word. These are strategies that borderline illiterate people will use to try to understand words, and for decades it’s been the method used by many schools across the country.

So that person you’re arguing with online who keeps going off on bizarre rants barely related to anything you said might not be a troll, they might just be functionally illiterate due to having never been taught to read. Yaaay!

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[–] 2 points 4 days ago* (2 children)

You cannot determine meaning from sounding out words, unless you already know those words. The core approach taught by MSV is almost completely unrelated to the skills built through phonics, which is why it was a huge problem when MSV was being exclusively taught as an alternative to phonics. That was a ridiculous approach. In practice, MSV is complementary to SSM and teaching it as a strategy to define from context in order to bootstrap one's vocabulary, rather than connect between spoken and written language (as in SSM), is greatly beneficial to development.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 child)

    Beneficial in what sense? I really can't see the point in teaching kids to guess or choose their own meaning of what they're reading when we know for a fact that the vast majority of humans can actually read, not only almost read. I'm not arguing that it can't be a helpful tool to assist with learning disabilities, but I really can't see why it should be the default mode, unless there is/was an explicit desire to lower the reading comprehension of the population. Which is sadly not even that absurd to believe everything considered...

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  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

    I really can’t see the point in teaching kids to guess or choose their own meaning of what they’re reading

    I'm being sincere in saying this, I swear I'm not trying to be shitty about it: I don't rustand how you have arrived at the conclusion that teaching kids to think critically about not just the memorized vocabulary but also the context in which new terms may be found has no benefit. Language is not static - there is no world where the english language will be exhaustively defined, and there will always be new terms for a person to encounter. As a naive example, you just did in small scale what MSV explicitly teaches people to do when you correctly read the word 'rustand' above as 'understand', or when you read read as read instead of read just now. MSV / Three Cueing has value through giving people a framework which they can use as a stable template upon which they can base questions about the language/grammar/etc they are working with, and which they can then use to make a decent attempt at figuring out the answer - it does not have value when used as a replacement for phonics, as using the concepts from MSV instead of and not in addition to phonics-based education (SSM) has been repeatedly shown to be utter hokum.

    This has been at the heart of the Balanced Literature division shouting match fistfight debate for ages, and although the antivaxers do seem to have won the right to assert their whackadoo definition (really, it's just Whole Language wearing beaglepuss glasses and doing a bad german accent) as the most correct, the less outwardly insane people are still around trying to get actual reformation in the way literacy is taught.

    (I'm sorry if this got rambly, I am very stressed for some unknown reason today)

    (Edit: clarity)

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