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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[–] 7 points 1 week ago (1 child)

The Wikipedia article that you linked completely disagrees with that you posted:

"According to a survey in 2010, 68% of K–2 teachers in the United States practice balanced literacy; however, only 52% of teachers included phonics in their definition of balanced literacy. In addition, 75% of teachers teach the three-cueing system (i.e., meaning/structure/visual or semantic/syntactic/graphophonic) that has its roots in whole language.[127][128]"

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    I just read the underlying survey results from the linked source in the footnotes. Which are from a 2020 study, not a 2010 study, but I'll leave it to someone else to fix the Wikipedia page, as my VPN address is blocked from editing Wikipedia.

    22% of instructors teach systematic phonics as their method of instruction. 4% use whole language, the system that discourages phonics emphasis. 68% use balanced literacy. And of those, when asked to give their own written definition, more than half (52%) explicitly mention phonics as part of it, literally the plurality answer in what the phrase "balanced literacy" means. 21% mention "phonemic awareness." 14% mention "all five essential components of reading instruction," which comes from a National Reading Panel definition that includes phonics and phonemic awareness as 2 of the 5.

    The study report itself explicitly disclaims trying to draw too strong of a conclusion that teachers aren't using phonics just because they didn't use the word in their definition. And other keywords like "whole language" only got 6%.

    But we don't need to try to infer what percentage, because the study itself explicitly surveyed the importance of phonics. For the question "When you're teaching students to read, how much emphasis do you place on phonics?," 70% answered "a lot," 28% answered "some," 2% answered "a little," and 0% answered "none."

    The study itself pretty strongly supports the idea that almost everyone in the US is teaching phonics as the foundation of reading for 5-7 year olds.

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