Half of Americans can’t read

I feel safe to express that here though. I am shocked! And I want to talk about it! Because it’s making me think do we have that here too? I literally am close to someone this nearly happened to - what are the chances?

The Sun assumes reading age of 9 while Guardian requires 14.

18% of adults in UK are functional Illiteracy. So around around 6.6 million people in England have low literacy skills at or below Level 1, meaning they can struggle with unfamiliar texts, bills, or official documents.

Phonics has apparently increased decoding ablities - which you'd expect but comprehsion skills are still lacking so overall reading not improved even in younger population. However in Wales teaching reading still left up to individual schools - so phoincs usage is up to the school - and reading and exam results are behind England even compared to similar social economic areas.

In US it's 21-28% fall at or below Level 1.

Same age, "learned" with ITA (what a total waste of time that was, miracle any of use learned to read at all) and did Latin at state comprehensive school.

Mind you, Latin was a piece of piss compared to ITA!

Latin was common in secondary private schools and grammar schools in this era. But we can hardly call it very common at a population level (which is what’s relevant for this discussion) when the majority of children in the UK did not attend either of these types of school, and even within private and GS not everyone learned Latin.

(the claim re Latin being common in primaries can easily be examined and debunked, of course).

How interesting, I didn’t know there were different methods to learn to read (I don’t have DC) and don’t remember learning, beyond ‘Kicking K and Curly C’ I always loved that for some reason. This was early 70s, I definitely didn’t learn ITA. I guess it was mix of look and say, and phonics.

For the Latin point, absolutely didn’t learn in my state primary, we learned very little of anything except working our way by ourselves through maths workbooks. I did learn Latin in my state comp, which was an ex-grammar. I think it was the only comp in the county though that taught it, so not usual.

Oh ok.

so this sort of thing is quite common in the uk in infants, probably reception or year 1.

if a child of say five or six sees a word they don‘r recognise some of them do just look at the first letter and guess. This is discouraged in the U.K.

if they are reading with a TA or teacher they are encouraged to sound the word out and recognise it that way.

those sorts of strategies (initial letter and guess) are typical of a U.K. reading age of five or six.

by seven the phonics is usually pretty embedded, as are parts of words ( so eg you might read snorkeling and recognise the ing on the end and know how that sounds and is spelt even if you are not sure about the snorkel bit).

I’d be surprised if those techniques (initial letter and guess, or first few letters and guess) were used by many ten/eleven year olds in America. It’s a pretty poor strategy

I completely agree that phonics is the best way to get the vast majority of children reading (EY teacher and teacher educator here). But it isn't the only way to teach reading and teachers should be supported to use their professional judgement to draw on other methods if and when phonics isn't enabling a child to make progress.

What's the second word? I can get the gist, and I often course do know the message! (A Level French, for reference)

L'hmuan bdreoit peut lirie du txet mÊme si les ltretes sont mléeangrumes." (The human brain can read text even if the letters are mixed up.)

I learned the old fashioned way at home. Phonetics were lost on me and didn’t make any sense, the school held me back for years as a result. My mother had to hired a third party assessor who point blank told the school I was reading at a 12-year-old’s level when I was only 7.

I’m now doing a PhD in literature…

If you’d ever taught in a secondary school in a deprived area, you’d be amazed the average reading age was as high as 10.
I’ve taught in schools where the bottom third of the school is functionally illiterate and they’re unable to access the curriculum. It’s very limiting when they’re supposed to be studying other subjects, and literacy is no longer being taught.

Well this is fascinating. I will be listening to this podcast!

I guess I still don't understand how that's different from phonics. The d and the o blended make a doh (not sure how to represent that!) etc.

What do you do with a long, unfamiliar word? Do you not break it down at all? Dog is of course a bad example for us who can read, because we no longer have to think about the three components.

But say I'm looking at a brand new multisyllabic word, I chop it up. What do you do? What if you don't recognise it at all? I mean, assuming we consciously realise that we need to. There aren't definitely those times when we realise we'd made up a character name pronunciation or whatever even while knowing we aren't really reading it. But as soon as I decide to look properly, the letters will be the starting point. Then I'll add in some guesses about the language it comes from, how they might pronounce those elements.

But I'm still breaking things down. Even something like Belvoir that kind of has to be whole word I suspect I see beaver first and mentally correct because I know to. Maybe if I lived there it would be more automatic. Like if someone write 'I live in Reading' I never think it's a long E sound.

I mean in French! Brain is cerveau

Phonics is about breaking it up into sounds though, not individual letters! The sounds are then blended.
So deep is d-ee-p. Not d-e-e-p.

Agree with others, you're describing phonics.

I think calling it phonics makes people suspicious. It's literally sounding out words. At school in the 90s we learnt ph makes a f sound and th makes the sound at the start of 'thumb'' and so on. It's just that on a bigger scale, learning more sounds made by different letter combinations.

I can read English, French, and German with varying degrees of competence. I have been thinking of trying to learn Russian to a very basis level. Russian has a different alphabet. So what is the best way to start?

Я живу в Лондоне. I live in London.

A few years ago I worked in a primary school which was very anti phonics and the person in charge would also instruct people to encourage the children to use the pictures in the book to help them guess words. Many children learned to read perfectly well by exposure to stories / words etc, but the year the government forced all schools to subscribe to a phonics scheme, at least 10.children reached yr3 significantly behind on reading, needing to take part in the catch up element - so over 10% of the children.

They’re made-up words, and are called alien words in the phonics teaching system. They’re used to test that children are reading words using phonics, because they’re able to sound out and read the words even if they don’t make sense. Gleb would be sounded out gl-e-b (based this on the reading homework my DD used to bring home).

Probably because it massively impacts the children who aren’t in the ‘vast majority’ who deserve to be taught using a method that works for them. When phonics doesn’t work, it really doesn’t work.

Wow, this is insane!! I thought in every language you learn letters first, then learn how to "stick them together" and then read. I remember trying to put letter together and then one day, magically, making a word out of them! (that was my native Russian).

This "whole word" learning sounds insane. How TF can you memorise every word?! Might as well use hieroglyphs, like in Chinese.

American education is insanely bad. No idea how, but the majority of their population cant count, read or write when they are 18. My stepdad is a professor in a community college in the US and the stories he tells me, my God. We categorically should not copy anything from the US as it clearly does not work.

Gleb could be pronouced Gleeb and Bamp could be Bomp, there are loads of instances in English when phonics doesn't work because of the mixed origins of words.

Phonics only matters to babies when they are trying to sound out the basics for the first time. Teaching phonics to 5 and above is why so many have dyslexia.

I was amazed to find that when I sounded out the Cyrillic letters, Лондоне = London

I learned to read via the see and say/whole word method. Throughout primary school, my reading age generally tested at twice my chronological age. Phonics is not essential for everybody.