Half of Americans can’t read

[Balalabab]

So the title is slightly clickbaity I feel.

But this is what is being said in a podcast I am listening to called ‘Sold a story’.

Ironic if the title is wrong considering the name of the podcast 😂

Anyway.. story goes that in Covid a bunch of adults all over the US realised their children couldn’t actually read.

What they had been taught to do was learn a bunch of words by sight, and then as reading became more complex they would look at the first few letters and guess from the context.

One of the example given was instead of ‘Poland was invaded by Germany.’ Someone who used this method read ‘Poland was invited by Germany.’

This reminded me of a story my in-law told me (he is mid 60s) of how he couldn’t actually read. And it was only when he went to his grammar school interview and asked to read a text did they recognised he couldn’t actually read. He knew he couldn’t read. That made absolutely no sense to me until I heard this podcast about people who are effectively half reading. Going through the motions and faking it. But who actually cannot read.

My mind is blown. And I am gripped by this rabbit hole.

In America; this ‘whole word’ method of reading has been a political war for the past 60 years. Politicised to be a left vs right issue and has now been called by some ‘The reading wars’. I have asked tried to ask on Reddit about this 3 times and every time it has been deleted. I don’t know if that’s denial of the issue, embarrassment, or just Reddit being Reddit.

Anyway this has really captured me. Has America fixed this? Do we have this problem in UK as we were using this teaching method many years ago too? How many British people can’t actually read? Whats going to happen to the Gen Z’s who can’t read!

And finally a down the rabbit hole fact for you - that image of Bush sitting in a classroom when 9/11 happened. The most famous image of Bush seen by nearly everyone in the developed world. He was in that school because he was trying to ban ‘whole word’ learning and push phonics first learning. This has really has been an invisible elephant in the room.

Some Americans are certainly unable to paste a tracking number into a box on the postal site of their national service - the USPS - and check on the progress of a package. In the last year Ive had 3 buyers contact me to say "I have not received this" when the package was only a few days in the mail. Or "can you give me an update on this" as if I was a courier service. Errm no, that's not my job. If I did it for one I would have to do it for everyone. Keeping track on the package is the buyers job.

I had one lazy guy ask 3 times for updates and then file an "item not received" when the tracking showed it was handed to the concierge of his apartment block. His attempt at theft was denied. Another left a negative because they had to pay a customs fee. Ebay removed it. Some buyers try on outrageous things and then forget that If go on live chat or call customer services the agent can see all the messages that were exchanged.

Well, I don't know what you've seen but it's not phonics as it's taught in schools 🤷‍♀️. The word ship would be taught as sh-i-p, with the sh being another digraph. Children would not be told to sound out s-h-i-p.

I'm 66. I learned to read via the whole word method (in Fife, Scotland). It worked well for me, but I have a clear memory of my mother expressing her surprise that I wasn't being taught to sound words out.

At the same time, in some parts of the UK they were using the Initial Teaching Alphabet. I recall seeing children's books with ordinary spelling on one page and the ITA on the opposite page. I remember thinking that it was daft. (This was when I was a child.)

I've since read that children taught via the ITA had difficulty switching to ordinary spelling.

As an aside, I recall reading a Tony Buzan book where he said that dyslexia is practically unheard of Serbia, because Serbian is written phonetically.

(That's not wholly true now - some loan words follow the original spelling.)

It's still the case that Serbian magazines will spell foreign actors names phonetically - for example, "Fajnz" instead of "Fiennes".

NB Serbian children are taught two alphabets - Cyrillic and Latin. (The rule is that you don't mix the two, though I've seen people doing it as a joke.) Since the break-up of Yugoslavia, Cyrillic has been used in official documents.

For many years now, children have been taught "Write as you speak."

I think I learned whole word ,I remember learning by flash cards in 75.

In the 80s we could chose Latin or German ,bog standard high school.

I’m from London and I moved to the Black Country.

My two you youngest did phonics - one in London and one here.

Some of the the letter sounds are different here, especially O and U, which my just turned 6 year old found confusing at first as she doesn’t have the accent, despite being born here. She sounds like Barbara Windsor, as do I.

And Pour sounds very much like power in a Black Country accent!

Like I said, if I had never seen a word before... let's say "universal"... I don't sound out every individual sound within the word. NO ONE does that in real life. I sound out the word in full. I move along the word and say "uuuuniveeerrrsssaaalll" as a single word. That's the normal way to sound out a word which everyone does.

I do. Not slowly, and not usually out loud, but it's why I was at university and not earlier that the word I had heard and said as ep-ih-tohm-ee was the same as the word I read as ep-ih-tome - which just hadn't clicked until then. Also slightly disappointed to learn clerestory is clear-story, not cleh-res-toh-ree as I had always read it...

I still break up words when I need to, especially when reading other languages. Fortunately, most other languages have easier spelling than English. I'm not the only one - I hear people do it in my Welah classes. Most of the rest of the time, it's just silent, in our heads.

I don't often come upon English words I don't know these days, but I sometimes do, and then I look them up. Fortunately, dictionaries often have an IPA version to guide pronunciation, and you can often hear words online these days. But it doesn't stop me trying to work it out by myself first.

I have no idea what your age group is but there has never been a time in the UK when the majority of people learned Latin from primary onwards.

You say you ‘move along the word’- that’s what sounding out is using phonics. The word is broken down into units of sound, not individual letters.

‘That’s the normal way to sound out a word which everyone does’. I don’t know why you think that everyone reads or learns to read in exactly the same way- this thread proves that’s not the case.

Exactly this! Latin has always mainly a private/public school subject: I was lucky to do it at my comp but that was the exception.

That’s not a Covid example. That person was 12 and in high school when Covid hit. If he got to high school not being able to do 10-3 there was a different problem at play.

I think a 12 year old should've known the answer to that question prior to Covid lockdowns!

It was a mainstay of state grammar schools too, but that was changing by the 1970s when I was at secondary school. When the 11+ was abolished, as it was across most of England from the 1960s onwards, many of the new comprehensive schools got rid of Latin teaching at the same time, sadly. (I have a Classics degree and I think the teaching of Latin, Greek, Ancient History and Classical Civilisation at school is very valuable.) I know from talking to contemporaries from primary school that in our city it was possible at that time to study Latin at both our local comprehensive schools as well as the direct grant schools (fee-paying but with large number of scholarship pupils and pupils on means-tested much reduced fees subsidised by the taxpayer). I suspect that even where it had survived the mergers and reorganisations that led to the new comprehensives, when the Latin teachers retired or moved on they weren't replaced.

My daughter's school, which is a comprehensive, never stopped teaching Latin and she was able to take it as a GCSE in the 2000s. She didn't stay there for the sixth form, but would probably have been able to take it to A level by special arrangement. I don't know if they still offer it, but as they have a languages specialism they might do.

Numeracy issues aren't a new problem and it can't all be blamed on Covid. About 30 years ago my husband went into our local library and spotted some old children's books being sold off for 10p each. He picked out 10 or 12 of them which he thought our young children might like and took them to the issue desk. He was gobsmacked when the young assistant got out a pen and paper and laboriously wrote on it
10
10
10
10
10
etc until she'd got the requisite number of 10s. Then she slowly added them up with a calculator.

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

I do rely on word morpholgy - which can lead me astray.

I didn't do Latin in school nor did my kids - I picked up little bit scattered in english meanings as I went through life but with my DC I did do spelling programs some of which explain latin pre and suffixes and also a program looking specifically at latin and greek bits of words.

DD1 didn't grasp place value in numbers - missed by school. So she was mixing up 31 and 13 because she missed the meaning behind that - once she grasped thirty was three tens and 10 was one she stopped doing that.

But not always! Given that 'rough', 'bough', 'through', 'dough', and 'cough' all have different 'ough' sounds, and that kind of thing happens a lot in English, how useful is phonics really?

Reason I found phoncis useful tool for me and kids is because it narrows the options down.

I was always being told to sound words out - one hearding sounds in words isn't always there for me and then if I can knowing all ways ough sound can be spelt means I can go through them and see what looks rght - rather than putting down random letters - TBH I relied heavily on muscle meory for spellings as a teen and like DD1 and numbers a string of letters getting swapped round when I had no understanding of their "value" was easy to do.

I rememeber asking an English teacher giving me supplimetary spelling lessons why sometimes word ending changed with suffixes and other times not - her reply she didn't know hadn't thought about it just knew. I was looking for guidance set of rules and execptions - they came with spelling programs I did with the kids meaning they could spent less metal effort there.

The biggest issue my DC have had with spelling is emergent spelling my DC got in school- it's not taught they're expected to pick it up and mistakes aren't always corrected meaning muscle memory learning is wrong from off. Spelling tests - list each week do not work - good spellers find the easy - but poor speller even if they memorirse list doesn't mean the correct spelling turn up in written work. Etymology is also useful - and we look outside school but agian never really taught in school to my DC.

Reading is decoding - spelling is encoding - with both phonics is a helpful tool to most kids - more so than other methods - but it is not the end of the process - reading comprehension and method like inference and sentence context do need to come in as well.

US used to insist reading and wealth went togther Mississippi proved that wrong this last decade - if US wants to imporve they need to look at what Mississippi been up to and how they've bucked the trends - and part of that is phonics but again it's not everything they've done.

It’s sadly more than half. Over 60% of Americans read to only a primary school level or less.

Oh that’s interesting! I do sometimes think American English is practically a different language.

I once asked someone if they were ‘in the queue for the loo’ and they thought I was on speaking Dutch 😂

I don’t believe this is true.

We have our own dialect up here. I was used to it, as dh is from the Black Country originally, but even I struggled when we first moved here!

I’ve got the hang of it now through, but if someone is really broad, you’d have trouble understanding if you’d never heard the accent/dialect before.

Apparently, it’s the closest to old English that exists anymore. I don’t know how true it is, but I saw a historian say once that if you understand the Black Country dialect, if you were suddenly plonked in England in the year 1500, you’d have more of a chance than most of being able to understand and communicate.

Wow! Fascinating!

But not always! Given that 'rough', 'bough', 'through', 'dough', and 'cough' all have different 'ough' sounds, and that kind of thing happens a lot in English, how useful is phonics really?

And this… I agree it’s confusing. The podcast was saying that when you read there’s the step of decoding the word then there’s the step of cross checking that with your vocabulary to identify it.

So these kids would probably know these words. That means they should be able to read them and then search for them in their vocabulary. Once they have made that connection then it’s made and every time they see it again it’s already stored in their head.

Problem is they can’t actually read new words at all. Their vocabulary is much wider than what they can read. This isn’t just poor areas. One of the stories was a black teacher who wanted to learn how the white affluent schools did so well - so she moved. Turns out the kids were just as stuck. But the parents were all paying for extra tuition to fix the problem. Which she was sad to realise was not a solution she could take back to her home community.

DH has a brother 6 years younger than him. He remembers his parents being appalled when they realised this was the way he had been taught multiplication at school, i.e. just by repeated addition. They put that right as soon as possible.

As you say definitely not a new thing. I remember about 50 years ago going to buy some wool. My pattern said I needed eight 50g balls of DK but the yarn I wanted was only sold in 40g balls so I said to the man behind the counter ( he was probably in his 50s/60s) that I would take ten balls. He insisted on working it out himself. He didn't have a calculator but he had some sort of chart to help him do multiplication. After looking up 8 times 50 and 10 times 40 and finding they were in fact the same he was enormously impresssed that I had worked it out in my head so quickly!

Edited to correct the mess made of my example by including asterisks

Accents can be very hard. Over 20 years ago when we were just starting to see lots of young people come over here from Eastern and Central Europe to work, I was waiting for a train at a tiny station in the middle of Ayrshire. There was a young woman nearby talking on her phone. I couldn't make head nor tail of what she was saying and just assumed that she must be from Poland or Romania. Then I did pick up a word and suddenly realised she was speaking English with a really broad local accent. As I am Scottish and lived not that far away as a child, I felt a bit of a fool.

I took Latin O level in England. Failing comp in 1980.

Yes. It was the same for us in '65...I have a clear memory of everyone shouting out "Aeroplane!" when the longest card was produced.

At our bog standard high school in the '70s, it was French from First Year and then a choice between Latin and German in Second Year. How times have changed...