Reading in the 1930's or 1940's

[yvette37]

Hello,

Does anybody know how they used to teach reading in the 1930's or 1940's? or earlier for that matter. What did they use instead of the 'Synthetized Phonics'? I am quite curious about this.

Thank you

Yvette

No, I am quoting from a New York parent's article

nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/want-to-see-future-of-nclb-look-to-uk.html

I didn't know it, but the Tories introduced this type of testing a year before Bush did.

You are right about the US Sat, but that is taken by 19 year olds I think, whereas NCLB involved testing at different grade levels state-wide. ALso teh US SAT is optional, whereas the grade testing isn't, I think.

introduced this testing a decade before Bush did

SAT taken by 18 year olds, not 19 year olds. Wine playing havoc with the keyboard/

@claig Most people use a different part of the brain to recognise icons (e.g. flags, images whole words etc) from the one used to rapidly decode text. (Some patients can't read words after brain damage but can still recognise icons.) Expert readers tend to use a mix of decoding and word shape/key letter recognition. It doesn't follow that the best method for teaching reading should be a mix of decoding and word shape recognition.

Good point, hildegard

But when we read quickly or when speed reeaders read, I don't think they have time to decode. I think they skim, use instant recognition based on memory and use context to create meaning. I think they use a fill in teh blanks type approach and only go back and look at words in detail if tehy can't extract meaning from a quick skimming process.

Actually, claig, evidence from the last 20 years of work in cognitive psychology indicates that we use the letters within a word to recognise words.

Yes we have to use the letters because words consist of letters. But how do we do it at breakneck speed when we speed read and scan a newspaper article? I think we 'see' the words rather than work then out. We then create the meaning based on our past experience and knowledge which we use to fit the words into patterns of meaning, at near instantaneous speed.

In teh same way that we 'see' a face or a photo. We can assimilate teh information in a photo in a flash. We can incorporate all of the complex detail in a flash, by 'seeing' and filling in a pattern.

I think that is how we increase our vocabulary. We 'learn' new words and they are committed to memory and we can then recognise and recall them instantaneously. When we don't recognise a word, we have to stop and analyse it slowly, but once we have learnt it, we then 'see' and recognise it in a flash, and we immediately recognise if it is spelt incorrectly etc.

I think we 'see' the words rather than work then out.

Yes, but it doesn't really matter what you 'think', when the latest reading research shows that it is incorrect.

I agree, it only matters what Gove and the Head of Ofsted think, but that doesn't mean that us citizens can't question the reasoning.

We know that sometimes the scientists and politicians make mistakes and change their minds. That is the entire history of the 'reading wars', where the progressive policy of Plowden was accepted by all the great and the good and was subsequently overturned by Margaret Thatcher and the Tories.

Gove thinks Sats are good, as far as I know. I tend to agree with him. But yopu and many teachers disagreed with him. That is as it should be. We are all free to think and question orthodoxy.

Not hard and fast proven scientific fact, though, claig. Slightly different.

I don't think SATs are bad - I think the league tables they are used for mean that lots of children are denied a broad and balanced curriculum in some schools in Y6. I also think the quality of marking in the writing test was absolutely deplorable - which was ridiculous when so much was riding on it.

What about that thing that circulates on the Internet every so often, where the first and last letters of the words in a message remain the same but the rest has been scrambled, and you can still read it?

I've always wondered what goes on in the brain with reading - clearly it isn't just decoding and it isn't just comprehension. Whoever works out the mechanism that makes both things work together is probably in line for a Nobel Prize... I would be interested to know if there has been any functional MRI work done on this, though I suspect the ethics of involving children would have prevented it.

As for Gove, I would like to disagree with him on principle and I think he is wrong on almost everything - blazers, academies, free schools, Dryden, to name but a few. Then he came out with his intent to abolish homework guidelines (and yes, I do realise that means schools are free to set more if pushy insecure parents want it) and I was forced to admit that he was capable of getting something right. Oh well.

And referring back to something waaaay upthread - my DDs both did Jolly Phonics in nursery, it certainly gave them a very secure platform from which to start phonics learning at school, and they flew through it.

Sorry, I thought it was Sats themselves that you weren't keen on. I agree with you about the league tables. They can become an end in themselves and even lead to cheating and can ignore the real point of education, just like teh health league tables and targets can sometimes ignore real health needs of people.

'What about that thing that circulates on the Internet every so often, where the first and last letters of the words in a message remain the same but the rest has been scrambled, and you can still read it?'

I haven't seen that. It sounds fascinating and understanding how we do it can unlock the secret of reading and how the brain really works. I am not a fan of looking at neurons firing etc. because I think the real learning process is philosophical rather than mechanical.

Hi claig, have a look at this - just Googled it and got this from the Cambridge Brain Sciences Unit site (my organisation works with them quite a lot). Apparently it isn't quite as simple as I originally stated, but still interesting:

link here

I think that there is very likely a philosophical component to the process of learning to read, but I don't think brain activity should be discounted either - I've seen a lot of fMRI data, much of it leading to real world applications, and I think we disregard it at our peril.

Learning to read should definitely not be a zero-sum game.

Yes, I don't much about MRI data, so you may be right that it is important. I tend to think that it can show us what is happening, but it can't tell us why and how, but I may be wrong about that.

Fantastic link

'Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.'

Sounds like whole word techniques. We already know in advance what they are trying to say, from our previous experience and knowledge, which is why we can fit it into the correct pattern. The fact that it is all misspelt is irrelevant, because we get the gist, we jump the hurdles and correct the errors to create the ordered meaning. It is exactlyteh same when we listen to a foreigner speaking English. Their mistakes are irrelevant, because we know what they mean, we guess what they are trying to say, and we do this by using contextual information.

''Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.'

We are not sounding this out, because it leads to a dead end. We are fitting it to a pattern of meaning that we already know and recognise.

It was extrapolating from what skilled readers appear to do that got us into the whole word mess in the first place.

What reading researchers have been doing for the last 40 years or more is try to establish how we get to the point of being skilled readers. The one thing that research has demonstrated is that we don't get there by whole word methods. Any more than a skilled pianist can sit down straight away and play a concerto to performance standard. It takes years of practice at the basic skills of piano playing. The same with any skill. My dd is an excellent horsewoman. She didn't get that way by being shoved on a pony at a young age and left to find it out for herself. It has taken lots of lessons and practice.

I am entirely pragmatic about what I do with the children I work with. I do what gets the best results.

I found it extraordinarily patronising when someone said earlier that 'phonics people' don't recognise that there is an emotional aspect to learning to read. I can say from daily experience that there are debilitating emotional consequences for children who don't learn to read. I'm not in the business of perpetuating that for the sake of an ideology.

maizie d said: "It was extrapolating from what skilled readers appear to do that got us into the whole word mess in the first place. "

Absolutely right. Except that I suspect it was extrapolating from what skilled readers actually do. Skilled reading is a complex hotch-potch of sub-conscious cognitive strategies. Our brains use whatever strategies work best (usually what works fastest). If anyone wants to know more, a good round-up of the authorities in the field can be found on the contents pages of "The Science of Reading" tinyurl.com/7pxt2bw.

But that doesn't mean that novices learn best by adopting the short-cuts that experts can use effectively. Novices need to build up their basic expertise so they know what short-cuts it's safe to take in what circumstances.

As an aside, exactly the same sort of error appears to have occurred in the area of writing. Children are expected to mimic skilled writers, making their writing persuasive, vivid etc, rather than building up their skill by reading widely, so they have a large vocabulary and repertoire of techniques to draw on. Skilled writers are almost invariably well-read.

'Skilled writers are almost invariably well-read.'

Agree. But why is that the case?

I think it is due to memory, they see how others do it and they internalise the whole words, whole sentences, whole thoughts and whole images portrayed by these words and they can then create new patterns, sentences and thoughts based on what they have seen before. They immerse themselves in words and thoughts until they become second nature, so that their ideas then flow rather than having to be developed brick by brick, sound by sound, from the bottom up.

scienceavenger.blogspot.co.uk/2007/12/cambridge-word-scramble-study-its-fake.html

quote
That this piece of obvious claptrap continues to impress is testimony not only to the ever sagging education level of Americans, but also to our ever-growing anti-intellectualism that gives more and more benefit of the doubt to anything that promises to validate ignorance and basic intellectual laziness.

Blimey, some of these phonics advocates don't mince their words, they rain fire and brimstone down on anyone who strays from the path. They seem to have mixed up the sounds of polite and poleaxe, but I guess that is why they are called the Science Avenger

The Avenger says:

'If we truly read words as a whole, then why must the first and last letters be fixed? Why can't the entire word be scrambled? And what exactly does "as a whole" mean anyway? How can one see a word as a whole without seeing the letters in it?'

Because we read the word as a whole in order to find its meaning, and to do that we need to recognise the whole word. If some of the letters are in familiar positions within the pattern of the whole word, then we can fit the entire correct pattern in less time and use context to fit the rest of the pattern of the whole sentence.

But skilled and trained people on 'Countdown' or masters of the Daily Mail crossword can handle more difficult whole word patterns which are more unfamiliar.

The Avenger uses the example

Bblaaesl

We do read this as a whole word, but don't recognise it as any pattern or word that we have previously seen, so we then break the pattern up, shuffle it and rearrange it until it fits a pattern that we have seen and learnt before.
We don't splutter out the sounds like the Avenger does, we use our minds to look for a pattern.