What is a mixed method?

[columngollum]

Can a brave teacher explain what she means?

Occasionally a teacher pops up explaining how necessary the storybook pictures are. But she gets such a ripping from the phonics fanatics that it's never possible to find out what she means.

Firstly we never know what the picture is of.
And secondly we never know what the word or sentence concerned is.

I think simple common nouns alone per page with their names below are excellent.

Definitions of MM which include archery, swimming and horse riding aren't any help. The definitions have to make sense.

The definitions have to be facts not a fairy tale to make you happy

I don't know where you got your definition of L&S from, but my teaching didn't include knitting, darts, cooking pies and art work.

It consisted of recognising words and spelling.

Well if that is the way you were taught it must mean that everyone who doesn't agree with you must be wrong

Already established as the central method to teach reading throughout England by the 1920s, whole word / look and say used reading scheme books with repetitive text. Children were expected to memorise the high frequency words as whole shapes through look-and-say 'flash cards' and the constant repetition of those words in a particular scheme's books.

One of the continuing stream of education 'experts', Dr. Russell of California University, produced a book in 1949 that included the following strategies, in order of importance, to aid recognition of new words:

1. The general pattern, or configuration, of the word.
2. Special characteristics of the appearance of the word.
3. Similarity to known words.
4. Recognition of familiar parts in longer words.
5. The use of picture clues.
6. The use of context clues.
7. Phonetic and structural analysis of the word.

What was his book called?

Dr David H Russell - Children Learn to Read 1949

Interestingly he was responsible for the Ginn reading scheme

Looks like the early developers of mixed methods studied how adults actually read and developed their method for teaching children according to that -- in opposition to phonics which they argued took too long and was unnecessary! woops!

No columngollum he was a developer of Look & Say

It's explained in a book called A root cause of why our children can't read columngollum woops indeed!

You're talking about a period from 1908 to 1940 in the US in which dozens of competing methods of reading instruction vied to oust phonics.

You can't just pick your favourite idiot PhD and name him as the father of L&S, especially if his work came out more than 100 years after it was invented!

That random strategy also makes Santa Claus the father of L&S

No columngollum I'm not talking about a period from 1908 - 1940 since Russell didn't write his book until 1949

and just to make it clear to you no one is suggesting Russell or Santa are the father of L&S.

Russell has nothing to do with L&S. He's inventing new stuff. That's the whole point of his book. His is the seven guessing strategies manual. That's not L&S that's think & guess.

Incidentally, if you do look at 1908-40 you'll see that a lot of idiot PhDs were in labs testing adult reading. Their results led to the onslaught against phonics. I guess that's progress for you!

Russell has everything to do with Look & Say columngollum. Although as you pointed out it was invented in the 18th C it didn't become a widespread teaching method until the 20th C when Russell wrote about Look & Say , taught Look & Say and published basal Look & Say reading schemes and was an active supporter of the method at the height of it's popularity.
all without the help or knowledge of Santa

www.societyforqualityeducation.org/parents/bkgrnd1.html

"Then, for no obvious reason, educators began to abandon the old method in favour of a new approach called "look-say". Look-say paid little attention to the letters and their sounds, but rather taught the children to guess at words by their shape, context, initial letter or picture clues. Look-say used readers with a controlled vocabulary to give the children a reasonable chance to memorize the words. It persisted for about 25 years, but it never was a very satisfactory method since the number of words which a child can remember is limited, and even the most gifted memorizers eventually reached their limit. Of course, many children did discover how to sound out words on their own, but some did not. At the end of grade four, look-say children were expected to have memorized only about 1400 words, whereas the children who could sound out new words were able to read any word in their spoken vocabulary - about 40,000 words.

Because of general dissatisfaction with look-say, about 25 years ago it began to evolve into a new method. For a while, it was called "language experience", then "psycholinguistics", and then "Whole Language". Now, it is known as Balanced Literacy."

Still no Santa ...

"Looks like the early developers of mixed methods studied how adults actually read and developed their method for teaching children according to that"

Ther thing is, 'directly copying what an expert does' is not necessarily an effective way of learning to do something frtom scratch.

I was thinking about a parallel with ballet [which I know a little about due to DD]. A small child 'copying what a ballerina does' will not be able to become a ballerina via that method.

EITHER that child will have to break each thing the ballerina does into small steps - e.g. to realise that in order to stand on pointe, they will initially have to strengthen their feet through pointing exercises, through raising and lowering onto demi-pointe, through learning to stand on demi-pointe for longer and longer times, and then gradually on to pointe. They will also have to somehow work out the correct way of doing each of these things so as not to distort the feet, to achieve the correct foot and leg alignment etc.

This is essentially what mixed methods of reading do - they ask the child to 'copy an expert' and hope that along the way the child will intuit the correct processes that underlie what the expert does. About 80% will manage that (possibly less with 'pure' L&S, because at least most mixed methods do have an element of phonics teaching)

OR the child can be taught the underlying process of ballet directly, through a series of carefully-graded and standard exercises (all those French names for steps), so a dancer will arrive on pointe having all the underlying processes explicitly taught and secure.

That is more like synthetic phonics - making all the steps explicit and secure through direct teaching of them, even though in the end the end product will look exactly the same as the expert studied at the beginning... (via this method, 95% at least will end up becoming expert).

Just to add to teacherwith2kids post, research into how the brain works has revealed that developers of mixed methods were wrong about how adults actually read and, indeed, about how humans learn to read.

To get technical, we read new words using the parieto-temporal region of the brain to sound out and blend the word. After we have encountered the word a few times we build a neural model of it in the occipito-temporal region of the brain. This tells us how the word is pronounced, how it is spelled and what it means. It allows us to recognise the word automatically and instantly. The important point is that we cannot go straight to the occipito-temporal region with new words. We first have to build up the parieto-temporal region. If you watch a capable reader reading you will see lots of activity in the parieto-temporal region. Both regions are on the left side of the brain.

Poor readers use the visual centres on the right side of the brain, essentially treating the word as a picture. They have low levels of activity in the regions on the left side of the brain in contrast to good readers where those regions are dominant. Treating the word as a picture is the strategy mistakenly encouraged by mixed methods.

Most children manage to work out the phonic code for themselves which is why mixed methods work for around 80% of the population. The reason synthetic phonics has a higher success rate is that it actually does use the approach taken by adults reading.

Russell isn't L&S it's

Think & Guess

His seven point guessing manual explains it as such.

You can call the Tooth Fairy and Peppa Pig inventors of L&S too if you like. That doesn't make it true.

Column, why does it matter who invented look and say?

The point is, it doesn't work well as a method of teaching reading tyo a whole population. It will work for the 4 in 5 who can work backwards to the phonic code, it WON'T work for the other 1. That's not an acceptable failure rate when there uis another method that only fails 1 in 20 or fewer.

I'm trying to follow your logic here. I think that you are saying that 'pure' look and say - in which a learner memorises words that they can then recognise - is fine as a method of learning to read, whereas using other cues is not, and is what you call think and guess?

The problem is what happens when a reader encounters a word that they have not yet learned using look and say. Is your belief that the 'mixed method' that should follow next is the use of phonics? Or that they should use other cues e.g. pictures, the rest of the sentence? 'Pure' look and say doesn't work UNLESS the learner reader always has an expert to hand to do Look and Say with every new word encountered....

columngollum is right Dr Russell didn't invent Look & Say it already existed but you could also argue that Abbe Bertaud didn't invent L&S as in 1744 he invented a reading method called Quadrille ... and for the record Santa didn't invent it either

teacherwith2kids L&S actually works for less than half the population and even for the half who are able to memorise lists of words unless they work out phonics for themselves they won't be equipped to read a tabloid newspaper.