Paul Alper writes:
While the national scene is all about woke, book banning and the like, apparently Columbia University is still dealing with the long-standing conundrum, the best method to teach kids how to read.
He’s referring to this news article, “Amid Reading Wars, Columbia Will Close a Star Professor’s Shop,” which begins:
Lucy Calkins ran a beloved — and criticized — center at Teachers College for four decades. It is being dissolved. . . .
Her curriculum had teachers conduct “mini-lessons” on reading strategies, but also gave students plenty of time for silent reading and freedom to choose their own books. Supporters say those methods empower children, but critics say they waste precious classroom minutes, and allow students to wallow in texts that are too easy.
Some of the practices she once favored, such as prompting children to guess at words using the first letter and context clues, like illustrations, have been discredited.
Over the past three years, several prominent school districts — including New York City, the nation’s largest — dropped her program, though it remains in wide use. . . .
Critics of her ideas, including some cognitive scientists and instructional experts, said her curriculum bypassed decades of settled research, often referred to as the science of reading. That body of research suggests that direct, carefully sequenced instruction in phonics, vocabulary building and comprehension is more effective for young readers than Dr. Calkins’s looser approach.
Alper writes:
This article did not at all mention anything about language specifics. I bring this up because my granddaughters are in a Minneapolis Spanish immersion primary school. Because Spanish is almost 100 per cent phonetic, and English is terrible in this regard, they spell and read better in Spanish than they do in English. The mechanics of learning to read back in my day, was simple and devoid of theory or disagreement. You kept at it until you got it right. The it was English only because no accommodation was made for special needs, immigrants or for the outside world in general.
I know some people at Teachers College but I’ve never encountered Prof. Calkins, nor have I ever looked at the literature on language teaching. So I got nothin’ on this one.
But I did reply that the above story isn’t half as bad as this one from a few years back, which I titled, “What’s the stupidest thing the NYC Department of Education and Columbia University Teachers College did in the past decade?” It involved someone who was found to be a liar, a cheat, and a thief, and then, with that all known, was hired to two jobs as school principal! And then a Teachers College professor said, “We felt that on balance, her recommendations were so glowing from everyone we talked to in the D.O.E. that it was something that we just were able to live with.” This came out in the news after the principal in question was found do have “forged answers on students’ state English exams in April because the students had not finished the tests.” Quelle surprise, no? A liar/cheat/thief gets a new job doing the same thing and then does more lying and cheating (maybe no stealing that time, though).
Alper responded:
You wrote that in 2015 which is about the same time as this story which made Fani Willis RICO famous:
Her most prominent case was her prosecution of the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal. Willis, an assistant district attorney at the time, served as lead prosecutor in the 2014 to 2015 trial of twelve educators accused of correcting answers entered by students to inflate the scores of state administered standardized tests.
SAT and all the others did not exist in my 1950 NYC school days, but I believe we did have the so-called Regents Exams and they are still around. It never crossed my mind that the scoring of those exams was not on the up and up. Was I being naive? Was there more honesty and/or less messing around back then and it was just not financially worth it?
Here’s my response:
1. This particular form of cheating sounds no more easy or difficult now than in the past.
2. In the past (i.e., somewhere between 1950 and 2015), tests were important students but not so much for schools. So, yeah, students may have been motivated to cheat, but teachers and school administrators did not have any motivation, either to help students cheat, or to massively cheat on their own. Nowadays, tests can be high stakes for the school administrators, and so, for some of them, cheating is worth the risk.
Andrew, there is a typo in your response. This sentence,
“In the past (i.e., somewhere between 1950 and 2015), tests were important students but not so much for schools.”
should read
“In the past (i.e., somewhere between 1950 and 2015), tests were important for students, but not so much for schools.”
Somewhat similar to the Teachers College story is this one, that had been reported on by friend of the pod Stephanie Lee (can’t remember if you’ve posted on this or not):
https://x.com/stephaniemlee/status/1770595454470017454?s=20
I find both of these stories disturbing, as they call into question some pretty fundamental tenets of “progressive” education reform that I have been pedagogically committed to for a long time. My sense is much of the criticism is warranted, but also that there are problems with some of the advocacy of the critics, e.g., the level of confidence placed in “settled research” into the “science of reading.”
Hard to know whether this is mostly just another iteration of the long time pattern where people can’t handle the uncertainties and vagaries and conditional probabilities of educational psychology and pedagogy, and so get locked into a pendulum of faddish, bitter zero sum struggles.
Unfortunately, the Jo Boaler controversy has become picked up and amplified by malignant grifters like Elon Musk and Bill Ackman. To the extent that the Boaler situation will lead to beneficial reform, the chances are significantly diminished when educational reform becomes weaponized in the culture wars..
“malignant grifters like Elon Musk and Bill Ackman. ”
I guess in this context “malignant grifters” = “extremely successful people who’s ability has been demonstrated in many fields many times over”
You’re risking some “gratuitous” references to “the left.”
forblogs –
When did ” “extremely successful people who’s ability has been demonstrated in many fields many times over” become criteria to use for evaluating insight into education? Perhaps we should enlist Donald Trump, Steve Ballmer, and the ghost of Bernie Madoff to formulate a commission to design our math instruction curriculum?
> You’re risking some “gratuitous” references to “the left.”
Go for it. Feel free to list all the grifters on the left who are weighing in on math instruction. There’s no reason the list should be limited by political ideology.
Re Musk and Ackman: “It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a man worth hearing; but as a rule they don’t know anything outside their own business.” — Teddy Roosevelt
A grifter is someone trying to get money. These people are already rich and appear to be spending money to obtain things they value more.
Wonks –
I meant grifter in the sense of narrative surfing, and shallow exploitation of complex issues (for a variety of reasons) but fine, I’ll retract “grifter” as I think it’s true they aren’t doing this for the money.
As for your other comments.
I wasn’t suggesting that the pervasive resistence is an indication of merit. I’m not arguing as to whether the “drill and kill” approach to phonics is “worse.”
I’m pretty convinced that a more phonics-centered approach (than what had been the norm for a long time) makes sense and that the pervasive resistence to it is counterproductive. But I’m saying it’s a complicated landscape that has very familiar patterns, one of which is a mutual lack of respect between theoriticians and practitioners, respectively. I think part of the problem is the inherent difficulty of evaluating empirical evidence in education, and a long history of people being overly-confidence in interpreting that evidence.
Joshua:
Yes, we discussed that case last year in response to an earlier article by Lee. Here’s what I wrote at the time:
Andrew:
Your points are good ones but a couple of things are missing:
1) people often claim their education didn’t teach them one thing or another when in fact it did, they just don’t remember being taught that thing.
2) unfortunately students sometimes struggle to understand the material, even if it’s being taught well so students may misapprehend that they are being “mistaught” when in fact it’s just their own difficulties with the material that they experienced. This is one way that student evaluations, while having some benifits, could go off the rails, since students don’t have the experience to judge whether they are being taught well or not, and it’s not clear exactly what they are in a position to judge well.
3) the benefits and efficacy of educational interventions that have been thoroughly tested formally are often wildly overstated. So, while your points about the difficulties of formal testing are sound, when an intervention actually that has been formally tested yields barely any dectectable benefit, researchers often flog the living shit out of it like it’s the second coming of Christ. IOW: education researchers routinely and dramatically overstate their results
4) with respect to your (3), why not just say it straight: education interventions depend strongly on the motivation and ability of the student. A poor student can be still perform poorly even with the best interventions, and a good student can still succeeed even under the worst conditions.
I suggest this book: “Out of the Gobi” by Weijian Shan. Useful, even if it is real.
Yes, that’s a good description. The ubiquity of high levels of certainty based on personal experience, combined with the difficulty of acquiring quality empirical evidence, is an unfortunate mix.
Joshua:
Andrew is mistaken. There is no shorage of “quality” emperical evidence. There is a shorage of people in education research with the brain power to comprehend the difference between “quality” and “gabage”.
But we can thank Andrews’ and your relentless campaigning for heart warming education for the decline quality of academic research and researchers.
Forblogs:
Your point #1 is consistent with my point #1. In my point #1, I say that we all have memories of particular ways their education was bad, and so it is easy to believe claims of huge effects.
Your point #2: Yes, and this is related to the difficulty of measurement more generally. We don’t always have standardized tests to use as outcomes and, even when we do, these tests are not perfect.
Your point #3: Yes, and this also relates to the statistical significance filter and type M errors: When people study small effects with noisy studies and publish statistically significant comparisons, this leads to wild overestimates. I should’ve put this one in my list; it’s just a point I’ve made so many times that I guess I forgot about it when writing that earlier post.
Your point #3 relates to my point #4, in that one of the goals of educational interventions is to increase motivations, and also relates to my point #3, in that motivation and ability are key aspects of what I referred to there as “context.”
This was helpful to have the opportunity to clarify.
Yes, forblogs2mm.st’s points are valid. But I have to point out the tone – it sounds just like any teacher lamenting the poor performance of their students to blame the victims. If it were only that easy. Believe me, I’ve had plenty of students who lacked motivation and/or talent and I don’t take responsibility for their shortcomings. But neither do I let myself off the hook by attributing all their difficulties to them and none to myself. I’ve seen plenty of horrible teachers use that tactic to excuse the fact that they were doing a poor job.
forblogs –
> 2) unfortunately students sometimes struggle to understand the material, even if it’s being taught well so students may misapprehend that they are being “mistaught” when in fact it’s just their own difficulties with the material that they experienced.
So the operation was a success. but the patient died.
I think the goal of education should be help all students achieve their potential. Obviously, students will have differing proclivity to master material entering into a course of instruction. The growth or lack thereof of each students is necessarily going to be a function of input of both the student and the teacher. And as such, the ability of teachers to help unlock students’ motivation is also a combined project. But I don’t think the point here is to judge pedagogy or instructional methodology only, or even primarily, based on whether students correctly apprehend whether they were taught properly.
> This is one way that student evaluations, while having some benifits, could go off the rails, since students don’t have the experience to judge whether they are being taught well or not, and it’s not clear exactly what they are in a position to judge well.
Agreed. One thing that always bugs me about feedback from student evaluations is that (when I couldn’t devise a means to get around it) evaluations are designed to be anonymous – because of a perceived need to enable students to feel a protection against potential retaliation from teachers in response to poor evaluations. But for me, understanding which student wrote what is critical for understanding the feedback. For example, if a students who is generally unmotivated to study certain material complains that a course is boring or too hard, that’s quite different than if the same feedback comes from a highly motivated student.
chipmunk –
> There is no shorage of “quality” emperical evidence.
Ok. If you say so, chipmunk. Surely controlling for all the potential confounders in empirical educational research is just a piece of cake for someone like you.
> But we can thank Andrews’ and your relentless campaigning for heart warming education for the decline quality of academic research and researchers.
I don’t know about Andrew, but certainly I am personally responsible for any shortcomings in American educational outcomes. Oh, and Korea and Taiwan as well, as I’ve taught in those countries as well.
BTW, just wanted to let you know I had you specifically in mind when I talked about people who are overly confident about the empirical evidence in education, based on their own personal experiences, despite a lack of quality empirical evidence. I’m glad that you didn’t disappoint.
Because of the time lag of this blog, I wrote this before the subsequent criticism of Fani Willis’s investigation of election interference in Georgia came to light. While it is good to be ahead of your time, too much ahead can be embarrassing.
When I read about the current push for pure phonics to teach reading I can’t help but think back to when my two kids taught themselves to read. My daughter announced one night that she just realized there was a code that attached sounds to letters. My son memorized the word/picture combinations in Richard Scarry.
The University of Cars and Trucks and Things that Go!
I think there are multiple ways people learn to read. A colleague who studied (human) perception felt there are also multiple pathways through which we ‘learn’ to see, i.e., recognize things. The successes of neural nets suggest we learn via several pathways, ‘subjectively shmushed’. (An expression used by H. Kyburg, Jr.)
Ooh, there’s so much going on here.
The principal of the Teachers College Community School who admitted altering students’ tests committed suicide. TCCS is a New York City traditional public school; it was created as part of the Community Benefits Agreement that Columbia negotiated with West Harlem to facilitate Columbia’s expansion into that neighborhood. The TC administrator who was the liaison, and who you quoted back then, had a courtesy faculty appointment.
I’ve written about the Atlanta cheating scandal as an incident of organizational misconduct: https://hechingerreport.org/why-organizational-misconduct-happens-a-look-at-the-atlanta-cheating-scandal/. This is different from many other forms of cheating.
As for Lucy Calkins and Jo Boaler, I wish that they would permit randomized controlled trials of their initiatives. Lucy contracted with AIR for a quasi-experimental evaluation which found cumulative positive effects on English Language Arts test scores in New York City and Georgia: https://www.air.org/project/evaluation-teachers-college-reading-and-writing-project-tcrwp-approach. And I have argued that if Lucy Calkins’ approach to reading has really doomed a generation of US schoolchildren, why isn’t there evidence of other programs kicking its butt? American kids are poor readers whether exposed to the Lucy Calkins approach or otherwise.
Aaron P. suggested this interesting link to the Atlanta cheating scandal:
https://hechingerreport.org/why-organizational-misconduct-happens-a-look-at-the-atlanta-cheating-scandal/
This informative site unfortunately, ends abruptly by indicating that the reader
“Read the full post at Aaron Pallas’ blog”
Unfortunately, that instruction get you to a wildly inappropriate website–try it to see what I mean. The following lengthy website
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/2/13/atlanta_school_cheating_scandal_the_untold
explains in great detail an entirely different picture of this cheating scandal in Atlanta. Although Willis was the prosecutor, surprisingly, she is not mentioned in the link.
Sorry that the link went to a site that is no longer maintained by Hechinger. It’s had a few inappropriate hosts. This link should work: https://nepc.colorado.edu/blog/why-organizational-misconduct-happens-look-atlanta-cheating-scandal-0
If anyone wants to learn more about the whole thing about teaching reading with Lucy Calkins, American Public Media made a great podcast called “Sold a Story” that covers this topic: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
I listened to a few episodes of the podcast. May listen to a few more, but I thought it was a bit one-sided. This article, I thought, covers much of the same material but is, IMO, a bit more even-handed:
https://www.vox.com/23815311/science-of-reading-movement-literacy-learning-loss
it’s amazing that such timely posts appear on a random schedule!
“direct, carefully sequenced instruction in…” chemical and mathematical fundamentals is “more effective for young” chemists and scientists in other disciplines than heartwarming grade school experiments….
who knew?
Chipmunk:
It’s not a random schedule. I write the post and then put it at the end of the queue. OK, not always. Sometimes there’s something topical, other times things get rearranged . . . OK, I guess it’s kind of random!
The best method to teach kids how to read has not been a conundrum among those who actually research these issues for decades now. It’s only among educators immersed in misonceptions (and overblowing the role of “experience” and personal anecdotes over decades of painstaking research). I know nothing about Ms. Lucy Calkins, but if the news snippet posted here is accurate, then I would say that the decision to dismantle this program was probably entirely appropriate, and possibly not a moment too soon. Encouraging children to guess is precisely what teachers should *not* be doing when teaching beginner reading; the reasons are found in every introductory textbook on reading development and reading instruction written by an actual reading researcher (not “some cognitive scientists” but probably all of them who know anything about reading research). Plenty of time for silent reading and freedom to choose books sound like very reasonable things to do, or at least I would have thought so myself, but it turns out it does not work (reasons not yet fully clear, but so are aspects of gravity and evolution, which are vastly better established). In this field, when we say that something “does not work”, we mean it does not help those who aren’t making it on their own with standard instruction. Although everyone requires some form and amount of instruction (you can’t divine reading skills, if only because someone needs to teach you at least some of the letters), the actual amount that is required varies enormously. Most children require explicit, intensive, and persistent teaching of phonics, in the context of vocabulary and text processing strategies aiming at comprehension, to become functional and effective readers. Some manage with very little, some struggle even after a lot. Most would probably do OK with most teaching methods (even if encouraged to guess), but the question is, what proportion of children are functional readers after a couple of years with a given method, how many fail, and how far back are those how struggle? Most personal anecdotes concern the majority of children who would do OK anyway. Research concerns everyone and puts greater weight on the trouble side, and that’s where the clear pronouncements of “the science of reading” come from. It’s not enough to be a delightful human being and a dedicated teacher who loves children and is adored by one’s pupils and their parents. You also need to know how to teach reading so that (almost) all kids will actually learn to read.
There are tons of books, blogs, and articles on this, but there is also substantial noise from experienced educators (with the wrong kind of experience) as well as commercial actors profiting from the sales of educational programs (many of which do not work). This is primarily an issue in English-speaking countries, due in part to the very messy orthography; in most other parts of the world it has long been obvious how best to do this. Europe (except the UK) largely speaking has no such issues.
Here is an article by actual experts:
https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100618772271
Here are a couple of informative blogs by people who know what they are talking about:
https://pamelasnow.blogspot.com/
https://seidenbergreading.net/
And here is a repository of evaluations of educational methods and programs:
https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/
(I hope the links make it through)
Athanossios –
I think that part of what’s going on, and which seems to me relatively little discussed (by some advocates of a phonics-based approach), is how a phonics instruction can potentially be dry and have a demotivating effect. It wouldn’t have to if skillfully implemented, and so that’s not a reason to notemploy a phonics-based approach. But it’s a relevant issue if you’re talking about bridging the distance between “the science of reading” and the art of employing the science of reading. And I think that’s where the anecdotal experience of teachers comes into play more than you seem to consider important (or at least that seems apparent in your comment). Again, that’s not to diminish the extent to which resistance to change, based largely in anecdotal experience and on a kind of inertia created by experience, have a detrimental impact in reading instruction.
For me, this goes back to the difficulty of applying empirical analysis to classroom practice. Teaching necessarily requires an interplay between theory and practice. I think there’s some validity to an inherent skepticism among practitioners about ideas such as “the science of reading” (particularly when it’s based on “brain science”). It’s unfortunate that such skepticism can manifest as an unwillingness to change. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to just dismiss a long history where claims about empirical evidence in education have been over-confident, at least with respect to crossing the bridge between theory and practice if not necessarily with respect to theory in and of itself.
BTW –
Thanks for those links. Only looked at the first one so far but it looks like a very valuable resource.
These sound like the kinds of “objections” uninformed teachers like to raise, and I’m afraid they hold no water at all. The extent to which phonics-based approaches might be demotivating if monolithically applied has been quite extensively discussed because it has long been a well-worn worry (and possibly a justified one at some point in the distant past when overeager instructors might have endlessly drilled kids out of context). Some of the people objecting to the science of reading seem to think that reading researchers are retarded monkeys locked up in their academic monasteries having no contact with classroom practice or with the crucial importance of motivation; or that they have some objective other than kids learning to read. There are literally decades of research, with hundreds if not thousands of studies both in labs and in classrooms. It is astounding that there is still pushback from educators (primarily in the US and UK) to something that has been so clear for so long. “Brain science” has nothing to do with it, by the way. It’s mostly good old educational psychology and cognitive psychology, and it goes way back, before “brain science” was a thing. Please take a look at the article I recommended, it is meant to be read by people outside the field and it will probably answer all your questions; it was written precisely for this purpose.
Thanassi
Thanassi –
You say:
It is astounding that there is still pushback from educators
Perhaps if you encounter something that’s pretty pervasive, and has existed over time, and you still find it “astounding,” then you might consider re-evaluating your approach. An approach that can come across as condescending and disdainful might be lacking in perspective taking, or what I call cognitive empathy.
There has been a pretty long trend of phonics instruction (at least in the US) often taking the form of “drill and kill” – essentially decontextualized, rote exercises. There’s an institutional and experiential memory of phonics-based instruction taking that form. That “memory” exists for a reason, it’s not just something that exists with no context. Attempts to course correct will necessarily encounter those memories, whether you like it or not. I’d suggest that the tone of what you’ve written suggests a problematic approach that certainly won’t be optimal at overcoming a perfectly understandable, if not necessarily justifiable, reflexive resistance. Ironically, it doesn’t seem totally dissimilar to the ivory tower attitude that you are saying shouldn’t apply.
You note that the “astounding” pushback is primarily in the US an the UK. Surely, through your familiarity with decades of research in classrooms, you’re aware of the larger context in the US of culture wars around rote instruction in opposition to experiential learning. You’re certainly aware of the political overlaps, as well as the pressures on teachers to manage classrooms of children with a large reservoir of unmet emotional and educational needs. Surely you’re aware of how relative to many other countries like I’d imagine Sweden, teachers are often underpaid, disrespected, and asked to perform an often thankless job where success is often times marginal in the best of conditions.
Again, I think that your being “astounded” is probably a window for you to dig deeper into understanding how the resistance you’re describing may not simply be irrational and unexplainable, but a fairly understandable phenomenon given the context. Again, that’s not to offer a defense, per se, but to indicate that IMO, at least, this dynamic fits with a long-standing, larger pattern of mutual “astonishment” between theoreticians and practitioners, who similarly can only attribute the behavior of their “others” to irrationality or other deficient attributes.
You say something like this “Brain science” has nothing to do with it,
When obviously “brain science” is absolutely part of the rhetorical context in which this dynamic plays out. For example, a simple Google turns this up as the 2nd hit:
https://www.nctq.org/blog/Teaching-reading-is-brain-science
I get your point, that there’s pedagogy here that stands apart from claims about brain science, but I’ll stress yet again that you have to deal with the context as it exists, not as you think it should be.
Opposition to vaccines has existed for a long time. One could call it “pervasive”. That’s not evidence that there’s any merit to it.
@Joshua, sorry, but all that is in my opinion irrelevant. No matter how overworked or underpaid one is (no arguments there), they will do something to teach reading. One can choose to do something that works or something that does not. One can choose to listen to sound research or fuzzy experience and cunning marketing. They’ll still be overworked and underpaid, but in the end fewer vs. more of their pupils will be functional readers. Regardless of all the other political fights you might have willingly joined or inadvertently been pulled into.
In my opinion, the “brain science” take is mostly BS from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective — and I can say that as no stranger to such studies. The neuroimaging findings do not demonstrate what people want them to demonstrate; they are mostly irrelevant to the core issues. Fortunately, the core issues have been resolved by relevant sound educational and cognitive research. I guess it is in vogue to refer to the brain as a way of attracting attention or causing amazement. However, the amazement is entirely unjustified: Literally everything a teacher does alters the kids’ brains, necessarily, unless the kids are in a coma (or asleep). Even just remembering that one was in the classroom today requires some sort of trace in the brain to support the memory; let alone anything that involves concerted effort and repeated practice.
I think that you are nevertheless correct in that policy has to deal with the problem in its actual context, and in that sense I agree that you raise relevant concerns with respect to implementation. So it seems to me that this is what is actually happening now, across several states: Someone is finally getting a grip and indeed doing something about it, by revamping literacy instruction requirements and criteria, closing down ineffective practices run by stubborn (however adorable) practicioners, and in general forcing (gently or less gently) a long-needed reform. It would have been better if teachers would just have listened to science and given it a chance (for the results are not difficult to see); but in the end someone has to actually care about the kids instead of politics, ideology, and their earlier personal or collective emotional trauma or whatever. In ten years everyone will wonder why they didn’t do it sooner.
In this context, lamenting the dissolution of centers applying curricula that teach children to guess rather than decode is, in my opinion, and to put it mildly, counterproductive.
Thanassi
PS. Although very highly problematic and not recommended by anyone I know of, when it comes to actual reading outcomes, “drill and kill” phonics would still be superior to guessing (or three-cueing or whatever) and silently pretending to read. If one could manage the motivational nightmare of actually running a “drill and kill” classroom. Going way overboard in one direction does not mean it was a bad direction to begin with; it is just another piece of evidence consistent with the idea that many teachers are not really good judges of these things and can perhaps be more easily swayed by ideas and emotions more than by science and evidence. The way I see it, the “drill and kill” situation actually reinforces the argument that responsible knowledgeable agents should impose effective curricula rather than leaving it to the practitioners.
Thanassi –
Thanks for the response but I we’re mostly retreading the same ground.
I am not defending reflexive resistance to change. I’m just saying it’s totally normal human behavior, especially when the reasons for it are fairly obvious and actually based on important issues. It should be entirely anticipated, and just dismissing it as “astonishing” seems reflective of an approach not only lacking in insight, I think it’s also just bound to be ineffective; it’s likely a limiting factor for developing a successful response strategy.
IOW, yes, one can choose to listen to research that would challenge your existing paradigm. Nothing I’ve said should be taken to suggest otherwise.
I mostly agree with you about the “brain science” aspect – particularly the problems with the imaging component. I was just pointing, once again, to one of the relevant factors: a less than effective use of “brain science” to support other questionable reform movements.
I don’t really disagree with you about what it would have been better if teachers had done specific things differently. You’re creating a false binary if you think that’s what I was saying. As you do when you say it would be better if teachers cared about the students rather than being concerned with politics. That’s just a bad faith construction and with such a bad faith approach you’re not likely to achieve optimal results, IMO. Same with your condescending comments about “emotional trauma.”
Doesn’t seem like we’re going to get anywhere here but thanks for the engagement.
Likewise, thanks for the engagement.
I am well aware that my personality/attitude is not well suited to politics or policy implementation. I will stick to what I think I do not suck at. :-)
Is there any evidence that a “dry” approach gets worse results?
“2. In the past (i.e., somewhere between 1950 and 2015), tests were important students but not so much for schools.”
My daughter is a middle school teacher, and that is exactly her problem with the standardized testing in this state. It takes up days in the spring, BUT the results don’t come out until the following fall — meaning there’s no opportunity for teachable moments FOR THE STUDENT at the time they might be effective.
The tests are almost all multiple choice and scanned, so if there was motivation those parts could be returned in a few days.
Can’t we all just admit that English spelling is a mess in terms of being able to infer pronunciation from spelling and admit this causes additional problems for kids learning to speak English? In addition to the irony, it’s really a shame English took over as the lingua franca (not for me as a native English speaker, but for the sake of the billions of people who haven’t learned English yet but will try soon).
Obviously it’s going to be easier to teach phonics in a language like Spanish, where the spelling is very predictable from pronunciation and vice-versa. And phonics simply won’t work in a language like Chinese. Japanese has three writing systems, hiragana, katakana, and kanji, the first two of which are syllable-based and phonetic and the last of which is essentially imported Chinese characters.
As Eric Neufeld said above, it’s important to realize that learners are not homogeneous in terms of learning style, current ability, or motivation, stable home life, etc. The heterogeneity of a population is a common thread on this blog!
And don’t forget romaji– Japanese written in the Latin alphabet! I’m not sure how closely romaji letters match the phonetic values of spoken Japanese. Romaji does use more diacritic marks than English does.
You called???
There are two main romaji systems: Hepburn, which has one glitch, sort of works, and works well if you understand the one glitch, and Kunreishiki which has two glitches (and thus doesn’t work) and is preferred by the Japanese themselves.
“Diacritic marks”. Japanese is a syllabic langauge where each syllable (well, mora) gets one unit of time. And most syllables consist of vowel by itself or a constant plus one of five vowels. So the “n” syllables are na, ni, nu, ne, no.
But there are a couple of things that get that unit of time but aren’t really syllables. One of those is “syllabic n”. So the word for woman is “onna”, which is THREE syllables: o n na. (This syllabic n bloke has 17 pronunciations (really!) depending on the surrounding context, and these pronunciation variations follow phonetic rules common to all human languages: they’re due to the physics of the human vocal tract (see, linguists aren’t idiots). For example, onna is actually pronounced omna with the mouth closed during the m.)
But, as you should have guessed by now, said syllabic n can get confused for an N syllable. E.g. ta n i tsu (4 mora) is different from ta ni tsu (3 mora). But scrunch then together to make them one word and they look the same. Oops. So romanizations put in a single quote mark to indicate that the previous bloke was syllabic n. Thus tan’itsu is ta n i tsu and tanitsu is ta ni tsu.
That’s a shared infelicity between Hepburn and Kunreishiki. But. The Japanese think of their language as having “50 sounds”: five vowels times (no consonant plus one of nine initial consonants). This mostly works, except that there are two “n” lines (one with the naninuneno guys and one with syllabic n all by itself), the Y line only has three entries (the other two were used in pre-1868 Japanese), and the T line entry consonats are irregular: ta chi tsu te to. And some of the lines can be voiced and some can be plosive-ified (ha vs. pa).
But since the Japanese think of the T line as a thing, Kunreishiki spells them ta ti tu te to. Doing it that way makes life waaaaaaaaaaaaaay easier for the Japanese themselves, but means that unless you know this detail, you can’t get anywhere near a pronunciation understandable by a native speaker when you ask directions based on a Kunreishiki romanized place name. Oops.
David in Tokyo–
Thanks for the above and below explications of Japanese writing and pronunciation!
David in Tokyo–
Re diacritics: I recall seeing macrons on highway signs in romaji, and just checking now, I see that in romaji, Tokyo has macrons on both “o”s.
“Tokyo has macrons on both “o”s.”
Yep. Tokyo is four mora: to o kyo o. In Japanese “long vowels” really are long: they take two mora.
If you’re the sort that reads this blog, you’ve already thought to yourself “long vs. short, that means there are FOUR words there”. Yep, in principle there are (although in this case, the other options are rare or unused) and the Japanese hear (and make) the long/short distinction in speach just fine, thank you.
Speaking of combinatorics, I thought up a “game” to torture Japanese learners: it would put up a word written in kanji and ask you to select the correct pronunciation from four or five options, only one being correct. That would require doing some string distance combinatorics programming to find real word pronunciations “close” to the correct one. The long or short bit would be the easiest one. There’s also the voiced/unvoiced and plosive/non-plosive, but all of these only occur on some words, so a general algorithm would also be needed…
To get back on topic, Japanese is written in Japanese, thank you. The two, 50-character phonetic alphabets are somewhat kludegey, but don’t have any irregular exceptions: once you learn how they work, everything’s phonetic.
Except that some time in pre-history, before the Japanese had figured out writing, they met the Chinese. And were completely knocked out by the Chinese writing system (Kanji), and adopted it whole-hog. They really really really love them kanji: all 6,000 or so of them. (OK, there are only 2,000 that you are officially supposed to use. Except for the extra ones in names. And everyone has their favorites among the extra 4,000 or so that you have to know to pass the top level of the “Kanji Kentei” test (which is a real thing. Really. It is.)
Oh, yes. Each kanji in Japanese has at least two, and often three or more, different pronunciations (depending on context; this is a loooooooooooong story). And all said pronunciations are used and on the test.
In real life, linguists report that actual real people who speak and read Chinese or Japanese know about 1,500 kanji. Which is still a lot.
So you’d think illiteracy would be a worse problem in China/Taiwan/Japan than the US/England. But, for native speakers anyway, literacy is as high or higher in these countries than anywhere else. Go figure.
(Japan currently has a literacy problem, since they are importing large numbers foreign workers to avoid having to increase the minimum wage or fix the regressive aspects of the tax system that make returning to the labor force uninteresting for married women. Japanese is a fun second language if you find it interesting, not so much if you have other things to do with your life.)
Interestingly, there is a shared problem. My (SO’s) nieces and nephews (one of said SO’s sisters also married an American) went to school in a Chicago suburb, and would come by some summers. They brought their grade-appropriate required summer reading with them. So I checked it out. It was horrifically bad. If you want to raise kids who hate reading, this slish has got to be the best way to do it.
A couple of months a go, I gave the Kokugo (national language) section of the Tokyo public high school entrance exams a shot (I could read the questions just fine), and found that the reading examples were the same horrific garbage as Chicago schools inflict on their students.
The problem, basically, is that real literature worth reading is about real people with their real problems and real agonies and how they think about deal with those problems and agonies. The school readings are stories in which the characters who appear act and think the way conservative beaurcrats think children should act and think.
I admit that English spelling is a mess. A enjoyable illustration of that mess is this book “P is for Pterodactyl.” https://www.amazon.com/s?=p+is+for+pterodactyl
This excellent new meme best describes the critics of Musk: https://x.com/johncoogan/status/1771569499952554035?s=20
Eklavya:
Yeah, the businessman-as-hero thing is about as annoying as the scientist-as-hero thing. It’s frustrating.
I think the rise of academic cheating scandals (especially in high schools/college) is simply due to the use of technology in doing school work. Many students have online exams for class, some with a lockdown browser and some without, and either way some students will cheat. On top of that, the fact that I can take a picture of a complex math problem and it will show me how to solve it. Sometimes these apps have premium versions to get full access and to me that just shows how popular it is: even budgeting college students see it as a solid investment. I take hand written notes in class because I know that if I were to use my laptop, the last thing I would do is open up a Word doc.