California has been experimenting with reading education lately. To simplify a bit, the state chose several dozen of its worst schools and introduced a phonics-based reading program in third grade. Here are the results:
The authors say that the gain from the program is equal to 0.14 standard deviations, which is about a quarter of a grade level. These are early results from a smallish set of schools, so it's not definitive. However, it's yet another bit of evidence that phonics works.
"Hooked on Phonics"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCKCeBxe0Tg
The right question isn’t “Does phonics work?” The pretty clear answer is, “Yes.” The better question is, “Does phonics work well for all or almost all students?” In my 41 year experience as an educator, I found that there were really no pedagogical methods that worked well for EVERY student, and that the wisest teachers worked to figure out what worked well for a given student and then employ that technique. There just isn’t a “one size fits all” method of teaching reading (or anything else…)
Plus100. My mother was a grade school teacher in schools in Ohio and California with lower economic level students and minorities. Her last few years teaching were in a junior high helping 7th and 8th graders reading at 3rd grade level to improve. Her opinion was the same as yours: different techniques work for different students, nothing is the perfect answer for everyone. As they say, "If phonics is so great, why do they spell it that way?"
(She also confessed that she didn't really "teach" most of the first graders to read. Most of them just absorbed it and acquired the skill when the material was presented, whether as look see or phonics or a mixture. The challenge was to identify and help the ones who didn't.)
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It seems like another important question is does phonics work better than what is being used in schools where teachers don't have the time or resources to customize their lesson plan for each student, which I imagine is usually the case in the school district where children are performing the worst and need the most improvement.
Phonics STILL Works in California Schools.
If California is "experimenting" with reading education, it's by abandoning methods that are not supported by sound research. The research supporing phonics instruction has been around for a very long time. "Why Johnny Can't Read—And What You Can Do About It is a 1955 book-length exposé on American reading education by Rudolf Flesch. It was an immediate bestseller for 37 weeks and became an educational cause célèbre.[1] In this book, the author concluded that the whole-word (look-say) method was ineffective because it lacked phonics training. " -- Wikipedia
Jeanne Chall's work supporting phonics instruction was well-established by the 1960s. https://www.gse.harvard.edu/hgse100/story/literacy-pioneer
That a bunch of charlatans and frauds took over reading instruction says more about how our education system selects curriculum than anything else.
yeah, i haven't paid much attention to it, but i was under the impression actual quality studies had proved pretty definitively phonics was the best method we've found to teach reading.
If you haven't done so, a great listen is Sold a Story. Covers this topic in depth https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
This makes me wonder how they teach reading in France, Germany, Denmark, etc, as well as reading English in Canada, UK, Australia, etc. Also, how U.S. reading skills compare to kids in other countries.
Interesting that this obvious question--how do they teach reading in other English speaking countries? or even in non-English-speaking countries using the same alphabet?--is never asked in news pieces about why many American students read below grade level. If a kid can't read very well, that impacts everything else schools try to teach them, not to mention their ability to do many tasks that employers might be willing to pay them to do. Add to that the human tendency for groups to adopt in-group dialects that are puzzling to outsiders, and it seems to be a hopeless task to standardize results on achievement tests.
Could it be that the real phenomenon we are watching unfold is the Fall of the American Empire? that decadence amidst our relatively widespread prosperity (apart from poor immigrants and people who are living on the streets) is channeling our society toward the drain?
I used to follow this closely when Bush pushed a phonics emphasis as President. Congress mandated a research program with the bill that provided funding. The evidence is always the same: when phonics is tested they put phonics based questions in the test which those not taught phonics do poorly on. But on other tests if they ask whether students were taught to break words into sounds, those who answer 'yes' invariably score lower than those who answer no. Trump is the perfect example of a phonics reader: he could read his daily briefing papers but could not understand what they said.
The problem is that we teach kids without phonics or sounding out words and instead teach them to look and see. To think about what words make sense next or to look at the pictures. A phonics reader still needs to do a lot of reading and practice reading comprehension to become better at that skill. It doesn't mean that you stop teaching children how to read actual words.
I often wonder if it’s that the new whatever(phonetics, diet, etc.) showed better results simply because people were more attentive.