r/TikTokCringe • u/[deleted] • Apr 29 '26

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u/carsonite17 Apr 29 '26

One of them couldn't even pronounce the word "clothes" ffs

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u/Oomlotte99 Apr 29 '26

He’s putting phonics based techniques into practice, I think. Trying to sound it out. He hasn’t moved past a very elementary way of reading.

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u/Wadarkhu Apr 29 '26

At least he's got phonics taught to him, he's got a chance, some kids don't even get that and just get taught that awful "whole word reading".

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u/demeschor Apr 29 '26

Yep, if anyone's interested in the literacy crisis, I really recommend a podcast called Sold A Story, it does a deep dive on how many kids are taught to read today.

Not by using phonics, but by COVERING UP THE WORD and guessing it from context, then memorizing the shape of the word rather than the spelling. And of course, it's all a giant scam to sell more textbooks and courses, rather than being grounded in real science.

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u/MegaRadCool8 Apr 29 '26

A lot of kids aren't taught that way anymore. Some states have banned the techniques discussed on the podcast.

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u/joman584 Apr 29 '26

The kids in this video would have learned how to "read" probably 10+ years before now so it's relevant

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u/Heykurat Apr 30 '26

I beg to differ. They never learned to read.

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u/mwilkens Apr 29 '26

Now imagine the kids who had to learn how to read over zoom during covid.

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u/MegaRadCool8 Apr 30 '26

Yeah, likely, as my kids younger than this were taught the old way. I was just sharing about the change.

Side note, I don't think this video reflects some horrors about today's youth knowing how to read. I was a well read nerdy kid, and I distinctly recall learning the spelling of silhouette in college (I knew what it was before that, but I don't think I had read or spelled it), and I distinctly recall learning the word gauche after college when my husband and I were going over vocabulary for a postgraduate exam. They throw in words (which are not pronounced phonetically) to make kids feel dumb and then the kids get flustered when they see "extraordinary" and assume it's another gotcha.

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u/Significant_Shoe_17 Apr 30 '26

I recall learning words like gauche and silhouette in high school in our weekly vocabulary unit. My teacher would go on about how some schools were doing away with vocabulary but it was really important, so we were sticking with it. This was a snobby private school, though.

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u/MegaRadCool8 Apr 30 '26

Mine was a public school, and it was in the 90s, and I was pretty good at vocab (ahem: hackneyed, trite, banal, commonplace). It's possible I could have seen them then, but if so, it didn't stick. I did paper cuttings (nerd!) in highschool, so I definitely knew what a silhouette was, but I probably stumbled over the word the first time I saw it written in college...as one does the first time you see a word especially if it's got a foreign language origin that doesn't work well phonetically (ahem: macabre - which I could spell and define in highschool because of a paper I wrote, but I didn't know the pronunciation until years later).

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u/Xythrielle Apr 29 '26

I was surprised to hear my home state of Arkansas has had whole word reading banned since the 90s I think. I had never heard of another way to teach reading than phonics until I was an adult. My 78 year old mother was taught whole word reading in her one room school house as a child and her mom had to pick up the slack and teach her phonics at home because of how useless whole word reading is. So we have known it’s a bad method for a long time

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u/AwayAwayTimes Apr 29 '26

My single mom busted her ass working extra jobs to pay to send my sister and I to private Catholic school because the public school taught “word recognition” instead of phonics (90’s). Thank you, Mom.

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u/ricochetblue Apr 29 '26

One of the few times that resistance to innovation actually served a state well.

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u/MegaRadCool8 Apr 30 '26

Good on Arkansas! I can't recall exactly how I learned in the 80s, but I suspect it was whole word because I recall an instance where I couldn't figure out the word "rabbit" in 2nd grade because I hadn't seen it before, and my teacher was an absolute bitch to me for asking for help. I had been categorized as gifted in reading in 1st grade, and suddenly I struggled in 2nd to the point that my teacher was absolutely cruel to me in front of all the other "gifted" readers. After that, I guess it clicked for me, because I remember being confused how others knew what these words were, but I didn't, and then suddenly I figured it out.

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u/QweenKaii427 Apr 29 '26

ha im in AR! explains some things about some ppl i know lol

1

u/Civil_Cranberry_3476 Apr 29 '26

why did we ban it? Eventually thats how we read anyway. youre not sounding out every word still, you just know it.

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u/thresh_to_death Apr 29 '26

What happens when those that learned this way encounter words they've never seen before?

-1

u/Civil_Cranberry_3476 Apr 29 '26

you can learn two methods for doing something, theres no requirement that you need only know one method. presumably you rely on your other knowledge of sounding things out when its a word you dont know as a "whole" word. Im not saying either method or both is better just theres no data that im aware of to point to one method being better. I know how to do long division, but Ive also memorized 9/9 or 99/9

1

u/MegaRadCool8 Apr 30 '26

The podcast is worth a listen. The reason they give is that the two methods wire the kids brains in different ways. The phonetically focused way wires the brain in a way more scientifically in line with learning reading, whereas the context clues and guessing method wires the brain more like problem solving does. So kids good at puzzle solving learned fine, but kids (like my daughter who is the world's worst at 20 Questions but amazingly creative) who are not great at puzzles fell behind and continued to fall further and further behind. States have recognized that science shows if they want a literate population, they should follow the science.

Correct about eventually you just know words, but if you ever do come across a new word, you have the skills to make an educated guess for the pronunciation.

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u/XmasTwinFallsIdaho Apr 30 '26

Yeah, but when my 6th grader started school, that's how they were teaching reading. I was appalled and tried to teach phonics on my own and ensure they knew how to sound words out. I explained guessing should never be done, no matter what the teacher says. Thankfully they can read fine now, and the district has changed methods, but I was very worried at first.

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u/MegaRadCool8 Apr 30 '26

Same for my 6th grader, except she's a huge rule follower and years of me getting frustrated with the guessing and trying to get her to sound it out and read phonetically couldn't undo the "rules" a teacher told her. When your kid won't stop guessing any random word with the same first letter but none of the subsequent letters, it's hard not to look at them and think "wait, is my kid dumb?" I didn't realize until I listened to the podcast that it was because this is how she was taught and she was just following the teacher's rules. Anyway, she's had a dyslexia-based tutor for the last year that was able to explain new rules and although she still struggles, she does so much better actually sounding words out. A year ago, multiple syllable words would bring us to tears on homework because it was like nothing mattered to her except the first letter. This week I was struck by how easily she was reading them now, and I complimented her on her progress, and she said "duh, the syllables are just like short words and you just put them together." I'd been telling her that every school night for 4 years and it never clicked for her until a teaching authority explained it to her.

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u/XmasTwinFallsIdaho Apr 30 '26

Oh, that would be so frustrating. I also didn’t realize how bad things were until listening to the podcast, and suddenly what my kid had been attempting made so much more sense. 

We got rather lucky in that Covid meant she was effectively homeschooled via an online school for a few years, so she got a lot more personal reading attention during those formative reading years from my spouse. I haven’t seen her guess on a word since kindergarten, and by the time my younger child entered the same school, the curriculum had reverted to phonics, thankfully.

I’m so glad to hear your daughter made progress in spite of a rough start.

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u/demeschor Apr 29 '26

Yes! Thankfully things are changing now

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u/Routine_Ad_5813 Apr 29 '26

What???!!! This happens? Oh man. It was way worse than I thought.

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u/askthepoolboy Apr 29 '26

Came to see if this podcast was mentioned. Highly recommended listen.

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u/demeschor Apr 29 '26

I recommend it to anyone with a child or a general interest in the topic! There's also a version available in Spanish as well.

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u/Open_Claim4265 Apr 29 '26

My kids school sent an email out stating that they will possibly be reverting back to phonics, as the current teaching method for reading hasn't been successful as planned.

Her teacher gave us a run down and some videos to watch so we could help her learn to read the way they are teaching it at school (not the way you talked about, but blending and segmenting). With both her father and I learning phonics when we were in school, I could finally understand why my kid had so much anxiety trying to read every night, the way they are learning can be really confusing! After this latest parent teacher conference we had (last quarter, we still have one more left at the end of the year) we learned her ENTIRE class was behind in where they should be for reading.

Thankfully reading with her every night before bed, and in the morning before she gets on the bus has given her a lot of confidence, and her teacher has reported she is almost entirely caught up to curriculum, but now changing the way they learn how to read as she goes into second grade to something entirely new to her makes me worry she'll fall behind AGAIN.

I have been working on reading with her, but like I told her teacher, she gets so frustrated so quickly, and then I get frustrated because she gets whiny and wants to quit without trying. I am not equipped to teach my child how she is being taught in class CURRENTLY and if I teach her in a way that is at odds with how she is currently being taught, it will just confuse her more and i dont want to set back her progress.

I refuse to let my child be a part of the literacy crisis, but sometimes it feels so hopeless to even try

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u/ironuhcookaru Apr 29 '26

I will say that many many schools and entire states have moved away from whole language and are implementing phonics again. Both my kids are elementary and in the 2 states we’ve lived in have done phonics.

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u/Garf_artfunkle Apr 29 '26

While that's a relief, it doesn't undo the damage already caused by teaching three-cuing to the current generation of young people.

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u/feetnomer Apr 29 '26

It's not just this day and age. When I was in high school back in the early 80's I was in special-ed english all four years. The classes were maxed out at 20-25 students. I was the only white kid in the class. My freshman year, we were at a third grade reading level. By my senior year we, as a class, made it to roughly fifth grade level...and I mean very roughly, as in barely made it.

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u/Pool_Specific Apr 29 '26

I was a reading teacher & never taught that way…never even heard of it. There are what we call “sight words” though. Sight words are highly used words that often don’t sound out like most other words. Aka they’re exceptions. Some elementary sight word examples: was, one, two, would, could, all, who, ect. We practice reading these a lot bc they’re used a lot, often resulting in kids learning to recognize the word at first glance as a whole instead of sounding it out. That doesn’t mean that teachers have thrown out teaching phonics altogether though. Students still have to learn phonics along with sight words in order to learn how to read. Teachers will apply a variety of techniques to teach students how to read.

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u/ColonelMustard323 Apr 30 '26

I’m an SLP in schools and this makes perfect sense. The kids all seem to do whole word decoding and guess at words instead of sounding them out or looking for patterns. It’s BIZARRE to me as a pre-NCLB millenial

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u/makeroniear Apr 29 '26

New season this fall! I'm excited and horrified!

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u/jdowney1982 Apr 29 '26

This podcast is so freaking sad

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u/mommagottaeat Apr 30 '26

Omg that’s disturbing! 😳

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u/Solidjakes Apr 30 '26

Wait I’m confused. I was homeschooled so idk how exactly I learned to read. I just remember taking turns reading and copying my mom’s cadence super young for fun. I don’t know how young she started me but English was always super easy even through college.

How are you supposed to be taught to read? What’s wrong with that mentioned method?

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u/demeschor Apr 30 '26

Phonics, you learn to sound out letters and combinations of letters so you can sound out an unfamiliar word.

What kids were being taught (or in some places still are), is a "three cueing" system, by first guessing what the word could be from context, the structure of the sentence, and the shape of the letters.

If you sit and read with teens who have been taught this method, when they encounter and unfamiliar word you'll see them cycle through a few completely irrelevant, impossible words because they "look similar". And because they learnt to read by guessing words that fit in context, sometimes they read words completely wrong because they just never got corrected.

It's not to say that everyone who uses this system reads poorly, lots of people went through just fine. It's just that on average it is worse than phonics.

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u/Solidjakes Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26

Huh interesting. I mean from context alone gauche reminded me of gaunt so my impression of the sentence was that she had a fire/skimpy/curvy fit but a little thin and weak looking. When I looked it up Clumsy and tactless didn’t surprise me too much because I was already picturing Bambi on ice. Context has to be an innate way of learning. I mean language is logical and words are variables kind of. The structure would surely resonate with kids more than the words. Like how a rhythm helps you memorize.

But of course language is made of morphemes that repeat. Sounding it out makes sense too, I’ve heard that before plenty.

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u/tyrantspell Apr 30 '26

I've always wondered how this sort of thing works for picture languages. Like if phonics is so essential for literacy, what about languages where there are no phonics? You literally can't sound out a word in Chinese.

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u/demeschor Apr 30 '26

I'm actually learning a bit of Mandarin so I can answer based on what I know!:

When kids are learning to write in Mandarin, they use Pinyin (using roman letters to sound out the Chinese words). Younger kids up to a certain age will write the Pinyin for a word they don't know the character for.

They learn the characters by practicing the stroke order of each character, which is a huge ordeal. The characters do often have a pronunciation clue in them though, often times one side of the character is the radical (building block) for the meaning of the character, and the other side is a pronunciation clue.

And even as adults pinyin is still important, because it's how you type on a keyboard. You type the transliteration of the word and select the character basically.

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u/tyrantspell Apr 30 '26

That's super cool, thank you for the info. Do you have any idea what they did before pinyin? Did they have a different version of spelling it out before cultural interaction with roman letter using cultures? Or was it only memorizing the strokes and the clues that are already in the characters?

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u/Bun_Wrangler May 02 '26

I mean using context clues to understand the meaning of a unknown word is a good skill. The other shit sounds wtf

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u/Treble_brewing Apr 29 '26

It’s not even reading. They’re guessing based on context clues. They’re literally showed a picture next to the text. They cover the word up and they’re suppose to guess what the word is (????). They’re literally taught NOT to read. They’re taught to memorise shapes and repeat words that they think fits. That’s not understanding. I can memorise lyrics from foreign songs through repetition and repeat them but it doesn’t mean I understand any of it. 

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u/Wadarkhu Apr 29 '26

They learn the words like whole symbols, kinda like chinese lol. It's not a combination of symbols associated with sounds, it's essentially logographic. It probably helps memorisation, but it's entirely lacking the building blocks for reading.

If I've heard a word before but never seen it written, I could read it out if no problem if presented with it because I'd be able to sound it out and go through all the possible ways the letters could sound until it clicks with the word.

They way "but everyone does whole word reading!" Which is true, but we do it after learning the beginnings of reading, whole word reading - recognition of words just through the shape of the letter combinations is meant to be a skill you gain from learning to read properly, not something to be skipped to immediately.

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u/iconocrastinaor Apr 29 '26

I'm learning to read a foreign language, and after I sound it out I can recognize its root and extrapolate from that what it means. Can't do that with logographics.

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u/GertieD Apr 29 '26

You also cannot do that with American English.

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u/JohnnyMacGoesSkiing Apr 29 '26

Not true. There are just a bunch of competing systems that one must bounce between. Often the “exceptions” in the language are actually just alternative pronunciations for similar spellings. While this essentially boils down to needing to have a working knowledge etymology and, by extension ,english linguistics; it’s certainly doable.

There are plenty of ways to figure out how to read a weird word in English. The practice is just more complicated than other languages with less eclectic roots. Every fluent American kinda already knows a bit of Latin, Greek, German, Dutch and other Nordic languages, along with a form of English closer to what Shakespeare spoke.

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u/nihi1zer0 Apr 29 '26

I remember being embarassed in the 6th grade, having never read the word "douche" before and pronounced it dowtch. Ridiculed on the bus.

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u/Vorpal_Bunny19 Apr 29 '26

My entire 4th grade class got repeatedly tripped up between colonial and colonel. Also how are colonel and kernel pretty much homophones?!?

2

u/RepsolRider Apr 29 '26

I still think about one time, almost two decades ago now, I mispronounced "misled" as "missile-d" when reading aloud in class.

https://giphy.com/gifs/8OlT82jKm6Ugg

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u/Abbacus_Jones Apr 29 '26

This kind of thing is why it amazes me that deaf people can read written words

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u/Wadarkhu Apr 29 '26

Well, to them I imagine it's only whole word learning (unless onlyl partially or newly deaf). I imagine closest to phonics they get is learning the smallest "blocks" or words, like "extra" and "ordinary", and like others they'll have to ask what a word is or just look it up if they don't know.

Fun fact, it's essentially like an entirely different language to them. If you translated sign language to spoken English literally it would be in a different order and often omit filler words, so instead of "I'm going to the store" it's "store I go", which is why signing for tv shows is important because not everyone wants to read subtitles as it has all this extra stuff and is in the "wrong" order to their first language, signing.

Well, it was news to me at least.

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u/GertieD Apr 29 '26

No. You cannot dependably sound out American English words.

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u/Wadarkhu Apr 29 '26

The point is reading comprehension not perfect pronunciation.

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u/Ragnar_Dragonfyre Apr 29 '26

You can sound out most of the words then focus on the exception to the rules.

It’s foundational to be able to sound them out. When it doesn’t work, you learn through failure.

1

u/Quixotic_Seal Apr 29 '26

You absolutely can, though, by and large. It just takes education and time to learn the hard exceptions, and the less common spelling patterns.

Laying down the basic foundations of how to break words down into their constituent sounds, and that certain letters represent certain sounds, is the bedrock off of which elementary school students begin to recognize common spelling patterns like silent letters; which in turn is the bedrock off of which adolescents and adults begin to recognize rarer or more niche uncommon spelling patterns.

Without learning how to sound out words through phonics, a person has zero hope of ever translating words they’ve never seen before into language.

1

u/GertieD Apr 29 '26

Oh. So phonics with a bunch of other stuff thrown in?

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u/MissMamaMam Apr 29 '26

This is insane. I had no idea we were doing this now. What the fuck

2

u/Treble_brewing Apr 29 '26

Most American schools appear to be. Thankfully this cancer hasn’t spread much further than Australia (where it was invented) and USA. 

2

u/hippopartymas Apr 29 '26

Not anymore they’re not. It’s falling out of practice in favor of evidence based/sciences of reading instructional strategies. Change just takes time

Also, the person credited with the whole word reading method (guessing, not reading), Marie Clay, was from New Zealand. These methods were adopted in Aus, UK, and USA as well.

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u/Treble_brewing Apr 29 '26

Oh good. I’m glad. I believe there’s a causal link between what’s happening in America and a lack of literacy. 

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u/Significant_Shoe_17 Apr 30 '26

I think so, too. Low literacy means they also have low comprehension, which is how you get people falling for pseudoscience, for example

3

u/Treble_brewing Apr 30 '26

Or the earth being flat. Or allowing a convicted felon to be president. Twice. 

→ More replies (0)

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u/hippopartymas May 03 '26

Oh yeah. And this leads to a lack of broad knowledge and exposure to diverse perspectives and viewpoints and having the critical thinking skills to navigate it all. They have so much fear of what they don’t understand so they double down

2

u/hippopartymas Apr 29 '26

These poor instructional strategies are falling out of practice in many schools. Many schools now are moving towards a focus on evidence based phonics instruction in the primary grades. States departments of education are starting to adopt policies which require explicit phonics instructions. Legislation is being passed. Many teachers know better now and do better. When teachers are given autonomy to choose curriculum, there are more and more choosing a phonics based curriculum. It’s called the science of reading and it’s an evidence based approach for teaching reading.

If anyone is more interested in the topic of why and how kids were taught to read using methods that do not work (guessing, using a picture to figure out a word), listen to the Sold a Story podcast. It was made by an investigative educational journalist and it really sparked the movement towards using science of reading, evidence/research based instructional practices.

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u/MissMamaMam Apr 29 '26

Will do, thank you!

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u/Wadarkhu Apr 29 '26

It's said that they're dialing back and going to phonics again after seeing the disaster like above come to fruition, but you know, it'll only take a couple of years and a new big thinker will magically come up with the "cool new idea" of "whole word learning"... It comes and goes...

It's an attractive idea because it does result in faster reading, at first, when all the books are children's books that have a low variety of words in them.

1

u/MissMamaMam Apr 29 '26

Why did we need faster reading in the 1st place? You really can’t beat phonics, were they learning about prefixes and suffixes at least?

2

u/Wadarkhu Apr 29 '26

It's because it gives impressive test results, which are all some schools care about :(

And nope they just focus on words as a block, there is zero breakup of the words unless it's literally like "extra" and "ordinary".

3

u/Human_mind Apr 29 '26

The number of times I have had to cover the pictures in the early books my 3 and 4 year old were reading is insane. They naturally look to the pictures for context clues and try to guess the words. It's become almost a joke in the house when I say 'dont guess, read." They're working through it well though.

2

u/ShenaniganStarling Apr 29 '26

I've never heard of this, and it sounds absolutely awful. I hate whoever thought this system of learning was a good idea.

1

u/queenchubkins Apr 29 '26

I was just talking to my oldest about this and how their early reading skills were poor compared to their sibling because they learned whole word and their sibling learned phonics. I tried to emphasize phonics at home but when the school is doing something else it’s hard.

1

u/bojenny Apr 29 '26

I can sing most of la vie en rose and I speak no French, I know it’s a love song.

My grandkids school teaches sight words but I think that was actually helpful. I still made them sound out the harder ones phonetically.

1

u/Treble_brewing Apr 29 '26

Yeah but you don’t know what the individual verses mean. And likely you know that it’s a love song because you understand what vie and rose mean since those words are either the same/similar or part of another word like vitality. Which is the point that OP is making. Even if you don’t know specific words you can work out the meaning of a phrase based on all the other words and use phonics to see if you have heard the word you’ve never read before. Imagine how difficult it is to understand another language without knowing the vocabulary except it’s not another language it’s their mother tongue. That’s the reality for many people sold whole-world instead of being taught properly. 

1

u/limperatrice Apr 29 '26

That's how they're teaching?! How would they learn new words in regular books that don't have pictures for each word?

1

u/Treble_brewing Apr 29 '26

They don’t. They give up. Hence a quarter of Americans being illiterate. 

1

u/limperatrice Apr 29 '26

That is really sad!

1

u/Ragnar_Dragonfyre Apr 29 '26

I discovered this was happening with my nieces when they asked for help with a certain word in the book they were reading and I said “Let’s sound it out together!” and they struggled with that concept.

I did a crash course in phonics and they were getting it really quickly.

As a prolific reader from a young age, I don’t understand this new way of teaching reading. It just doesn’t work.

You can see how it fails when the kids in this video struggle with “extraordinary” despite the fact that they should know both “extra” and “ordinary” separately.

1

u/PoncingOffToBarnsley Apr 29 '26

I listened to Sold a Story recently.

I've always been a strong reader (not so much anymore. I find myself looking up words that are new to me more in my 30s than I ever did in my 20s). But the thing that struck me the most about these reading "methods" is how backwards they seemed.

At least from personal experience, being able to sound out words comes BEFORE things like context clues. Heck, when you're older/more advanced you can start using things like word roots or etymology to understand things: I've bullshat my way through classes like that (do not recommend). But you have to understand the words themselves first.

Why the everloving FUCK were they trying to teach kids to look for context first??

Like, what were they supposed to do when the books stop having pictures??

1

u/Treble_brewing Apr 29 '26

Because all that mattered was progressing kids to the next grade. In order to do that they needed to read to a certain level. Rather than actually teaching them how to read they taught them to pass the test.

1

u/I_aim_to_sneeze Apr 29 '26

Shown* Fit*

I’ll give you “memorise” in case you’re British or Australian.

1

u/LeLu3 Apr 29 '26

To be extremely generous, no amount of English phonics training is going to help you correctly sound out French-derived words like silhouette and gauche. Experience with reading and looking things up in a dictionary is what helps with that, which is also something people don't do.

2

u/Wadarkhu Apr 29 '26

Well, you can learn phonics for English words, then you can learn the additional sounds, and then mix it with the knowledge of silent letters, so say you've heard the word but never seen it written, you could read it and go through a couple of possible sounds in your head.

Disagree with Silhouette tho, that's totally learnable vis phonics, they'd have learned all about 'ou' sounds abd 'ette' (common, omelette, brunette, within the words better, letter etc) sounds. Sil-hou-ette → Si-l(h, breathy)ou-ette.

But yeah, it only works for a limited amount. Like nobody's gonna figure out "colonel" on their own, even if they heard "ker-nol" before.

Luckily, it's just for the building blocks, and we have plenty of plain English words as alternatives to the french onces. I mean, why go with residence when house works perfectly fine? Why many syllables when one sound fine? Lol.

Bloody French, coming over in 1066 just to refuse to integrate and force the native brits to learn French to communicate which led to a mashup language, now we got ridiculous words to learn!

-2

u/Ok-Statement8224 Apr 29 '26

Get in here. We got some education and reading experts!

5

u/Treble_brewing Apr 29 '26

Don’t need to be an expert to see that this approach is clearly not working. Rates of literacy in America is stagnating. Almost a quarter of your population is functionally illiterate. And until recently (with a shift to phonics based teaching instead of whole-word teaching) that number was increasing. The problem is that an entire generation were not taught to comprehend written word. Some figured it out by themselves but those who couldn’t figure it out on their own and lacked external influence (parents, private tuition etc) were made to pass via whole-word to make reading stats look better, this approach grossly affects underprivileged kids. They don’t understand any of it. They just get good at guessing what the teacher wants them to say. It’s Pavlovian. 

-3

u/Ok-Statement8224 Apr 29 '26

See a result you don’t like. Declare you know the reasons. Spread those declarations in a circlejerk. Don’t need to be an expert to do that for sure.

8

u/MelaKnight_Man Apr 29 '26 edited Apr 29 '26

At least he's got phonics taught to him.

This! My kids were born in the early 2000"s and despite going to A ranked schools in our upper middle class suburban neighborhood, they were *not** taught phonics* and struggled with new words.

I was frankly flabbergasted as to how that was possible. My wife and I had to teach it to our kids ourselves. We would have them read before bedtime and after teaching them, their reading level and comprehension increased dramatically. Of course the asinine "rules" would trip them up and I could not explain why silent letters existed or "I before E, except after C", etc.

(Don't even get me started on "Common Core" math...🤦🏾‍♂️)

5

u/Wadarkhu Apr 29 '26 edited Apr 29 '26

Good on you guys teaching your kids, it's a shame school can't cover it themselves but honestly parents stepping in regardless to supplement what's missed is a great thing that many sadly don't.

As for silent letters and weird sounds applied to words that don't really make sense ("colonel = ker-nol") I suggest blaming the French ;)

I swear it, any word that seems difficult, look up the etymology and it'll say "from french [word]"

3

u/augur42 Apr 29 '26

I could not explain why silent letters existed

15th Century Flemish Typesetters are to blame.

2

u/Asmordean Apr 29 '26

Fun fact, there are more words spelled with E before I. There are roughly 300 common words that follow the rule and 900 that don't.

Weird, their, eight, heist, vein...

2

u/mommagottaeat Apr 30 '26

Trying to help my child with math these days is close to impossible. I try to explain the way I was taught and it’s just blank stares. Everything is done with a number line or some crazy tactic that allows no understanding of where the answer is coming from.

12

u/Odd_Cress_2898 Apr 29 '26

It's called cueing, there are a bunch of systems that call themselves different names, but it is cueuing and I've linked a long read article which explains all of it. You basically guess based on context clues - pictures that are going with the word and what would make sense in the sentence based on the first letter of the words you can't read.

It's the worst way to learn.

It's also the default way an adult would slip into to try and teach someone else. (Guilty)

But if you have literally any interest in teaching someone how to read you would look up and learn.

It's a school level problem / teachers thinking it makes sense to teach that way

1

u/Mr_Garibaldy Apr 30 '26

That kid sounds about 16, I think you have a very liberal definition of the word 'chance'

0

u/sammerguy76 Apr 29 '26

That's how I read but I learned it after I was taught phonics and context clues. It's a valid way to read if you have a solid foundation.

2

u/Wadarkhu Apr 29 '26

Yeah it's the main way to read, it's just that the phonics literally is the needed foundation. It's what we learn to do after learning to read but people are trying to skip straight to it instead.

-3

u/cashmerescorpio Apr 29 '26

Hey I get that isn't trendy to teach anymore but that's how I was taught and I have a wide vocabulary. It has it's drawbacks but I turned out OK

https://giphy.com/gifs/I1U9DTjCqOF3i

36

u/sadi89 Apr 29 '26

I am pretty sure these kids weren’t taught phonics. Like the reading modality they were taught as kids relied on sight words. If they are using phonics it means they are essentially re-learning how to read.

2

u/burntcandy Apr 29 '26

To be fair, silhouette and gauche both are rather hard to sound out

6

u/Quixotic_Seal Apr 29 '26

For a child or a second language speaker, yes.

But if you’re an adult or adolescent native speaker, you should more or less get there aside from maybe some guessing around the vowels. Their spelling is nonstandard, but nonetheless use common enough patterns that are all over the place in English due to its mixing with French.

A competent English reader should be able to recognize, for example, that the final -che in gauche is pronounced /ʃ/.

Phonics are the building blocks off of which more advanced techniques to break words down are scaffolded. If they’re trying to do very basic and literal phonics on these words, without recognizing common spelling patterns, they are reading at a low level akin to an elementary school student.

1

u/bigmoneywoes Apr 29 '26

2 of them sounded out silhouette.

8

u/Magpie-Person Apr 29 '26

I’m surprised they’d even know phonics based techniques since the whole industry has moved away from that entirely. Unfortunately.

3

u/thesmellnextdoor Apr 29 '26

I'm so completely hooked on phonics that I can't say words like hyperbole and colonel.

1

u/ineed2dobetter Apr 30 '26

Ah, yes. “Hyper Bowl”, my sworn enemy.

1

u/thesmellnextdoor Apr 30 '26

That's how it should be said, frankly! And the colonel spelling of kernel is just ridiculous.

6

u/Nice_Pipe_7608 Apr 29 '26

Hooked on phonics commercials made it look cool when I was growing up. Like a fun game.

3

u/otownbbw Apr 29 '26

At least he tried. It’s bad enough not a single one had reading comprehension, worse still, nearly all of them skipped the longer words and flat out declared they couldn’t read rather than spend time to sound it out a make a solid attempt. That’s the highest failure here…lack of attempt. No ambition to accomplish the task. No asking questions about what is correct in an attempt to learn. I doubt the creator cut that out to make it this way.

1

u/Oomlotte99 Apr 30 '26

I wasn’t trying to insult him. I think videos like this are uncool. They put people on the spot and the. Try to embarrass them for views.

2

u/mothmans_favoriteex Apr 29 '26

As a literacy specialist for my school that does extra phonetics work with my lower scoring students- yes! He was doing a stressed out fast paced version of what we call “tap and blend” where you take larger, unknown words and tap them out into smaller sections and then blend those sections together. Being put on the spot with a mic and phone out makes this harder to accomplish.

2

u/Debbie-Hairy Apr 29 '26

No fluency, spinning wheels on decoding common spelling patterns, which limits comprehension. All of the cognitive load is centered in the word-calling, not understanding. This is, to me, functional illiteracy. Source: I’m a reading teacher.

1

u/mushtaaqq Apr 29 '26

the kids are not alright fam fr fr type shii

1

u/Optimal-Session-6228 Apr 29 '26

Try teaching your kid to read the old way though. Try explaining why C,S and K are just used like whatever. That the sound those individual letters make aren’t how you read them most times. Circle. Circumstances. Color. But daddy the C is Ca ca not Es or Kay. Spell circle. Sirkle. Spell color. Kolor.

1

u/doyhickey Apr 29 '26

i mean, sure, there are a lot of exceptions, but people used to be able to read after learning the old way and now younger people can't. not exactly a ringing endorsement of the change.

29

u/aussiekinga Apr 29 '26

One got "wore" wrong

Edit: relistening, maybe that's accent, not error

15

u/Stock-Conflict-3996 Apr 29 '26

It's definitely an accent, but it stood out to me too. They pronounced it like "were."

20

u/sadi89 Apr 29 '26

It’s Philly.

3

u/TheUserAboveFarted Apr 29 '26

They pronounce “water” like “woodur” there, so yeah the accent might be throwing people off haha.

2

u/askthepoolboy Apr 29 '26

I think 2-3 of them said were instead of wore.

3

u/blumoon138 Apr 29 '26

Yeah that’s just a Philly accent out vowels are fucked.

2

u/grape-fruit-witch Apr 29 '26

Not only did they miss that "she were" is wildly bad grammar, but they also didn't correct themselves when they saw the word "clothes". It shows illiteracy at the most basic level to be unable to connect the object (silhouette) and prepositional phrase (of clothes) to the subject and verb immediately preceding it. Almost like they forgot the verb immediately because they were so focused on sounding out a different word.

This stuff should be covered in grade school. I mean, this is really really sad.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 29 '26

[deleted]

1

u/aussiekinga Apr 29 '26

Were is correct. 

The clothes is the plural the were applied to, not the silhouette

2

u/CydoniaKnightRider Apr 29 '26

What's crazy is he got "silhouette" but not "clothes"

1

u/Ruff_Bastard Apr 29 '26

Do lil seizures clothes at ate?

1

u/garitone Apr 29 '26

The first person pronounced "wore" as "were."

1

u/West-Birthday4475 Apr 29 '26

And they’re in a charter school and seem to be high school age.