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What Hacker News says
- Fans of "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" might wish to check out "Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach" [0]. It uses a similar phonics approach but uses basic pattern matching to teach kids in a much simpler format. Be sure to check out the reviews for the original and newer edition.
- My understanding is that Dr. Seuss & P.D. Eastman books (among others) were primarily intended to be read by kids learning to read, not to be read aloud by parents.
But I have personally found these books with extreme limited vocabulary to be much better read-aloud books for 2-year-olds than books for independent reading by 4–5 year-olds. More generally, many other graded readers are excellent read-aloud books. At age 2–3, my kids particularly enjoyed the Henry and Mudge books https://www.amazon.com/dp/1534427139, and everything by Arnold Lobel.
If you are trying to teach kids to read, let me highly recommend Bloomfield’s workbook Let’s Read from the early 60s, which I heard about from a 2012 comment here on HN by Tokenadult. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0814311156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4665466
Bloomfield was one of the leading linguists of his era, and his book is very carefully structured to introduce only one new spelling–sound association per lesson, with the first half consisting of only regularly spelled words, so there is no possible confusion, with the full mishmash of irregular words only introduced after the reader is already fluent with regular spellings.
My son & I started working through it together for about 10–15 minutes per day when he was 3.5 years old, and it took about 8 months to get to the end, after which he could fluently read pretty much any material he could comprehend. As a not-quite-5 year-old he now happily independently reads books intended for 3rd–4th graders. (I’m not trying to suggest every kid should start on such a project at that age; every kid is different, and interests and attention span vary.)
- I see that the submitted article, and many of the interesting comments in this busy thread, relate to the issue of the bizarre spelling patterns of English. As a native speaker of General American English (the dialect of English I recommend to foreign learners of English ;) ), I have two perspectives on this.
1) As a parent of English-speaking children, I thought it was VITAL that they learn well the main consistent sound-symbol correspondence rules of English spelling. (This is called "phonics" in the context of teaching reading to native speakers of English.) My favorite book recommendation for this is Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach, by linguist Leonard Bloomfield and lexicographer Clarence Barnhart. All four of my children learned to read well with this book. The book is now in a second edition
http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Read-A-Linguistic-Approach/dp/081...
prepared by a second generation of the Barnhart family. Learning to read with an approach like this is dialect-friendly (the book is specifically organized to take into account dialect differences, at least within American English) and systematic for understanding what is consistent in English spelling and what is not.
2) As for spelling reform in English, I think it was HN user gnosis who once shared a very interesting link
http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ortho.html
about English spelling reform by a commentator who knows linguistics well. English spelling reform is often desired by native speakers of the language, but it is a tough problem. See what the link has to say about various proposals for spelling reform.
- A good book for developing reading skill and getting kids hooked on reading (it has worked for all four of my children) is Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach.
http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Linguistic-Approach-Leonard-Bloom...
- To add to the great comment above, especially for the parents here considering instructing their children on the formalities of reading, make sure your children learn the sound-symbol correspondences of English (or whatever language's) writing system and skills for pronouncing unfamiliar words first seen in print. All four of my children, now avid readers, got a lot of help from the book Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach by Leonard Bloomfield and Clarence Barnhart.
http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Linguistic-Approach-Leonard-Bloom...
I like the stories in that book, too, especially the very last story.
- Press release on the same study:
http://www.dundee.ac.uk/pressreleases/proct02/dyslexics.html
(I looked this up to get a better idea which countries were considered, and which were not.)
Excerpt from a good book on dyslexia by some of the leading researchers in the field:
http://books.google.com/books?id=OTMYM5ijMtMC&pg=PA383&#...
Here's another good link on dyslexia:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/l15r432m85775666/
Here's a link to a forthcoming book with practical advice to parents about dyslexia:
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-047042981...
My overall comments on the submitted article and the claim in its title are:
a) Yes, the English penchant for preserving etymological spellings from multiple languages (especially Norman French) makes learning reading of English more daunting than learning to read a language with a reformed, consistent spelling such as Spanish. But linguists have applied thoughtful effort to improving reading instruction in English, and it is possible with the best materials, for example Let's Read: A Linguistic Approach by Leonard Bloomfield and Clarence Barnhart,
http://www.amazon.com/Lets-Linguistic-Approach-Leonard-Bloom...
to make great progress in reading English independently in less than one year of instruction. (It's regrettable that more schools don't use superior books like Let's Read for initial reading instruction.) Part of the difficulty that pupils have in school in English-speaking countries comes from suboptimal reading instruction rather than from inherent features of the current English writing system.
http://www.amazon.com/Early-Reading-Instruction-Science-Brad...
b) The study didn't test "European languages" exhaustively. It may be that there are some languages in Europe that present similar difficulties. Certainly there are languages in other regions of the world (including languages in the Indo-European language family) that present tougher challenges to primary-age learners learning to read, although those learners often overcome those challenges.
c) For overall adult performance in reading, exposure matters, and for second-language learners of English, the network effects of having huge numbers of users of English (both first-language users and second-language users) all over the world ensures that most second-language learners still reach quite an adequate level of reading proficiency in English, which indeed in many cases exploits the similarity of English spelling to spellings from foreign languages. English gains its position as the world interlanguage honestly and will not be challenged as the world interlanguage by any other language in the lifetime of anyone reading this message.
