To the people who are thinking about other languages, "Lexical decoding" - recognition of a word during reading was the strongest predictor of reading compression (as opposed to phonological).

Restating the highlighted result: Gc ("Comprehension-Knowledge") had the strongest effect on both lexical and phonological decoding. Knowing a word makes it easiest to comprehend when reading. This is probably completely obvious, but the broader point is that rich conversations with students that involve teaching them lots of words will improve their reading.

Only partially supported interpretation/application - All this business about phonics will only take you so far if the adults in a kids life (including their teachers) are not talking to them richly about a lot of stuff. Asking teachers to do a lot of rote repetition risks cutting out the really important part of school where students are actually building vocabulary. Teachers that use/teach large vocabularies may be unexpectedly more effective at teaching reading.

[Not an expert] I met someone once who got very expensive glasses with some carefully calibrated prism to perfectly align both eyes. Like when you are exhausted you get double vision. His eyes were fine but with the glasses he could read all day as opposed to only a few hours. He only used them when his eyes started to tire. He said that anyone could have them made but was very curious how many poor readers could benefit as his tired eyes just felt like not wanting to read anymore.

What I would like very much is a 'runbook' of techniques in pedagogy. I've read a couple of the books in the space hoping for something and it seems like all of them have philosophical content. The Intentional Teacher is generally pretty good with motivating examples and underlying theory but I'm just looking for a large number of techniques. If anyone has things to share on this front I'd appreciate hearing.

I imagine some kind of teacher training handbook or something. I'm pretty good with rote practice and mechanical repetition, so if there is a list out there of "in case of X, do Y" I will be able to memorize it. Do share if you know what I'm talking about.

It would be interesting to see a study comparing languages where writing encodes sounds like English versus languages where writing encodes meaning, like Chinese. And also how a person’s visual and auditory capabilities relate to reading. Because languages like English need both I think.

I’m learning Japanese, and I’ve started learning Chinese characters, both their meanings and how to read them. Reading them feels different than English... I have a hypothesis that our brains work differently when processing symbols that encode meanings as opposed to just sounds. English requires an extra step, where characters are translated into sounds and then into words.

With Chinese characters, you are immediately looking at the meaning; you don’t need translation into sounds. This feels like a more efficient process cognitively to me, even though I have to memorize to recognize more characters.

The article is strange, as it starts with "we used to think it was just that smart kids read well, but this new study etc etc"

But the details of the new study seem to support exactly that original idea.

Perhaps a little more detail on why and what kinds of smart, but it was a pretty broad set of mental skills that mattered

It would be nice to replicate in other languages. In Spanish and German, reading is almost phonetic, unlike English.

Anyway, from my experience with my daughter, the step from single letters to silabes is difficult.

'an'?

Is bad grammar one of the reasons, even though the title suggests there is just one?

This has been the mainstream understanding of dyslexia since the 1990s.

"Since the 1990s, the phonological deficit hypothesis has been the dominant explanation favored by researchers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_deficit_hypothesi...

Somewhat off-topic but related - doing a lot of AI-assisted coding lately, multiple projects at the same time. I'm basically in 15 hour loops of reviewing code/output and creating prompts, switching to the next project while Claude (and others) work. I noticed an almost dyslexia emerging where I'm thinking of the prompt/instructions while typing, then I look at what I typed and it's not what I was thinking - sometimes it's a combination of two different thoughts/prompts that are actually intended for separate projects. It's so weird - I can instantly recognize it's wrong when re-reading the prompt and I still have my intended prompt/instructions in my head. I've never been diagnosed with dyslexia or ever had similar things happen, before AI seemingly captured my brain with the promise of delivering one some of the dozens of my dormant projects/ideas. Maybe I need a break...

The solution pointed to by this article is as basic and practical as learning how to read is. For someone to become a successful reader they need a supportive environment around them, willing to work with the young reader and help them overcome the many small difficulties that make reading seem impossible at first.

One of my kids has a fair bit of auditory processing issues, and had to have special help in school learning to read - we couldn't figure out how to help them at home. Now they're the biggest reader I know, but without help they might have continued to struggle for a long time.

Dr. Daniel Hajovsky, associate professor in Texas A&M University's Department of Educational Psychology published study https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40863201/

Can someone corroborate the lead in

> For decades, the common explanation for why children struggle to read has stayed remarkably consistent. Smart kids read well. Kids who don't simply aren't smart enough.

This strikes me as something that was debunked in the 60s. Ascribing reading ability to intelligence seems like the most fatalistic thought terminating idea one can have.

An unexpected cause!

U is a vowel.

it must be rad to be a scientist and get paid to do a bunch of BS that doesnt really matter and most people wont even double check your work and then if anyone questions your work hordes of Internet Hero's will defend your Expert Honor

Practical pedagogy is called didactics and primary school teachers (should) learn a lot of it: after all, a child's brain is still quite undeveloped and you cannot teach them like you would teach a peer or yourself. E.g. you cannot teach grammar rules but you can teach a foreign language through singing, learning games etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didactic_method

These approaches work for most children most of the time, but when they don't, you have special education teachers who have a different degree in diagnosing (debugging) learning difficulties big and small as well as implementing interventions etc. The service they provide is also called remedial education [and it's especially cool when a primary school teacher and a special education teacher work in a big classroom together, the latter immediately bringing back to speed anyone who grasped something slower than the others]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remedial_education

Teaching requires simulating the thought process and emotional state of learners. And then modelling the appropriate thought process to them, repairing their misunderstanding, and managing their cognitive load and other emotions.

Outside of relatively narrow domains, I'm not sure a runbook makes any sense here. People are not, in this sense, machines.

"Reading is almost phonetic" is a largely meaningless phrase. There are some orthographies that are more regular than others. But, indeed, the very confusion people love to talk about with English only works if it is phonetic, but ambiguous.

And just solving for one form of ambiguity does not, necessarily, help. Consider contronyms. Words that are literally their own opposites.

I'm convinced the main thing lost in getting kids to read, is that too many mistake interaction with the words as automatic. It isn't. Taking apart a word symbol by symbol and putting it back together in a different form is the entire point of teaching how to read. And if you don't teach kids to do that with words, are you surprised when they can't do it with equations?

You should think "the step from single sounds to syllables", and the way to do that is to begin with the easy syllables like "tu", "mi", "el" (not unlike the multiplication or addition tables) before moving to longer ones. [And note that M alone is not "em", it has to be "m" when learning to read - a common pedagogical mistake! M + I makes "mi" not "emi", so M must be "m".] At least that's how children are taught in Finnish schools since sometime before the 1980s, and since then almost everyone learns to read during the first school semester. Also, one simple and efficient protection against dyslexia is to play the Graphogame (or similar) to get a lot of repetition with the sound-letter correspondences while learning to read (for various reasons, some brains take longer to build the necessary connections and you want to avoid the negative affects of learning slower than your peers if you can).

  ma, me, mi, mo, mu
  pa, pe, pi, po, pu
  sa, se, si, so, su
  ...