how are schools handling students who memorize books but can't actually decode

I think some of us truly feel blessed to have small people to share books with.
😍
But sadly, many do not feel this particular joy. This is just so sad and a situation where everyone misses out.

Thanks NotSpaghetti. Good clarification.

Used in the USA explains it.

UK schools often start with picture books where the children are encouraged to talk about the pictures, but the words are not included. These books encourage pre-readers to infer plot from visual cues, learn how to turn pages, and narrate the action in their own words.

NB Even though we introduced it at pre- school meetings with parents, including demonstrations of children using picture books, we found some parents were really not happy with this stage. It required more effort than simply pointing at words.

Excellent post, NotSpaghetti.

I would say, from experience, that the guesses at words are usually wild rather than intelligent

How anyone can defend any part of this ludicrously unscientific method of teaching reading is completely beyond me...

Speaking of science, neuroscientists say that the word identification process starts with breaking it into its component letters and builds from there. That the whole word ID process done by skilled readers takes a matter of milliseconds; which I think is the reason that people think that phonics is irrelevant to word ID. Whereas it is fundamental.

DaisyAnneReturns mentioned it earlier - I wanted to elaborate a little.
Forgot to say you had talked about it Daisy

Think this issue is really a non-issue here in the UK as it's the result of using the Balanced Literacy method.
I am new to this idea but this is what I've read about it:

Instead of teaching children to look at a word and "sound it out" from left to right, it's based on "Three-Cueing"

It teaches that print is only one of several clues to a word.

When a child doesn't know a word, they ard taught to ask 3 questions:

​"What makes sense here? Look at the picture."
​"What kind of word fits (grammatically) here?"
And
"What does the first letter suggest?"

Initally children are given very "predictable" texts - books with sentences like "The horse is in the barn" (picture). "The cow is in the barn". The pig is in the barn etc.

​Because the books rely heavily on repetition and clear illustrations, children quickly learn the pattern and look at the pictures to "read" the changing words.

It means that children seem to be reading when actually they are making intelligent guesses.

By 8-9 illustrations disappear from the books, text gets smaller, and multi-syllabic more complex words appear because the child is now a "reader" they are expected to read words that don't really have a picture - environment or bureaucracy for example so children often don't have the skills to decode these more ordinary books.

If they muddle through for a while later on intensive "weaning" is needed or basically the secondary school children won't really be able to read.

There's a lot of work in America to help children catch up.

^this is just what I think the original poster was talking about.

The method of the thre cues is now actively banned in some states.

I've always liked the word,.but.not been able to slide it into a conversation.
I'd pronounce it as you've written.

MissAdventure

I've never said halcyon out loud.

😆😆😆

hal see on

(though I do think it’s possibly better represented as hal see yon)

I've never said halcyon out loud.

The problem is when you meet a new word, you do not know how it is pronounced.

I was a precocious and avid reader, but many of the words I knew the meaning of, I had never heard spoken, so, when i used it I would pronounce it incorrectly, and get laughed at and corrected.

A child with a good spoken vocabulary would be able to identify a strange word partly from a few phonic clues and partly from the context

This, too, may be a question of how the child's brain is "wired". My father left school at 14 but was very keen to continue learning and worked hard at improving his vocabulary. However, I was baffled that he couldn't see a connection between the English word "bread" and the German word "Brot" which to my mind are related in so many ways. This may be because he had always been monolingual (apart from a smattering of French and Swahili) but I think it more likely that he literally just couldn't make the connection.

This is a totally fascinating subject. I'll probably be thinking about this a lot and I can't wait to buttonhole my DiL to ask her what studies have been carried out.

The OP has never been back.

Elegran
A child with a good spoken vocabulary would be able to identify a strange word partly from a few phonic clues and partly from the context - which is one of the reasons it is so important to chat with children from an early age, and for them to be aware of words in places other than just school reading books They can be seen in places like food packets and tins, birthday cards, advertising hoardings, street names, everywhere they go. Literacy is not just textbooks.

A very good explanation.

Phonics combined with some “look and say” of common high frequency words. made reading a lot easier for most children.

As a teacher I did find that children with a poor spoken vocabulary were, in general slower at learning to read.
They were having to learn not only how to decode the word either by “look and say” or phonics, but to use it in conversation or understanding the text.

Comprehension also benefits from conversation. I remember a few children who struggled to explain why a girl on a SAT reading paper called her rabbit “Shadow” even though in the story, the rabbit followed her everywhere.

Where did the OP meet all these children? I’m not sure about where reading progress isn’t or wasn’t monitored even before specific phonics teaching.

I did not meet my grandmother until I was 4 and she did not believe my aunt that I could read already. She was convinced I simply memorised the books I had at home. So she bought an early reader and instructed my aunt to bring me over. I remember quite a lot of that day and how I was promised a cream cake if I could read the book. It was called "Where the wild things are" and is still in print. Of course it was one of those books with vivid illustrations and sentences that spread across both pages. However I apparently read it perfectly and my grandmother was amazed.

We did not have phonics back then and I don't remember anyone teaching em to read so I must have done it myself. I know that I was always well in advance of my class for reading and writing and good at subjects like English language and literature.

Words have always fascinated me. They make patterns on paper and patterns in the mind. I find it sad that the basic skills of reading and writing are declining among the population.

The dyslexic son of a friend was diagnosed as having short term memory problems. His brain was not good at transferring data from his short term memory to his long term memory

As a child he never read story books and now doesn't read novels because by the time he got to the end of the book he had no memory of what went before.

He learnt to read phonetically and by grinding repetition the phonics of reading are now in his long term memory, and, now in his 50s, he still reads using the phonics in his long term memory, rather on recognising whole words.

In answer to your first question, yes.
Their decoding skills are good, but their comprehension is very poor.
The reverse of this is when you have youngsters who perfectly understand the story, the language, the texts, when read out to them, but are not able to decode the written symbols. Very often these pupils may be diagnosed with dyslexia.
Some authors are great at writing books with high interest low reading abilities, sometimes called hi/lo.
Hope this helps.

Maremia

Okay, thanks for the responses. What I actually was trying to convey is that there are some, very few, children with the cognitive ability to decode text but at the same time to not have the cognitive aptitude to understand the words.
It's a very niche, but genuine, educational need.

@#£%&&

So I did understand you correctly. It's not so much about the ability to read as about the ability - or inability - to understand what they have read. I notice this sometimes when reading; I can get through a whole page.and then realise I haven't taken any of it in. Also, this is how computers work: they can see the words, and point to them in a dictionary, but cannot say what emotion is being expressed or what exactly is happening in the text. (Although, with AI, they are getting there)

To get back to children, though, and to answer the original question. Are people seeing better results with stronger phonics screening up front or is it more about how classroom reading is being monitored?

I don't think it matters how, or by which method, the child learnt to read, I think the connection between the mechanics of the word and its actual meaning is made much deeper in the child's psyche and is not something that can be taught. It's an interesting topic. I'll talk to my DiL about it. She has a PhD in psychology. Mind you, her experience of learning to read is limited to German, which hasn't gone through the various phases of teaching methods, simply because it is not necessary due to the phonetic way of spelling.

My learning disabled autistic niece can spell out and read words, but cannot understand what is written down as continuous text.

Okay, thanks for the responses. What I actually was trying to convey is that there are some, very few, children with the cognitive ability to decode text but at the same time to not have the cognitive aptitude to understand the words.
It's a very niche, but genuine, educational need.

I'm like that with French, Maremia. I know the phonics but my understanding is rather very limited... (mostly to understanding menus )

But teaching English speaking children to read English it would be a poor teacher who didn't help them to expand their vocabulary if they came across an unknown word...

Maremia

Perhaps a way if explaining is that, because I know the phonics rules, I could read a few sentences of Latin text, but not understand what it means.

I did learn Latin at school. When we had to do translations, some were Latin to English, some English to Latin. I got very good marks for the Latin-English, though not always so good for the English-Latin. The reason was that I had already read a lot of books (in English) and had a wide English vocabulary. The meaning of any Latin words which I had not had to memorise could be deduced from the words in the English language which were derived from them, and which I knew already. (To get as good marks, the English-Latin translation had to be grammatically accurate, which was more difficult to achieve)

A child with a good spoken vocabulary would be able to identify a strange word partly from a few phonic clues and partly from the context - which is one of the reasons it is so important to chat with children from an early age, and for them to be aware of words in places other than just school reading books They can be seen in places like food packets and tins, birthday cards, advertising hoardings, street names, everywhere they go. Literacy is not just textbooks.

I appreciate what you are saying, Mamie. Of course I didn't encounter children at that level of educational need. But I did encounter many children whose 6 years of primary reading instruction had left them baffled but who 'could' have learned to read to a better level had they not been subject to the NLS.

Perhaps a way if explaining is that, because I know the phonics rules, I could read a few sentences of Latin text, but not understand what it means.

MaizieD

Mamie

Phonics was reintroduced in England with the literacy strategy in 1998 and synthetic phonics in 2006. I remember huge arguments in meetings of teachers, advisory teachers and inspectors. Everyone had very strong feelings and some people had a very narrow view with no room for compromise.

I’m firmly one of the latter, Mamie.

I spent the last few years of my working life with secondary children severely disadvantaged by being barely able to read. Compromise was what led to that state.

I retired more than a decade ago but thinking of some of the children I worked with still saddens and enrages me.

I can understand that if you only worked in secondary mainstream schools. As an advisory teacher I worked across the whole range of disabilities and learning difficulties and that needed flexibility including Rebus.

BlueBelle

‘Whole pattern books’ and ‘decoding’
I don’t even understand your language ekartroda

I think OP intended to say “picture books” and decoding is the actual reading and not memorising of words.

Learning totally by phonics has its drawbacks too, with many exceptions to the rules in a lot of English words.

Not if it's a good phonics programme. A good programme doesn't talk of 'rules', it teaches the simple sound/symbol correspondences and moves on to the complex ones. The most it teaches is 'probabilities'. Written English is complex because it contains words from a number of different languages which retain the sound/symbol correspondences of the original language. Learning the variations of the correspondences makes the learner flexible. It may be 'probable' that a letter or letters represent a certain sound, but if that doesn't work (make a recognisable word) the reader has other choices to apply. If children don't learn this they have nowhere to go if their initial choice doesn't work.

Most other written languages are much less complex and reading them can be learned quite fast. Written English is a bit of an outlier in the eyes of reading scientists because of its complexity. But the 'difficulties' are very high profile because it is such a widely used language globally.