Anon is Illiterate
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What’s a chapter book?
Most adults just call them ‘books’. But in case you want more, it’s a book with chapters like “Chapter 1 - in the beginning’ and so on. Very few pictures, lots of words. in the US, youth call them chapter books because it’s a moment of transition from reading short simple stories to books more than 100 pages long.
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Yes. And, 25 is far less than ALL. And your article mentions that program is being dropped all over the place because the science doesn't back up its claims. Even the program's grifters are pivoting to incorporate phonics into it.
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Also I don't know if this is true for all of these types of tests but I got literacy test bi-yearly in school because I was in special education and apparently at least for the one I was administered it counted verbal reading speed towards your score. So you could talk at a slightly slower rate than prescribed but explain the full context of what you read and still get a lower rating.
Correct. Also getting to 6th grade is generally defined as the the language skills needed to read/write news, most novels, contracts, information pamphlets, etc. The use of specialized language, such as technical lexicons, is where you get into higher grade levels of reading. There isn't any universal standard as to what determines this, exactly. Many tests also work on being able to make sense of sentences that gradually become more, and more, obtuse. Their length, use of punctuation, tenses, and other technicalities, are increased until the person can no longer explain the sentence correctly. The problem with this is that it may be technically correct, but it is bad writing. If someone where to ace a test on some of this overly complex sentence structure, they would actually do worse for submitting it to a test of the skills on writing a sentence explaining something. So a lot of this lexical grading of reading level is nebulous, and results will vary from each person reviewing them, and exactly how they are performed.
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Eng Learning TLDR: I was raised with both sight words and phonetics, and realize that my gen was fucked over.
I've heard about the reading wars, but this was the first time I actually thought about it with my education, and I realize why I probably wouldn't read as well if I didn't have parents who actively read with me as a child.
I'm a 2006 baby, so I guess my elementary years were at the perfect time for this little debate to occur. I definitely remember doing sight words and their flashcards, but I swear we still did phonetics (thank god). But like, how would anyone expect a kid to magically learn words by just looking at it 50 times and hearing a teacher say that word? I get that according to this article, a large portion of Eng words can't be read properly first try, but still, I see the value in having a kid connect the sounds of "cat, bat, hat, that," etc. Yes, some homonyms like "to, too, two" are gonna have to be "sight words" but that's unavoidable.
I hated Eng class, not because of sucking at it, but how we never really got free reading time after elementary, and that we were doing lame ass journals and reports on books I didn't want to read. And there were high levels books I did want to read, which is why I loved a banned books project that gave us the freedom to pick a book to do a creative, in any format you want, presentation of the knowledge from the book.
So if I, a person who actually wanted to read and can read well hated Eng class, then people who have learning disabilities, are simply bored, didn't have parents who cared, etc were cooked. I guess that's why my college classmates are so incompetent rn...
Also side note about Chinese (or well, Japanese in my case):
Yeah, CN and JP use hanzi/kanji respectively, which are logograms, but both CN/JP have "alphabets" that can be used to tell you the reading of a word. Chinese uses pinyin (which is actually what most of their keyboards are based on I think), and JP has hiragana/katakana. It's still however more useful to learn the readings for these characters in the context of what you're reading (esp. Japanese, they got their writing system from China but used their own bastardized readings for words, so 生 has like 10+ readings depending on the word it's paired with).
But they still have a neat trick in which kanji have two parts, the phonetic component, and the meaning component. Kanji are made of radicals, which is like using lego blocks to make a single character (i.e. 米 + 青 = 精). The neat part is that you can potentially guess the reading of a word if you already know that phonetic components reading. 青 can be read as "sei", and these kanji 精, 清, 圊, 睛, etc. all have "sei" or a similar version as a potential reading. Now sometimes the radicals don't always make sense meaning wise when added together. 青 is "blue/youth" and 米 is "rice", but 精 means "spirit/ghost", "energy", and uh... "semen" (mostly in the word 精液 "spirit fluid"). Why rice + youth = spirit or ghost, is beyond me, but these kanji usually have interesting stories behind them that could potentially explain their reasoning.
JP Kanji Learning TLDR: JP is fun to learn and kanji have reading patterns based on their components.
LeVar Burton put out a documentary recently on the topic called "The Right to Read".
Also, yeah, I've gotta give Japanese a proper go at some point. The characters look really interesting to learn.
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I'm good with distilling information in whatever form, but I do get impatient with audio/video sometimes. I can read faster than people talk, so I want the audio to go faster. I've tried upping the playback speed, but we encode a lot of information in the pauses and cadence of speech, and the faster playback screws with the perception of that. Doing that is fine for technical information, but I don't care for it with a novel.
Interesting, never though about the cadence thing. I usually try to speed up videos. It works fine for casual YouTube videos but never for podcasts or anything where I need to retain the information.
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One of my favorite Youtube channels (Greg's Airplanes and Automobiles) has great videos about WWII airplanes and aeronautical technology, really digging into the weeds with original source material kind of stuff. But: they're just him reading a script he's written and showing still pictures and excerpts from pilot manuals etc. His content would make excellent written blog posts or even a book, but then nobody would read it. He has to turn what is fundamentally written material into videos in order to make any money off of his work because that's what works for most people. Just makes me sad.
This is why I love ones like Kurzgesagt that publish sources and 'read more' pages for their videos.
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Something else I forgot to mention was a concept that I learned in the military called BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front. The idea is that most people aren't going to read past the first sentence or two before skipping to the end so you better get the absolutely critical information out right away; before your reader gets bored/decides they have more pressing matters to deal with. I would regularly see emails that started with a summary before even the salutations.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I just saw this at work today for the first time from a younger person. No one I've ever emailed with has done summaries before. It took me by surprise... especially because this is an organization that is built on reading things.
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I had a coworker approach me on break and start telling me about a book he was reading and how much he was enjoying it. Towards the end, he mentioned struggling with it and that he wished someone had told him how great reading was earlier. We were both damn near 30, and it was a YA novel. I resisted the asshole urge to roast him because, shit, at least he's trying?
I'm glad reading is cool now.
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I had a friend tell me that she didn't learn to read until she was like eight. Ya never really know where people come from. All of our lives are so different.
wrote last edited by [email protected]That doesn't sound too bad considering almost half of Americans (regardless of age) reads below 6th grade level. At 8 you should still be able to overtake most grownup Americans in reading skills.
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Interesting, never though about the cadence thing. I usually try to speed up videos. It works fine for casual YouTube videos but never for podcasts or anything where I need to retain the information.
Yeah, it really throws me off. I'm a little overly sensitive to body language and other cues about what a person is thinking and feeling, and some of that is messed up when the speed is increased.
