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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29306 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Is it this one? https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-not-whole-word-best-teaching-reading/591127/

Also, this: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/the-reading-wars/376990/ (1997! That's how old this war is!)

In an atmosphere rich in simple printed texts and in reading aloud, small children make a wondrous associative leap from knowing the alphabet to being able to read whole words. Their minds receive print as if each word were a Chinese ideogram. If a word is unfamiliar it can be skipped, guessed at, or picked up from context. Phonics theory takes exactly the opposite position: the proper analogy for learning to read is learning music notation, or Morse code, or Braille, in which mastery of a set of symbols comes first.

How do Chinese children learn to read, if their every word is an ideogram? Do they all have abysmal literacy rates, like these "balanced literacy" children from the US?

They also have pinyin. They can spell things out phonetically to get the pronunciation.

1997? Try 1955, when Rudolf Flesch's "Why Johnny Can't Read" was published.

Care to elaborate for the non-Flesch readers amoung us?

He just demonstrated that phonics was, objectively, the best way to teach Anglophone kids to read, and lamented its disappearance in American schools. IIRC, the "see-and-say" method was dominant as early as the 1930s.

Phonological and morphological awareness do seem to be well-correlated with literacy outcomes both in alphabetic and non-alphabetic languages, and there's a lot of meta-analyses which show about the same low-moderate correlation in Chinese primary language learners as in English primary language learners. There's some studies that show cross-language transfer in English/Chinese bilingual households for phonological and morphological awareness, but no such transfer for orthographic awareness, which seems to suggest there's something fundamental about the cognitive process of organizing and mapping the set of graphemes and meaningful constructive subsequences in the written language to its equivalent phonetics and trivial phonetic expansions, which is independent of a language's orthographic characteristics.

In any case, I don't think there's any dispute that written Chinese has semi-consistent phonological and morphological structure. The majority of Chinese characters are horizontally structured phono-semantic compounds with a semantic left radical and a phonetic right radical (maybe 70-80%); around half are phonologically regular regardless of tone; and there's only a few hundred common semantic and phonetic radicals. There's clearly a massive encoding and decoding efficiency achieved through semi-consistent phonological mapping of the orthography.

It's really hard to find trustworthy or low-bias takes on this topic. There's a vivid, unsettled debate about how exactly the Chinese literacy rate improved (from <20% in the 1950s, to ~96% by the 2010s), and to what extent the introduction of simplification, pinyin, etc played a role. People get downright vicious in these discussions because they tend to get deeply involved in Chinese idpol culture wars. The debate has its own Wikipedia page. I don't place that much confidence in my understanding of how it all fits together, especially through the fog of culture war - this is a mind-bogglingly complex topic. My basic understanding is that opinions vary widely, from believing that simplification (and possibly pinyin, significantly more controversial) fundamentally enabled mass literacy, to believing it was purely a result of herculean educational investment and widespread literary access (and even that simplification/pinyin was reformist nonsense or foreign interference), with huge diversity of opinions on the relative weights of every effect within that spectrum. It seems fairly uncontroversial that China pre-1950s did not have widespread educational access, and that what access existed was often printed in traditional characters or unique regional characters that the masses could not feasibly learn without dedicated scholarly investment. The literacy rates are also undisputed. I don't think it has much relevance to the question of how Chinese children today learn to read, but it's nevertheless an interesting sideshow.

How do Chinese children learn to read, if their every word is an ideogram? Do they all have abysmal literacy rates, like these "balanced literacy" children from the US?

First of all, there are only ~3000 commonly used Chinese characters, and they contain patterns which make them easier to memorize once you memorize a few hundred. At one character per day, you can learn all the characters in 12 years of schooling. Realistically, the characters are introduced much faster than one character per day and used much more frequently.

One might compare this to the number of phonetic exceptions in English: I remember 5-10 new words for the spelling test every week, from 1st grade to 9th grade.

Note however that if you are going to memorize English words without learning them phonetically, there are many more English words than Chinese characters. A few orders of magnitude more.

One might compare this to the number of phonetic exceptions in English: I remember 5-10 new words for the spelling test every week, from 1st grade to 9th grade.

Yes, this is one thing I noticed living in China and comparing strings. When you look at English in terms of phonemes rather than characters, it's just as impressive that people learn to read in English-speaking countries as in China.

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