This is quite recent but I’ve been browsing Lemmy a bunch lately and quite often I see extreme grammatical errors.
I’m not talking about like, incorrect stylistic choices between commas and dashes, or an improper use of ellipses or missing commas or incorrect use of apostrophes in its/it’s or in multiple posessive articles or just plain typos or any nitpicky grammar nazi shit like that, but just basic spelling specifically.
It’s one thing when you can’t spell some pretty uncommon words and you’re too lazy to look it up and/or use autocorrect, but it’s a completely different league to misspell very basic words, very recently I saw someone spell “extreme” as “extream” which is just kind of baffling, I actually can’t even imagine how one would make such a mistake?
And it’s not been an isolated thing either, I’ve seen several instances like that lately.
Am I going crazy? Is it just me?
I think this is finally being corrected, but for decades kids have been taught “whole word reading” rather than phonics. The basic idea is that instead of learning how to sound out words, they should look at the first letter and guess what they think the word might be based on context/pictures. The proponents of this method claim kids will memorize words as “whole words” and eventually be able to read.
So, they can’t actually read. But they know how to look like they can read.
When you can’t read it’s not enjoyable, so you read less. When you read less you come across fewer words, which you don’t really know how to decode anyway because you were never taught.
Anyway these kids are now adults, and even the ones who are smart still struggle with spelling and reading.
Check out the podcast Sold a Story, really interesting investigation on this topic.
This made me look up “whole word reading”, and it just made me irrationally angry. To be fair, English isn’t my native language and I don’t have a recollection of learning how to read, but “whole word learning” sounds insane. But like… Why would you do that if you are using an alphabet?
Phonics is dogshit and it’s being phased out in favour of whole word reading here.
You should not learn spelling by “sounding out” much of anything, you should learn it through reading text and remembering how words are spelt.
You might want to look at the latest research. Its not favorable after decades of data from “whole word” reading techniques education.
you should learn it through reading text and remembering how words are spelled.
Thats the concept of “whole word”, yes, but in practice it severely limits vocabulary and comprehension apparently. That real world data tells the tale.
I’ll have a look, but idk I was taught whole word in two languages and I can write a lot better than I can speak in at least 1.3 of them.
Did you downvote me because I pointed out the latest research doesn’t agree with your position?
I didn’t downvote you at all
My apologies. The downvote was on my post in under 15 seconds after I posted it. I had assumed the only one that would see it would be the person alerted to it. I guess Lemmy is growing up there are downvoters waiting to pounce instantly! We’re graduating to the big leagues now!
At average apparent text sizes, you only see ~4 letters clearly at a time, so it’s often enough that you can’t read a whole word at once. From there, there’s so many prefixes, suffixes, conjugations, compounds, and portmanteaus that it doesn’t make sense to just try to memorize the dictionary. What happens when you’re reading a flamboyant author that has tons of theasaraus usage and you come across words you’ve never heard in your life? You use context as best you can, but if there’s familiar roots in the word, you have a better chance of understanding it.
Also
spelt
That is a grain spelled “spelt”
You can memorize the patterns of each word and eventually you just understand language. Is that not how it’s meant to work?