ok ok, I read you as stating he’s wasting his time with his kid and training him up to perform some demeaning and ultimately useless parlour trick for his own twisted satisfaction.
I see it as useful for all the reasons I stated.
[quote=“ben_ehlers, post:21, topic:49870”]
Developmentally speaking, it is impossible to teach kids reading (in the traditional sense) when they are this young; they schema just aren’t fully developed enough to support the kinds of abstraction that reading requires.[/quote]This is the scenario that bothered me: that he may be so far out of his depth as far as anything resembling actual reading is concerned that he doesn’t get any more out of this than a chimp would, learning to fake a skill without any meaningful progress towards the real thing.
[quote]This doesn’t mean that parents can’t take steps to lay the foundations for literacy by strengthening a child’s command of the cognitive strategies that are available to them (pattern and symbol recognition, word repetition, etc).
[/quote]Does something like this really do him any good that e.g. the same task with pictures wouldn’t? It seems that there are entirely levels to this that make it harder but are completely lost on him.
I think there are many roads to reading. My (now 21 years old) daughter was read to constantly by everyone from pretty much the day she was born, at least two or three hours a day. However, she was a late reader, it was easily 3rd grade before she read on her own. Why should she? She was read to by at least 2 adults daily, and often more. My older son (now 16) taught himself to read at 2 years old. My younger (now 14 yr old) son wouldn’t sit still to be read to, at best he got a page or two a day. And he was another late reader and his school even wanted to put him in a special late reader group. But interestingly, all three are now “college” level readers who score off the charts on reading tests. Most of what we think of as “reading” ability is actually vocabulary and common knowledge acquisition I think. Read to kids, talk to kids, watch documentaries with your kids, play word games with your kids, do flash cards with your kids, it’s all really the same. If they have a lot of words in their head, then eventually they will read well.
Isn’t that true of every skill at the early stages? Whenever I start learning something new, I usually start with imitating the actions of someone with more knowledge, whether that be in person, through books, or via YouTube. I have copied loads of stuff whose implications I may not appreciate at first.
Moreover, the research is pretty positive in supporting the conclusion that repeated exposure to reading in any form at the youngest ages produces better adult readers.
(And to equate the learning process of kids to that of chimps is kind of demeaning to kids (and kind of insulting to chimps, too). It seems like you have not spent extensive time with either group. )
Edit: a random link for support - http://m.tec.sagepub.com/content/19/1/3.short
There’s loads more research out there if you look.
Tl;dr spending time with your kids in a pro-reading way is never wasted time.
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My daughter was introduced to ‘Baby Can Read’ when she was one year old.
At 18 months she could barely speak, but here she is reading - http://adoralevin.com/post/4436482094/adora-can-now-read-about-50-words-when. (It’s weird how similar our video is to the above.)
She kept improving her reading & comprehension skills in the following years. Now she is 5, and last week she got her first book published - http://adoralevin.com/post/106886263806/we-are-super-excited-to-announce-that-adoras!
Go, Baby Readers!
Baby Can Read works, if you do.
I was told I was reciting in kindergarten. Then I got tested. Read like a 3rd grader, in pre-K. Who knows, these things are possible.
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I had good results teaching 4 year olds reading by using a similar method to this. With a small enough set, you’re just recognising words with different shapes and lengths that are easy to distinguish from each other. As you build up the vocabulary, you introduce more similar words that require closer reading, but at the start it’s just recognising enough of the word to eliminate the other options. I didn’t start with phonetics, but I found exposure to the vocabulary helped them to learn a lot by extrapolation. In my own Chinese learning, I found the same technique to be quite useful. Rather than learning the character enough to be able to reproduce it, start by being able to distinguish it from a small set - greater understanding of the finer distinctions can come later. It seems to me that in speaking, it isn’t really important to know the cases, tenses or morphemes involved at the start. Babies often chunk groups of words together to communicate, then learn to distinguish and use the individual words later.
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I don’t think the important point here is whether or not the kid could read, but rather what the parents hoped to get out of posting this video to the internet? did they need everyone to validate they are good parents? Or brilliant themselves? or were they just looking for their 15 minutes of fame? Or were they hoping for a lot of likes in order to feel like people like them?
What a bunch of cranks and cynics in this thread.
Having worked in the field of early childhood development, I can say – rather definitively - that many empirical, longitudinal studies have shown a direct correlation between this type of activity and both literacy and learning, Is the kid actually “reading”? Of course not. BUT he is building the foundation by associating all those shapes with language and meaning. At the stage this little guy is at…the key process is cognitive development. Recitation is a good thing.
Families cannot begin early enough with this. Reading and talking are only the start of the benefits. It most definitely is worth the time and effort…not to mention the simple joys of conversing with the child.
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…and I won’t dribble down the front of my shirt while doing it either.
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My guess is because they have friends and family with whom they want to share this moment.
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He’s 16 months old. What tasks did you have in mind for him?
You have a much more optimistic view of human nature than I do 
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My spouse is fairly terrified that someday one of our own baby videos may go viral.
Our almost 2 year old recognizes letters and numbers but doesn’t read yet. He does have lots of books and phrases from books memorized though. I figure that’s a step towards reading.
I figure we’ll just keep reading to him all the time and he’ll figure it out eventually.
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I can read a Hungarian newspaper out loud with relative accuracy. I can read. I know the letters, and I haven’t memorized the word-shapes. But I can’t understand the vast majority of it.
What does understanding the ideas behind a word have to do with reading?
I still don’t understand string theory in English, even, but I can read the words out loud.
I’ve given up on my kids. Now I am wishing one of our cats would do something interesting (i.e. marketable) enough to help me retire…
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Yeah, but even Chinese isn’t really a matter of mere “symbols” for “words”, as most Chinese words are made up of multiple characters just like most English words are.
Speaking words out loud has nothing to do with “reading”. I took a course in university entitled “Reading German”. It consisted of reading assignments in German and answering questions about what I read (in English). In retrospect probably it would have been better to have taken an integrated reading/writing/speaking course but the skills are completely different.
Like memorizing multiplication tables, or state capitals?
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