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Wait, this is a real thing? I was handing in a marketing copy and one of my us colleagues mentioned that I was using fairly complicated language that most Americans won't understand. Is that the reason? I thought I had used normal level English that everyone who has learned it as a second language would understand. It never occurred to me that native speakers would have issues? Not in a business context at least?
As someone born and raised in the USA, like anything else in our country it's a gradient and not black and white. There are plenty of people who speak eloquently and can engage with an expansive vocabulary.
There also are, I'd wager almost certainly more, people who are borderline functionally illiterate for whom reading is a chore and who actively try to avoid it.
Beyond that, the vast majority of folks can read and write but have a limited lexicon and have not attempted (and probably won't) to grow their knowledge of English words. Most of us just get by and go along.
I don't know why I still am constantly surprised by just how stupid my compatriots are. Maybe I just want to believe in a better world. The sad reality is Americans, as a whole, are pretty goddamn dumb and ignorant and like it that way.
How it was implemented is going to vary by state and even by school, but this system was used for years in every state. Anyone in their mid 30s and older doesn’t have that excuse, but kids being taught to read in the early 2000s and on were increasingly taught with three cueing alone and no sounding out words, because the theory was basically they just figure it out themselves.
A lot of them did not figure it out themselves.
Um. I think you might have misread the wiki article, three-cueing stopped being taught exclusively in 2000. (Sorry, really not trying to be shitty here)
The research has been there for decades, but it hasn’t been reflected in the way reading was actually taught for a lot of students. Some states are just now introducing laws to make sure students aren’t being taught exclusively three cueing.
Do you have a source on the prevalence you are claiming? Sincerely asking, I work in education and this is very much contrary to what I have seen.
Absolutely, check out the American Public Media (they’re the second largest public radio in the US after NPR) investigative reporting in Sold a Story: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/season-1/ They have links for supporting reporting under some of the episodes: https://www.apmreports.org/story/2022/11/10/heinemann-sales-by-school-district
I am sorry I cannot watch the vid at the moment, but what a good article. The vid may talk about the current prevalence of teaching queuing (I think I'm so funny), I didn't see it come up beyond incidental mention in the article nor did it mention that the rate of teaching MSV has increased, but I overall agree with everything they're/you're saying there:
Yes absolutely, MSV is not a replacement for phonics.
Again, absolutely correct. The beneficial parts of MSV are in learning to derive meaning and infer context from non-textual cues, not the whole dowsing-for-phonics thing.
I'm getting the distinct impression this is an overloaded term and that we're agreeing about phonics vs. MSV, I suspect it has (ironically) a fairly contextually-dependent meaning.
(edit: There's a whole side-topic about the hell that is "whole language")
Yes, if you are writing for the general public you need to keep it simple. A shocking number of people are barely literate, something like 1 in 5 adults in the US are illiterate.
It’s worse. From a search:
Slightly less than 1 in 20 (at least in 2019. Unfortunately the last time this came up I couldn't find the PIAAC evaluations fully broken out more recently than that, and I have had no more luck this time)
Without an example of the text in question it's a pretty unanswerable stereotype, but it's possible. The topic of US literacy is an extremely complex one, but overall it had been trending up (until the kids were kneecapped by COVID) and US advanced literacy L3+ among non-college grads tends to be heavily siloed towards jargon shaped by the prevailing regional industry with little mixing between areas. It's a fascinating topic, really.
Anyways: minor criticism for OP as they're kinda basing their complaint on the idea that MSV is exclusively what is taught in the US; this hasn't been the case for decades. While they're absolutely right that MSV as an exclusive method for learning to read is a horrible approach, it's a very useful skill for inferring meaning from context, especially when combined with a foundation built on the standard vocab+definition+phonics framework.