Episode 26- What is 3 cueing?

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Maggie. [00:00:01] Speaker B: And I'm Nicole. Welcome to the DIC Dyslexia and Coffee Podcast. We're so happy you could join us. We're both moms and dyslexia interventionists who want to talk about our students and children. What dyslexia is, how it affects our kids, strategies to help and topics related to other learning disabilities will also be covered in this podcast. Parents are not alone, and we want to give a voice to the concerns and struggles we are all having. This is a safe place to learn more about how to help our children grow and succeed in school and the world. Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the conversation. [00:00:36] Speaker A: Hi, everybody. So it is time for the concept of the week. That is how we like to start our episodes. Kind of pivot a little bit on concept of the week, and instead of teaching about something, we would teach about an intervention session. I'm going to do a little pivot and talk about what is a cue, because that is directly related to our topic today. So a cue is simply a teaching tool that uses questioning to kind of keep a student on track or to monitor understanding. So that is what we're really talking about if we're talking about a cute. [00:01:21] Speaker B: So welcome to episode 26. Today's topic is what is three cueing and why don't we like it? [00:01:30] Speaker A: So this episode is actually inspired by a recent conversation that I was having with a parent. This is also something that we get asked about quite a bit. [00:01:43] Speaker B: Yes. Because it's a method that's talked about quite a bit, especially in our state of Wisconsin. [00:01:50] Speaker A: Yes, it is a teaching method that is on the chopping block in a lot of places and for very good reasons. And it is also something that I think it's misunderstood often. So we're really going to actually talk about, okay, what is three cueing? How is that different than cueing and questioning? All of a sudden the word cue is like, outlawed. All of a sudden it's like, wait a minute, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We're not talking about cueing in general. We're talking the method of three cueing. And why is that bad? So in short, three cueing is a teaching method that's used in the balanced literacy or whole language model of teaching reading. And the proponents of this method believed that good readers guess at words in text based on three meaning, structure, and visual. We will get into each one of those a little bit later on. But that's basically what three cueing is. [00:03:05] Speaker B: So a little bit of history. The idea of three cueing is most associated with Ken Goodman Kennedy. In 1967, he published an article called Reading a Psycholingistic Guessing Game. In this article, he set out to disprove the notion that reading is a precise process that involves exact, detailed sequential perception and identification of letters, words, spelling patterns, and larger language units. [00:03:38] Speaker A: Yes. So basically his idea, after observing readers who, spoiler alert, turned out to be actually very poor readers, he decided that it was just a psycholinguistic guessing game and published an article stating that as fact. Soon this idea was embraced by some really big names in education like Marie Clay, Irene Fontes, and Gesu Pannell. [00:04:12] Speaker B: Lucy Calkins endorsed three cueing, and it was a large part of her units of study readers workshop model. And this model was widely sold and many teacher training programs taught this model to their prospective teachers. [00:04:26] Speaker A: Right. So basically became a huge part of whole language instruction. Took over for approximately 40 years. So this was a big problem and. [00:04:47] Speaker B: I've never used this approach. So I'm going to have Maggie explain what these different parts are. [00:04:56] Speaker A: Yeah. So basically, and I can tell you from my teacher training program and even into my master's program, this was what was taught to pre service teachers. We were taught to look at cues that were organized into three different categories. So shorthand was the MSV approach. M for meaning, S for structure, V for visual, and some cues that we were taught to use with our students. So M for meaning. Some possible cues there would have been look at the picture. Does that word make sense? Try a word that makes sense. So absolutely encouraging students to guess at words. SQs for structure. Does that word sound right? Is that how it would sound when we talk? And then V for visual, which by the way would have been the last option that teachers were taught to do is does the word look right? What is the first letter? And then stretch through the word, not sound it out with every component. Stretch through the word. So basically look for phonemes you do know, and stretch through the word. Very different than the way we teach our students to read now. [00:06:34] Speaker B: So like, some examples could include like reading for a meaning clue. So let's say the reader said the small cat was sitting purring by the window. Well, they substitute purring when that word was actually quietly because they had recently read another book where cats purred. So purring and quietly are very different meanings. But because the reader had read something that was similar, they thought that the word could be purring. [00:07:18] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, when they're associating. Right. What do cats do? They purr. [00:07:22] Speaker B: Right. And so an Example for semantic or does it make sense? Is so the word the sentence is my dog Scruff likes to take a bath. And the student replaced take with have. So in this one, the replacement doesn't change really the meaning of the sentence, but it could. What happens if it was like past tense or there's multiple or it changes the time frame. [00:07:54] Speaker A: Yeah. And teachers were encouraged by the way to ignore miscues that didn't change the meaning for a sentence. So if a student read that, if the student read instead of my dog Scruff likes to take a bath. If the student read my dog scruff likes to have a bath because it didn't change the meaning in that sentence, teachers were taught to ignore it. It doesn't matter. It doesn't change the meaning of the sentence. Let's get on with it was kind of the way that that was changed. If there was a miscue, by and large, if there was a miscue that did not affect the meaning, it was acceptable practice, encouraged practice to just move on and let's just get through this reading. [00:08:45] Speaker B: Okay. So then an example of a reader using a visual cue. So the reader read the smell cat was sitting quietly by the window. So in this example, the substitution for smell was. Was for small. So the correct word was small, which shows that the reader is using the beginning blend of SM correctly. But then it is the wrong, completely the wrong word. Right. Smelling and small were completely different. [00:09:24] Speaker A: Totally changes everything. Right. It changes the sound of the word. It changes the meaning. That would then that would have been a cue that would have required a correction from a teacher because it did change the meaning. But basically the meaning was the end all, be all Q. That's why it came first in MSV and it was treated like the most important and the first line Q for this method of teaching. [00:09:58] Speaker B: Well, and wouldn't this be really difficult when student gets older because if they're guessing incorrectly, that changes the meaning a lot more Exactly. [00:10:09] Speaker A: And words become way, first of all, more difficult to discern. If there was a student who had a really faulty understanding of a word or had many, many times practiced a word incorrectly, it would be very difficult to undo that process. Not only has that student learned that word incorrectly, they've been using it incorrectly. Let's not even talk about what happens with spelling. If we're constantly reinforcing incorrect pronunciations of words, it's going to be really quite, quite, quite thorny. One of the big problems we're going to get into the problems with this approach. You can Tell. We're already not happy about this approach, but we're going to get into the why here in a minute. But one of the. One of the biggest issues is that this appeared to really, really work in very early, early readers. And it was because they were exposed to very repetitive texts. And it was like books like See the Giraffe, See the Elephant, See the Monkey. And because they could really just get all of these words by just basically picture cues and meaning, it was appearing as if, wow, these students are really knowing all these words. And isn't it cool that we can expose them to these complicated early words? That's amazing. And it wasn't until later when it was like, oh, all of a sudden, these kids really hit a wall because they could no longer rely on those context clues before. We really are looking into, oh, they're not actually reading. Because this was based on faulty science to begin with. The idea that reading is a guessing game is completely false. We have much evidence. We know that that is not in fact true, but it was absolutely embraced by large publishers. [00:12:46] Speaker B: So some other issues are with three cueing. It relies too heavily on the meaning and the structure cues. So this leads to students guessing at words rather than actual reading, which we were just kind of saying. And students rely too much on context clues, which eventually will not be enough to figure out brand new words for them. [00:13:09] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. If they're trying to read something like a science textbook and they don't have a basic understanding of the concept to begin with, they're not going to have enough context clues because this is something new. That's not different than you and I studying something brand new. We would not have enough context to figure out new vocabulary on that subject. I certainly would not be able to pick up a law textbook, for example, and be a fluent reader and have enough of those words that I was going to be able to get meaning from context, I would need to rely on lots of other sources of information. That would take me a long time, and I would need to reread it many times. But that was not taught. That was not the idea. [00:14:03] Speaker B: Interesting. Also, students can develop false notions about what the sounds are in words, which, as we've said in earlier episodes, that would be a problem. [00:14:15] Speaker A: Yeah, that's, you know, over generalizing patterns that are less frequent. For example, if a student is reading the word school and seeing that ch. Right. Says that K sound in school. Yeah, it does say that sometimes. But when they come across the more common sound, which is ch, many of those students that were taught to read in this method had a very difficult time understanding that. Oh, actually, it says two sounds, and you should try that soft sound first because it's more common. So undoing that really is kind of a losing battle. First of all, it's very difficult to unlearn and restructure those things, but that was definitely a problem with this method of teaching. [00:15:12] Speaker B: Also, often the visual cues were used as a last resort rather than the first thing that a student should do to figure out a word. So actually, using our phonemic awareness. [00:15:26] Speaker A: You know, students were encouraged to keep going after miscues rather than going back and rereading the words. So the prompt, really, even if a student didn't know a word at all, there was a widely used visual. I don't remember whose curriculum it was. Could have been Lucy Culkins, could have been somebody else associated with us, but they were like little cutesy animal carts. And one of them was a bunny or a frog. And they each had a reading strategy. And one of those reading strategies was, if you get to a tricky word, use your little hoppy bunny or the hoppy frog and hop over the word, skip it entirely, continue the sentence, and then go back and try to figure out that word from the context of the sentence. [00:16:21] Speaker B: Okay. [00:16:21] Speaker A: Yes. [00:16:23] Speaker B: This really interrupts that process of orthographic mapping that we were talking about in an earlier episode where students are connecting the visual cues to the phonemes in a word and so that they can see the word, know exactly what word it is when you're reading after being exposed to that word so many times. That does not happen with this method. [00:16:48] Speaker A: No. Students don't have enough accuracy to develop those, like, mental pictures of words either. So, yeah, I just want to make sure we are being very clear here. So to be clear, the science of reading does support students use context to make sense of new words. Students should absolutely be taught to ask themselves if what they are reading makes sense, but they should not be taught to skip or guess at words. So, yes, we want our students monitoring their understanding as they are reading. But if it's not making sense, then they need to go back. They don't need to just power through and get on with it. [00:17:42] Speaker B: Yeah, because I'm guessing that later, you know, when you're learning to read is different from reading to learn. So when you're reading to learn, if you have the wrong word, the wrong meaning, then you can be completely learning the wrong concept. [00:17:59] Speaker A: And you also don't know that because you haven't been corrected. If it had not affected Meaning you really had not been corrected. And so you may have a very poor monitoring skill. You may not be able to monitor your own understanding. Because if you are sure that word is, you know, I'm trying to think of a good close distractor kind of word. If you are sure the word is compel, but it's not, it's compost or something like that, you're not. They're. They're only looking at that first part of the word. They're completely guessing. They're looking at what it could be, and they're moving on. And if they don't really have a good understanding or vocabulary anyway, they're not going back. They could just really have false ideas about what words mean. And. [00:19:05] Speaker B: And would they also, because they were reading the incorrect word, would they map it incorrectly? So then it would be wrong all of the time. All the time. And then you would use the wrong word all the time? [00:19:19] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, it also interrupts the idea of, you know, a schema. Right. So a schema is the way our brain organizes new information. So what it likes to do is make associations. So if we see an unknown word, we want to be able to take that word and map it to other things we do know. For example, if a word is pony and the student really doesn't understand the word. A pony. Pony. Right. But maybe they do understand horse. Sometimes that student. Right. They will just too closely associate pony and horse and get those two totally mixed up. We want a good idea of how these words are similar, how they are different. And if we're not exposed to enough words and we don't have enough actual correction or vocabulary instruction, we're not going to get there. And this method just completely skips that. [00:20:18] Speaker B: So how do we teach students to read unfamiliar words? [00:20:22] Speaker A: Yes. So that is what we get a lot. And that is kind of. The pushback from proponents of three cueing is one, they really do believe this is the great way to teach reading. They do believe reading is basically guessing. And they get a lot of pushback of, okay, well then how do we teach unfamiliar words? And really, the answer is they need to be taught to break up words into their smaller parts. If it's a single syllable word up into the phonemes, if it's a longer word, break it up into the syllables or recognize the morphemes in the word. Being able to recognize those prefix and suffix and break those longer words apart, that is how we want readers to attack words, because that's actually what our. [00:21:18] Speaker B: Brains are doing, and that is There's a ton of science behind these methods. [00:21:25] Speaker A: Yeah. So phonics. Right. By now we are broken record on this. Right. Though phonics needs to be explicitly taught in a systematic, sequential manner. You know, and then again, students need to be taught to go back and reread as many times as they need to. Rereading helps them confirm or change the word that they chose. It also helps to rebuild meaning after fluency was disrupted. So if we're reading along and we stumble upon a word and we have to go back and we have to figure out that word, our fluency is interrupted. And so we're not making the meaning from that text that we can. So we need to go back until we are fluent and they can solve that tricky word. It allows students to compare the word's spelling with its sound. Right. Building that orthographic mapping. And then it also gives them a second look at a challenging word, which helps them with future automaticity. So, yeah, this was three cueing, folks. Yeah, I find it a little shocking now, now that I know so much right now that I have been in this structured literacy world for many, many years. I understand the importance of phonics. I understand the harm done by three cueing. This is, I think, a pretty important thing to be discussing. We do live in the state of Wisconsin and there's is supposed to be Right. Banning of three cueing. I guess some of the pushback that we get from the balanced literacy camp, I guess is like, well, what's the harm here? Or are we really not teaching kids to use context? And, you know, I guess my answer is of course not. Right. You know, yes, meaning is incredibly important. We do need students to monitor their understanding as they are reading. And no one from science of reading ever said that we should not use any cues. No one ever said that. That is first of all ridiculous. That's how we teach. You're not teaching is cueing. Right. It's structured questioning and the idea of inquiry. And students should be able to discover through words. That's, that's great. But the problem is that wasn't done with a systematic and sequential approach. So they were all just guessing at words willy nilly. [00:24:48] Speaker B: So how does that impact their comprehension? [00:24:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, later in life that can really impact their comprehension because they don't have the correct strategies for pulling meaning from word. They have developed poor reading habits of guessing. And when they get to a passage with many, many unknown words, which they are going to, we all do, there is just a really heavy reliance on using their own background knowledge, which. That's another really whole episode. Right. Not everybody comes to the table with the same background knowledge. And again, that can be used to really create some false notions there. So comprehension long term can be quite poor. It also can affect oral vocabulary because if they're not, one of the ways we build our robust oral vocabulary is by reading. And if we're not associating words correctly, we're really not learning anything. And that is where we can get into issues with, you know, either semantic kind of mistakes or structural types of mistakes. Our kids who skip suffixes. Right. Yeah. They're not really used to having to look out for that. They don't really feel like it matters. And that translates even into spoken and oral vocabulary. Not to mention, when we're speaking, we don't always pay attention to the structure of the words we're saying, but we sure as heck have to for reading and for writing. So I guess the answer to the what's the harm here is all of the harm. We taught for a good 40 years in education, and this was not. This was not just the state of Wisconsin. This was not just the United States. This was globally based, really, on some very, very salty, faulty science, but very charismatic people. That was a camp that was. Well, we just want our kids to love to read. We just want to expose them to lots and lots of rich text. Man, they made some beautiful books with gorgeous pictures. And it is true that many of those early readers really kind of loved those kind of classrooms because along with this 3Q method came the whole balanced literacy world of you were exposed to a lot of different kinds of text, and there was kind of little accountability. So, you know, the balanced literacy folks would say, well, structured literacy is boring, and all you do is drill and kill, you know, and there was that kind of. I don't want to be explicitly teaching. We're taking the joy out of reading. That was, first of all, not true, but it appeared true in the short term. [00:28:29] Speaker B: Interesting. Yeah. Because, I mean, right now, when our kids that come here. [00:28:35] Speaker A: Yes. [00:28:35] Speaker B: And they have that aha Moment. And they. [00:28:40] Speaker A: Yes. [00:28:41] Speaker B: Flip from I do not want to read to I love to read. It's so amazing to see. [00:28:47] Speaker A: Yeah. Powerful. Because we're actually teaching them to read, not just guess at words. And, you know, as we know, our. [00:28:59] Speaker B: Kids can guess very well. [00:29:03] Speaker A: And it's so. It really is made to be so early, to be so easy early on. That's why there's so many repetitive, repetitive books at those levels, you know, really. And true. When we're talking about those leveled readers, things like Fontas and Pinell or the teacher college. Those are those books, right, that have like the A to Z reading levels. That is not based on any science at all. And it is all a measure called readability, which is measuring the sentence length and like the complexity of different kinds of sentences, which has really nothing to do with decodability. That's why we don't like those. And it really is those early, early, like abc. Most educational researchers out there all do kind of coalesce around the. If we could just ban those, like level ABC books from the classroom, we would do a lot of good for the students because now we're actually getting rid of those super duper repetitive. You're only getting meaning from pictures. Those kinds of books. Those are the real. Those are the real harm done books. I am absolutely. Please nobody hear me say that I don't like picture books. I love picture books. I love graphic novels. I love beautiful, beautiful children's literature. And yeah, I do want kids looking at pictures. Absolutely. That is all literacy, but it isn't all specifically teaching reading. [00:30:57] Speaker B: Makes sense. Yeah. So Maggie, what's happening outside of dyslexia? [00:31:03] Speaker A: Yeah, that is a good question. So outside of dyslexia for us right now, it is beginning to warm up a little bit. So I am very excited to be able to go outside with the kids. My kids are off these couple of days and thank goodness we can take them outside because holy cow, we have just been. We've just been pent up for so long and yeah, it's been like energy. [00:31:36] Speaker B: Out negative 25 below. So, I mean, it's been way too cold to go outside. [00:31:41] Speaker A: Way too cold. [00:31:45] Speaker B: And in our house, we've just been all about the basketball. Our daughter was on two teams, the fourth grade through sixth grade team and then the sixth grade through eighth grade team. So it's been quite busy, but very exciting. They did one. They got third place at the tournament last weekend. Yay. And she stole the ball in the overtime to keep the other team from scoring again. [00:32:09] Speaker A: Amazing. Yay. [00:32:11] Speaker B: So it was very cool, Lizzie, so. [00:32:14] Speaker A: That's so cool. She's worked so hard at that too. [00:32:17] Speaker B: She has. [00:32:17] Speaker A: So exciting, so fun. Well, thank you all for listening. Please, if you like a show, if you like our show, please follow us on social media and reach out if you have any questions or you would like us to discuss a topic. We are always looking for. What do you want to hear from us? If you do like our show, be sure to follow and give us a rating on your favorite podcast player. That is really how we reach more listeners, right? The algorithms like it if you like us. Thank you, everybody. [00:32:51] Speaker B: Thank you.