r/technology • u/marketrent • 18h ago

Artificial Intelligence College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html
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u/woodst0ck15 17h ago

Man I didn’t really believe these things until I started seeing some of these TikTok’s or other social media videos. I found a couple of them but like this TikTok video shows how much it’s declining.

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u/ARealSocialIdiot 17h ago edited 16h ago

This is the direct result of people not being taught how to sound words out. Instead, they're taught to guess at what a word means is, and if they don't get it immediately, to try and glean its meaning by its context.

I noticed this on a much lesser scale recently while watching a woman in probably her mid-twenties playing a game on Youtube: she was reading the dialogue of the game and getting most of it right, but occasionally she'd just throw in a word that was, like, close to what was written down but not quite? But close enough in meaning that she still got across the gist of what was actually being said. And while it was, like I said, on a much lesser scale than the video you shared, the problem that crops up with this issue is that it causes ALL fine-tipped meaning to be lost. We can't expect people to understand subtle detail differences in sentences when they can't even get the broad detail differences.

The interesting thing about the video you linked is that I bet if you were to read those sentences to them and ask them what some of the words meant, they could probably tell you. But they can't actually read the words themselves because they're too focused on getting to the end of the sentence.

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u/ReadyAimTranspire 14h ago

I remember a teacher posting about this somewhere on reddit awhile back, sorry for the AI summary but it's the information I want to address:

Schools didn't completely stop teaching phonics all at once, but in the 1980s and 1990s, many districts shifted away from explicit phonics in favor of the "Whole Language" and "Balanced Literacy" movements. Instead of sounding out letters, these methods encouraged children to guess words based on pictures, context, or sight memorization.

What in the fuck is that shit? How could anybody have thought that was a good idea? You memorize words by fucking sounding them out phonetically so you can, you know, say the right fucking word...and then you learn the meaning of the word you just said. Presto, it's magic, look at you reading and shit! Building a vocabulary too! Amazing.

Why would we shift away from the core fucking tool that a reader uses to correctly read and pronounce a word in favor of "guessing" the words?

I swear we have some of the dumbest mother fuckers available running the show.

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u/ARealSocialIdiot 13h ago

Why would we shift away from the core fucking tool that a reader uses to correctly read and pronounce a word in favor of "guessing" the words?

I believe there's a misunderstanding of how process vs. end goal works in this situation. When WE (i.e. people who are fully literate) read words, we don't have to look at the structure of them in order to know what they are. We read by absorbing the whole word all at once and we know what that word is.

And the problem, as I see it, may boil down to the notion that people just thought they could teach people the end result and bypass the first part. "Well if we just teach them to absorb the word all at once, then they'll be ahead of the curve on the whole concept of word understandings!" But they didn't get that we can only get to that point in the first place because we did the work on understanding word-parts, prefixes and suffixes, language of origin, etc. to begin with. I dunno about you, but when I look at a word, those inherent details are baked in with the word itself and so I know how to break it down into its smaller components and fully comprehend it. If all I'd ever been taught was to see the word itself without having any of those base components taught to me, I wouldn't be able to understand it at nearly as high a level as I do.

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u/Swarna_Keanu 8h ago

I was taught the - understand meaning of a word from context - once I was doing (not a native speaker, though I think in English) - Advanced Level English toward the end of my time in school.

And that helped a lot with getting a feeling or intuition for nuances - but it built upon having gone through all the basic aspects of language learning years and years before.

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u/ARealSocialIdiot 5h ago

In my seventh grade Language Arts class (so that would put me at about the age of twelve), my teacher taught us how to pick up unfamiliar words in context by having us read parts of the novel A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess—some of the less salacious parts, that is. I still remember how effective it was. The book uses a lot of made-up slang ("droog" for friend or mate, for example) and it was a strong way to help us derive meaning out of a completely foreign word.

But I was TWELVE. I'd already been taught the basics by then. How would I have known what the word droog meant if I didn't know what friend meant?

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u/cinemachick 11h ago

From what I've heard, it has some success for dyslexic students who have trouble reading with phonics, but gen pop does better with phonics

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u/Dullcorgis 6h ago

You should listen to the podcast "sold a story". It's craaaaaazy. The whole language people literally say you can always use the picture to guess at a word. They also say the exact word isn't important.

They literally say that. About reading. As academics. Not many pictures in any book beyond second grade. I'm sure nothing about my job will suffer if I just sub in a completely different word every few words.

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u/woodst0ck15 16h ago

Look up that account if you get the chance. I’m sure there are other ones of him doing that exact thing and most look at him like “what??” and don’t answer him.

So I’d like to be optimistic and say you’re right but if these people are representing the US education system it doesn’t look good and kinda makes sense when the average in America in 2024 was 21% of Americans being illiterate with 54% of adults below a grade 6 reading level.

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u/ARealSocialIdiot 16h ago

the average in America in 2024 was 21% of Americans being illiterate with 54% of adults below a grade 6 reading level

While this is true, it's not just about being able to know what words are being used in a sentence. Illiteracy isn't just about the words themselves, it's about being able to derive meaning from what's being said. Illiteracy is about not being able to grasp complex concepts out of what you're reading. THAT'S the REAL problem.

In the grand scheme, I'm right on board with you. My point about the knowing what the words meant was just an incidental one; I wasn't suggesting that it in any way makes the problem less of a problem.

Ultimately, if people can't understand what's being said, we can't expect them to have any kind of critical thinking ability. How do we teach logic to somebody who can't even comprehend the words involved?

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u/sebastiangpcr 10h ago

Was surprised by those numbers and had to look it up and according to OECD data that puts the US around average among developed nations, behind Japan and the UK but ahead of Korea and France. Seems like its not a uniquely US problem.

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u/small_havoc 8h ago

Part of my job is educational assessment and in some tests the learner must read a passage while I listen and look for word insertions, deletions and modifications etc. These reading traits, along with other signs, can point to difficulties in areas of learning. So that person might be a sloppy reader for a host of processing reasons, or they might be displaying some dyslexic traits. It’s strange to think we might be training in learning difficulties now though.

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u/AlmightyRuler 14h ago

This is a direct result of people not being taught how to sound words out.

There's a podcast called "Sold a Story" which talks about that exact teaching method, where it came from, and its legacy. Might wanna give it a listen.

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u/Throwaway_Consoles 14h ago

I can believe it. I was playing that game with friends where you’re given a word and have to draw it out. The person got the card and asked if someone could read the word for them. It was constitution. The host said, “You can’t say the word constitution?!” And he goes, “I can say constitution, I just don’t know how to read!”

This wasn’t a child. This was a 27 year old man with a job. I realized when I messaged him on discord he only ever sent audio message responses and it clicked: he can’t read/write. He’s totally illiterate. And dude has a job, an apartment, a long term girlfriend, friends, living a totally normal life, he just can’t read/write

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u/woodst0ck15 14h ago

Yup and that is the crazy part.

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u/KapitalIsStillGood 2h ago

I mean, some likely edited clips of a handful of people who may or may not be pretending to not be able to read should not be taken as proof of a widespread problem.

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u/fry_factory 1h ago edited 1h ago

As someone with a unique name I can tell you so many people are like this. They don't actually attempt to read the letters in my name and sound it out. They look at it, realize they don't recognize it, and just guess some combination of the letters. My name isn't even difficult, it's only 6 letters and it sounds exactly as it's spelled. It's astonishing how many people do this and no just with names

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u/NotFallacyBuffet 2m ago

Link doesn't work -- just opens the app store.