tdekken

Thanks so much for your response Vanderson! I wish I had known about How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Lessons when I was teaching my daughter. I definitely fumbled my way through it :).

> I think you have an up hill battle with getting traction with DI, but if you succeed that would be a great benefit to many people. (my perception)

I completely agree and it really isn't too surprising that DI never took off in schools. FWIW, I am looking to revive the underlying pedagogy (e.g., teaching sequences for non-comparatives, joining forms, etc.) rather than DI proper.

> What is the protocol on this site for starting conversations "offline"?

Interesting question that I never stopped to consider :). I have met dozens of people through HN, and it seems congruent with the hacker ethic ("throughout writings about hackers and their work processes, a common value of community and collaboration is present"), but ::shrugs::.

Thanks again for sharing your DI story.

Hi havercosine, I would love to (my contact info is in my profile).

Hi numeromancer, I am surprised to hear mention of Engelmann and Project Follow Through here on HN :). I would love to connect and learn more about how you discovered DI. FWIW, I am a former principal engineer at a FAANG company turned educational researcher / edtech founder. I am working to revive Engelmann's Theory of Instruction and democratize access to the explicit, systematic teaching of the skills of reading (e.g., phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition).

Hi Vanderson, I am surprised to hear mention of Engelmann here on HN :). I would love to connect and learn more about how you discovered DI. FWIW, I am a former principal engineer at a FAANG company turned educational researcher / edtech founder. I am working to revive Engelmann's Theory of Instruction and democratize access to the explicit, systematic teaching of the skills of reading (e.g., phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition).

In 2018, I took a year-long sabbatical from a FAANG company (FYI, I was principal level and it required VP approval). I had previously taken a few 1-3 month breaks between positions prior to the sabbatical. Although am I grateful for the extended breaks, they are far from a panacea and downright stressful if you set your expectations too high :).

Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss further.

Thanks so much for your response @sirspacey!

> Framing education as lessons presumes that lessons are how people learn

To clarify, are you thinking of a lecture instead of a lesson? A lecture is "a speech read or delivered before an audience or class, especially for instruction or to set forth some subject" whereas a lesson is "a section into which a course of study is divided".

A lesson is a generic term agnostic to instructional style (e.g., explicit, discovery, project-based, etc.) Similar to how everything in software engineering is a "task" :).

FWIW, this framing is the start of an essay I am writing about why the untold number of apps that purport to teach children to read fall far short and what can be done about it.

> what have you done so far

So far, I am a week into learning ML :). I have spent ~30 hours watching various ML courses and am in the process of testing the hypothesis that teaching reading with a shallower orthography (e.g., differentiating between the short and long 'e' sounds by introducing an 'ē' grapheme) leads to improved recognition of sublexical patterns. The step I am working on is building an embedding layer to ensure that these new graphemes (i.e., 'ē', 'ā', etc.) are near their parent grapheme (i.e., 'e', 'a') in the embedding space. (Although the model seems straightforward, I could also be completely misguided in how I am tackling this problem :) ).

FYI, this orthographic approach (i.e., how words are spelled using an alphabet) is used in a few highly researched literacy programs, but AFAICT there isn't direct research on the approach itself. The motivation is to initially make English a consistent language (i.e., the letters you see have a one-to-one correspondence with a particular sound). This should greatly simplify the initial roadblock in learning to read English (as seen by studies of countries with "shallow" orthographic languages) and then learners would transfer this knowledge to the normal (inconsistent) English orthography.

Congratulations on launching! I love the combination of an app coupled with physical books. It really demonstrates your understanding of your customers.

* I would love to know more about your phonics instruction. From what I can see, Ello embeds the instruction into the "help the child sound out the words" component. Is that correct or is more systematic instruction provided?

* How do you help children overcome the seemingly maddening inconsistency of the English language? For example, the long a sound can correspond to the a, ai, eigh, aigh, ay, er (RP), et, ei, au, a_e, ea, and ey graphemes.

* Does your speech recognition system understand at the phoneme level?

BTW, I would love to connect. I am an independent educational researcher and early literacy edtech founder. My background is big tech (principal engineer at a FAANG company) and am now navigating the treacherous waters of building an audience, securing funding, bringing in experts, etc.

Best of luck!