I think it’s been around for a bit (at least I remember seeing it last year). Double laxative effects aside, I always thought this would taste weird.

Eloquently put. Did a site tagline just drop?

They get into it pretty quickly, but it doesn’t get a name till later. The name of the idea seems to be called “cueing theory” or the “three cues system”. Basically, it says that beginning readers should look at cues or context for reading new words, such as the first and last letters of the word, what the sentence says so far, etc., and use these to try to infer what the new word is. Sounding out a word should only be used as a last resort under this system.

The thing that’s funny to me (in a kind of way) is that the way the people who support these ideas talk about teaching reading sounds a lot like training an AI language model - i.e. use the preceding context to guess the next word. They even go so far as to use a sticky note to cover the next word and try to get the kids to guess it as a classroom exercise.