A 2019 report by Emily Hanford for American Public Media, “At a Loss for Words,” described how millions of students in the United States were still being taught to read using a flawed approach known as “three-cueing.” This method, Hanford writes, sprang from a 1967 paper that theorized that fluent readers recognized words not merely from their spellings but also from “contextual” factors such as sentence structure and accompanying illustrations. Primary education, the theory held, should teach students using the same process: not “sounding out” words but using only isolated phonetic components, such as a first letter, and combining these with contextual clues.