Quote:
Originally Posted by Daniel Pereira:
...this particular study, which is often quoted...
|
Well, as someone has been steeped in early literacy research, pedagogy, and theory for several years now, I am embarassed to say that I thought htis was a new study.
Anyway, I agree with just about everything Daniel said. As I said in my earlier post, "phonics," syntax, and context are all important in reading and all have to work simultneously. The reason we can read the jumbled text is precisely that we are using all of those cueing systems.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Daniel Pereira:
What a crazy idea: maybe the best way to learn to read is...to read a lot.
Nah. It'll never fly.
|
There it is. I couldn't agree more. I have been teaching students with "low literacy backgrounds" -- largeley poor kids with little or no exposure to print before Kindergarten. What they need is, ahem, EXPOSURE TO PRINT. They need oceans or reading experiences poured on them, and some guidance through it. Now, there are a lot of things we can do in the guidance part to assist development, but immersion in text is a necessary component of any instructional program.
John -- this point is one of the key points brought home by the groundbreaking New Zealand literacy researchers you've heard about (Marie Clay, Brian Cambourne, etc.). In NZ (and I am sorry, but this is such and old saw in litercy theory, that I do not know of a cite for it), they came up with this distinction between the "ten-book child," and the "thousand-book child." If you read to your child every night from age 2 to 5, that's roughly a thousand books. So when that child enters kindergarten he or she has had all this experience of seeing print and hearing print read fluently. Compare that to students who enter kindergarten never, or almost never, having had a book read to them. So how does the K teacher make up that gap? How do we fit three years of exposure plus a year of instruction based on that exposure into one academic year? Meanwhile, over the summer -- while one kid continues to get more exposure and practice, and the other does not -- the gap widens so that next year there is just as much ground to make up if not more.
The prevailing political answer in the U.S. right now is to bombard these kids with "direct, explicit, skills intruction" divorced from any meaningful reading experiences, because such methods are "faster" and can therefore "accelerate" learning. Rather than try to improve the "literacy background" of these kids and their families, which would require money and time and effort, let's just drill them with mind-numbing excercises. The result is that in some instances we
are able to improve phonics and decoding skills in early readers, but when they hit 4th and 5th grade, their comprehension skills are so low, they might as well be "reading" engineering technical manuals.
The problem isn't really between phonics vs. whole language, or even "direct instruction" vs. "language experience," which are false dichotomies because in niether case does one approach necessarily exlude the other. The problem, for the most part, is social inequality, which is excerbated by posturing politicians and administrators (politicians in training) who don't think much of teachers, seem not to give a crap about kids (especially poor kids), and wouldn't know what best practices were they bit them on the tips of their....
As Daniel put it: *sigh*.
David R.
WHAT? Is that possible?
Linear Mode
