News factoid

The bottom line: Victoria is not politically correct regarding reading to children, but more important—she is correct!

I am confident that there is some value to reading aloud to beginners. Most children enjoy listening as others read aloud. I encourage the practice.

My father read to my brother and me every day when we were four and five years old. We loved it. We would dash out of the house in an attempt to be first to retrieve the evening newspaper as soon as it hit the porch. One of us would carry it to my father. He would settle himself in his favorite parlor chair, put one leg over an arm of the chair (wearing the fabric thin much to the displeasure of my mother), place his cigarette in a standing ashtray, and open the paper to the comics section. Then he would proceed slowly and clearly to read the title, author, and every word in each cartoon frame. My brother and I hung on each word that escaped his lips. [My father even moved his lips when he read silently.] We learned that print carried meaning. We experienced the flow of language. We came to realize that the ability to say those squiggly black marks on a page could give us fun and information. There is something we did not learn: We did not learn to read a single word. Knowledgeable teachers taught us how to do that—not mere listening.

Celebrities and politicians seek publicity by going to schools and reading stories aloud to groups of children. They get considerable reading reinforcement; not the children. I would much prefer to observe the children reading aloud to their visitors.

I was one of those kids who makes ‘whole language’ look like a good thing — learned to read ‘naturally’, though I has some spalding in Gr. 1 and I bet that helped me become an excellent speller. But BOY do I wish it could be outlawed. In retrospect, my son is the exact opposite — and I don’t find it any surprise that many dyslexics are also artistic. YES…he was looking at the pictures. And fooled us mega by having an excellent auditory memory, so he could pretty much ‘recite’ a whole language primer after conning us into reading it to him FIRST…

I hate standardized testing. But as far as I can tell, the Ontario EQAO is the ONLY thing pushing whole language OUT THE WINDOW…YAY!

I heard on ReadbyGrade3 (I think) someone say that NO one learns to read by whole language. Everyone learns the code if they are readers. What tends to happen is that they teach themselves the code thru letter and sound association. I think there is truth in that.

—Jane

I think they teach themselves the code, sort of. I believe “natural readers” decode by analogy. They have good phonological processing skills and good visual memory. They “subconsciously” identify repeating patterns in words and they read new words quickly. This is the child who has learned to read “day,” “say,” “hay,” and “may” and he or she has intuited the “-ay” rime and quickly recognizes “say” when it comes along.

In addition to teaching sounds, segmenting and blending, we need to insist that our LD/dyslexic readers practice reading by analogy under teacher direction. We need to force their attention to the details of the words, to the similarities in words. We need to get them to identify the patterns and to look for the patterns. Gradually, the patterns MUST be identified as chunks, otherwise fluent reading is never achieved.

I am drifting, excuse me. This is why in my high school literacy classes I emphasize this. I teach prefixes and suffixes. I use the analogy of “the.” I tell my students that they KNOW the word “the.” They never have to stop and identify it. They do not and cannot sound it out, they recognize it as a chunk. They must learn chunks of words in the same way. “-tion” is one of the best examples. You cannot sound it out, you just learn it.

Then, I must “force” the students to adopt and practice a strategy where they look across an unknown word for chunks and try to eliminate as much of the word from confusion as possible at the outset.

Good readers perform these operations “intuitively,” the best readers never needed to be taught because they were able to attend to the details within words and to generalize/transfer. Dyslexic readers never figure any of this out unless we point it out and make them practice and practice with increasingly difficult patterns and longer words for years.

Now, my last point is a question. If NCLB says we can get all students proficient on grade level and we are mandated to teach grade level standards, if we must spend hours and hours of school days teaching operations that are intuitive to half of the student population and more readily learned with explicit instruction by the next 30-40%, then where do we create the time in the school day to teach the “obvious” to the dyslexic reader and still get him or her proficient on grade level? This presents a fascinating math problem to me.

Well, Anitya, the fact that I am very quick with those little math problems – like how to teach three groups four hours each in a six-hour day, how to give twenty kids ten minutes of individual attention each in an hour — added to the fact that I am compulsively honest explains why I can’t work in a school system. I’m broke but a lot calmer, not living in a Catch 22.

Yah… unfortunately, the folks passing the legislation were educated in America, where it’s spin and image, not whether it actually adds up, that matters. (One does wonder how many of them were educated in the public system, though.)

I had to stop when I couldn’t say “if you do what I’m asking you to do, it will help you learn,” and believe it myself.

No Child Left Behind is an inspiring slogan. It has energized people, and it has resulted in some progress. Unfortunately, it is an unattainable objective.

Some students refuse to cooperate with reasonable lesson assignments. Others have extremely low mental power. It is unfair to blame teachers, methods, and materials when these situations are present and desired learning fails to occur.

Anitya is a consummate professional who will continue to teach as much as she can with what she has been given.

“the folks passing the legislation were educated in America”

Yeah, but it was the law schools that ruined them. :) We’re not the only country with that problem either.

John

Anitya,
What’s the best program you’ve found for teaching chunks? I fully agree with you that this really is the best way to achieve automaticity.

I’m a Title I reading aide and recently had a teacher angry with me because I took a little extra time each day to work on “decoding” with a first grader who appears to have a very severe reading difficulty. The teacher just wants the child to work on “reading” (that’s memorizing!) books. It’s soo sad.

Then later in the day I work in a fourth grade class with a teacher who wants me to work on decoding with some of her kids because they are so extremely low in reading. Now if only this were done in first grade!!!! How inept!!!

Guest — I totally agree with you about how inept.

I suppose there is no chance of getting the Grade 4 teachers to sit down with the Grade 1 teachers and give them the low-down on what the kids *need* to learn?

Besides teaching decoding directly, I have students practice decoding within their reading of stories. If you would like my compilation of posts and notes on teaching reading, now up to a book in progress, please send a request to [email protected]