This page is still to be developed. But the links will give you an idea of my thoughts on this….
“Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.”
I have absolutely no interest in fighting in the Reading Wars, which have been going on for decades — with the pendulum swinging wildly back and forth, so that practitioners are necessarily wary. I am only interested in describing what I’ve found that has worked beautifully for every child I’ve worked with — except for one child who was not able to speak even his own home language.
I’m interested, but not impressed as far as practices go, by studies that advocates claim prove that the brain is not wired for reading, thus reading is not a natural process and cannot be compared with how a child learns to speak. But, they claim, does prove that we must start out by causing every child to memorize phonics before we try to “teach” them to read.
Running into someone who believes and advocates this is like running into a buzz saw. The serious researchers and practitioners I worked with at my own Claremont Graduate University and elsewhere never made such absolute statements about anything, so I am taken aback by such behavior. And I would caution anyone making or hearing of such claims to remember that any study being done has certain parameters that necessarily limit findings — so that results should taken only as parts of a much larger puzzle — not taken out into the world and be used as a claim to prove this an that about any practice. And that doing so is why we keep having wild pendulum swings in practice.
No one actually knows, for certain, all the strategies a good reader employs, just as we don’t know that with speech. What we do know — because we can see it — is what we do that helps them. And as the jumbled up passage from Cambridge shows, reading is far more than simply applying phonics to sound out the words as we go. And as we pass through this pendulum swing where “science proves” all children must begin with phonics, I caution practitioners and parents to take this with a huge grain of salt. Yes phonemic awareness and phonics is important — and I include both as an important component of what I do to help a child learn to read. At the same time, I continue to watch for what nature tells us about how we can help a child learn to do anything.
For more about the work from Cambridge University, coupled with what we do know from observing children suggests, I believe at least part of the problem is in the way we look at the challenge that faces us, which I’ve described in, Are We Teaching Reading/Writing or Helping a Child Learn to Read/Write?
