Friday, May 8, 2020

Louisa Moats and David Boulton on Consequence of unnatural overwhelming ambiguity



Here is an article by Dr.Louisa Moats on the interview by David Boulton conducted some 20 years ago.
 
I had started writing a lot and going to NICHD symposia. I was teaching graduate courses to teachers the whole time and then it began to dawn on me through all these experiences that the teachers I was working with, by and large, just had no idea at all about the things I knew about at that point. Their training wasn’t equipping them to help the kids. Most of the clients I had in my clinical practice simply hadn’t been taught well and Reid really got me to understand that what we were facing was a crisis of understanding and implementing what we knew from research.

That was where we were in 1986 and then it took another ten years to even mobilize the National Reading Panel. 

My comment: That was 30 years ago that Louisa is talking about. She and Reid Lyon had already known there was a crisis of understanding and implementing what they already knew. Question is when was it then subsequently implemented? 

I had written elsewhere my discourse with Dr. Richard Selznick who is a US certified school psychologist and I quoted him in my book as follows; “I agree with you (Luqman) that many of these kids are instructional casualties and if they had been taught differently many would not have shut-down.”

Do Louisa Moats and Reid Lyon know what is not taught correctly? It is the wrong teaching of the pronunciation of phonemes. 

Every day I’m in a school and working with teachers I continue to be astounded by the gulf of knowledge, the gulf between our knowledge base in the scientific community and the practices that go on in teacher training.

These kids will not make it into higher education; they’re not going to make it into jobs that require writing, even if they can read at a basic level. It’s a tragedy. It’s a tragedy and it’s a treatable one.

I see so few people willing to stand up and say you can’t have a non-verbal teacher teaching reading to first graders. There are so few people who are willing to set standards and to talk about what a teacher should really know and to hold any teacher candidates to some kind of a standard. There are so many excuses and so many forces aligned against the adequate preparation and nurturance of teachers.

My comment: I have been saying what a teacher should know and how to implement it for 10 years now. Is Louisa Moats willing to listen and do something about it now?

David Boulton:  According to Reid Lyon and James Wendorf, ninety-five percent of the children that are struggling with reading are instructional casualties.
It’s a consequence of an unnatural, overwhelming ambiguity forced upon the child while nobody is giving them a stairway through it before they shame-out to the process. The shame itself then impedes their cognitive ability to process it, as well as diminishes their self-esteem in general with all of its transferred effects.

My comment: I believe that David Boulton is not that naïve and neither is Reid Lyon not to know the basic problem faced by kids in school who are unable to read. As per the words of David above – “It is a consequence of unnatural, overwhelming ambiguity forced upon the child.” 

What is the ambiguity?
The unnatural ambiguity is the teaching of the pronunciation of phonemes wrongly.

We can end the Reading Wars only if we teach the pronunciation of phonemes correctly from the onset.

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