Friday, June 12, 2020

Right to Read Project





This article is by the Science of Reading advocates.
You may read the whole article here.



Here are some extracts and my comments:

Many of us assume that because each child is a unique human being, every child learns to read in a different way. This widespread misconception causes unnecessary difficulty for teachers and for our students.
My comment: This widespread misconception has been repeated often and causes much confusion upon parents as well as teachers. This is how they come up with ‘one size does not fit all’ meme. Do read my post here on 'one size fits all'.

“It is simply not true that there are hundreds of ways to learn to read… when it comes to reading we all have roughly the same brain that imposes the same constraints and the same learning sequence.” (Dr. Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain, 2009.)

My comment: I beg to disagree that all have the same brain that imposes the same constraints.
Everywhere on the internet, it is stated that a small percentage of students learn to read naturally/ without difficulty. 


About 50 % learn to read after wasting an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to read and finally figure it out and learn to read. This is the group that is left far behind the first group and continues struggling as they have missed the vocabulary building part, the comprehension and the fluency exercise including forming sentences that Prof. Pamela Snow has been twitting on.


This leaves the approximate 20 to 30 % who disengage or shut down from learning to read.


If teachers taught /c/ /a/ /t/ as cat instead of cuh - ah - tuh then no child will have to waste time figuring out how to read and no child will shut down/ disengage from learning to read..


As such, to say the brain imposes the same constraints and the same learning sequence is unacceptable.


Teach all students the way it will not disengage the 20 to 30% who are predisposed to shutting down and then there will be the same learning sequence.








No comments: