Reading Recovery and Kareem Weaver

 

Today, 14.11.24 (Malaysian time) the following was Tweeted by:

Kareem J. Weaver @KJWinEducation

 

I believe Reading Recovery... a program embedded in districts AND universities, is a menace. Parents have no idea this snake oil is being sanctioned, sold, and used on the children who need the most help learning to read.

 

I know nothing about Reading Recovery or any other reading programmes.

I don’t criticise reading programmes that anyone claims to work. Thousands of teachers successfully teach using various methods.

Why would anyone criticise the video? LINK

Naïve Ph.D’s (Part 2)

 

This is a continuation of my post on Gwendolyn Lavert. LINK

To a question on how she teaches High Frequency Words, Gwendolyn replied that she teaches kids to learn them by sight and patterns.

Luqman Michel

English words are not pictorial like Chinese characters and I teach my students to memorise them by rote memory. I explained what I meant by that.

How do you teach High Frequency Words? Which, where, here, who, like, there.

 

Note: Many teachers teach kids to memorise HFWs by sight. Then they complain kids can’t read. Why reduce an alphabetic language into a pictorial language?

How do you teach the above HFWs by patterns?

Tweet exchanges with Catlin Goodrow - Evidently Reading

                                                             

On 7.11.2023 I read a tweet by a SoR advocate, Catlin Goodrow. Here is part of her tweets and my replies.

EvidentlyReading @EvidentlyR

I'd like to address another misconception, however. The article begins with an anecdote about a striving reader who is being assessed by one of the authors.

They argue that, because this reader knows letter-sound correspondence, but has trouble reading "after" and "insect" she needs some other instruction than phonics. In fact, they claim this is evidence that "phonics" failed this reader.

But letter-sound instruction is not all there is to phonics! It IS something that will be taught in a structured literacy environment, usually in kinder and/or early first grade. But phonics (or, more accurately, foundational skills) is so much more!

 For example, "after" includes an r-controlled vowel.  Phonics instruction explicitly teaches these vowels, as well as vowel teams, syllable types, etc. We also teach how to blend sounds into words/syllables, and strategies for decoding longer words. 

Notes to my book – Teach your child to Read - Part 1

 

Dolch (High Frequency) words

My upcoming book teaches phonics along with 8 (Dolch words) called sight words to be memorised in each lesson.

The Dolch words comprise about 50 to 70 percent of the words in most books. These are High-Frequency words such as on, the, with, here, to, no, at, etc.

In order to achieve reading fluency it is best to get your student to memorise these words by rote memory.

Once a child knows this list of words, it makes reading much easier because the child can then focus his attention on the remaining words.

Teaching sight words as wholes

Here is a Twitter exchange between Elizabeth Brown and me on 11.7.2023. This discussion would not have happened if she had read the links in my post here.  I wrote that post after a Twitter discussion with her, more than a year ago, on a similar matter on 5.3.2022.

I have several posts on my blog on how to teach kids to memorise the Dolch words. Any educators with a little common sense will realise that memorising 220 words that makeup between 50 to 70 percent of all the words in a kid’s book should be encouraged. 

Cognitive Dissonance

 

So, in a way it is why the greatest dangers are not from foolish people who do foolish things or evil people who do evil things but from good people who persist in doing their foolish wrong things to preserve their beliefs that they are good, kind and competent. (Dr. Carol Tavris)

 Dr. Carol Tavris, co-author of the newly released third edition of Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): ‘Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts.’

The book explores reasons good people remain wedded to foolish approaches.

I have not read the book but the above is exactly what I have learnt from reading many posts and tweets. 

My 5th day with Jack and emails from his parents

My firth day, dated 11.5.22, with Jack was teaching Jack word family ‘ig’ and ‘ug’.

Once he heard me pronounce the word family ‘ug’ he read the words bug, dug, hug, jug, mug, rug, tug with no prompting by me.

He could read the words above because he now knew the correct pronunciation of the consonants and his confusion has been cleared.

Jack is not the first student who can read all the words from chapter 8. Almost all my former students were able to do it. 

What is important is for you to ask how these students who could hardly read any word, when they came to me, are able to read them after a few lessons.

Do read my Twitter discussion with the mother, Alanna Maurin, who had used my lesson to teach her son to read. Link.

My way or the highway - SSP proponents

 

There are many Science of Reading (SoR) and Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) proponents who claim it is their way or the high-way. They keep Twitting not to teach kids to memorise the High Frequency words (Dolch Words).

They keep lying that words can be memorised only by shape.  

They say that teaching letter names before letter sounds will confuse kids.

No wonder the illiteracy rate in the UK is still high as it was decades ago.

Rethinking how to teach high frequency words Podcast.

 

                     Stacy Hurst, an assistant professor of reading at Southern Utah University

I listened to a podcast by some Science of Reading advocates and believe they have become desperate to promote their products. Listen to the podcast here and determine for yourself. The following are some extracts and my comments.

At minute 8.03: There is a limit as to how many words can be memorised – I heard 2,000 words.

The reading brain - Mark Seidenberg

 

This is a continuation of the Tweets by Alanna Maurin. I am posting this now as, yesterday, I listened to a short video by Mark Seidenberg where he says that there are no multiple ways that the brain can be structured to read.

“Educators have a pretty firm belief that every kid is different and that the challenge of reading is to be able to tailor your instruction for the needs of the child, and their learning style, the way that they happen to learn best. We don’t find that when we study the computational, and behavioral, and neural systems that underlie reading” (Mark Seidenberg) LINK.

As far as decoding is concerned, the above video should have put paid to the frequently quoted saying ‘One size doesn’t fit all’. 

Lesson 14 -'oo'

 

Notes:

In the last two days, 1st and 2nd December 2020, I have had discussions on Twitter with a teacher named Erin Harrington. She is an SSP proponent who insisted that High Frequency words are memorized, by Whole Language kids, by visual memory.

The above is not a correct assumption. One of the reasons why there is widespread reading difficulties could very well be due to this assumption that we store words using visual memory.