Tunya Audain says:
May 25, 2016 at 4:29 pm
Reading Wars Do Immense Damage !
It is FLABBERGASTING — a) that teacher-training faculties DO NOT teach HOW TO TEACH READING; and b) that discredited reading programs still proliferate.
I just heard today that there was a recent workshop in “balanced literacy” filling three conference rooms in my province of British Columbia, Canada. We must be some kind of backwoods because this is a program that pretends to use phonics in early years, but only as a last resort. We still have Reading Recovery, which is an expensive remedial program feeding off the “failures” of the “balanced literacy” or “whole-language” approaches. The byword still seems to be that reading is “caught” not “taught”.
This is so sad because reading is a BASIC SKILL. If not reading by end of Grade Three, students might start acquiring the Matthew Effect and start sliding backwards to failure and poor self-esteem.
The “sight words” part of these discredited programs (discredited via quantitative research) were actually a successful way to teach DEAF children to read, but then this was generalized for other children who principally use auditory cues to first learn to sound out the alphabet and words, a phonetic approach.
This is a disaster soon to be played out in developing countries where an Early Grade Reading Assessment program (EGRA) under some UN and other auspices is to be mounted as a serious initiative. Right in their literature they forecast trouble — “The reading ‘wars’ are alive and well in many low-income countries, often miring ministries of education and teaching centers in seemingly endless debates between the ‘whole-language’ and ’phonics-based’ approaches.”
Heaven help us!. Why should it be LUCK if some kids learn to read properly and systematically while others still do it by “guessing”?
[comment to Joanne Jacobs blog — http://www.joannejacobs.com/2016/05/principal-teachers-dont-know-how-to-teach-reading/#comment-218485 ]