Unlock
the Treasures of Literacy
During
the last several decades, popular approaches to teaching
reading have come and gone. Most either relied on phonics,
with highly structured direct
instruction lessons, or they relied on a more holistic approach that emphasized
meaning. But often these approaches
were not effective for every child. Some lucky
children learned to read, to understand the text and to love literature. Many
missed out on the
world
of children's literature
and exciting authors as they plowed through basals designed only
to teach decoding, a single skill of many required for reading.
Some learned to love literature but couldn't read independently.
And many didn't learn to read well at all.
Although
many would have us believe there is primarily a two-sided
debate between phonics or whole language, or phonics and
whole word, or phonics and whatever else is current, the
fact is the question of how to teach reading is not simple.
The complexity of the reading process does not lend itself
to easy answers. There is not a magic book or series
of steps that will instantly and successfully teach every
child to read well. Any program that claims to have all the
answers should be viewed with scepticism.
Reader's
Way is a program for teaching one aspect of reading (decoding)
in ways that respect and open up the rest of the reading
experience. As a decoding program, Reader's Way provides
students with a structured introduction to the reading system.
As a program grounded in the fullness of literature and the
entire reading process, Reader's Way treats decoding as the
key to reading, not the end point of the journey. Reader's
Way treats reading as a joyful experience at all stages of
decoding skill.
It's important
for any reading program to respect the complexity of the
reading process. Consider just a few of the fields and topics
which play a role in
attempting
to the question of how to teach reading: brain research,
sociolinguistics, optometry and vision studies, linguistics,
speech and hearing, learning styles, psychology and intelligence
theories, medicine, child development, and public education.
Many of these fields provide information that may be very
useful to the field of teaching reading, but the emphasis
and applications of the work usually does not consider
these implications. It is up to reading specialists and practitioners
to relate the information from these other fields to practical
applications in the teaching of reading. The task of compiling,
sorting out and researching all of this information is
enormous,
and has only just begun.
An effective
reading program recognizes the need for learning to decode,
to comprehend,
to effectively use what is read
and to appreciate and understand literature. Within this
need for balance, the bottom line remains that students must
learn to independently decode if they are to master the other
important skills and processes. Students should be able to
translate lines of symbols back into comprehensible language.
And they
should be able to do this easily, with fluency and speed.
Decoding,
involves many skills and processes, including prediction,
self correction, listening for syntax, awareness of meaning,
knowledge of spoken English pronunciations, and memorization.
Primarily it involves knowing how the phonemes of our language
are mapped or associated with a basic code. This code is
not a simple one. It is full of overlaps, exceptions and
omissions. It must be taught because our brains do not
automatically know how the code works. Even logic will not
always provide
answers to solving the riddle of the code, for it can be
quite quirky.
How
to find out more:
Reader's
Way a project of the Centre
for Learning and Democracy and is
under development. To find out more contact tom@learningdemocracy.ca.
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