Appalling reading advice for parents and TAs

[Feenie]

This document is being flagged up in lots of the teaching pages i've liked on Facebook:

literacyforpleasure.wordpress.com/ta-guide-to-listening-to-reading-making-comments/

It's terrible, full of recommendations to encourage children to guess. Really depressed at the number of teachers tagging others to flag it as 'useful'. It really, really isn't.

If you're starting as a reading volunteer in September, I hope you're not given anything like this. Any advice encouraging children to guess words is really poor and awful practice.

If a child is 'stuck', encourage them to look at the sounds and blend - or if they're really stuck, give them the word and come back to it later. Feedback to the teacher on the sound they couldn't recognise is fabulous.

And thank you for volunteering in the first place - your help is invaluable and much appreciated.

Very lively debate. A person's view on what reading is will of course have a huge impact on how they think it should be taught.

Catch Up does seem to improve self-esteem for reluctant readers, but according to the Education Endowment Foundation it doesn't significantly improve actual reading ability.

From Education Endowment Foundation regarding Catch up

'Pupils in the intervention group received one-to-one tuition as part of Catch Up Literacy, whereas the control group received normal classroom teaching. This introduces the possibility that a proportion of any observed effect was caused by the more intensive tuition received by the intervention group, not by any particular characteristics of the Catch Up Literacy intervention.'

Nothing improves self esteem more than being able to read rather than guess or skip

For the children I've worked with it has improved actual ability. They've made good progress and continue to do so. We wouldn't do it otherwise as it takes up a lot of staff hours and schools won't waste those as we all know!

But I'm derailing, sort of. I don't agree with some of the document but some things I was trying to say can be of help.

The evidence is high costs for low effect

Goodness, Feenie and Mrz are entirely correct. This is not good advice.

Everyone should consider what reading is for:

Why do we do it? What is it purpose?
If you're a parent, why do we want to do it with your children before bedtime?
What is the ultimate life-long aim of teaching children to read?
What sort of reading adult to we want to foster in the earlier years?
How should we present reading, as an activity, to young minds - because once they have their view of what reading is - it is very hard to change - they take on the philosophy towards reading that the important adults in their lives take on.

Surely the key to effective, enjoyable reading is actually being able to read...

What does reading mean to you? There are different views to what constitutes reading.

Well to me, reading means decoding the words on a page and understanding what they mean- what message the writer wanted to send. A child who isn't a confident accurate decoder is at a huge disadvantage when it comes to understanding. So I think it's a really really bad idea to give the message that accuracy isn't that important.

I should have said 'what message the writer sent/sends' rather than 'wanted to send' because actually they're often not the same thing!

It's not as simple as 'what is reading for'. DD2 hated reading at 7. I thought she would never read for pleasure. Why? 1. She wasn't fluent enough to make books interesting. 2. She was being given girly books to read and she wasn't a girly girl. Once she was almost 8 and had discovered Beast Quest she started to read a bit more. Now she has just turned 9 and she's very often got her nose in a Rick Riordan (Percy Jackson) book.

DH, who struggled at school, has never developed reading fluency to the point that he enjoys reading. He can read. But his reading is so slow that even the most exciting plot drags on and on.

DD2's self-esteem was certainly boosted once she could decode words accurately and reliably on the page.

If you're a parent, why do we want to do it with your children before bedtime?

Who said they did? The header on your page states that this is also TA guide to listening to reading and making comments.

Why do we do it? What is it purpose?

We read for many reasons - information - instructions- enjoyment etc etc

If you're a parent, why do we want to do it with your children before bedtime?

If you're a parent read to your child as often as you can and not just at bedtime and if you're a teacher /TA share books at every opportunity for the sheer pleasure books can give not as a pseudo reading lesson

What is the ultimate life-long aim of teaching children to read?

Once again there are many reasons for wanting children to become literate adults and while we hope they will become readers who gain enjoyment from reading that's something we can't teach

What sort of reading adult to we want to foster in the earlier years?

We want adults that can read and understand what they choose to read. As readers we hope that they will share our love and enjoyment but unfortunately we can't guarantee that no matter what we do.

How should we present reading, as an activity, to young minds - because once they have their view of what reading is - it is very hard to change - they take on the philosophy towards reading that the important adults in their lives take on

Yes once they get into the habit of believing that the words on the page aren't important and it's OK to substitute any that fit, even if it completely changes the meaning the writer intended, it's very difficult to change. Guessing appears the easy option.

When a child is guessing a word it shows that they are beginning to understand the structure of text.

When a child is guess it shows they do not understand the relationship between spoken and written language and that those squiggles on the page represent a specific word.

A simple sentence

*The girl saw the huge xzwqy.
*
The mystery word could be absolutely anything ... Guess anyone?

• Thank you Whole Language. Thank you for your many pearls of wisdom. Thank you for Context Clues. Thank you for Prior Knowledge. Thank you for the Initial Consonant. Thank you for Picture Clues. Thank you for Miscues.
•
• But most of all, thank you for my wife. The other day she and I were riding along the highway and saw a sign for a town called Verona, so my wife read "Veronica". It's very simple, you see. First she applied Context Clues (she knew we were looking for a name). Then she applied the Initial Consonant ("V"). Then she applied Prior Knowledge (she already knew of a name "Veronica"). She put these Whole Language strategies together and ... success! At least, as much success as we can expect, I suppose.
•
• Thank you William S. Gray for inventing "Look-Say" and the "Dick and Jane" series of basal readers. Thank you A. Sterl Artley for helping Mr. Gray and for your phonics-bashing diatribes of the 1950s and 1960s. Thanks to the National Education Association for giving Mr. Gray and his friends two years of free promotion in the NEA Journal in 1930 and 1931. Together you all had managed to essentially eradicate phonics from America's public schools by the 1950s and early 60s, when my wife went to school.
•
• But more importantly, thank you for my wife. Awhile back she was reading a pamphlet about something that was described as "venerable". Now that's a word you don't see every day, so what did she do but cleverly pull out her Whole Language skills? Context Clues, you see, told her that she was looking for an adjective. Next was the Initial Consonant "V". Then out came the Prior Knowledge -- she simply thought of an adjective she already knew that was about the right length and started with "V". And voila ... success again ... she came up with "vulnerable". Perfect! Well, at least as perfect as things get in publik ejukayshun, right?
•
• Thanks Kenneth Goodman for reviving the floundering Look-Say, adding a few New Age twists and renaming it Whole Language back in the early 80s. Just like the Whole Earth Catalog and Whole Grains and everything else that was Whole ... what else could it be but wonderful? Without you, Kenneth, the evils of phonics might have returned, and then where would we have been?
•
• Thank you Dorothy Strickland for "Emerging Literacy" -- the idea that kids are naturally inclined to read if only we will surround them with literature. Thanks to all the other Whole Language textbook authors who cranked out textbook after textbook that either omitted phonics entirely or disparaged phonics openly. Thank you Teachers College, Columbia for promoting Whole Language to teachers' colleges worldwide. Can you even imagine how effective you were in eradicating phonics instruction throughout the English-speaking world?
•
• Thank you International Reading Association (IRA) and National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). For decades you appointed people like William S. Gray and Kenneth Goodman to lead your entire organizations in the fight against phonics. Somehow you raised hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of dollars to pay PR firms to get their opinions so heavily quoted in the press that the public is now completely confused in its ideas about what works and what doesn't work in reading instruction.
•
• But once again thank you for my wife. Awhile back she was reading about some Congregational Church. And do you know, even with the Context Clues and the Prior Knowledge (about what names churches might have, presumably) and the Initial Consonant, she still managed to come up with "Congressional Church". Even though this was years ago, I remember it like it was yesterday.
•
• Thank you Alfie Kohn and Dennis Baron and Mike Ford and Gerald Coles and Harvey Daniels and Regie Routman and Susan Ohanian and Stephen Krashen and Jim Trelease and all the other propagandists who lash out continuously against successful practice in general and phonics in particular. Through your tireless efforts, the public is continually misinformed. Without the public's perpetual state of confusion and misinformation, Whole Language would not have survived a single day. Thank you for keeping Look-Say and Whole Language and Balanced Literacy alive to create yet another generation of people who can read as well as my wife does.
•
• Speaking of my wife, last night she was reading a brochure aloud about a museum with an "eclectic" collection, and what do you suppose she said? You guessed it (and so did she): "electric"! Maybe the absence of the Initial Consonant threw her off.
•
• Thank you Marie Clay for inventing the phenomenally expensive Reading Recovery, a program installed in virtually every public school, it seems, and designed to treat the educational effects of Whole Language by applying yet more Whole Language. Thank you for giving my school district more stuff like this to spend my tax money on. How is it that I am not clever enough to imagine things like this?
•
• Thank you Richard Allington, current (2005) president of the International Reading Association, for your campaign of misinformation against Direct Instruction (a successful phonics-based program). The cleverness of your propaganda puts the Soviets, the Chinese Communists, and all the other tyrants of the 20th century to shame. You know of course that Direct Instruction (DI) participated in a huge study (Project Follow Through) in which all the participants except DI failed, and in which DI succeeded brilliantly. And so you twist this around to say that by virtue of its association in this study with the constructivist-favored instructional styles that failed so miserably, we should all conclude that DI must necessarily also have been a failure. Your logic, so typical of that of the IRA, the NCTE, and the rest of the Constructivist Cabal, is irrefutable.
•
• But once again thank you all for my wife. Hardly a day goes by when she does not demonstrate the success of Look-Say, or Whole Language, or Balanced Literacy or whatever you all call it now. Really, it's so amusing I really can't even quantify it. I never know what she'll read next ... and neither does she! Just imagine all her Miscues!
•
• The sheer unpredictability of listening to her read is astounding ... and unpredictability is the essence of entertainment, right? I mean, she might read "deleterious" as "delicious" or perhaps "injurious" as "injustice" or "parabola" as "parachute" or maybe "quintessence" as "quintuplet", or "signify" as "signature". I could go on and on almost endlessly. The laughs just never stop here. And all thanks to you. All of you.
•
• So thank you, Whole Language. Where would we be without you? The possibilities just boggle the mind.
•
• -- Anonymous

Yes once they get into the habit of believing that the words on the page aren't important and it's OK to substitute any that fit, even if it completely changes the meaning the writer intended, it's very difficult to change.

I worked with someone like that once, in a temp job. She was in her thirties. The area we were working in had a very specific technical vocabulary. Accuracy was important. We were doing admin, but we had to deal with filing, answer queries, look up records, so we needed to have a basic level of familiarity with the vocab.

If this woman came across a word she didn't know, she just substituted something that sounded vaguely similar, but which nade absolutely no sense, and couldn't understand why it mattered that no-one knew what the hell she was talking about. And also, incidentally, why it made our office look bad when we had to deal with the professionals in the field.

Well to me, reading means decoding the words on a page and understanding what they mean... So I think it's a really really bad idea to give the message that accuracy isn't that important.

I skim read, skip bits and guess at words all the time.

Used to reading scientific articles it's not unusual that there might be a biological process, a chemical compound or something else that has a word I don't immediately recognise. I just want to understand the point of the article. I am intelligent enough despite apparently not being able to read properly because I don't decode to know what words I need to know and what don't actually make any difference. to my understanding of the piece. So I ignore such words. I often don't even bother guessing, just skip the word knowing it it "some hydrocarbon" or whatever.

I do similar when reading for pleasure. It it's a high brow book with a word I don't recognise, as long as I understand the meaning it doesn't matter if I can't decode or don't know the word. If my novel contains a character name I can't decode (Girl With the Dragon Tattoo had loads of these), I just make something up for that name I can't pronounce.

Sometimes I might read:

"He lifted the bucket, it was high above his head"
as
"He lifted the bucket high above his head"

(and I really wouldn't bother stopping the flow of the story my child was reading me just because he missed the comma pause and "it" when he was reading it)

some people are so anal that their was is the only way and the right way

And some people just ignore the fact that multi cuing has had a huge negative impact on reading standards. What was this weeks headline ... Adults with reading ability of a five year old ( but it doesn't matter because they are good guessers)

FATEdestiny, I do read like you do sometimes as well, but that's fine, since we are adults, I think.

It's totally different when children are learning to read, is it not?

Yes Irvine when I've sat in the sun with my "popular fiction" I've skipped words, sentences even whole pages if I'm not gripped by the writing and it doesn't really matter but if I did the same with a report from an educational psychologist or paediatrician when reading reports it really would matter. It doesn't matter if I skip bits when flicking through a magazine in the doctors waiting room but it does matter when I'm reading an EHCP and for those times I've got an effective strategy for reading unfamiliar words and I don't have to guess

A pupil reading GCSE or A level questions needs to be able to read and understand every word. Any skipping words/guessing could be disastrous.

some people are so anal that their was is the only way and the right way

Gosh, yes - those pesky Maths teachers who insist on absolute accuracy when calculating, aren't they annoying?

And those History teachers - surely 'round about the middle of the 17th century' will do when describing the Great Fire of London.

And how rude and pathetic to nametag one poster in your ridiculous post, when every single teacher on this thread, bar the co-author of the document, has explained clearly why not teaching accuracy causes severe problems later on for some children?