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.

Interestingly in the idea that "poor readers" (who read perfectly well) use a different part of the brain - my spelling is atrocious.

It is the advent of word processing and autocorrect that saves me in this aspect. Spelling does not come naturally to me. That follows because I am not a natural decoder, rather a last-resort decoder.

This supports the idea that I am hard wired - in my brain - to read in a very different way. Yet I am a successful reader. I needed to learn in a different way.

I'm taken back to that quadrat diagram of different learning styles - kinaesthetic and whatnot. A good educator would cater for the differing learning styles of pupils.

"Scientific evidence strongly demonstrates that the development of skilled reading involves increasingly accurate and automatic word identification skills, not the use of "multiple cueing systems" to read words. Skilled readers do not need to rely on pictures or sentence context in word identification, because they can read most words automatically, and they have the phonics skills to decode occasional unknown words rapidly. Rather, it is the unskilled readers who tend to be dependent on context to compensate for poor word identification. Furthermore, many struggling readers are disposed to guess at words rather than to look carefully at them, a tendency that may be reinforced by frequent encouragement to use context. Almost every teacher of struggling readers has seen the common pattern in which a child who is trying to read a word (say, the word brown) gives the word only a cursory glance and then offers a series of wild guesses based on the first letter: "Black? Book? Box?" (The guesses are often accompanied by more attention to the expression on the face of the teacher than to the print, as the child waits for this expression to change to indicate a correct guess.) Even when children are able to use context to arrive at the correct word, reliance on context to compensate for inaccurate or nonautomatic word reading creates a drain on comprehension. This kind of compensation becomes increasingly problematic as children are expected to read more challenging texts that have few or no pictures, sophisticated vocabulary, and grammatically complex sentences."
Spear-Swerling 2008

Learning styles is yet another discredited theory that clings on

How the brain learns to read -Dehaene

Searchlights. Learning styles. What's next, Brain Gym?

I was halfway through typing post that said exactly that!

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/learning-styles-debunked-there-is-no-evidence-supporting-auditory-and-visual-learning-psychologists-say.html

Educational theories are constantly changing. What was once heralded as critical to learning can subsequently be discredited.

We'll all agree on that.

Brain scans of adults reading shows that all good readers are subconsciously sounding out and blending at high speed.
Have you a reference for this one? One of those things I keep seeing quoted as fact and sounds like it would be really interesting to read about.

Generally though, as a reading helper, I spent half the year trying to persuade year 1s not to make wild guesses from first letters. They can read level 2 or 3 books apparently well. Then they get a level 4 or so book and completely fall to pieces because there are more words and they're not guessable. That's when it becomes apparent they're not actually sounding out even very simple words. I do wonder if it comes from the school sending out mixed messages on phonics - not exactly the reference in Feenie's post but the head doesn't seem 100% behind it.

Thankfully we don't have to rely on theories when there is evidence

What exactly do you teach, FATEdestiny?

Some how I have a degree so I'm not thick, but I still struggle to read aloud, can't remember what I tripped over with tonight's bedtime story, but DS is still small enough not to notice. How long can I keep that quiet? However if I notice I do always stop and reread the sentence, often stories loose their meaning with a miss read sentence.

My mother (a natural talent) despaired at me guessing words as a child. I think she would blow a gasket if anybody actually encouraged my DS to guess words.

Chemistry

MrBear - I'm the same. I dislike reading out loud too. I do when I have to, but prefer not to. Maybe you use the different side of the brain for reading, like me. How is your reading?

I use loads of methods

Lots of people think they use loads of methods. The evidence of brain scans is that they don't. You are almost certainly using the pareto-temporal and occipito-temporal regions on the left side of your brain when reading. These are the same regions that fire up in a child when they are sounding out and blending. If you were a poor reader most of your brain activity when reading would be in the visual centres on the right side of your brain.

So... what would I be defined as in the poor/good reader stakes?

I would expect that you are a good reader.

But I must use the different part of the brain to Good Readers

Not at all. There is no basis at all for you to arrive at that conclusion.

*Maybe the problem here is what defines a "poor" reader actually does not mean someone who doesn't read"

Nice try but no cigar. Researchers use the same definition of "poor reader" as the average man in the street.

Its definitely not something I do subconsciously and at high speed

You have no idea what is going on inside your brain when you are reading. The fact it is subconscious means there is no way you can know short of having your brain scanned as you read.

because decoding is my last option - I would be defined as a "poor reader"

No you would not. If you can read perfectly well you are a good reader. However, a scan of your brain would almost certainly show that, although conscious decoding is the last option, subconscious decoding is happening all the time. If it is not you are different from anything that has been encountered in research and should definitely be studied to understand what is happening.

None of us think we are decoding as we read because we aren't conscious of it except when we come across a word we don't know, i.e. one for which we have not yet built a model in the occipito-temporal region of the brain.

KS3. FATEdestiny?

I don't doubt you prh, thats really interesting stuff.

I don't know the mechanism for reading "easy" words that I know without thinking. You're clearly more knowledgeable than me on that one and unconscious deciding makes sense now you explain it.

I regularly come across words I cannot read immediately. I pause at them as reading. I don't know if other adults do this or just me? I don't usually choose to decode unknown words unless I have to.

I use a multitude of reading methods, not just phonics. I'm glad I learnt these methods alongside decoding. For me they are useful.

KS3 science, chemistry and physics KS4 and A Level chemistry. Secondary state school.

Why?

Then you must encounter children who.struggle to access your curriculum because of poor reading skills. I don't understand why, when confronted with that kind of evidence right in front of you, you still advocate the kind of misreading early on that is exactly the barrier you see children struggle with, day in, day out.

I also find it strange that a secondary Science teacher is ignorant of the debunking of learning styles years ago.

I don't understand why,..

Allow me to confuse you further.

In addition to other people's children, I also advocate it with my own four primary school aged children

There's more. Are you ready for this? The school where I'm governor employs a Reading Recovery teacher

Oh my God. Clutch my pearls. In three different contexts - as a parent, as a teacher, as a governor - I disagree with you in all of them.

http://dana.org/Cerebrum/2013/InsidetheLetterboxHowLiteracyTransformstheHumanBrain/

Reading someone on a internet forum minimise the problems of struggling KS3 readers doesn't make me pearl clutch, FATEdestiny.

I'm not reading any if your links mrsz, or your copy and pastes. Just for your info, I wasn't sure if you were posting them in relation to my posts? I'm sure they are useful to others though.

If I was interested in reading research, I could find it myself.

I much prefer first-person discussion. Each to their own.

A scientist who ignores the science