Here’s a video clip that @sheilaspeaking sent me in support of the comment that she made on a post earlier in the week. This might also support part of Nancy’s comment on the same post, relating to attitudes towards dyslexia.
For me, I’m open to learning as much as I can about what is actually happening when kids learning to read. Although we have some of this figured out, including some of the ways that we can help children that struggle, I sense that there is still so much more to learn.
One of the big take-aways for me in this video is that learning to read is not a natural process in the same way that learning to communicate orally is. There’s lots to do to support an interest in reading, an appreciation for text, and a love of a reading life. At the same time, some of our children will need more explicit support if they are going to be able to take full advantage of the power of the written word in our text-drenched world.
Thanks Sheila for placing this in front of us. Thanks to both Sheila and Nancy for their comments.
Maryanne Wolf is a very important figure in current research on reading development. I’ve been fortunate enough to hear her present at conferences several times in the last few years; she is a dynamic and passionate speaker and, unlike many academic researchers, is very grounded in practice and practicality and can address concerns of parents and teachers in an informed and pragmatic way. Her book (alluded to in the broadcast), Proust and the Squid is a very engrossing and informative read; I strongly recommend it, for parents and teachers both, along with Dehaene’s recent Reading and the Brain which, while it goes into many issues of neurology and information processing, is equally readable and has much to say about current practice.
Sheila’s comment shed light on a very pervasive gap (alluded to by Hart and Risley in their groundbreaking Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Lives of Young American Children: that children enter school, even in JK, with already a profound “achievement gap” in place that schools need to address: middle-class children may have been exposed to many millions more words than their lower-SES peers, and have also had over a thousand more hours of literacy experiences. Not only the quantity, but quality of the interactions are significantly different. (See a brief summary of Hart & Risley’s work here: http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/spring2003/hart.cfm )
Oral language is the foundation of reading — we can’t develop strong readers without underpinning language competence. This is where all-day-kindergarten offers a real opportunity. TDSB’s “From 3 to 3″ program ( see http://www.from3to3.com/) is targeted at this need; special Kindergarten programs for children with language delays also are a good initiative. There’s a real place for engaging children more with playfulness in words and their usage, making some early reading skills a subject of games and activities. We put too much emphasis on meaning too soon. Not every “reading” experience has to deal with earth-shattering “meaning” — games, songs, poems, and silliness have a place! All-day K opens up more possibilities for language activities to develop these pre-reading competencies that children like Sheila’s often acquire at home in a focused, but fun, context. Phonological awareness — that is, awareness of the sounds of language — rhyme, metre, alliteration — leads to phonemic awareness — awareness of individual speech sounds — which underpins early reading skills..
The MOE prepared documents for teachers with many good activities which can be used in K (and later) to develop these essential skills. Some schools are using PALS (Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies) to ensure all kindergarten and Grade 1 children learn their letter-sound correspondences and how to use them to read and write words — this is a structured and explicit, but activity-based (and fun) approach. The MOE is supporting this, see:
http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/research/PALS.html
and
http://qspace.library.queensu.ca/bitstream/1974/6715/1/Mattatall_Christopher_A_201109_PhD.pdf
These are just some of the initiatives in place to address the disparity in readiness that is evident in many schools. Having high standards is excellent, but we must provide children with the means to achieve them.
That said, reading difficulties are no respecters of social class or previous learning, and we have not seriously, as a system, looked at how to address the learning needs of some 10%+ of our students who have major struggles with reading and written language acquisition. These children often need, not just excellent teaching, but excellent teaching of a different kind. With all the hype about “differentiated instruction,” I’d like to see “differentiated” reading instruction for these students. The problems I’ve seen preventing it are practical ones: staffing, resources, appropriate teacher training and over-crowded curricula.
“One of the big take-aways for me in this video is that learning to read is not a natural process in the same way that learning to communicate orally is. There’s lots to do to support an interest in reading, an appreciation for text, and a love of a reading life. At the same time, some of our children will need more explicit support if they are going to be able to take full advantage of the power of the written word in our text-drenched world.”
An understatement, but a great start Stephen. Pity, I had to do a lot of learning to truly understand what effective explicit support is to learning. But that is another story, and sitting here today, as a parent I certainly wish I had the knowledge that I have today, for the nightmare years in the early grades of education for my child and for myself. I can’t tell you how many times, I heard very convincing arguments from the educators and others on the school board staff, that my child did not have reading difficulties. I would go back home, and it would eat away at me, until I turned on the internet to once again finding new information, that my child’s major stumbling block to learning is reading difficulties. If not the internet, the handy device called a phone and speak to an expert, and after speaking to them, I would moan about being stuck in the middle of the nowhere, and do what most parents in the urban areas do, seek out help for their children in the private sector. As a result, over the 11 years, it was one of the highest and steep learning curves I was ever confronted with, in order to help my child effectively. No one else in the education system was going to help my child, and the job landed in my lap.
In the process. I learned a lot about an education system that avoids the science in learning, cognitive and other education processes that takes place outside the education system. I learned, how those within the education system cherry-picks the outside research and cobbles a reading program that best fits the current dogma and pedagogical stances. Reading Recovery is one such beast, that did very little for the majority of children nor were children tested in over all reading ability after finishing the program. PALS is the new kid on the block, and still as of yet has not been independently reviewed outside of the education other than the approved ones such as “What Works Clearinghouse”. ” PALS was found to have potentially positive effects on alphabetics, no discernible effects on fluency, and mixed effects on comprehension for beginning readers.” http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/interventionreport.aspx?sid=364 As I further explored PALS, I found that PALS has been commercialized to not only serve the education system but as well for parents at a hefty price.
That said, there is no easy fix, no short cuts in reading instruction, nor a easy set of reading strategies that can be provided to reach a high level of proficiency for all students. As I learned, reading is complex and cannot be divided into individual silos, without due consideration of the affects on the other silos. So what do you with a grade 1 student, who can read individual known words, failed the pseudo-nonsense word test, and somehow managed to have a high level of vocabulary. In the video of PALS on the Ontario Education Ministry site, that ElementaryTeacher provided, at the 4:50 mark describing the results of the students and being able to show the students where they started in reading rate to now a student is able to read 65 words a minute from 5 words a minute. http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/research/PALS.html
I have a few questions here, is it a text passage or single words because there is a big difference according the reading science. It was a very fine day when I stumbled upon The Children of the Code in 2004, at a time when I finally won the battle of forcing the school to provide a psycho-educational assessment. A time, where it was insisted over and over again that my child did not have a learning disability, nor did she have a reading problem. Since she did not have a reading problem, she was never qualified for any supplementary reading help outside of the classroom. PALS, would it picked up kids like my child? I doubt it and once again the education system, avoids the research taking place outside of the education system.
What really bothers me the most, and is the usual percentage that is cited within the education system is the 10 percent. Elementaryteacher states, “That said, reading difficulties are no respecters of social class or previous learning, and we have not seriously, as a system, looked at how to address the learning needs of some 10%+ of our students who have major struggles with reading and written language acquisition. These children often need, not just excellent teaching, but excellent teaching of a different kind. With all the hype about “differentiated instruction,” I’d like to see “differentiated” reading instruction for these students. The problems I’ve seen preventing it are practical ones: staffing, resources, appropriate teacher training and over-crowded curricula.” The outside research has been consistent in the studies of longitudinal studies as well as the studies over shorter periods of time, for the last 40 years or so, about one-third of students in the primary classes will struggled learning to read for various reasons. Effectively, remediation and other supplementary reading programs are crafted and targeted at the lowest assessment scores and the cut-off point is no more than 10 percent of the classroom students. The latter for administration purposes and to control costs. I would love to know the breakdown of PALS and the costs where 23 % of students who are also in need of supplementary help but did not meet the criteria. Who are the students? Students like my child, who will probably be identified as having a specific learning disability well pass grade 4, and for some they may never be identified in the 12 years of schooling. For other students, it could be not acquiring the vocabulary levels needed to begin to learn to read. There is many reasons, but I leave it with the experts.
The Children of the Code, provides the research and the reasons from the top reading researchers in the world. A few Canadian researchers are part of the organization, and in Canada are routinely ignored. Take for example. Dr. Stanovich -
” The Effect of Reading on Thinking
David Boulton: Is it fair to say that the process of learning to read creates a cognitive processing infrastructure that wouldn’t be there if we didn’t, and that that cognitive processing infrastructure is a significant part of the way that we think these days?
Dr. Keith Stanovich: Oh, yeah. I couldn’t agree more. That’s a very good characterization. That is what we started to try to capture in a program of research that call The Print Exposure Program. After I published the Matthew Effects article, I mean, that was essentially a model that synthesized a lot of literature, but we tried to study empirically some of the effects of differential exposure to print. That’s a program that I undertook with both Anne and Rich, subsequent to the Matthew paper which was published in 1986. For about a decade we were quite involved with studies looking at the effects of print exposure.
One of the aspects of that program was in part methodological: How do you measure differences in exposure to print? Then once you’ve done that, how do you show print exposure as an independent contributor to cognitive growth? And we thought that we had done that in a variety of studies that illustrate your statement. Of course, we focused immediately on some of the obvious candidates, and certainly vocabulary was something we focused on a lot.”
http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/stanovich.htm
Translation on WIkipedia – “In the words of Keith Stanovich (Adams, 1990, pp. 59–60):[2]
Slow reading acquisition has cognitive, behavioral, and motivational consequences that slow the development of other cognitive skills and inhibit performance on many academic tasks. In short, as reading develops, other cognitive processes linked to it track the level of reading skill. Knowledge bases that are in reciprocal relationships with reading are also inhibited from further development. The longer this developmental sequence is allowed to continue, the more generalized the deficits will become, seeping into more and more areas of cognition and behavior. Or to put it more simply – and sadly – in the words of a tearful nine-year-old, already falling frustratingly behind his peers in reading progress, “Reading affects everything you do”
It is what happen to my youngest child, even though she had a high level of vocabulary and other strengths entering formal schooling. On The Children of the Code, a comprehensive and links that it would take a year to review, and anyone would be asking the question why are the education systems not following the science of reading. By the end of grade 3, according to the assessment, she was at a grade 1 level in language arts and below grade 1 in numeracy. All the gains made prior before entering JK two 1/2 days nursery schools, two years of intensive speech therapy, and an assortment of other physical activities plus the assignments and what I called homework assigned by the health professionals were all gone. Today, in the year 2012, another item would be added to the list, at the age of 3 she would begin the early processes to learn to read, and no doubt be reading without as much struggle as she did in 2001 in grade 1. Now she is 17, her main difficulties is still with low phonemic awareness and decoding problems which is the result when low phonemic awareness is the core difficulty, that sets off a cascading effect in other parts of reading such as fluency and impacted her writing skills. Read it all at the Children of the Code site, and from there leap-frog to the research papers across the world, and PALS begins to look rather the poor cousin of the supplementary reading instruction and programs.
The Children of the Code have now reach stage 2, a new site called Stewarding Healthy Learning.
On the front page – ““We can no longer assume that what we think children should learn
is more important than how well they can learn.” http://www.learningstewards.org/
On another page, “Many people are looking for magical bullets – they want to skip trying to understand the issues and jump to the solutions. Buying into solutions to problems we don’t sufficiently understand retards and often disables our learning. If you’re not interested in learning your way into a deeper first-person understanding, if you’re looking for a quick fix you don’t have to understand, then this work is probably not for you. We are about ‘magic glasses’ – better said, ‘learning lenses’ – not magic bullets.
Caveats
#1 – Our intent is to render this case in as generally relevant and comprehensible way as we can while still staying within scientifically accurate generalizations. We don’t want to be so scientifically exacting that we have to burden every expression with numerous exception notations and caveats. We are making a general case to a general audience. There are always exceptions.
#2 – Certainly there are people whose learning, behavioral, or health issues have innate neurobiological causes. Our generalization is ‘most’ not ‘all’ – most of our crime problems are consequence of learned behaviors – most of the children who struggle in school are struggling because their learning (noun) is insufficiently resourcing or maladaptively directing their learning (verb).” http://www.learningstewards.org/orientation-and-caveats/
The 60 second video is for you Stephen. I think you will take it and start to do some leap frogging on possibilities that has never been taken seriously or considered in the public education system that refuses to look outside their walls. A gated community that keeps the outsiders locked out or the educators confined within the locked gates. Or both maybe?
Thank you Nancy for spreading word of our work. Clearly you are one who is interested in getting underneath the superficial assertions and learning to improve your own 1st person understanding. Parents and educators like you are our greatest hope. All the best, David
As a teacher, I have noticed a lot of my kids benefit from different forms of teaching. One of the newest ways is from using electronic learning devices. Partially because of the times we live in. They see adults using iPads and iPhones and instinctively become curious about them and want to use them as well. I know as a kid I hated feeling like I was being tricked into using something that was “educational” but things like the VTech VReader or the Leapfrog which mimic the iPad help make reading a much more natural process. Im not saying that other non-electronic things are not as good or that electronic learning should replace these thigns, but they are very helpful and promote reading at an early age.
Keith – the electronic readers, the devices that reads text audio, and their features with dictionaries actually improves fluency and vocabulary for students who are struggling in reading. In part, reading text, the number of words per line averages 5 to 6 words, which allow students who have difficulty in core reading such as decoding, to be able to keep with the class, and more importantly unknown words are not skipped and they received immediate feedback on how the unknown word is pronounce and its meaning. The research is all in the LD and dyslexia research, that is about 10 feet high, confirming fluency and vocabulary of the readers increase significantly.
But here’s the catch in the public education models coast to coast across Canada. The majority of students struggling in reading, from the mild to severe do not meet the narrowed criteria defined under print disability. Keeping that in mind, a student does not qualify to access the devices provided by the school board, and for students who can afford their own devices, do not qualified to access the various e-text materials that is provided by the board. Given that fact, today’s devices can now switch any printed medium to a digital format, including braille. It leaves LD students out in the land of limbo and other students having no access to the any of the digital material held by the school board. It is only under the good graces of a school, who and how the devices can be access, including the personally owned devices of students.
My child greatly benefited starting in 2004 using MP3 players at low cost and it did improve her reading proficiency. However, my child was denied access to the digital material, and in so doing, rendered the devices ineffective for school use. They even objected and banned the use of audio, including ear phones for the devices that had audio as well as audio e-books. .
The education system is so far behind, when they still think that the outdated, almost feels like 1980 technology of the Vtech reader that appears to be still in use at the school level, is just as good as the 2012 e-readers. Its almost like comparing the old black and white TVs to the plasma TVs of today. As I experience, MP3 players are vastly different today than back in 2004, and the same thing can be said about the dizzying variety of computer technology and devices today compared to 2004.
Reading on an electronic device aids a student, but will never correct and remediate core difficulties in reading. Explicit instruction is the only route to go.