[Reading-hall-of-fame] Re: ILA on phonics

[Shanahan, Timothy E]

Judith—

I only skimmed your letter, but I noticed that you failed to mention morphology, epistemology, motivation, evolutionary language studies, neurology, phrenology, text structure, epidemiology, morality, or any of the dozens of other topics that could have been mentioned.

Given this highly revealing failure, I don’t see how anyone could take this criticism seriously given its lack of proper contextualization. Obviously, there is no way that anyone can ever abstract a single idea and focus on it for a few pages profitably, so writing anything on literacy (including this kind of criticism) is reductionist and misleading.

I don’t think your letter gave enough weight to the empirical research that has been done with beginning readers—and can’t imagine how teaching them to decode text will prevent them in any way from a lifetime of event learning within or across disciplines. Can’t wait to read your next ethnography on that.

tim

Timothy Shanahan.
Distinguished Professor Emeritus
University of Illinois at Chicago
shanahan at uic.edu

208 W Washington St  #711
Chicago, IL 60606
(312) 933-2835
www.shanahanonliteracy.com<http://www.shanahanonliteracy.com>




From: <reading-hall-of-fame-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> on behalf of Judith Green <judithlgreen at me.com>
Date: Saturday, July 20, 2019 at 4:51 PM
To: Thomas Sticht <tgsticht at gmail.com>
Cc: "Reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk" <Reading-hall-of-fame at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>
Subject: [Reading-hall-of-fame] Re: ILA on phonics

Hi Tom,

Thank you for sharing this.  I skimmed it and it is scary and re-inforces my 6 decades of understanding that ILA (then IRA) did not understand how children learning language, how to analyze reading processes and practices, or how to trace developing literacy processes across time and opportunities for learning.  This does not situate phonics in the more complex understandings of meaning construction, prediction of meanings from text or how literary text shape us to be particular kids of readers.  This could lead those who seek phonics as the center to dismiss once again the complex nature of engaging authors in the text and learning to engage with texts.

Really does not reflect what we know about what constitutes a reading process or language processes or event learning with and through texts within and across disciplines, educational contexts or social worlds.  Scares me as it seems to ligitimize one approach as READING.

Just sharing,

Judith


On Jul 20, 2019, at 2:33 PM, Thomas Sticht <tgsticht at gmail.com<mailto:tgsticht at gmail.com>> wrote:

Folks: Regarding discussions on phonics, the ILA has put out a report calling for explicit and systematic phonics instruction:

https://www.literacyworldwide.org/docs/default-source/where-we-stand/ila-meeting-challenges-early-literacy-phonics-instruction.pdf

Tom Sticht

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