[Reading-hall-of-fame] PBS feature

[Colin Harrison]

Hi everyone

Don’t all English-speaking ‘developed’ nations have a 15-year cycle of moral panic about the teaching of reading?

I was able to view the program from my office in the UK (thanks for the link, Camille).

I hope my somewhat random thoughts resonate with some of yours.


1.     I share Sarah Seyko’s view (0;34) that: reading is not a ‘natural process’; it needs to be taught, and it needs to be taught systematically. Also, that a separate teaching approach is not necessary for ‘dyslexic’ students: good, multifaceted teaching, involving real books, natural language patterns, language development, vocabulary and comprehension development, as well as phonics, is what gets the job done.

2.     However, when I saw that seven out of nine listed ‘team’ members of the ‘National Center on Improving Literacy’ were from the University of Oregon, an alarm bell rang….

3.     I like it that the students understood that their extra help was to develop not only their reading, but also their writing and their spelling.

4.     I applaud multisensory approaches (though I’m not sure that the Oregon team has any deep understanding of the relationship between auditory processing, beat and syllable stress, and the big-unit/small-unit issues).

5.     Wow! I hadn’t realised that the NRP advocated state-wide dyslexia instruction twenty years ago…. (!!!???) Don’t you love this???!!! [As I wrote fifteen years ago- ‘When governments turn to science, science turns to rhetoric’….]

6.     What this brief program didn’t do was to say what dyslexia actually is- to which my answer would be ‘a difference (ten years ago I would have said ‘deficit’) in the formation and processing of letter-sound linkages, that generally slows up the ability to read, write and spell accurately’, and which can usually be helped by good teaching that includes all the elements listed above in my point 1.

7.     ‘Systematic’ phonics is not necessarily boring, de-motivating, redundant or divorced from the real world; only bad systematic phonics is like this.

8.     In the UK, the word ‘dyslexic’ is no longer thought of as applicable to ‘a doctor’s child who can’t read’.  It’s generally applied much more widely than in the US, in ways that fit in with my definition in my point 6. When I was visiting professor at UT Austin, it was made very clear to me that in Texas at least, kids who got to be labeled ‘dyslexic’ were – guess what?- white and middle class. Strangely, poor black kids didn’t get to be labeled ‘dyslexic’. I know that some of my colleagues won’t be comfortable with my cognitive processing definition of ‘dyslexia’, but here in the UK, it is at least applied across social and racial populations.

Best regards

Colin






-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.nottingham.ac.uk/mailman/private/reading-hall-of-fame/attachments/20190502/82efe57f/attachment-0001.html>