Share this page!

The Reading Ape Profile picture
Twitter logo
6 Mar, 4 tweets, 1 min read
The 'language surplus' gifted by privilege often conflates early reading instruction and primary education in general as we try to repay a language/privilege deficit with undue haste in an understandable desire for social justice. Cognitive load will always apply.
Far better to ensure foundations are secure - particularly focusing on automaticity (arguably the main concern of primary education) in all areas, and in reading build to fluency slowly and surely. Discrete, global, cultural knowledge is assigned to the curriculum.
The deficit is unlikely to be repaid by the end of primary education but with fluency in place and the associated release of cognitive load, the opportunity for repayment of the deficit and building of substantial surplus and privilege is possible throughout secondary education.
And then pupils can benefit from...‘Knowledge begets comprehension begets knowledge’ (Pearson, 2006).

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with The Reading Ape

The Reading Ape Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @TheReadingApe

The Reading Ape Profile picture
5 Mar
Sorry Mat, only just got to this.Beck and McKeown carried out considerable research on QtA and the studies on teacher activity and use of querying suggested that practices indeed developed. However, in terms of pupil outcomes their research was inconclusive.
Their 1996 study (as I said, this is old stuff) used a control group that received instruction from a basal programme. There were significant differences in favour of QtA between pupils who received QtA instruction and those who read without instructional support.
However, there were no significant differences between pupils who received QtA instruction and the basal instruction control group. These findings were repeated by Garcia et al. (2007) using 'responsive engagement' - similar to QtA. The control group had vocabulary instruction.
Read 8 tweets
The Reading Ape Profile picture
3 Mar
Try these: Beck’s (1998) assertion that phoneme to grapheme mapping is the equivalent to reading as dribbling skills are to basketball: necessary but not sufficient to play the game. The implication is clear: without sufficient phonic knowledge, reading may not be possible.
Daniels and Diack (1956) - to ignore the alphabet when teaching the decoding of English is inexplicable.
Whole word method is undermined by the capacity of humans to remember a limited number of symbols. Chinese children are expected to recognise only 3500 characters by the age eleven (Leong, 1973), and it takes twelve years of study to learn 2000 logographs in Japanese(Gough,2006).
Read 9 tweets
The Reading Ape Profile picture
3 Mar
Reciprocal Reading treats reading comprehension as a skill. As such it is in denial of Kahn's (2007) assertion that it is not a skill, but a complex mix of thinking, reasoning, imagining and interpreting and is a largely knowledge-based process dependent on content knowledge
It assigns roles to pupils (predictor, clarifier, questioner, summariser) in a small group who 'collaborate'. It seems to have evolved from Collaborative Strategic Reading (Kim, 2006).The technique is used in Success For All - much criticised by Kozol (2006) and McGuinness (1999)
The research that implied it was successful was undermined by the evidence that pretty much any comprehension skills teaching was effective. Reading seemed to improve reading. More here on skills-based comprehension strategies: thereadingape.com/single-post/20…
Read 8 tweets
The Reading Ape Profile picture
2 Mar
Now there's a good question! There is no source because there is no recognised model for effective reading instruction in the UK which as @EdinspireGeoff states has 4 separate national bodies.
The only universal expectation is phonics teaching in Reception and Year 1 and once the phonics screening check threshold has been crossed this may stop - despite comprehensive code knowledge not yet having been achieved.
Beyond this pretty much any approach goes from whole language to reading dogs. Guided reading still maintains traction along with numerous schemes that mainly focus on comprehension 'skills'. These include the 'power of reading' which includes precious little reading...
Read 9 tweets
The Reading Ape Profile picture
18 Feb
Excellent question and apologies for not being clearer. Although silent reading is a relatively recent phenomenon- Latin was usually written in scriptio continua with no breaks between words making it easier to read aloud - it greatly speeds up reading rate.
Oral reading reduces saccade length(how far the eye moves between fixations)and slows reading but this lengthens substantially with silent reading and most US college students read between 300-400 wpm(try doing that aloud).
As a result, the expectation is that children learn to read silently but if we can't hear hear children read, how do we monitor that they are actually reading? The NRP (NICHD,2000) concluded that unmonitored reading in the form of Sustained Silent Reading was not effective.
Read 8 tweets
The Reading Ape Profile picture
16 Feb
An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.
It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.
Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).
Read 16 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

Like this author's thread?

Get emails when @TheReadingApe has new unrolls!

Check out other threads from @TheReadingApe!

Read all threads by @TheReadingApe