Is current illiteracy really founded in WHICH method of teaching to use? Or is that the kind of nitpicking that school districts, consultants and political campaigns love to battle over, while not doing a whole lot on the ground?
Is current illiteracy really founded in WHICH method of teaching to use? Or is that the kind of nitpicking that school districts, consultants and political campaigns love to battle over, while not doing a whole lot on the ground?
According to research, yes. Children who are taught to read by "guessing" are demonstrably worse readers, even when evaluated years later. I don't think there's much of a battle going on outside of the effort it takes push the fix out everywhere.
Is anyone left defending the thoroughly flawed system? I doubt there's very much pride wrapped up in it. The folks who invented the whole word system meant well. The biggest factor is probably the fact that there isn't a giant corporation whose quarterly profits depends on selling the materials for and teaching the flawed system for their income. Amazing that.
By this article's data and other data linked, reading scores have been FALLING since 2015 (2013 for other scores) - and through 2024. This cannot be because of NOT adopting some reform. Something else has to be in play. You cannot damage some production result merely by NOT introducing some change. That's insane. "According to research" has some explaining to do.
I'm not saying that changing the teaching method would or wouldn't help. I'm saying that something ELSE had to actively happen that caused the measured drop.
Yes, method absolutely matters
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/02/677722959/why-millions-of-kid...
>This advice to a beginning reader is based on an influential theory about reading that basically says people use things like context and visual clues to read words. The theory assumes learning to read is a natural process and that with enough exposure to text, kids will figure out how words work.
>Yet scientists from around the world have done thousands of studies on how people learn to read and have concluded that theory is wrong.
>One big takeaway from all that research is that reading is not natural; we are not wired to read from birth. People become skilled readers by learning that written text is a code for speech sounds. The primary task for a beginning reader is to crack the code. Even skilled readers rely on decoding.
>So when a child comes to a word she doesn't know, her teacher should tell her to look at all the letters in the word and decode it, based on what that child has been taught about how letters and combinations of letters represent speech sounds. There should be no guessing, no "getting the gist of it."