Ten Myths About Learning to Read ▬ SEDL

Ten Myths About Learning to Read

SEDL: Dec 2002 by Sebastian Wren

Myth #1:
Learning to read is a natural process

Literacy Skills

It has long been argued that learning to read, like learning to understand spoken language, is a natural phenomenon. It has often been suggested that children will learn to read if they are simply immersed in a literacy-rich environment and allowed to develop literacy skills in their own way. This belief that learning to read is a natural process that comes from rich text experiences is surprisingly prevalent in education despite the fact that learning to read is about as natural as learning to juggle blindfolded while riding a unicycle backwards. Simply put, learning to read is not only unnatural, it is just about the most unnatural thing humans do.

Myth #2:
Children will eventually learn to read if given enough time

This is arguably the second most pernicious myth, and it is closely related to the first.

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Research has revealed an extremely dangerous phenomenon that has been dubbed the "Matthew Effect." [Children of the Code] The term comes from the line in the Bible that essentially says that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That certainly describes what happens as children enter school and begin learning literacy skills. Over time, the gap between children who have well developed literacy skills and those who do not gets wider and wider.

Myth #3:
Reading programs are "successful"

It is extremely common for schools to buy a reading program to address their reading instruction needs, and trust that the program will solve their school's literacy issues. Typically these programs require a great deal of commitment from the school, both in terms of time and money.

However, while reading programs can be "useful," no reading program has ever been shown to be truly "successful" — not with all children, all teachers, and all cultures. And no reading program has been shown to accelerate all children to advanced levels of performance.

Myth #4:
We used to do a better job of teaching children to read

As the song goes, "The good old days weren't always so good." We have, in fact, never done a better job of teaching children to read than we do today. The bad news is, we've never really done a worse job either. We are basically just as successful today as we have always been (which is to say, not very successful).

Nothing illustrates this better than the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the NAEP). This assessment has been given to children across the country aged nine, thirteen, and seventeen since 1970. Student performance at those three age levels has not changed substantially in over 30 years — consistently, depending on the age tested, between 24% and 39% of students have scored in the "below basic" category, and between three and seven percent have scored in the "advanced" category. Other investigations have found that literacy rates have not really changed in this country since World War II, and some studies suggest that literacy rates were actually worse before the war

Myth #5:
Skilled reading involves using syntactic and semantic cues to "guess" words, and good readers make many "mistakes" as they read authentic text

Research indicates that both of these claims are quite wrong, but both are surprisingly pervasive in reading instruction. The idea that good readers use contextual cues to guess words in running text comes from a method of assessment developed by Ken Goodman that he called "miscue analysis." For his dissertation, Goodman examined the types of mistakes that young readers make and drew inferences about the strategies they employ as they read. He noticed that the children in his studies very often made errors as they read, but many of these errors did not change the meaning of the text (like misreading "rabbit" as "bunny"). He surmised the reason must be that good readers depend on context to predict upcoming words in passages of text. He further suggested that for good readers, these contextual cues are so important that the reader needs only occasionally to "sample" from the text—that is, look at a few of the words on the page—to confirm the predictions. Children who struggle to sound out words, Goodman says, are overdependant on letter and word cues and should learn to pay more attention to the semantic and syntactic cues.

Goodman's model, which eventually gave rise to the "Three Cueing Systems" [literacyspace] model of word recognition, is extremely influential in reading instruction, but has never been supported by research evidence.  READ MORE ➤➤

 

Automatic Readability Checker

Based on 7 readability formulas:

Grade Level: 13

Reading Level: fairly difficult to read.

Reader's Age: 18-19 yrs. old

(college level entry)