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The Forum > Article Comments > First, become a good reader > Comments

First, become a good reader : Comments

By Jennifer Buckingham, published 15/10/2014

Hundreds of thousands of children struggle with reading at even the most basic level, because they haven't been taught properly, even after spending years at school.

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What Jennifer says is probably true enough but I would suggest that there other factors at play too, and also that back in the olden days many people never learnt to read much too

The pernicious influence of television and how it brain-washes the childs developing nervous system and psyche.
Many babies are plonked in front of TV from day one. How are they thus being brain-washed?
The Jesuits used to boast if given a child for the first 7 years of its life, they could indelibly bind the child to the church
How many hundreds of hours does the normal child spend watching TV in its first 7 years?

Many children, especially from the more down-and-out segments of society are also zonked out on junk food with all of its sugar and toxic additives.

Many children also suffer from chronic systematic emotional abuse too via their "toxic" parents who also in many cases wouldnt have much of a clue about anything, let alone what it takes to be a parent.

For anyone to learn anything one has to have a certain degree of free energy and attention - the more the better. Furthermore you cant really teach anyone if they are not essentially balanced and happy - this is especially the case with children.

Combining all of the above many children have very little capacity to even sit still let alone develop any kind of reading skills.

It is also interesting to note that in the Steiner Waldorf system of education children are not taught to read until at least 7 or 8, perhaps even later. They are of course read to a lot, especially traditional fairytales. Parents who send their children to Steiner schools generally do not let their children watch, and thus become addicted to and BRAIN-WASHED by TV.

From another perspective our entire culture is effectively toxic, and what we call "education" is a process whereby we brain-wash our children to become "well-adjusted" to this toxic anti-"culture".

Joseph Chilton Pearce wrote extensively on this beginning with Magical Child. His work is introduced here:

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/EE.html
Posted by Daffy Duck, Wednesday, 15 October 2014 1:58:36 PM
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It starts at home. My kids are great readers and writers and I don't give their schools much credit.
Literacy and illiteracy are generational phenomena. Even so, for most kids and adults reading just can't compete with all the other diversions.
The ratio literacy:illiteracy hasn't changed, it's just that now some illiterates can.
This elitist quote isn't far from the truth, and we may equate discrimination in reading with discrimination in thinking.
Posted by Squeers, Wednesday, 15 October 2014 7:02:54 PM
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My 2 oldest were both reading, writing & arithmeticing before they started school. The youngest one had trouble. She was so lucky to get a 60 year old teacher for first & second classes, [70 kid school with 3 teachers including teaching headmaster], who refused to have anything to do with "all this new fangled muck", & taught by the old book.

With this & a couple of good games learning computer programs, & a literary mother she got the idea. I have still never seen her read a book.

Daffy I went to school a long time ago in Queensland, Townsville actually. Kids & their parents were less well prepared than today. Many parents were functionally illiterate. My teachers had 40 or more in their classes, & we all learnt to read & write, & do arithmetic.

Fortunately in those days we had good teachers, who at least knew their subjects, & we were streamed starting from about 6 months, at the end of "prep 1".

I was unfortunate enough to move to Sydney, [Ryde] for the start of 5Th class. Ryde was a small school in the 50s, with 5Th & 6TH classes combined. I had already done all the work they did in 6Th class. NSW was that far behind Queensland & has not improved.

In fact the quality of the teaching & the curriculum for my kids was considerably below that when both their parents went to school. In fact in a 1700 kid high school, there was only one teacher capable of undertaking the physics or math C courses for matriculation, & 4 who were pretending to teach them.

The feminisation of school has been disastrous
Posted by Hasbeen, Thursday, 16 October 2014 12:22:18 AM
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This is in response to Bronte’s comments.

I don’t know the author, or her qualifications. I dislike the Centre for Independent Studies and the Abbott Government. However this is why I think the message in the article is correct.

Firstly, to the research. The National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy, issued in December 2005, contained a volume entitled “Literature Review”. It can be downloaded from this page: http://research.acer.edu.au/tll_misc/5/ if you scroll down a bit.

This comprises a comprehensive review of studies into the teaching of reading, concluding in its Summary section:
“For beginning reading during the early years of schooling, findings from meta-analytic syntheses of a large volume of local and international evidence-based research consistently indicate that direct, systematic instruction in phonics makes significantly greater contributions to children’s initial and subsequent growth in reading, writing, spelling and comprehension, than do alternative approaches involving unsystematic or no phonics instruction.”
Chapter 3 of the Literature Review discusses a large number of these research studies in detail.

The understanding of the research that Bronte has, that ‘many of us learn to read in very different ways’, is simply incorrect. What the research actually shows is that phonemic awareness is an essential skill early readers need to master. Phonemic awareness is the ability to detect specific sounds in words. It is an aural skill, which is a prerequisite for understanding phonics, which is letter/sound correspondence. Phonics is in turn necessary to allow readers to decode words into groups of words, and vice-versa. In many of us who take to reading quickly this all happens so fast we don’t really notice the steps. But it is different in those who struggle.

(To be continued)
Posted by Philip Howell, Thursday, 16 October 2014 10:55:06 AM
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The Reading Recovery people for years tried to avoid the significance of phonemic awareness, as their system was not based on it. I have an article from August 1999, the abstract for which states:
“Success in Reading Recovery was closely associated with phonological processing skills ..... We conclude that Reading Recovery can be more effective in a whole language instructional context if greater emphasis is placed on the development and use of word-level skills and strategies involving phonological information. “
(The article is ‘Success in Reading Recovery Depends on the Development of Phonological Processing Skills’ by James W. Chapman, William E. Tunmer and Jane E. Prochnow, and was Revised Research Report for Phase Three of Contract ER35/199/5, submitted to the Ministry of Education, New Zealand).

By 2005 Reading Recovery seemed to have got the message. Here is a quote from Marie Clay’s 2005 publication ‘Literacy Lessons designed for Individuals’, Part 2, page 69:
“What research began to uncover in the 1970s was how young children learn to consciously isolate the phonemes of a language from the flow of speech. .....
......... And it is clear that becoming aware of phonemes is essential for becoming good at word recognition.”
So while there might have been some academic disagreement from the 1970s to the 1990s, the necessity for phonics training has been common ground for at least 10 years.

The significance of phonics which was revealed by accumulating literacy research in the late 20th century has now been confirmed by the results of medical imaging over the last 10-15 years.

Earlier this year I read a 2009 book called ‘Reading in the Brain - The New Science of How We Read’, by Stanislaus Dehane, then the Director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit in Saclay, France. It sets out how the eye and the brain connect to process language, based mainly on brain scans and other scientific methods. In Chapter 5, the book identifies the implications for the teaching of reading.

(To be continued)
Posted by Philip Howell, Thursday, 16 October 2014 10:55:43 AM
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Among its conclusions are:
# p.218: “... it is simply not true that there are hundreds of ways to learn to read. Every child is unique .... but when it comes to reading, all have roughly the same brain that imposes the same constraints and the same learning sequence.”
[In other words, the ‘hardware’ in our brain can only learn reading in a specific way.]
# p.219: “.... Considerable research, both with children and with illiterates, converges on the fact that grapheme-phoneme conversion radically transforms the child’s brain and the way in which it processes speech sounds. This process whereby written words are converted into strings of phonemes must be taught explicitly. It does not develop spontaneously .......”
# p.228: “The punch line is quite simple: we know that conversion of letters into sounds is the key stage in reading acquisition. All teaching efforts should be initially focused on a single goal, the grasp of the alphabetic principle whereby letter or grapheme represents a phoneme.”

I am not a teacher. However my wife has 30 plus years in special education. Her experience is instructive. Her undergraduate teaching degree in the late 70s did not contain anything about phonemic awareness. In the mid 80s she did a masters degree and learned that lack of phonemic awareness was a predictor of reading failure. Teach phonemic awareness and failure can often be avoided.

She has subsequently successfully put the theory into practice, but apparently undergraduate teaching has not changed much. Most classroom teachers have not been taught what the research shows. Bureaucrats in the NSW Education Dept can now parrot the words ‘phonemic awareness’, but without understanding their true implications. The politicians, such as that ultimate lightweight, Bob Carr, latched on to the alternative of Reading Recovery, but have never undertaken a thorough, peer-reviewed study of its effectiveness.

Reading Recovery is not cost-effective. What we really need to do is re-train K-2 teachers.
Posted by Philip Howell, Thursday, 16 October 2014 10:56:26 AM
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