Might it be that the immunization effort of the past decade in early reading education has contributed to problems that are far more serious than word recognition ever was? Might it even be that students’ word recognition is, in fact, quite good and that it is their background knowledge and engagement in reading that is the real problem?
There are some children who come to school who officially learn to read in school but who have had hundreds of hours of experiences with books, print, and language play.
Any text written in English is decodable at some level in that the code never deviates from the alphabetic system. However, the degree to which the letter-sound correspondences within words are common or consistent can vary considerably.
SummerReads is in the June/July 2010 issue of Reading Today!
If you were 6 years old between 1930-1967 in the U.S., there is a high likelihood that this text was the first of your school career.
Here is a brochure that summarizes the SummerReads™ program. Feel free to distribute the brochure to your friends and colleagues.
ELLs may have the concepts of a topic but simply give the concepts different labels than the English ones. In a unit on the human body, native Spanish speakers know about a skeleton.
In linguistics, cognates are words that have a common origin.
We know that oral language is a primary way in which meaning gets constructed and built. Through talk, we come to understand concepts and our interpretations and ownership of ideas.
As facilitator of the 2009 CREATE conference, I promised attendees that I would reflect on what I view to the important take-aways from the conference and share them in this venue.
