Prevent reading problems before they start!
- Never teach the letter names first. Teach only the letter sounds.
- Never teach sight-reading. Teach only true phonics.
- Never teach the capital letters first. Teach only the lower-case.
Byron Harrison and Jean Clyde, who co-authored the insightful book, Reading Through Tears, show without a doubt that neither parents, preschool teachers, nor elementary school teachers should ever teach the letter names first. They should only be taught long after the children have a good grasp of phonics and of blending sounds into syllables and words.
“We find confusions between [letter] names and sounds to be one of the most common causes of reading errors. It is important simply because it usually undermines a child’s capacity to blend letter sounds together and that then means that the higher order phonic skills also remain unreliable, and if children's phonic skills are unreliable don't be surprised if they revert to inaccurate guessing instead," as the Visual Attention Span (VAS) Theory researchers say.
"We also find that remediation of name/sound confusions is a surprisingly difficult task even in the hands of a specialist tutor. We therefore must PREVENT these problems before they start.”
The VAS research website has overwhelming scientific data proving that synthetic [explicit, systematic] phonics is the best and only way to teach reading properly.
To quote some of the research by Harrison and Clyde, “Research has clearly demonstrated that at the learning-to-read stage many children are unable to work out for themselves the full range of letter sounds; they need to be specifically taught. Word-guessing not only fails to develop this knowledge, it also wastes time during the critical 6-9 year-old learning period and allows time for confusions between names and sounds to become habituated.
Visual Attention Span (VAS) Theory reading expert Jean Clyde writes, “Today I saw Adam. He is almost 11, has a shy smile, is a little small for his age and thinks that he is average in reading and a little below average in spelling. However his mother is concerned about the fast approaching problems of Adam's entering high school, a very common concern among parents of 11 year olds! She has been reassured that Adam is progressing satisfactorily but his mother has long ago learned to distrust such [school] assurances.
He can read one, two and many three syllable words, which is more that many of my other 11 year-olds can do. And yet when I ask Adam to tell me the sounds of letters he shows hesitations and some of the 3-syllable words show evidence of confusions between names and sounds.
“Adam had originally learned letter names and guessing. He had then struggled to read. He preferred guessing words partly because guessing [seemed] faster, partly because his [elementary] teacher encouraged him to guess, but mainly because his insecure grasp of sounds undermined his confidence.
“Guessing however is inherently inaccurate. [The next teacher tried but] failed to over-teach [phonics] to the stage where his newly acquired phonic skills became automatic. The phonic skills that he was taught are therefore still insecurely based and guessing still dominates.
“Knowledge of sounds needs to reach the stage where, when you see a letter, you automatically associate it with its most common sound. Later on you can learn the secondary sounds but if you fail to initially consolidate the basic letter sounds, you may condemn the Adams of this world to being average in reading and below average in spelling when they might have been superior in both!” http://www.vasresearch.com
VAS Theory supports what The Godfrey Method has always said in the "Top Ten Myths of Reading." Doing it right the first time is so much easier!
No comments:
Post a Comment