Comment on Early Repairs in Foundation for Reading

The post by Ruth Robarts includes the following:

The panel also will recommend some shifts in teaching techniques, said a panel member, Dr. Susan Landry of the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. These include having at-risk children spend more time in small groups that address their specific weaknesses; emphasizing skills like blending sounds (C + AT = CAT), which have been found to be good performance predictors; and training parents to reinforce school lessons.

To be able to blend C+AT, a student must first have a command of phonemic awareness, i.e., the ability to hear three sounds. To be able to read (and therefore blend) C+AT, the student must have a command of sound-symbol correspondence, i.e., the child must know what sounds the letters make when pronoucing C, A, and T.

This is true of absolutely every child, regardless of their so-called learning style.

Effective reading programs (like direct instruction curricula) make absolutley and systematically certain that students possess phonemic awareness and sound-symbol correspondence.

Less effective reading programs (like Reading Recovery and balanced literacy) leave the student to discover or construct phonemic awareness and sound symbol correspondence hapazardly on their own.

Unfortunately, children who struggle to read do not easily (and sometimes never) make these discoveries on their own. Even those who learn to read easily benefit from instruction that builds mastery of phonemic awareness and sound-symbol correspondence.

Posted by Ed Blume at October 4, 2006 7:48 PM
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