Author
Anne Castles, Kathleen Rastle și Kate Nation
1 reading card from 1 book · 2018.
1 card
Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition from Novice to Expert · 2018
Decoding is taught and finishes; comprehension grows out of vocabulary and the world.
The synthesis closed a fifty-year argument: at the start, children need explicit, systematic teaching of the link between letters and sounds. In Romanian that part is easier than in English because the spelling is nearly phonetic — which is why many parents think it is solved, when in fact the hard part starts right there. The second floor, comprehension, has no method: it grows out of vocabulary and knowledge of the world. A child who does not know what a cooperative is will not understand the paragraph about cooperatives, however fluently they read. What you do, floor by floor. Floor one, until eight: read aloud daily, alternating, until the stumbling disappears; hard words are read three times, not skipped. Floor two, from eight onwards: vocabulary and world. One, speak to them using the real words, not simplified versions; a word heard in context four times sticks. Two, five minutes of discussion about what they read beats fifteen more minutes of reading. Three, alternate fiction with non-fiction: knowledge of the world is half of comprehension. Four, let them choose what they read, comics included, below level included; volume builds fluency and pleasure builds volume. Five, audiobooks count for vocabulary, though not for decoding. Six, keep the book in the way: on the table, in the car, beside the bed — availability beats encouragement. And a simple threshold: twenty minutes a day, every day, from four to eighteen.
“The debate is settled at the beginning: explicit teaching of letter-sound correspondences produces better readers. What comes after — vocabulary and knowledge of the world — decides how far they get.”