The Science of Reading: A Handbook || Teaching Children to Read: What Do We Know about How to Do It?
✍ Scribed by Snowling, Margaret J.; Hulme, Charles
- Publisher
- Blackwell Publishing Ltd
- Year
- 2005
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 177 KB
- Edition
- 1
- Category
- Article
- ISBN
- 1405114886
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Many of the chapters in this volume focus on literacy development. Typically they discuss the complexities of learning to read: the problem of the alphabetic principle, which requires learning how to segment speech into sounds represented by graphemes; the problem of English orthography, which requires going beyond simple phoneme-grapheme links to represent the morphemic, historical, and etymological information preserved in the writing system; and the problem of comprehension, which requires building a representation of textual and situational information. In contrast, this chapter considers the issue of literacy pedagogy: what constitutes good teaching and curriculum in the domain of literacy?
Of necessity our focus is limited to the English-speaking world, and within that largely to the US. Issues of reading pedagogy are delightfully minimized in many parts of the world. In Korea, for instance, educators worry little about reading pedagogy, as the Korean alphabetic system is rarely a source of learner difficulties. In Japan, where "lesson study" absorbs considerable time and energy among teachers (Stigler & Hiebert, 1999), the lessons studied are all mathematical. Literacy lessons in Japan are not seen as problematic.
In the US and the UK, on the other hand, the initial teaching of reading is a major source of worry and the focus of attention from many directions. In the US, primary grade teachers commit the bulk of their serious teaching time to reading; many of the comprehensive school reform plans prescribe a 90-to 150-minute literacy block. In the UK, each child receives one hour of literacy instruction each day through the elementary grades (Department for Education and Employment, 1998). Textbook publishers, curriculum developers, and purveyors of professional development also devote enormous amounts of time, attention, and resources to early reading, and of course reap even more enormous benefits from their investments.
In this chapter, we attempt to explain why issues around reading pedagogy have attracted so much time and attention in the English-speaking world.