I've been considering responding to this issue -- whether proficient readers could make significant errors on non-words, and specifically, read them as real words -- for some time, but have hoped that someone else would do it. No one has, so it seems it had better be me. I have seen variations of D...

The teacher-training issue needs a rethink, in most situations. I used to feel (as many here perhaps do) that pre-service training should ground teachers in specific skills in teaching beginning reading, the alphabetic code, mathematics, behaviour management and many other specific skills that are ...

Moerk's work makes the same points as Jenny, but illustrates in great detail how parental teaching (of normal children -- the focus of his work) propels and facilitates the "self-teaching." And of course, for those who do not meet the criteria for "normal," direct teaching is even more valuable; in...

It's often the case, as JAC's experiences suggest, that teachers do not necessarily have control over the seating arrangements in a classroom. Several schools I've been in recently have moved away from individual desks to tables, less for pedagogical reasons than for optimum use of space. The schoo...

On a slightly different tack: the view that toddlers learn spoken language without direct instruction has always puzzled me, because it seems to me that adults actually provide a lot of direct instruction An excellent (and though scholarly, very readable and engaging) book on this topic is Ernst Mo...

If you haven't seen it before, this article is a must-read on the topic: http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_4_pre-k.html Preschool programs can be powerfully effective and change children's life trajectories. The "graduates" of the original preschool program here went on to successful, mostly midd...

Tricia can doubtless contribute far more on the topic than I can, but I did work with juvenile offenders in an alternative-to-incarceration setting. Violent and dangerous offenders aged 12-16 are placed in secure custody (where no volunteers are welcome and security is extremely tight), but young p...

frances5, I’ve been meaning to respond to this but have been pressed for time. I couldn’t agree more with recommending Michael Pressley’s work but for your specific concerns about your own son and how to teach inferencing, I have some specific ideas and recommendations I could share. If you’ll send...

When considering the issues of poverty and student achievement, people often steer into either Scylla or Charybdis – on the one hand, taking the position that good teaching will neutralize the effects of poverty and equalize opportunity, or on the other hand that we cannot teach children well and f...

That A-frame graphic is not at all new -- it has been around for a decade at least. I have it from a staff training in around 2003, and it has been on the SEDL site and referenced by others, like the Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network over that time. Our own Ministry of Education adver...

A propos of autism and Vitamin D, there is serious research going on now to explain the extremely high rate of severe autism in Somali emigrant communities in Minnesota and Stockholm (the same pattern is apparent in the Somali community in Toronto as well, but there is less accurate data because au...

This thread is actually about Ideology v. Evidence in Education Reform; I think it got hijacked somewhere along the line ;-) It may have veered off on a tangent, but I don’t agree the thread has been hijacked . Mona has always – and long before many others – argued for evidence-based instruction an...

What strikes me about the Finnish situation is that the apparent straightforward nature of the Finnish language very likely leads educators to teach the phonics of the language without giving it a second thought. That is, if most words can be dependably decoded, they why on earth wouldn't you teach...

. The rule of thumb for 'reading readiness' is when a child can speak in whole sentences and participate in everyday conversation. Hmm, I think I recognize that "rule of thumb" ;-) -- but it isn't one that is specifically supported by empirical data or research. I suspect most experienced teachers ...

Unfortunately -- pace the Oxford Reference Dictionary -- the word "decoding," as commonly used in reading-related publications, education and pedagogical works and even in many assessment instruments, no longe r means "using the alphabetic code to identify a word." It simply means recognizing a pri...