Greetings everyone - I'm delighted that you're really into the meat of the book and hope that it sparks some great new conversations.
The kinds of issues you describe are becoming more obvious given that we have over-emphasized phonics under Reading First and NCLB. I'm in a district in southwestern NY this week and we have lots of similar issues and it gets worse at middle school, believe me!! I know this will sound a bit crazy, but I would suggest that you confer with this little guy and explain that there are 3, not one but 3, surface structure systems. Yes, I would use that language and tell him why. The 3 systems are called surface structures because they describe the parts of language we can see and hear. Tell him what is involved in each and invite him to teach the others - tell him you may have forgotten to fully inform everyone about all three (oooops!!!) and that you think it's high time you tell the kids that there are really 3 ways, not one, that we identify words and read fluently. Tell him that he gets to be the teacher and once he feels that he has a good grasp of what all 3 systems do that he gets to teach the other kids!! I think you have to take him out of the role of the passive, almost victim-like learner and put him in charge! I talk to kids about the lexical system as a kind of "big camera in your mind that takes pictures of the words you sound out so that you never have to sound out a word more than once." The issue with kids like this isn't that they're sounding out (and I know you weren't implying that), it's that they're sounding out more than once which makes them disfluent. So many teachers, and apparently, tutors, believe that the grapho-phonic system is the key to reading fluency when, in fact, the lexical system is really key to reading fluency. Certainly we want kids to have the skills to decode a word, but we don't want them to have to do it more than once. We want an "imprint" of that word in visual memory so that when they encounter it again, they recognize it, visually, instantly. All I'm suggesting here is that we just tell them that. Let's be explicit with them about the 3 systems they need to use in order to read fluently and identify unknown words. Then we can be explicit about the three systems they need to understand. We know what it takes to read well. . . I vote we tell them!! That's what I've done in similar circumstances - I think I know what's about to happen to him (and the rest of your kids) but I'd sure like to hear you describe it here!!! Very best, ellin A couple of thoughts came to mind: One: I have a second grader at my school who had a tutor that over-taught the graphophonic system. This kid feels the need to sound out every single blessed word. So far, the modeling and prompting that our intervention teacher and I have been using haven't really worked. This kid's tutor continues to give him prizes for sounding out words...the more he sounds out, the more junk he earns and he actually told me he'd rather read for her because he 'gets stuff.' Anyone have any ideas for how I might help this little fellow? He is sounding out stuff like "black" and "sun" because he thinks that is what real reading is. I have never had a kid so stubborn about sticking to the graphophonemic cueing system! Two: Ellin is citing research by Rumelhart to prove that the cueing systems all need to be taught simultaneously. I need to get my hands on this research...I still have colleagues who think that first you decode, then you learn to comprehend. Anyone read this research? Ellin...is it the 1976 or the 1981 citation in your bibliography? Jennifer _______________________________________________ Understand mailing list [email protected] http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/listinfo/understand_literacyworkshop.org
