Outstanding post clarifying the unhelpfulness of the notion of 'Balanced Literacy'

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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Outstanding post clarifying the unhelpfulness of the notion of 'Balanced Literacy'

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

I think this is such an important topic that I did not know how best to entitle it for the forum.

Professor Pamela Snow has encapsulated the impossibility of understanding what 'balanced literacy' really means - that is, what does it 'look like' in practical terms. Indeed, Pamela demonstrates that, in effect, the term is utterly meaningless because of the many ways it can be interpreted or misinterpreted as the case may be. Please do read Pamela's post:

http://pamelasnow.blogspot.co.uk/2017/0 ... ional.html
Balanced Literacy: An instructional bricolage that is neither fish nor fowl
This post is essential reading.

Professor Pamela Snow is a member of IFERI's Advisory Group and you can read about her work here:

http://www.iferi.org/professor-pamela-snow/
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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Re: Outstanding post clarifying the unhelpfulness of the notion of 'Balanced Literacy'

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

I'm cross-referencing Pam's post with the very famous paper by Dr Louisa Moats:
Whole Language Lives On: The Illusion of Balanced Reading Instruction
http://www.iferi.org/iferi_forum/viewto ... 1530#p1530
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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Re: Outstanding post clarifying the unhelpfulness of the notion of 'Balanced Literacy'

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

Alison Clarke writes about balanced literacy via her Spelfabet site. Alison always includes plenty of links and references to back up or exemplify what she writes and to provide further information:
Balanced Literacy: phonics lipstick is not enough
https://www.spelfabet.com.au/2017/08/ba ... -149691929
However, the Whole Language pig still has not been put out to pasture where it belongs. Our literacy education brains trust simply applied a bit of phonics lipstick, changed its name to Balanced Literacy, and carried on much as before.
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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Re: Outstanding post clarifying the unhelpfulness of the notion of 'Balanced Literacy'

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

Teacher and blogger, Greg Ashman, also writes outstanding posts, and this post below contributes to the topic of 'balanced literacy':

https://gregashman.wordpress.com/2015/0 ... -the-wild/
How is reading being taught in the wild?


Around the turn of the century, a U.S. panel reported on the evidence about how best to teach children to read. They were crystal clear; a systematic phonics programme was best. This was seen by many as the definitive end of the ‘reading wars’ that pitted whole-language advocates against promoters of a phonics-based approach. Whole-language was a theory of learning to read that emphasised whole words, ‘real’ books and students ‘constructing’ their own meaning. As such, it aligned with ‘constructivist’ views of teaching that remain fashionable in schools of education.

However, like Fukuyama’s declaration of the ‘end of history,’ hopes for an end to the debate on reading represented a false dawn. Whole-language advocates rebadged their approach as ‘balanced literacy,’ implying that phonics was now a part of it, but only one component part. Many people have come to accept their rhetoric that spending 5 hours per day doing nothing but decoding and perhaps a little maths would be harmful to primary school children; perhaps the greatest straw-man argument in education. The idea that phonics proponents have no interest in comprehension and only care about training children to ‘bark at print’ has held enormous rhetorical power, despite the fact that many phonics experts would subscribe to the ‘simple view of reading’ where decoding and comprehension go hand-in-hand to understand a text. What they reject are alternative ways to try to decode words such as rote memorizing lists of whole words – ‘sight words’ – or guessing what a word might be from a picture or perhaps from the first sound in the word. They would claim that this is a lost opportunity to practice phonetic decoding and represents a danger to students who rely on these methods when later, more complex texts simply cannot be decoded in this way. This is consistent with the science which finds little support for ‘multi-cuing’ strategies.
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