Alison Clarke: Attention During Learning
Posted: Wed Jan 13, 2016 7:20 pm
This posting by Alison Clarke via her 'Spelfabet' blog might be of interest to parents. It provides yet another description of a child 'guessing' rather than accurate decoding. But what are children to do if that is how they are taught - or if they are given books to 'read' that they cannot read by decoding so they have to guess. This is a major issue that parents need to be aware of:
http://www.spelfabet.com.au/2015/06/att ... -learning/Attention During Learning
A child I've been working with has just started reading and spelling four-sound words.
He can read them with and without consonant digraphs (e.g. "shops", "chimp", "held" and "ducks") in games and single word activities.
He can write them slowly but accurately in single word activities.
However, when I asked him to read them in an illustrated decodable storybook recently, his reading accuracy went through the floor.
His eyes kept flicking back and forth between the pictures and the words, instead of focussing on the words, and he was clearly guessing lots of words from pictures, first letters and/or context, rather than sounding them out. For example, he read "a bunch of grubs" as "some worms".
Then I discovered he's started having a daily intervention session at school with a Reading Recovery teacher.
I simply can't compete, on one session a fortnight plus three or four fifteen-minute home practice sessions a week. Sigh.
It's really not fair to him that adults are teaching him two contradictory things. I teach him to sound out every word, but Reading Recovery encourages sounding out only as a last resort, and teaches children to attempt to read words beyond their decoding level (so of course the only thing they can do is guess).