Phonics, Skills And Knowledge: What Matters For Teaching Reading
Over at Forbes.com, a look at how a new working paper figures in the reading debates that have raged since the dawn of time.
The paper, a product of nine co-authors (from University of Virginia, Notre Dame, and Auburn University) including David Grissmer and Daniel Willingham, starts by laying out the basics of reading debate.
One element of teaching reading is phonics, and there is little true debate about that. Despite charges to the contrary, few-to-no educators believe that reading instruction should be either 0% or 100% phonics instruction. But the ability to decode words, to sound out what the marks on the page say, is only part of the process of reading. When you click on the “listen to article” link at the top of this column, software will perfectly decipher the sounds represented by the letters on this page, but it will not “understand” a single thing it translates into audio.
In students this is termed “word calling.” The student can read aloud fluently, but understands very little of what they’ve read.
So decoding is not enough. Teaching reading means developing the ability to comprehend what has been read. The paper points out that there are two schools of thought about how to teach reading comprehension.
One approach is to address what the paper calls “procedural skills.” For the past couple of decades high-stakes testing has assumed (and therefor teachers have been pushed to teach) that skills like using context clues, spotting main ideas, and drawing conclusions can be taught as discrete skills that exist in a sort of academic vacuum, like studying waves in a lake with no water.
The second approach to reading comprehension is to build a “stronger base of previously stored General Knowledge.” Students better comprehend readings about subjects about which they already know something; this does not seem like a radical notion.