BellaOnline Forums Education School Reform Unfair Reading Instruction

U.S. public schools favor a time-consuming method of reading instruction whose success depends upon a child’s advantaged home life. Until a quicker and more equable method is adopted, 50% of entering five year olds will continue to fail to achieve proficiency by the end of third grade.


Unfair Reading Instruction

Maeve, which program do you favor? I know that DISTAR has had some research to say that it works. For folks with JSTOR access, here is a study link.

DISTAR Effectiveness

A friend who teaches high school non-readers uses LANGUAGE! and she loves it. Again it is direct instruction. She has had 16-year-olds start at the primer level and progress to the 5th grade level in 1-2 years of instruction.

Connie,
I swear by Romalda Spalding's Writing Road to Reading. It has been revised since I used it, so I don't know how it has changed. What I like about it is that it begins at the true beginning by showing children how to sit and hold their writing implements. It teaches them the relationship between speech sounds and symbols and how to form the symbols before throwing them into the reading of words. It engages their minds in a way that sight methods don't. It has a learning curve for teachers, but once mastered is well worth the effort.

The Spalding method is based on a system that was developed to re-teach soldiers who had received brain injuries. It can be very effective.

DISTAR has been around a long time. I remember that it was being used successfully where I taught in the 70s and 80s.

I'm not surprised at the speed at which the 16 year old improved. An illiterate adult can be taught to read from scratch in about three months. The Cherokee nation, many of them illiterate in any language, learned to read (a newspaper in Cherokee and a Cherokee translation of the Bible) with Sequoyah's phonetic system in the 1820s.

Dragging out reading instruction is unnecessary, but it is profitable.