Whole language is a philosophy of reading that is based upon the premise that learning to read English, especially for young children, comes naturally to humans in the same way that learning to speak develops naturally. In assessing this claim, research psychologist Keith Stanovich asserted “The idea that learning to read is just like learning to speak is accepted by no responsible linguist, psychologist, or cognitive scientist in the research community”, while in a systematic review of the reading research literature, Louisa Moats concluded that “Almost every premise advanced by whole language about how reading is learned has been contradicted by scientific investigations.”
Reading education is the process by which individuals are taught to derive meaning from text. Schoolchildren not capable of reading competently by the end of third grade can face obstacles to success in education. The third grade marks a crucial point in reading because students start to encounter broader variety of texts in their fourth grade.
Reading Recovery is a school-based, short-term intervention designed for English speaking children aged five or six, who are the lowest achieving in literacy after their first year of school. For instance, a child who is unable to read the simplest of books or write their own name, after a year in school, would be appropriate for a referral to a Reading Recovery program. The intervention involves intensive one-to-one lessons for 30 minutes a day with a teacher trained in the Reading Recovery method, for between 12 and 20 weeks.
The National Reading Panel (NRP) was a United States government body. Formed in 1997 at the request of Congress, it was a national panel with the stated aim of assessing the effectiveness of different approaches used to teach children to read.
Synthetic phonics, also known as blended phonics or inductive phonics, is a method of teaching English reading which first teaches the letter sounds and then builds up to blending these sounds together to achieve full pronunciation of whole words.
The Spalding Method is the methodology and educational philosophy of The Writing Road to Reading program. The Spalding philosophy is child centered, that is the physical and mental well-being of students is a primary concern of Spalding teachers. High expectations for all children are central to the philosophy. These principles of learning and instruction are applied throughout the spelling, writing, and reading curricula.
Saxon math, developed by John Saxon, is a teaching method for incremental learning of mathematics. It involves teaching a new mathematical concept every day and constantly reviewing old concepts. Early editions were deprecated for providing very few opportunities to practice the new material before plunging into a review of all previous material. Newer editions typically split the day's work evenly between practicing the new material and reviewing old material. Its primary strength is in a steady review of all previous material, which is especially important to students who struggle with retaining the math they previously learned.
Inventive spelling is the use of unconventional spellings of words.
Scripted teaching or scripted instruction refers to commercial reading programs that have highly structured lessons, often with specific time allotments for teaching specific skills, and often word-for-word scripts of what the teacher is to say. Scripted instruction has often been advocated for schools where teachers have had inadequate teacher training and is also seen as way to standardize the quality of instruction. Critics say that such programs stifle teachers' creativity, undermine teachers' expertise, and fail to provide for the diverse needs of many classrooms. Advocates see it as the easiest way to provide teachers with the essential elements of effective reading instruction. Scripted instruction has also been applied to preparation of lessons in many other subject matter areas.
"Phonics" emphasizes the alphabetic principle – the idea that letters represent the sounds of speech, and that there are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken words, which is specific to the alphabetic writing system Children learn letter sounds first and then blend them to form words. Children also learn how to segment and chunk letter sounds together in order to blend them to form words.
The Orton-Gillingham Approach to reading instruction was developed in the early-20th century.
Sight words, often also called high frequency sight words, are commonly used words that young children are encouraged to memorize as a whole by sight, so that they can automatically recognize these words in print within three seconds without having to use any strategies to decode. Sight words don’t follow the standards rules of phonics or the six syllable types. The term sight words is often confused with sight vocabulary, which is defined as each person's own vocabulary that the person recognizes from memory without the need to decode for understanding. Sight words were introduced after Whole language fell out of favor with the education establishment.
Direct instruction (DI) is a general term for the explicit teaching of a skill-set using lectures or demonstrations of the material to students. A particular subset of direct instruction, denoted by capitalization as Direct Instruction, refers to a specific example of the approach developed by Siegfried Engelmann and Wesley C. Becker. DI teaches by explicit instruction, in contrast to exploratory models such as inquiry-based learning. DI includes tutorials, participatory laboratory classes, discussion, recitation, seminars, workshops, observation, active learning, practica, or internships.
Diane McGuinness is a cognitive psychologist who has written extensively on sex differences, education, learning disabilities, and early reading instruction. She currently holds the title of Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of South Florida.
Dyslexia is characterized by learning difficulties that can include:
A balanced literacy program uses research-based elements of comprehension, vocabulary, fluency, phonemic awareness and phonics and includes instruction in a combination of whole group, small group and 1:1 instruction in reading, writing, speaking and listening with the strongest research-based elements of each. The components of a 'balanced literacy' approach include many different strategies applied during Reading Workshop and Writing Workshop.
Analytical phonics refers to an approach to the teaching of reading in which the phonemes associated with particular graphemes are not pronounced in isolation. Children identify (analyze) the common phoneme in a set of words in which each word contains the phoneme under study. For example, teacher and pupils discuss how the following words are alike: pat, park, push and pen. Analytic phonics for writing similarly relies on inferential learning: realising that the initial phoneme in /p i g/ is the same as that in /p æ t, p a: k, p u ƒ/ and /p e n/, children deduce that they must write that phoneme with grapheme. Today, Analytical phonics is referred to as Implicit phonics. This is because it signifies the analysis of the whole word to its parts.
A word sort is a developmental word study activity espoused by the Words Their Way curriculum as written by Donald R. Bear, Marcia Invernizzi, Shane Templeton, and Francine Johnston. The activity focuses students' attention on critical features of words, namely sound, pattern, and meaning.
