My 3 1/2 year old "engages in reading-like behavior." He sits down with a book and proceeds to flip through the pages while telling a story that, while he made it up himself, is fairly plausible based on the illustrations. This is IMHO perfectly appropriate for his age.
The standard for a 6-7 year old in first grade, however, should be at minimum the ability to read BOB books.
"The standard for a 6-7 year old in first grade, however, should be at minimum the ability to read BOB books."
ReplyDeleteWhy? Why should all kids be able to read at the same arbitrary minimum level by this arbitrary age?
This is a serious question. No snark.
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ReplyDeleteIf for any reason, I would argue that assuring that your child can read early in their school experience will likely immunize them against the dangers of whole language and balanced literacy. Chances are high that this is what you're gonna get in your local public school and walking through the doors with the ability to read is good insurance.
ReplyDeleteLori, I happen to agree with you about "one size fits all" standards. But *IF* educators are going to have a standard, then it ought to be something A) useful and B) age-appropriate. I don't consider "engages in reading-like behavior" to be a good standard for 1st grade by those criteria.
ReplyDeleteWhy should all kids be able to read at the same arbitrary minimum level by this arbitrary age?
ReplyDeleteWell Crimson Wife specified not merely an age, but a grade - first grade. Presumably 6-7 year olds who haven't yet reached first grade, or have already surpassed it, should be at different reading stages.
More generally, isn't it efficient for education purposes to know that every kid who has reached level x can do certain things? That means that future teachers can focus on new things and reduce the variety of levels they need to try to teach in one class. There's a certain arbitrariness about what exactly is taught, but that doesn't mean that there's no point in setting standards at all.
I would also say that early, fluent reading is an insurance policy against bad teaching and bad outcomes (e.g., dyslexia diagnoses).
ReplyDeleteAlso, I've seen a number of studies that relate early reading ability to later reading ability and volume. And I can't cite the research, but I've read about the Matthew Effect with reading, where early readers learn more and therefore their comprehension and reading skills are better, so they can read higher level books, and the cycle continues.
Assuming no learning disability, it's a good idea for children to be able to read at least BOB books in first grade.
ReplyDelete1) A child who can read at a basic level can understand written instructions without help.
2) If your child is able to read, he or she can assemble information at his own speed. He can also seek out books which interest him--he's freed from the boring remedial readers.
3) Remedial readers... if your child isn't reading, remedial action is called for. Our local school doesn't seem to make a distinction between dyslexia and a slow learner. A bright child with dyslexia will be able to pretend to read, by analyzing the pictures and very similar sentences. "We are at the circus. We see the lion. We see the elephant. We see the clown. etc." By at least the third sentence, a bright child doesn't need to try to sound out words anymore.
4) If a child has difficulty learning to read, it is better to start to remediate earlier rather than later. If your school is a whole language school (or if your teacher is a whole language teacher), your child may not have been introduced to phonics. If your child has dyslexia, there are programs which can help--Orton-Gillingham and Wilson are two I've heard of.
It's better to know in first grade than fourth grade that there's a problem.
My observation is that far too many schools/teachers are very quick to apply the "not developmentally ready" label onto kids who are struggling to read, compared with their K-first-grade classmates. There doesn't seem to be much consideration of the idea that a different method of instruction (phonics!) might make such kids into readers, before they are several years behind. I get the feeling that they just keep repeating the readiness diagnosis until the kids are at least two years behind, which I think is one of the triggers for the learning disability evaluation. By that time, these kids are programmed for academic failure, unless they get very high-quality remediation very rapidly.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous @ 1:19 pm, that is what you'd expect if the school personnel took the idea of developmental stages as gospel. Perhaps the challenges students face in learning to read vary by school?
ReplyDeleteIn our public school, in the early days, there seemed to be a belief that as long as one kept reading with a child, at some point she'd magically catch on. Some children needed more reading instruction than they received.
I guess, if they really believe in "not developmentally ready," then you'd want to make certain your child hits their milestones. One of my children began to read at an early age, and there's an incredible halo effect for that, i.e., an increase in others' willingness to see the child as a smart kid. I would assume that there's also a negative effect on expectations from being "slow to read."
As many parents supplement school instruction (from preschool on now!), I wonder if there's an effect from this de facto interfamily competition.
lori - It's at least conceivable to me that there is something akin to a "critical period" for learning to read. Rodolf Flesch talks about it in his second book, Why Johnny Still Can't Read. (I can't remember now whom he cites in discussing this - possibly Maria Montessori.)
ReplyDeleteI remember several years ago coming across a peer-reviewed study suggesting that adolescents may be better able to learn algebra than adults...
Flesch doesn't assert flat-out that a 'best period' for learning to read definitely exists, but it's something to think about.
Apart from that, education is cumulative, so you want kids to be able to read as soon as possible simply so they can begin reading and acquiring knowledge through that route.
RMD - right!
ReplyDeleteThe Mathew Effect. That's Keith Stanovich, I think.
Vocabulary acquisition is cumulative.
Chances are high that [whole language] is what you're gonna get in your local public school and walking through the doors with the ability to read is good insurance.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely.
As I've been learning more about phonics, I've come to believe that you need to protect your child from 'balanced' instruction.
The problem with 'balanced' instruction is that kids develop bad eye tracking habits; they jump their eyes all over the word & the page looking for 'clues' to what a word is.
Habit memory is permanent. Period. You can't forget a habit. The best you can do is learn a new habit that conflicts with the old.
You should never learn bad habits if you can avoid it, and you shouldn't let your public school teach bad habits to your child.
More generally, isn't it efficient for education purposes to know that every kid who has reached level x can do certain things? That means that future teachers can focus on new things and reduce the variety of levels they need to try to teach in one class.
ReplyDeletedefinitely
one more point about the Mathew effect.
ReplyDeleteOral language uses a much narrower range of vocabulary words.
You want to get kids reading fairly sophisticated texts sooner rather than later.
Catherine,
ReplyDelete"You should never learn bad habits if you can avoid it, and you shouldn't let your public school teach bad habits to your child."
I agree with you. I do believe that dyslexia exists, and that some children will need intensive work with phonics in order to learn to read--and that there are children who will never read fluently, because they are dyslexic.
However, I also think that it is possible to teach anyone to do anything badly. That is, I think it is possible to teach a child not to read, especially if you don't believe that that child has the capacity to learn.
Curiously, our youngest child made great strides once we started reading books without pictures to him. He couldn't look at the pictures, and had to focus on the text.
Catherine,
ReplyDeleteJane Healy's book Your Child's Growing Mind deals with the issue of optimal times to learn reading and why they are optimal.
She also talks a lot about neural plasticity and doors closing most of the way after certain ages.
I love what she says about teachers and parents acting as scaffolding for those areas kids are ready to learn with some aid.
As for difficulty of text, too many kids go straight to chapter books after readers. Controlled vocabulary is not a good way to learn to read fluently.
Kids are better off discovering the wonderful Bill Peet books, William Steig, Patricia Coombs' Dorrie books, and other great picture books that tell entertaining stories with rich vocabulary.
Also go to the 398.2 part of the childrens nonfiction and introduce your kids to the wonderful folk tales and fairy tales. These work well for boys and girls (and adults). Read a page and then have the child read a page so they don't tire but get a chance to practice phonics and blending with multisyllabic words.
A child who knows there are great stories sees mastering the phonetic code not as a boring chore but as a passport to a fascinating world that can be theirs soon without an escort.
You know- I've never read her book!
ReplyDeleteI think I've got it around here somewhere -- must find it.
One of my children began to read at an early age, and there's an incredible halo effect for that
ReplyDeleteinteresting
makes sense
Curiously, our youngest child made great strides once we started reading books without pictures to him. He couldn't look at the pictures, and had to focus on the text.
ReplyDeleteHow old was he?
Had he been taught at school to use pictures to figure out words?
The latest figure I've seen for incidence of "real dyslexia," meaning dyslexia that is biologically based and not produced by balanced literacy instruction, is 1.5% of the population.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I'm forgetting at the moment my source for that...though I think I may have posted it already a couple of weeks ago.
It's also true, as palisadesk has pointed out, that children in the bottom 5% of the IQ curve will have a tough time learning to read.
ReplyDeleteThe way I figure it, at this point, is that with excellent instruction in synthetic phonics no more than 7% of the students in a school should be struggling readers, and this 7% includes children with developmental disabilities.
btw- please, anyone who knows what the incidence 'ought' to be, chime in!
ReplyDeletebtw- please, anyone who knows what the incidence 'ought' to be, chime in!
ReplyDeleteWell, I don't *know* but I'll chime in with some citations anyway. My guess is that the rate of incidence is dependent on a number of other variables. Thus, you would expect to see a higher incidence in some populations than others.
The evidence is mixed on this topic. Frank Vellutino is one of the major contributors to this line of research. Studies in several US states done by Vellutino (Albany, NY), Torgesen (Fla), someone in Texas -- I forget who-- and elsewhere came up with fairly consistent findings that explicit instruction in reading, including code knowledge, blending and advanced phonics skills reduced the number of students with decoding disabilities to under 10%.(the range was 3%-10%).
Vellutino's studies, and some others, did not include children with IQ's below 90. Decoding difficulties, per se, are not correlated with IQ.
Different programs were used, as well as ad-hoc instruction that drew on various sources and materials but was focused and explicit. No particular program or approach clearly surpassed others -- some were more suited to 1:1 instruction, others to group instruction.
Gough and others published a large-scale study that showed more than 95% of children in first and second grades could be taught effectively enough to score above the 25th %ile, which is considered in the average range.
One problem with all these studies, however, is that they lack longitudinal data. Children who successfully master basic decoding skills and are reading well in first and second grade may fall behind later for a variety of reasons (no single cause). Some continue to struggle with decoding skills at higher levels, others with syntax, language comprehension (including, but not limited to, vocabulary), fluency, auditory and working memory, and more. While poor readers in second grade rarely end up as outstanding readers in fifth grade, the opposite can happen: the good reader in second grade can be a failing reader in fifth and beyond.
Some of Vellutino's articles:
Vellutino, F. R., Scanlon, D. M., Sipay, E.R., et al. (1996). "Cognitive profiles of difficult-to-remediate and readily remediated poor readers: Early intervention as a vehicle for distinguishing between cognitive and experimental deficits as basic causes of specific reading disability." Journal of Educational Psychology 88(4): 601-638.
Vellutino, F. R., Scanlon, D. M., Snowling, M. J., & Fletcher, J. M. (2004). "Specific reading disability (dyslexia): What have we learned in the past four decades?" Journal of Child Psychology Psychiatry 45(1): 2-40.
Scanlon, D. M., & Vellutino, F. R. (1997). A comparison of the
instructional backgrounds and cognitive profiles of poor, average, and good
readers who were initially identified as at risk for reading failure.
Scientific Studies of Reading, 1, 191- 215.
Vellutino, F. R., Scanlon, D. M., and Tanzman, M. S. (1994). Components of
reading ability: Issues and problems in operationalizing word
identification, phonological coding, and orthographic coding. In G. R. Lyon
(Ed.), Frames of reference for the assessment of learning disabilities: New
views on measurement issues (pp. 279-329).
Other sources make the point that low-achievers (who may find reading difficult for varying reasons) need much more instructional time -- at least twice as much, sometimes 3 times as much, and in a more intensive, fast-paced, interactive milieu. This is rarely provided and probably not even possible in most public school settings. The only longitudinal accounts of such success are from the UK, and the details of what was done and when and how in both the Clackmannanshire and W. Dunbartonsihre studies are sketchy.
Nothing similar has taken place on this side of the Atlantic; the best overall results have been from DI schools, but even there, population mobility, staff turnover and limitations on instructional time lower the ceiling for student achievement.
He was 5, going on 6. The stories were Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories, various titles in the series. They do have small pictures, but nothing which makes it possible to guess the language, which is rich and unpredictable.
ReplyDeleteOnce he started reading, he's jumped to chapter books. We had already read to him a plethora of picture books--Steig, Marshall, McPhail, and Seuss among them.
He loved the pictures, and just didn't look at the words.
oh, interesting --
ReplyDeletepalisadesk - THANK YOU!