Archive for Older Students

Illiteracy and Outsourcing?

July 29, 2012 Dolores No comments

Much has been said and written about American jobs being outsourced  to other countries, and many reasons have been given as to why this is so. Here is one more reason to add to the list — illiteracy.

What on earth does illiteracy have to do with outsourcing? What’s going on, anyway?

According to a recent article by Robert Reich (http://robertreich.org 7-18-12) America isn’t educating enough of our people well enough to get American-based companies to do more of their high-value added work here. He states our K-12 school system isn’t nearly up to what it should be, and that American students continue to do poorly in math and science relative to students in other advanced countries.

Take a closer look at Apple, for example: low wages are not the major force driving them abroad. The components Apple’s Chinese contractors assemble come from many places around the world with wages as high if not higher than in the United States.

More than a third of what you pay for an iPhone ends up on Japan, because that’s where some of its most advanced components are made. Seventeen percent goes to Germany, whose precision manufacturers pay wages higher than those paid to American manufacturing workers because German workers are more highly skilled. Thirteen percent comes from South Korea, whose median wage isn’t far from our own.

Sadly, workers in the United States get only about six percent of what you pay for an iPhone, which goes to American designers, lawyers, and financiers, as well as Apple’s top executives.

And the share of R&D spending going to the foreign subsidiaries of American-based companies rose from 9 percent in 1989 to almost 16 percent in 2009 according to the National Science Foundation.  (http://robertreich.org 7-18-12)

And to think it all begins way back in first grade, with teaching reading! Because first, you read. Everything else follows. And if you can’t — it doesn’t.

The mightiest mountain in the whole world is easily climbed by taking only one small step at a time and keeping on going, and the biggest book in the whole world is easily read blending one letter sound at a time into syllables, words, phrases, and sentences using direct, explicit phonics.

Teaching reading is really very easy — anyone can teach it, and everyone can learn!

FAQs, Illiteracy, Older Students, Teaching Methods, Teaching Reading

The Math-Reading Connection

June 13, 2012 Dolores No comments

The ability to think clearly, logically, and sequentially is a prerequisite for success in math/science. This skill is acquired, and is not innate.

Currently, reading is thought of as an innate, inborn skill such as walking or talking. It is believed that students will pick up this skill automatically if they are taught a few letters, but words are learned randomly, as a whole. Phonics is taught implicitly, and students are encouraged to guess at unknown words:  Implicit Phonics  Skill-based instruction and precision in reading are thought to be redundant to reading and comprehension.

Stastics on illiteracy rates clearly show otherwise. There is increasing evidence that systematic, skill-based instruction is indeed vital not only to the reading process but in our very ability to think logically and reason clearly. Sometimes it’s the brightest students who experience the most difficulty because they need to perceive patterns and relationships, and see how things fit together. Their minds rebel against a system that has no logic.

On the recent News Hour a savvy teacher said students don’t fail in high school, they fail in second grade because they have not been taught explicit phonics and are subsequently just carried along through school. She is absolutely correct!

When students learn the sounds and spelling patterns comprising over 95% of the English language in an incremental, progressive fashion math scores frequently improve without tutoring. Spelling improves dramatically! (Example: Why do we double some endings and not others in words such as “submitted, visited, marketing” and “compelling”? One simple rule covers over 90% of these words.)

Reading and reasoning develop simultaneously and synergistically. Moreover, brain imaging shows that dyslexia frequently disappears after students are taught how to read accurately with explicit phonics!* Accurate reading trains students to extract meaning from text, rather than insert meaning into text:  Explicit Phonics

Skill-based reading instruction is urgently needed and long overdue, but for the most part has not even been included in teaching colleges for over 50 years. Most of the old phonics texts have long been out of print. Once we provide this missing link in today’s reading curricula math/science skills will follow as has been demonstrated, because students have been taught to think logically and sequentially.

As the old Greek Herotimus once said:

“We are dragged on by consistency—but a thing may be consistent and yet false!”

 

*Dr. Guinevere Eden, Nature Neuroscience, 5-18-03

Comprehension, Dyslexia, Illiteracy, Older Students, Spelling, Teaching Methods

The Comprehension Dilemma: A Simple Solution

April 6, 2012 admin No comments

Today’s reading programs often produce excellent reading scores in the early grades, but by 3rd or 4th grade frequently comprehension begins a downhill slide. That’s the point where instruction shifts from decoding and word recognition to fluency and comprehension.

This phenomena is so widespread that researchers have given it a name: “The Fourth-Grade Slump.”

Oklahoma is one of several states that recently adopted new reading policies that call for 3rd graders to be held back if they flunk a state standardized test. “If our children are not able to read at grade-appropriate levels,” Gov. Fallin said when signing the measure into law last year, “they can’t learn the math, the science, the social studies as they … go through the education system.”

All the plans appear to take a page from the playbook in Florida, where a policy to end the social promotion of 3rd graders was enacted under former Gov. Jeb Bush.
Supporters say that retention is intended as a last resort, and that a key goal of the policies is to place a greater focus to make sure schools intervene early with struggling readers. Without an adequate ability to read, they say, children are ill-equipped to learn across disciplines and may never catch up.
Indiana state schools Superintendent Tony Bennett stated “It really comes down to this: How can we expect our children to use that vital skill of reading as a learning tool if they haven’t learned to read in the primary grades?” (Education Week, 4-7-12)

What happened? What went wrong? Wasn’t phonics supposed to address some of these issues?

The problem is, the definition of phonics is like that of beauty and is in the eye of the beholder. It means many different things to many different people!

Implicit Phonics teaches the words first, and then breaks them into parts.

Explicit Phonics teaches the letters first, and then builds them into words.

Implicit phonics teaches reading using beginning and ending letter clues, the shape of the word, and sentence context clues. Here is a demonstration lesson teaching reading using implicit phonics that is quite revealing: Implicit Phonics

 And here is a presentation of how to teach the same two multisyllable words using Explicit Phonics.

Implicit phonics and explicit phonics have vastly different results! Clearly, explicit phonics is the preferred way to teach reading with any degree of accuracy, precision, and comprehension.

Coming soon:

A simple recipe for reading that anyone can use to teach students of any age how to read! Ten easy steps reveal what to teach (and what not to teach)  using colorful graphic illustrations. Discover the most important features to keep in mind when looking for a good phonics program. Watch for it!

 

Comprehension, Dyslexia, FAQs, General, Illiteracy, Older Students, Phonics or "Phonics?"

Multisyllable Words

March 23, 2012 admin No comments

Question:

“I don’t need help with beginning readers, but what about third and fourth graders who know how to decode almost everything but have some difficulty with multisyllable words?”

Answer:

This is a common problem, and is usually caused by guessing at a multisyllable word rather than sounding it out by syllables.

I would begin with a quick check of basic skills first.
Read more

FAQs, Multisyllable Words, Older Students