Marilyn Jager Adams: 'Two Solitudes'

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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Marilyn Jager Adams: 'Two Solitudes'

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

World-renowned reading specialist, Marilyn Jager Adams wrote this piece many years ago as shown in 'Organization for Quality Education' (2004) but it is still relevant to this day - not that researchers are 'unaware' of the three-cueing system (they are aware of teachers' belief in multi-cueing reading strategies nowadays), but that so many teachers still believe in, and teach, multi-cueing reading strategies to this day. The teaching profession should know about this issue - all teachers - but members of the public should also know about this issue - because it's important and makes a huge difference to at least some of our world's pupils - millions in fact.

See Marilyn Jager Adam's piece here:
Two Solitudes

The three-cueing system is popular with teachers but researchers are barely aware of it.

By Marilyn Jager Adams
http://phonicstrainingonline.com/wp-con ... itudes.pdf
If the intended message of the three-cueing system was originally that teachers should take care not to over-emphasize phonics to the neglect of comprehension, its received message has broadly become that teachers should minimize attention to phonics lest it compete with comprehension.

If the original premise of the three-cueing system was that the reason for reading the words is to understand the text, it has been oddly converted such that, in effect, the reason for understanding the text is in order to figure out the words.

How did this happen?

The sobering revelation of this story is the profound breach in information and communication that separates the teaching and research communities. In the world of practice, the widespread subscription to the belief system that the three-cueing diagram has come to represent has wreaked disaster on students and hardship on teachers.
And now see my piece (July 2015) in 'SEN Magazine' which indicates that even in England, years later, when Systematic Synthetic Phonics with no multi-cueing reading strategies is official Government guidance, still many teachers persist with multi-cueing reading strategies and still the whole language intervention programme, Reading Recovery, is embedded in the Institute of Education - a leading University for teacher-training in England (Reading Recovery personnel in England insist that RR has changed, but where can we find literature to describe and confirm these changes? If anyone can enlighten us as to these 'changes', please contact IFERI as this is an important issue - VERY important):

https://senmagazine.co.uk/articles/arti ... d-practice
Phonics screening check

The following are selected bullet points form the DfE Phonics screening check evaluation, Research report (NFER, May 2014).

“In the majority of schools, however, other strategies alongside phonics were also supported…”
“More than half (60 per cent) of schools reported that they taught systematic synthetic phonics ‘first and fast’, although teachers’responses regarding use of other methods to teach children to decode words were not wholly consistent with this data”.

What does schools’ phonics provision look like?

In England, the notion and promotion of systematic phonics is certainly not new. After years of successive governments promoting phonics and even funding systematic synthetic phonics (programmes, decodable books, resources and training), it would be understandable if all infant and primary teachers in England consider that they are well-equipped in terms of their professional understanding and their schools’phonics provision. But observation and analysis reveal some major differences between schools –and of course the question arises as to what effect different practices and professional understanding may have on the literacy results of the children, particularly the slowest-to-learn children who have the widest range of challenges and disadvantages.
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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Re: Marilyn Jager Adams: 'Two Solitudes'

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

IFERI committee member, Gordon Askew, provides a very good description of the realities of the multi-cueing guessing strategies and why they are simply not advisable:

http://ssphonix.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/ ... ne_31.html
Your guess is(n't) as good as mine

I am prompted by recent responses from this country and abroad to return to the issue of guessing unknown words from context.

In the UK I know it is very prevalent for learner readers, even some who are being taught to decode effectively in discrete phonics lesson, to be encouraged to try to guess words from context when actually practising their reading. Now I am assured that this is also common practice in both Australia and the USA - and it concerns me greatly.

I have already said elsewhere on this blog that it is a widespread but highly damaging fallacy to think that guessing words from context helps learner readers to make meaning from text. Now I feel I need to explain a little more fully why this is so.

You see, guessing from context is a rather sly fox of a strategy. It can be very sneaky in the ways in which it leads us to think that it works when in fact it doesn't, at least not for vulnerable learner readers at a most crucial time.
Do read Gordon's description of why it is a 'highly damaging fallacy to think that guessing words from context helps learner readers to make meaning from text'.
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