Pamela Snow: Language is literacy is language

Downloads and links to relevant research and articles, along with book recommendations.
Post Reply
User avatar
Debbie_Hepplewhite
Posts: 2499
Joined: Sat May 23, 2015 4:42 pm

Pamela Snow: Language is literacy is language

Post by Debbie_Hepplewhite »

This is an excellent wide-reaching article and it is being widely read! Do take the time to read the full piece.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10. ... 15.1112837
Elizabeth Usher Memorial Lecture: Language is literacy is language - Positioning speech-language pathology in education policy, practice, paradigms and polemics
International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology

Volume 18, Issue 3, 2016
Special Issue: Selected papers from the 2015 Speech Pathology Australia National Conference

Reading Recovery

A way forward?

Reading Recovery is a remedial reading program developed in New Zealand in the 1970s by the late Dame Marie Clay (see Clay, 1993) to accelerate the progress of the lowest-progress readers after a year of formal education. In schools that adopt Reading Recovery, specially-trained teachers provide daily 1:1 30-minute blocks of instruction, typically over a period of 20 weeks, emphasising the Whole Language-based “Three Cuing” technique (helping the child to derive meaning from semantic, syntactic and, as a last resort, grapho-phonic cues). This approach is based on the Whole Language argument that English has poor letter–sound correspondence and so phonics-based instruction is misguided, if not harmful. In fact, however, some 50% of words in English are directly decodable from their written form and a further 36% violate only one sound–letter rule (usually via a vowel), 10% can be spelt correctly if morphology and etymology are taken into account and fewer than 4% are truly irregular (Hanna, Hanna, Hidges, & Rudorf, 1996; cited by Moats, 2010), so this argument does not hold up. It is beyond the scope of this paper to review Reading Recovery in any depth; however, it is important to note that it has been the subject of vigorous scrutiny in Australia and overseas, including in New Zealand, from whence it originated, where it has failed to meet the needs of the struggling readers from disadvantaged communities for whom it was specifically designed (Tunmer, Chapman, Greaney, Prochnow, & Arrow, 2013).

Like its ancestral father Whole Language, Reading Recovery is controversial and divisive and enjoys an almost faith-based following among many teachers. This no doubt reflects the earnest desires of such teachers to effect improvement in struggling readers’ performance and the fact that at least some children derive at least some benefit from this expensive, wait-to-fail approach. Longer-term follow-up studies show, however, that initial apparent gains are prone to washing out over time and many students who are thought to have been “successfully discontinued” from a Reading Recovery program are in fact instructional casualties in the longer term (Tunmer et al., 2013). It is also notable that in-depth qualitative research indicates that, when probed, even teachers who are Reading Recovery “devotees” express reservations about its ability to meet the needs of all struggling readers (Serry, Rose, & Liamputtong, 2014).
Post Reply