Author: admin
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Long Articles
Click on the link to read on Substack What is Developmental Dyslexia? How We Learn to Read How the Brain Reads A Brief History of Reading Education Is Learning to Read the Same as Learning to Talk? Sounds of the English Language Spellings of the English Language Holding Students Back Fails Can Words with the…
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How the Brain Reads
If you are a skilled reader, you can comprehend this sentence as soon as you read it. Yet the process of reading is incredibly complex, and to do it your brain must integrate two normally distinct functions: visual processing and language comprehension. Not surprisingly, the first step in reading involves visual processing, which occurs in…
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Holding Students Back Fails
I published this post last week but added an addendum to the end of the article based on a reader comment. Last week, I wrote about being told that my daughter should be held back in first grade because she wasn’t learning to read fast enough. Her teachers tried to convince me that retaining a…
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Is Learning to Read the Same as Learning to Talk?
Short answer: No! Some twenty years ago my daughter’s first grade teacher and several education specialists called me into a meeting. I had no idea why– my daughter had no behavioral issues and I thought she was doing well in school. She wasn’t. At this meeting, I was told that my daughter was not learning…
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Spellings of the English language
an introduction to graphemes The English language has over forty sounds but only twenty-six letters. Because there are fewer letters than sounds, many sounds, such as the /ch/ in chip, are represented by a letter pair or letter group. Learning to read English would be difficult enough if this were the only quirk of the…
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A Brief History of Reading Education
Growing up in the 1970s, I remember visiting my grandparents and looking through my dad’s old Dick and Jane books. I knew that these books were used to teach the antiquated method of look-say, in which students were required to memorize whole words, and felt glad to have born in the modern age of phonics…