Category: Literacy
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Our Brains Were Not Born to Read…Right?
As I began my great awakening to the relatively extensive body of research on reading, one of the claims of reading research proponents that I’ve picked up on and carried with me is the idea that reading is unnatural and our brains were not born to read. And this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective,…
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I think I was wrong about Phonemic Awareness
When I began this journey into learning more about literacy and language development (not too long ago), one of the first areas where I began sensing a tension in the field was around phonological awareness and the notion of instruction related to different “grain sizes.” We know that phonological awareness develops in a manner that…
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Phonology: How it Relates to Language and Literacy
I posted something on Twitter the other day (as I am wont to do far more frequently than write anything of deeper substance, alas) worrying that because the Simple View of Reading is a predominant model of reading (and may be therefore the basis from which some educators who are aware of it may primarily…
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Whole to Part to Whole
Oral language is baked into our brains. We are born to learn to speak. Similarly, reading our visual surroundings is second nature. Our eyes are neurally attuned to pick out fine-grained distinctions and patterns amidst the noise. But written language is something we graft onto our existing circuitry. Graphemes get bootstrapped onto our auditory and…
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Provide Our Students with Textual Feasts
In a webinar, Dr. Alfred Tatum discussed the need to provide our students with “textual feasts” to build their intellect, and the phrase and concept has stuck with me ever since. It resonated with me because there’s a very strong tendency, when serving our students who struggle with academic text (such as students learning English,…
Language & Literacy 