Double Entry Journal #9

The strange fact about learning to read is that poverty and learning to read are linked.  This fact is strange because poor children are not "less good" at reading than children from a higher socioeconomic status.  All children can learn a complicated system located in a video game, but not all children learn what is taught in school.  School manages to transform children who are good at learning things like Pokemon into children who are not good learners because they use the instructional method of instruction, which is not the best way for children to learn.  Traditionalists say that reading should be taught in a "sequential, skills-based" approach, or that it should be taught in an instructional way.  Progressive educators, on the other hand, lean more towards "meaning-making".  They say that people "learn to read best when they pick up the skills as part of attempting to give meaning to written texts".  The author of this book argues that reading is too new to be a natural process, unlike learning to speak a language.  A natural process is something that is innate, and it is something that everyone succeeds well at.  An instructional process, on the other hand, only a small number of people succeed well at and far more succeed less well.  These contrast with a cultural process, which only a few really master and excel at, but everyone else who needs the skills learns them "well enough".  Humans learn best through a cultural process, however, reading in school is taught through an instructional process.

According the the author of the book, the cause for the "fourth-grade slump" is caused because children learn to read, but the fail to read to learn.  They cannot take information away from what it is that they are reading, which causes a backwards slide.  A better predictor of reading success than phonic awareness is "early language ability".  "Early language ability" is the ability to recall and comprehend sentences and stories, and the ability to engage in extended, connected verbal interactions on a single topic.  This ability is developed by family, community, and school language environment where children interact intensely with adults and more advanced peers.  The traditionalist approach to teaching children how to read fails because it teaches children to read academic language, which is not what they hear at home.  The parents of poor children, in some ways, are to blame for their children's inexperience with specialized varieties of language before they come to school.  The only exposure children have to language and reading before coming to school is what they gain at home, and if they do not get the proper foundation at home, they fail to succeed when they do reach school.  I had no trouble reading this text.