... Always a Reader
Some find it hard to believe that when I was younger my family was told I'd never be able to to fully read efficiently. As a child, I wasn't fully aware what this meant, but all I knew was that it upset my mother immensely. When I was old enough, she explained it all to me. Of course by this point, I had already been selected to read at church more times than I could count, I'd given the salutatorian speech for my eighth grade class, and I read so many books my father called me Belle (from Beauty and the Beast.) I remember when I was in elementary school, and finally learned to read, my father would take me to the library every week (much to his dismay at times for never getting a break,) for new books. They still joke with me to this day they couldn't keep up with me and the number of books I read. It's not that I was reluctant to read, I just needed the key to unlock the door of how to read.
How did this transformation take place? I tribute part of the change to my family (mainly my mother) for realizing that I wasn't receiving the type of instruction I needed in order to succeed. Although never diagnosed with a specific learning disability in reading, I struggled... This resulted in a school change to where I would receive the type of instructional strategies I needed most.
What I needed was structured literacy. I also affirm this is why I highly believe in it, have a high interest in studying it, and enjoy teaching it. This approach is crucial especially in the early childhood (P-3) years of learning. This is not in objection to the importance of comprehension, and the simple joy for students to simply look at a book and enjoy it. Students should in fact be given freedom to exercise book choice and use their own strategies to navigate texts. Furthermore, a balanced literacy approach ensures students are exposed to phonics/phonemic/phonological awareness, vocabulary and syntax, comprehension, and encoding (writing) components. For me, it was was the phonics that went missing, and so did my growth as a reader.
Many times students are told to guess at the word, use picture clues and context clues to assist in decoding. While this isn't considered wrong, and is often a "go to" for many readers, students need a toolbox of strategies to help in various situations, systematic instruction irrefutably yields success further than other strategies.
One of my favorite organizations is the International Dyslexia Association. It is here, teachers of all experience levels can learn more about using a systemic instructional approach to reading in their classroom. IDA states:
"Successful literacy instruction and interventions provide a strong core of highly explicit, systematic teaching of foundation skills such as decoding and spelling skills, as well as explicit teaching of other important components of literacy such as vocabulary, comprehension, and writing."
I've concluded that much has been lost to the idea of more open ended approaches, and while I do not criticize methods schools/ teachers use for reading instruction, I do wish for elevated consideration on the application of this approach given it's unquestionable rate of success with so many students (myself included.) I am living witness to the effects of this method.
Again to reiterate, I never pose that a "one-size-fits-all" standard is the end that justifies the means. We need to examine closely the needs of young readers to use strategies that will increase their interest in books while always having a variety of tools to keep with them as they advance their skills, to create a culture of lifelong readers...
Need resources to get started? Check out this link from the IDA website on Structured Literacy:
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