Word: challe
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Baseball at Homestead Chall...
With amazing prescience, Chall foresaw what would happen if phonics instruction was taken too far. "[W]e will be confronted in 10 or 20 years with another best seller: Why Robert Can't Read. The culprit in this angry book will be the 'prevailing' [phonics] approach... The suggested cure will be a 'natural' approach--one that teaches whole words and emphasizes reading for meaning and appreciation at the very beginning." The rise of whole language perfectly corresponds to this scenario...
...1970s, when students filled in endless phonics work sheets and read inane basals, and teachers felt overly controlled, whole language exercised a strong attraction. By the 1980s, it had come to dominate the teachers colleges and was strongly influencing publishers. Chall argues that the shift from a code emphasis to a meaning emphasis hurt reading scores. Citing National Assessment of Educational Progress data, she has written, "[F]rom 1971 to 1980 there was a steady improvement in the reading comprehension of nine-year-olds. However, during the 1980s...the scores did not improve and rather declined...
...counterrevolution began in 1990 with the publication of another landmark book, Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print, by Marilyn Adams, a cognitive psychologist. Adams' purpose, similar to Chall's, was to synthesize innumerable, uncoordinated studies of reading. She came to exactly the same conclusion that Chall did: reading programs that included systematic phonics instruction led to better readers than programs that did not. Programs that combined systematic phonics instruction with a meaning emphasis seemed to work best...
...came from studies conducted by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health. Under the direction of Reid Lyon, researchers have found that problems with phonemic awareness correlate extremely closely with reading failure. Other NICHD studies have reaffirmed the conclusions reached by Chall and Adams--that programs with some systematic phonics instruction lead to better outcomes. Finally, brain-imaging studies are beginning to show how poor readers differ neurologically from good readers, and the indication so far is that the former have less activity in the brain's "phonological processor...