If I heard correctly , the whole language pedagogy started in the 1960s. If so, most readers under 60 were probably exposed to some version of it. I’m in my early 60s and may have been one of them! My brothers learned to read before they started school, one taught himself at the age of three. Not me. Words were a puzzle I could not solv…
If I heard correctly , the whole language pedagogy started in the 1960s. If so, most readers under 60 were probably exposed to some version of it. I’m in my early 60s and may have been one of them! My brothers learned to read before they started school, one taught himself at the age of three. Not me. Words were a puzzle I could not solve. Even though I repeated 1st grade twice, I stumbled through texts in 2nd grade. Luckily my up-to-date private school was also diagnosing dyslexia in students. I was placed in a new program for the dyslexic students whereby one volunteer mother would tutor another mother’s child. (It was very SAHM 1960s; my physician mom sent one of the nurses in her private practice as a substitute.)
I was tutored, patiently, and for the first time in my recollection I was taught to sound out words. If had a tremendous effect on me. No longer did I have to beg family members to read to me or consign myself to illustrations. I could read the words myself ! It was as if, like the scene in Wizard of Oz, I was seeing books in technicolor and they opened up new worlds.
I do wonder about the long term effects, even on adults who eventually learned to read. Could our preference for narrowcasting, only reading articles that cover familiar terrain and fit a pre-existing narrative, be an extension of the baseball study? Does our collective lack of reading comprehension make us eschew difficult texts?
If I heard correctly , the whole language pedagogy started in the 1960s. If so, most readers under 60 were probably exposed to some version of it. I’m in my early 60s and may have been one of them! My brothers learned to read before they started school, one taught himself at the age of three. Not me. Words were a puzzle I could not solve. Even though I repeated 1st grade twice, I stumbled through texts in 2nd grade. Luckily my up-to-date private school was also diagnosing dyslexia in students. I was placed in a new program for the dyslexic students whereby one volunteer mother would tutor another mother’s child. (It was very SAHM 1960s; my physician mom sent one of the nurses in her private practice as a substitute.)
I was tutored, patiently, and for the first time in my recollection I was taught to sound out words. If had a tremendous effect on me. No longer did I have to beg family members to read to me or consign myself to illustrations. I could read the words myself ! It was as if, like the scene in Wizard of Oz, I was seeing books in technicolor and they opened up new worlds.
I do wonder about the long term effects, even on adults who eventually learned to read. Could our preference for narrowcasting, only reading articles that cover familiar terrain and fit a pre-existing narrative, be an extension of the baseball study? Does our collective lack of reading comprehension make us eschew difficult texts?