The Reading Instruction Show is a podcast about reading instruction (and other things) with a little bit of attitude. There is plenty here to inform and entertain all. And, by the way, I'm not trying to sell any books. I don't have any curriculum or programs to market. I don't accept speaking fees. And, I don't ever want to be a consultant.
The really big point is this: It’s the semantic connections that are most important, not orthographic, graphemic, or phonemic connections. When you encounter the words ‘elephant’ you don’t connect with short /e/ words. You don’t activate words containing the /ant/ letter pattern or words with silent ‘ph’ blends. You connect with elephant things, regardless of the letter sounds or patterns. Just hearing the word ‘elephant’ brought some of the elephant things in your elephant schemata to consciousness. Meaning that, if elephant were followed by the words sock, trunk, swallow, you’d be able to identify the word ‘trunk’ microseconds faster than the other non-related words (Higgins, Rholes, & Jones,1977). This is called priming. Priming looks at how something that comes before primes or impacts what follows. The very word ‘elephant’ primed the pump so that I would be able to identify elephant words quicker and more efficiently. We’ll be looking at some of these research studies below.
1. It’s not a strategy to teach students. 2. It’s not a pedagogical strategy that teachers use. 3. It doesn’t exclude phonics instruction. 4. It doesn’t encourage children to use picture clues to figure out words. 5. It’s not an approach to teaching reading. 6. It’s not a method of “decoding” printed text. 7. It’s not a “staple of early reading instruction”. 8. It’s not whole language 9. It doesn’t exclude explicit and systematic instruction.
In his book, Global Mind Change (1989), Willis Harman describes three views of reality which he calls metaphysical perspectives. Metaphysical here refers to ontology or the question of the origins of the universe and the nature of reality. These perspectives are materialistic monism, dualism, and transcendental monism.
There’s a difference between (a) reading research related to reading instruction and (b) reading what others have said about research related to reading instruction. It’s important to know the difference. When you read research articles, you get to evaluate the methodology and interpret that data. When you read what somebody else has written about research, you must trust that their evaluation is fair, and their interpretation of the data is accurate. You are reliant on the relative clarity of their lens. So, far too often you’re left with people like me whose job it is to continually read and evaluate research. But this chapter is written so that you will be able to do this. It’s written to make me obsolete.