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They
are testing these two theories and changing them successively as they
read more books.
In the Observation Survey an emphasis will be placed on the operation
or strategies that are used in reading, rather than on test scores or
on disabilities.
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A
child may have the necessary abilities but may not have learned how
to use those abilities in reading. He will not be observed to use
helpful strategies. He must learn how to work effectively with the
information in print.
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Or
a child may have made insufficient development in one ability area
(say, motor coordination) to acquire the required strategy (say, directional
behaviour) without special help.
He must learn how to ... in spite of ...
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Again,
a child may have items of knowledge about letters and sounds and words
but be unable to relate one to the other, to employ one as a cross-check
on the other, or to get to the messages in print. He is unable to
use his knowledge in the service of getting to the messages. He must
learn how to check on his own learning ... and how to orchestrate
different ways of responding to complete a smooth message-getting
process.
In any of these
instances the task for the reading/writing programme is to get the child
to learn to use any and all of the strategies or operations that are
necessary to read texts of a given level of difficulty.
There is an important assumption in this approach. Given a knowledge
of some items, and a strategy which can be applied to similar items
to extract messages, the child then has a general way of approaching
new items. We do not need to teach him the total inventory of items.
Using the strategies will lead the reader to the assimilation of new
items of knowledge. Strategies for problem-solving novel features of
print are an important ~'art of a self-extending system.
An example may help to clarify this important concept. Teachers through
the years have taught children the relationship of letters and sounds.
They save, traditionally, shown letters and given children opportunities
to associate sounds with those letters. There seemed to be an obvious
need to help the child c translate the letters in his book into the
sounds of spoken words. And, in some vague way, this also helped the
child in his spelling and story writing.
In our studies of children after one year of instruction we found children
at risk in reading who could give the sounds of letters but who found
it impossible to hear the sound sequences in the words they spoke. They
could go from letters to sounds but they were unable to check whether
they were right or not because they could not hear the sound sequence
in the words they spoke. They were unable to go from sounds to letters.
Being able to carry out the first operation, letters to sounds, probably
leads easily to its inverse for many children but for some of our children
at risk one strategy did not imply the other.
After six months of special tutoring Tony's progress report at the age
of 6:3 (see below) emphasises not the item gains (in Letter Identification
or Reading Vocabulary) but the actions or operations that he can initiate.
He can analyse some initial sounds in words, uses language cues, has
a good locating response, checks his predictions and has a high self-correction
rate.
Tony
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(aged
5:9) has some early concepts about directionality and one-to-one correspondence
but his low letter identification score and nil scores on word tests
mean that he has no visual signposts with which to check his fluent
book language.
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(aged
6:0) has made only slight progress in the visual area. In reading
patterned text, he relies heavily on language prediction from picture
clues and good memory for text, with very little use of visual information.
His self-correction behaviour is almost nil; the two corrections made
were on the basis of known words.
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(aged
6:3) identifies 37/54 letter symbols, has started accumulating a reading
and writing vocabulary and can analyse some initial sounds in words.
In reading unpatterned text, he uses language cues, a good locating
response, known reading vocabulary and some initial sounds to check
his predictions. He has a high self-correction rate.
An approach to
literacy learning which emphasises the acquisition of reading strategies
bypasses questions of reading ages and learning disabilities. It demands
the recording of what the child does, on texts of specified difficulty;
it refers to the strengths and weaknesses of his strategies, and compares
these with a model of the strategies used by children who made satisfactory
progress in reading. It assumes that the learner gradually constructs
a network of strategies which make up a selfextending system, allowing
the learner to continue to learn to read by reading, and learn to write
by writing.
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