Return-Path: <nifl-povracelit@literacy.nifl.gov> Received: from literacy (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by literacy.nifl.gov (8.10.2/8.10.2) with SMTP id e9H2AL926435; Mon, 16 Oct 2000 22:10:21 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2000 22:10:21 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <20001016.220538.9286.3.GDEMETRION@juno.com> Errors-To: listowner@literacy.nifl.gov Reply-To: nifl-povracelit@literacy.nifl.gov Originator: nifl-povracelit@literacy.nifl.gov Sender: nifl-povracelit@literacy.nifl.gov Precedence: bulk From: "GEORGE E. DEMETRION" <gdemetrion@juno.com> To: Multiple recipients of list <nifl-povracelit@literacy.nifl.gov> Subject: [NIFL-POVRACELIT:194] Response to George X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas X-Mailer: Juno 1.49 Status: O Content-Length: 6794 Lines: 133 Anne: Thanks once again for a highly stimulating and incisive point-by-point response. Because the importance of learning theory is so great, the level of detail which you offer provides some highly specific arguments through which to continue the discussion. I realize that any comprehensive discussion requires us to look at the politics and culture of literacy, to say nothing of racism and poverty, but in order to further explore the pedagogical issues I' would like to narrow the focus of this message to deal with the particular issues at hand. First, I have a little unproven theory. I speculate that a teacher does the best conceivable job when working out of his/her passion, whether that passion be a contextually driven whole language approach or a skill-driven phonemic approach. That may be more fundamental than any embrace of 'right" theory and practice because such engagement calls out maximum energies and infuses the teaching process with enthusiasm, care, and very close attention to the most subtle of nuances in the effort to bring practice and world view together within a teaching moment. This is not to deny that theory or specific points of research are unimportant, far from it, but that teaching, at least in our field is as much relational as it is cognitive, which may supersede the value of adhering to the purity of any single school of pedagogy. Hopefully, we can learn from different perspectives and at the least, broaden are own frame of reference even if we are unlikely to be converted to another point of view. In this spirit I would like to attempt to shed more light than heat on this topic even when that requires making critical observations. Let's focus on the assisted reading method that I discussed in the last post, where a student progressively reads a text through the scaffolding support of the instructor. When particularly the beginning level reader reads through the entire passage with few or no mistakes, there is more than short term memory involved. It does not seem that the key at this point is the holding of "the sounds (phonemes) of words long enough for meaning to be extracted," but, rather, some kind of association between visual and nonvisual cueing. What I acknowledge is that whatever process is taking place at that time it does not immediately transfer into long term memory in a manner that would be viewed as the internalization of the reading process. That very well may take some combination of specific skill development combined with a lot of practice of real reading in a lot of different contexts over time. We probably disagree about that. What I do acknowledge is that some people may better benefit with more rather than less work on phonemic mastery, though I am not convinced that anything is gained by making that the dominant focus of instruction and certainly not applicable to all low-level readers. I want to go back to your point that "short term memory is the key" since "short term memory actually holds the sounds (phonemes) of words long enough for meaning to be extracted." Frank Smith talks a lot about short term memory which he links to schema theory. The brief of it is that short term memory can only hold 5-7 chunks of information and the more organized such chunks are into coherent wholes, the more information that short term memory can process. Smith provides the following examples, first about random letters. Look quickly. How many letters do you see and in what order? J L H Y A J M R W H K M Y O E Z X S P E S L M Notice that all the work has to be done by the eyes since each letter is a discrete, unrelated phenomenon. Now try this. How many letters can you see when they are organized like this: Sneeze Fury Horses When Again Perhaps two or three words or 9-15 letters. We draw on our knowledge of words, but since there is no coherent thought, the organization is limited. Now try the following Early Frost Harms The Crops You were probably able to repeat the whole thing after a single glance. If so, you recalled. If so you were able to recall 23 letters *in context.* That is, you drew on visual and nonvisual information. Smith argues that we don't typically see the letters when we look at the sentence (though we see parts of letters--just enough), but apply our nonvisual information to the partial clues we see when looking at the text. Could it be that in the assisted reading approach what the student is gradually mastering is this *learning* phenomenon where information on the page incorporates background information (about both reading and more general knowledge) to enable the emergent reader to make sense of the text? Now I'm going to grant that phonemic awareness is an important tool in facilitating the process. I would agree, for example, that the vast majority of adult literacy students at least with whom I've worked do quite well with the assisted reading approach in the immediacy of the moment and that there is considerable residual impact over time as students move from one text to another wherein a certain degree of learning takes place through unconscious assimilation and much practice over time. But the other reality is that many adult learners do not attain independent fluent literacy, so there is some issue involved in moving from short term to long term memory which may not be taking hold. The need, then, I would argue, is not so much for the mastery of phonemic awareness for short term memory, given the efficacy of the assisted reading approach. The need, rather, is in the transfer from short to long term memory, including the development of schemas through which to organize new knowledge. I don't deny the value of specific phonemic work in the facilitation of such a process, though I would have trouble accepting its "foundational" role given my assumption that reading emerges through some integration of visual and nonvisual information in the process of making sense of the effort. In short, there are various research traditions about reading. So I take some issue with you when you say that the causes of reading failure are known, which you specifically link to the lack of phonemic awareness. The research which you draw upon certainly makes that point, but that literature represents only a certain segment on the literature on reading research and theory. There are several other points you make, but given the length of this, let me by-pass the rest in the hopes that if this topic is of general interest others will pick it up. Anne, thanks for raising these issues. This is a fundamental discussion and I think we have both argued our respective positions well. Regards, George Demetrion P.S. This message only took 2 hours. I must be improving.
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