WOW! You just gave me words that have been floating around just outside my reach!! You nailed/articulated exactly why I am so passionately opposed to synthetic phonics/Reading First-type programs. It's not just the difference between meaning-based and smallest-units-we-can-find-in-the-word-based; that's pretty obvious and not-so-hard for at least those of us interested in comprehension strategies to easily agree upon. It's exactly as you quoted Goodman: "Children must learn to expect ambiguity." There is something very, very scary about kids never being challenged with anything except what they can do easily, quickly, and basically without using their full capacity and potential. We do them no favors to structure everything they come across as phonetically regular when we are talking about English, for heaven's sake!! The most important phonetic knowledge a child can have, in my opinion, is that when you're talking about English words (especially in the vowel areas) that there are some sounds that letters are more likely to make, so you can try those sounds first to make a sensible word, but basically you just have to keep slotting in possibilities until one makes sense/brings meaning. Which brings me to DIBELS: I know many of you are required to give these tests, so have conditioned yourself not to think too much about their value/nonvalue. I, however, think the tests are fundamentally dangerous/deadly to quality instruction because of everything said above. If you as a child, on a regular basis, or required to "spit out" nonsense words as quickly as you possibly can and are rewarded for doing so through lavish celebration about "progress", won't that become at least somewhat habitualized or, at the very least, seen as something very valued to do? Excellent readers must be able to do two things, I believe, that are relevant to this post: expect ambiguity and always try to clear up the ambiguity through meaning. NO MATTER THEIR AGE AND STAGE!!! All decoding is dependent, first, upon meaning, not nonsense--rather than the synthetic phonics/Reading Mastery-like reverse order: Spit out the sounds, blend them together, and Bulldoze Ahead as fast as you can. Where would our kids get a better idea: that's exactly what they're taught every time they take the DIBELS and every time they receive instruction? Thank you so much, Ruby!! You've made my day/week/month! Bev Now I'm going to try to corral these thoughts and get them down as I think about To Understand and some of those posts. *************************************************************************************** I teach my children to do what Ken Goodman said at NCTE Atlanta-- "Children must learn to expect ambiguity." Without the ability to expect and deal with ambiguity, children are stuck using only the phonics skills they know, even if what they know is wrong.> Ruby _________________________________________________________________ Enter the Zune-A-Day Giveaway for your chance to win — day after day after day http://www.windowslive-hotmail.com/ZuneADay/?locale=en-US&ocid=TXT_TAGLM_Mobile_Zune_V1 _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list Mosaic@literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org.
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