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Language at the Speed of Sight QUOTES

Language at the Speed of Sight QUOTES

1 " American attitudes toward teachers are frankly incoherent. We want outstanding people to enter the field but provide little incentive to do so. We expect teachers to be able to educate every child, including one for whom the obstacles to learning originate outside the school. They should be able to do this without adequate training, having figured it out on their own. "

― , Language at the Speed of Sight

2 " However, our culture's emphasis on the importance of reading to children creates the impression that it plays the same role in learning to read as speaking to children plays in their learning to talk.
That's not correct. Whereas talking with children guarantees that they will learn to speak (in the absence of pathological interference), reading to children does not guarantee that they will learn to read. In short, reading to children is not the same as teaching children to read. I emphasize this point because the mantra about reading to children makes it seem that this is all that is required. A child who has difficulty learning to read therefore has not been read to enough. Among the first questions that will be asked of the parents of a childe who is struggling is whether they read to the child and if there are books in the home. Reading to children is important but not sufficient; children benefit from it, some quite a lot, but it neither obviates the role of instruction nor vaccinates against dyslexia. Children who are read to until the cow jumps over the moon can still have difficulty becoming readers. "

― , Language at the Speed of Sight

3 " The path to orthographic expertise begins with practice practice practice but leads to more more more. Only a limited amount of spelling can be taught, and instruction typically ends by fourth grade. Orthographic expertise is not acquired through the years of deliberate practice required to become an expert at playing chess or the tuba. We don't study orthographic patterns in order to be able to read; we gain orthographic expertise by reading. In the course of gathering all that spelling data, a person can also enjoy some books. "

― , Language at the Speed of Sight

4 " K-12 teaching is a low-status profession in this country, and in academia, teaching (what is already known) is less highly valued than research (expanding what is known). Teaching teachers is then the lowest of the low, totem pole-wise. "

― , Language at the Speed of Sight

5 " Phonics never went away; it was outsourced. If the schools were not providing adequate basic skills instruction, concerned parents could try to fill the gap by other means. "

― , Language at the Speed of Sight

6 " The serious way to improve reading-- how well we comprehend a text and yes, speed and efficiency-- is this (apologies, Michael Pollan):

Read. As much as possible. Mostly new stuff. "

― , Language at the Speed of Sight

7 " Unlike mozzarella and engineering, reading aloud and comprehension are closely connected in English. Children who struggle when reading texts aloud do not become good readers if left to read silently; their dysfluency merely becomes inaudible. Reading aloud and silent comprehension are causally connected because they both make use of the phonology -> semantics pathway. "

― , Language at the Speed of Sight

8 " The persistence of the [whole language] ideas despite the mass of evidence against them is most striking at this point. In normal science, a theory whose assumptions and predictions have been repeatedly contradicted by data will be discarded. That is what happened to the Smith and Goodman theories within reading science, but in education they are theoretical zombies that cannot be stopped by conventional weapons such as empirical disconfirmation, leaving them free to roam the educational landscape. "

― , Language at the Speed of Sight