[senco-forum] Pilot reading project

Aly - you'll be less confused if you read my mail properly. I said ' These need not even be real words.'  I am still experimenting with the actual content but one version starts with nonsense words but that sort of challenge misses the point entirely.

There is no question of children learning lists of words. There  is only a question of children being exposed to the experience of all grapheme - phoneme correspondences so that they can become internalised as sight vocabulary.

We know that all poor readers have limited sight vocabularies and that all good readers have very extensive sight vocabularies but no matter how extensive they are, there will always remain at least 25% of words in an average piece of text which have to be decoded.  That is inevitable. I am only hypothesizing that a healthy sight vocabulary serves as an intuitive, internalised means of decoding and that sight vocab can be proactively primed so as to aid decoding. 

Decoding is a core reading skill - I regard that as an undeniable fact.

Eddie C.