[senco-forum] Pilot reading project

Dear Eddie,
Since the skill that your pilot is addressing is that of word recognition
(i.e. not language comprehension, inference, expressive language etc. etc.),
would you not be wise to use a test of word recognition (such as the WRAT)
at the beginning and again at the end of the intervention? Any results in
terms of SATs will be controversial because SATs are not standardised and
they test a great deal more than word recognition. You might like also to
consider having a control population that is matched for its word
recognition scores at the start of the intervention?
Good luck,
Mary

-----Original Message-----
From: senco-forum-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk
[mailto:senco-forum-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk] On Behalf Of Eddie Carron
Sent: 09 August 2007 23:59
To: Maggie Downie; senco-forum at lists.becta.org.uk
Subject: Re: [senco-forum] Pilot reading project

Hi Maggie

My programme doesn't purport to teach children anything .

What is does is create an environment in which the children themselves learn
these correspondences intuitively. There is no formal teaching involved.

It uses words which are within children's receptive vocabularies  A group of
such words are presented on the screen and the one of them is voiced - the
child's first task to make the link between what s/he hears and what s/he
sees.  In my pilot, children with reading deficits as great as six years
managed (to my surprise) to cope with this requirement, apparently with
little difficulty.

As a means of extending the time which these words are held in short term
memory, they are also required to 'whisper-spell' each word before it
disappears and then to spell it using an onscreen voiced alphabet.

It is neither intended to teach the children these words or that the words
themselves should be 'learned.' The words are simply vehicles which contain
the range of grapheme/phoneme correspondences which are necessary for the
acquisition of decoding skills.

The strategy I  propose would appear to be acceptable to older children. It
is a very short (20 mins) daily session. Teachers by and large seemed to be
supportive in the pilot project .  Some even intend to carry on with it.  My
larger project should, if the results are positive, be sufficient to
convince everyone except perhaps those whose convictions are fundamental.

The sample used will be a credible one (over one thousand Year 6 poor
readers) and the end test (Key stage 2 results) is a widely recognised one.

Surely no reasonable person could object to a remedial research project
carried out in such a valid way at no cost to the taxpayer or the
participating schools.  If the research shows that this strategy offers no
significant advantage, I can live with that outcome but there are
indications that it will prove otherwise.

I will be involving at least one thousand Year 6 children who are predicted
to achieve less than Level 4 at Key Stage 2. If the project results in some
of them in fact achieving Level 4 or higher, would you not regard that as a
good thing?

Eddie C.

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Maggie Downie 
  To: Eddie Carron ; senco-forum at lists.becta.org.uk 
  Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2007 11:08 PM
  Subject: Re: [senco-forum] Pilot reading project

  Eddie,

  How does your programme teach children the phoneme/grapheme
correspondences that they don't know?  Or is it assuming that they do know
them all?

  Maggie

  Eddie Carron <eddiecarron at btconnect.com> wrote:
    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.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
  Yahoo! Mail is the world's favourite email. Don't settle for less, sign up
for your free account today.