[senco-forum] Re Teaching vocabulary

Graeme

Teaching SP doesn't create parrots - it creates people who are able to decode.  No-one has ever implied anything other than that as far as I am aware. This may not be of importance to you personally but it is a critical skill for millions of poor readers.

Comprehension of language beyond a restricted expressive code is a consequence of life experience and innate intellectual capacity.  It is generally agreed that there is no specific and separate phenomenon called 'reading comprehension' - there is only language comprehension. If you define 'reading' as the retrieval and assimilation of the intellectual content of text then these children have learned to 'retrieve' but not 'assimilate'  It is not a weakness of synthetic phonics that some children have limited language appreciation.  Another feature of innate intellectual capacity is the inability of generalize information and this specifically limits the ability to assimilate implied meanings. Such children usually cope reasonably well with non-fiction reading material but generally fail with fiction where inferrential comprehension is required. It is important to appreciate that SP is about improving decoding skills and is not in any connected with 'comprehension' 

Eddie C.