[senco-forum] Re Teaching vocabulary

Hi Eddie

Graeme
I do understand your motive but your statement about SP was both specific 
and derogatory - SP creates parrots!  This does not leave much room for 
misinterpretation.

Even the child with the most limited language competence has to learn to 
decode in order to be able to read even the restricted range of words which 
are within their linguistic experience and SP is ideal for this purpose.  SP 
is useless for teaching algebra or history but it is great for teaching 
children to decode text and that is a very worthwhile goal.

Contributors to this forum do care about those with APD.  What you should be 
doing is to enlighten them positively about the recognition of those with 
APD and guiding them in the approaches which are likely to be most 
successful with children with APD not denigrating anything that does not 
work with children with APD.

Eddie C.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "dolfrog" <dolfrog at tiscali.co.uk>
To: "'Eddie Carron'" <eddiecarron at btconnect.com>; 
<senco-forum at lists.becta.org.uk>
Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2007 6:48 PM
Subject: RE: [senco-forum] Re Teaching vocabulary

> Hi Eddie
>
> To get away from my cutting remark about SP, which was supposed to be 
> tongue
> in cheek, but seems to have been taken the wrong way.
>
> Most children at this age are using very visual multi-media at home where 
> it
> is easy to learn most things of importance to them visually. The play
> computer based games that utilise their visual skills and dexterity, and
> when the look up the cheats web sites most of the instructions are visual
> and the text content for the most part is overlooked. And this is what you
> are competing with, in their minds, they are able to learn most to the
> things important in their lives using their visual learning skills, but SP
> is trying to teach them an auditory method of decoding a visual notation.
> And they are learning these skills to please the teacher but the do not 
> seem
> to know why.
>
> So if it were possible to combine some visual reading learning skills with
> the auditory reading learning skills this may help improve this problem. 
> The
> problems here would be training teachers to understand all the various
> reading programs so that they could adapt their teaching methods to match
> the needs of the children in front of them. (but then we have all the
> problems with professional bodies of opinion which seem to take precedence
> over the children's learning needs mentioned in another thread)
>
> Best wishes
>
> Graeme
>
>
> -----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: 07 February 2007 11:07
> To: senco-forum at lists.becta.org.uk
> Subject: [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.
> 