[senco-forum] Re: How many rules?

The most efficient way to 'grasp' literacy is to experience it.

Those children who are 'lucky' enough to be able to work out the rules on 
their own and actually become fluent readers by doing the process of 
reading, and there are many, are the lucky ones. Our job as facilitators of 
reading, writing and spelling should not be bogged down my having to drill 
rules and laws into the children in our care. Our job should, rather, be 
about giving them the opportunity to experience literacy in all of its 
forms.

For those who have difficulty accessing Literacy then we need to find ways 
of alleviating that stress and, yes, some rules are important for doing 
this. If you start nailing literacy into the box of rules then you might as 
well nail on the lid and bury it six feet under.

Literature is not a science, it is an art. It demands imagination and 
creativity. Let's find the best ways for the children to find their own 
enjoyment with literacy. Bogging them down with rules is not the way.

I know that I was probably lucky in my education, but I only discovered some 
of these rules that you are talking about when I went into teaching after 25 
years of being an avid reader. Some of them came as a total surprise to me.

Tim Rupp.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Maggie Downie" <maizie2004 at yahoo.co.uk>
To: "Biff Crabbe" <ba at biffc.vispa.com>; "Philip MacMillan" 
<P.Macmillan at exeter.ac.uk>; "Amanda" <amandavh at btinternet.com>; "Phil" 
<pmacken1 at bigpond.net.au>; <senco-forum at lists.becta.org.uk>
Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2007 2:41 PM
Subject: Re: [senco-forum] Re: How many rules?

>
>
> Biff Crabbe <ba at biffc.vispa.com> wrote: Not a piece of research published 
> in a learned journal, but personally I'd
> recommend Bill Bryson's 'Mother Tongue' as an excellent and eminently
> readable book about the English language.  Populist rubbish in some 
> circles
> I'm sure.
>
> It's apparently encouraging that the number of 'rules' in English is 
> finite,
> albeit with more exceptions to rules than is comfortable.  But if you're
> having to learn how to read and spell via those rules, you're probably not
> showing promise of being a 'natural'.
>
> I'm not quite following your reasoning here, Biff.  How can one learn to 
> read and write *without* being taught how reading and writing 'work' (i.e, 
> the 'rules', if you insist on being rule bound)?  Reading is not a 
> 'natural' process, therefore no-one can be 'a natural' at it...
>
> Surely, those who are slower to learn have a far better chance of learning 
> 180ish 'correspondences', and how to apply them to decode & blend words, 
> than they do of learning 250,000 words as discrete entities?
>
>
> Those people lucky enough to just
> learn to read and spell fluently without particular difficulty very often
> can't articulate the rules, or even recognise that there is a rule 
> governing
> something that they know how to do (as Jean has attested).
>
> So while we might be comforted by the finite number of rules to be 
> learned,
> we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that those who need to learn in this 
> way
> are already at a comparative disadvantage.  And it's certainly not the 
> most
> efficient way to grasp literacy.
>
> So, what is the most efficient way to 'grasp literacy'?
>
> Maggie
>
>
> ---------------------------------
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