I went to a lecture this morning called “Component Skills in Reading: Linking Research and Practiceâ€. John Strucker of NCSALL-Harvard Graduate School of Education was the speaker. He was introduced as the rock star of literacy research.
I don’t know anything about literacy except to know that illiteracy is a very bad thing. It cascades into less health care, less money, less community involvement, nearly less everything. I’ve also never been a reading teacher and like most professions there are plenty of acronyms which I had never heard of and couldn’t even pretend to decipher.
With all my deficits, I found his talk to be interesting and engaging. I don’t know that he was very rock star-ish but I am going to look up a few things he talked about to get a better understanding of the John Strucker fan club. I just wish I could figure out how to take what I learned and incorporate it into my own work. I’m not sure that a solution will readily present itself as everyone we teach has at least an undergraduate degree.
Some of the ideas discussed:
Invented Spelling: I don’t remember doing this because I really don’t remember not knowing how to read which means I don’t remember how not to spell. Which means I was too young to remember, I didn’t do this or I jumped into reading and writing pretty quickly.
Transparent Orthography (languages like Italian, Portuguese, Spanish)
English is an opaque writing system—it is a little more difficult to teach someone how to read English. There are 26 letters in the alphabet but something like 40 fundamental phonemes. Just goes to show you I should have spent more time paying attention in the Linguistics class I had to take as an undergraduate. It seems like linguistic concepts keep cropping up.
