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Ending the Reading Wars

Monday 18th June 2018

Kate Nation, Anne Castles & Kathy Rastle have published an accessible review of the science of reading - spanning from alphabetic skills all the way through to text comprehension.

Academic research has explained much about how children learn to read and how they can best be taught but, somewhat surprisingly, this research has been slow to make inroads into educational policy and practice. Instead, the field has been plagued by decades of "reading wars." Even now, there remains a wide gap between the state of research knowledge about learning to read and the state of public understanding. "Ending the Reading Wars" aims to fill this gap by presenting a comprehensive & accessible review of the science of learning to read, spanning from children's earliest alphabetic skills through to the fluent word recognition and skilled text comprehension characteristic of expert readers. The authors explain why phonics instruction is so central to learning in a writing system such as English. But they also move beyond phonics, reviewing research on what else children need to learn to become expert readers and considering how this might be translated into effective classroom practice. Finally they recommend an agenda for instruction and research in reading acquisition that is balanced, developmentally informed, and based on a deep understanding of how language and writing systems work.

Click on the link below to read the full article - don't be intimidated by the fact that it is a moderately lengthy article in an academic journal - it is an easy enough read and well worth the time.

External Link



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