English spelling! Do I really have to teach it?
Discovering the alphabetic principle appears to be the key to learning to read (Backman, 1983; Bradley and Bryant, 1978), with the...
Hyperlexia - a deficit or a super-ability?
It would appear that reading difficulties for children fall into two broad categories: developmental dyslexia – extreme decoding problems...
What happens when we 'let the wrong one in'.
Kenneth Goodman and Frank Smith’s whole language theory of reading, whereby decoding and word recognition are eschewed for the pursuit of...
"From decoding to automaticity - the missing link" - The Reading Ape webinar recording.
STEP Ahead Teaching School Hub have made a recording of the webinar available - click here - the password is: tra.
The character of writing systems - characters or letters; which is better?
Alphabetic writing systems, though ubiquitous are not universal. Non-alphabetic writing systems are not, however, anachronistic and,...
Dyslexia...Disputed? Distortive? Disease? Discuss...
In 1896 a paper entitled ‘A case of congenital word blindness’ in the British Medical Journal (Morgan, 1896) reported the case of a...
The Eyes Have It - what eye movements can tell us about reading instruction.
We may never know how we learn to read and what the cognitive processes of a skilled, fluent reader actually involve. Although fMRI...
Not so simple...The Simple View of Reading.
At the heart of the conflict between whole language approaches to reading and code emphasis approaches appears to be a confusion between...
Controlling the text - the dilemma of decodable texts.
Code-based instruction explicitly and purposely teaches letter-sound correspondences systematically. Chall’s (1967) review of reading...
All References...
Adams, F. and Gray, L., 1949. Teaching Children To Read. New York: Ronald Press. Adams, M. and Bruck, M. (1993). Word recognition: The...