February, 2014
Teaching reading has always been the nucleus of heated debates between two camps of scholars: advocates of the traditional school of literacy emphasize the need for an instructed and learned process of teaching reading. This process is made up of a set of chained stages starting with explicit teaching of phonemic and phonetic awareness then fluency and vocabulary and the end of the process comes comprehension. Proponents of the progressivist camp, on the other hand, trivialize the instructed process through which students are being taught reading and instead advanced a new paradigm for teaching reading, one that is based on context and meaning. They foreground comprehension as being an essential factor for readers to be able to develop elaborate reading skills. Progressivists liken the process of learning to read to first language acquisition. They believe that since a kid learns his/ her first language through immersion and without the need for any explicit instruction, learners too can pick up reading skills by simply being immersed into reading heads on.
The visual below(created by the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota) mixes the views from the two camps and comes up with this wonderful list of tips for parents to use with their struggling readers.
Courtesy of : Teachthought.com
