The very peculiar case of Goodman, Smith and Clay (or why the whole language approach just wont die)
In April 1967, Kenneth Goodman presented his landmark paper at the American Educational Research Association. ‘Reading: A...
top of page
First there was the word and the word became God...but what about the letters?
The word method of teaching reading dominated instruction methods for a century with its word lists and flash cards and repeated...
Short-term gains, long-term pain: 'The Word Method' starts to take hold...
‘It is not perhaps, very important that a child know the letters before he begins to read. It may learn first to read words by seeing...
Universal literacy...not in England - the historical roots of a divided education system.
The worrying levels of illiteracy in England has its roots in a system of teaching reading that was heavily biased against the masses; a...
Reading Comprehension - let's talk about it.
Pressley and Afflerbach’s (1995) assertion that comprehension was a moment by moment process affected by complex interactions influenced...
Why English is just so darned difficult to decode - a short history...
The eventual decline of the Roman empire resulted in a waning of the dominance of Latin across Europe as it retreated to Rome along with...
Why the reading brain can't cope with triple cueing.
Information processing theory attempts to articulate the unobservable through models that illustrate a cognitive-processing perspective...
The final battle of the reading wars? Why 1965 should have marked the end of the war.
Where Flesch’s (1955) ‘Why Johnny Can’t Read’ stole the headlines, it was Terman and Walcutt’s ‘Reading Chaos and Cure’ (1958) that...
Reading the brain - what MRI scanning tells us about reading.
If information processing theory attempts to articulate the unobservable (Tracey and Morrow, 2012), then it is relevant to explore, with...
Totally automatic - the sticking point between phonics and fluency.
Phonics is certainly fundamental to reading fluency but there seems to be a missing link. Children learn how to read fluently at...
bottom of page