Reading Disabilities – Latest Research

Transcript

“Back in 2000, the national reading panel got together and looked at all of the reading that was most important or most effective for reading intervention. So that information is very old. It’s over a decade old, however, nothing is new. And we know what’s effective for reading instruction, phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, reading, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Those are the important components for learners to read. The sad part about this is that although we have all this great research and Dr. Sally Shaywitz has written books about this, she and her colleagues have done a lot of research in functional brain imaging, and they know exactly what’s happening with reader’s brains and non-readers brains. So we know what’s important. We know what the intervention is. There’s lots of research that’s been done in the last 20 years. And unfortunately the news is not getting to our elementary school teachers and our reading teachers out there through the universities and colleges.

So many times, many of our teachers are still teaching in an eclectic way and in a thematic way, which are really nice ways of learning, but for our learners, especially those twenty-five percent that really need explicit reading instruction, they’re not getting it. And then our teachers are not trained adequately in the basic reading pieces or the structure of the language in order to teach reading adequately to our impaired readers. So that’s sort of the good news. Sad news piece is we have the answers, the research is there and we just haven’t effectively gotten that information to our teaching programs in the country. There are a few that have been very effective, but not all of them. So we need to do a better job of getting that information to our teacher training programs.”