How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers | At a Loss for Words | APM Reports

How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers | At a Loss for Words | APM Reports:
"...Woodworth had stumbled on to American education's own little secret about reading: Elementary schools across the country are teaching children to be poor readers — and educators may not even know it.
For decades, reading instruction in American schools has been rooted in a flawed theory about how reading works, a theory that was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, yet remains deeply embedded in teaching practices and curriculum materials.
...A shocking number of kids in the United States can't read very well.
A third of all fourth-graders can't read at a basic level, and most students are still not proficient readers by the time they finish high school.
...The fact that a disproven theory about how reading works is still driving the way many children are taught to read is part of the problem. 
..Teachers are taught the theory in their teacher preparation programs and on the job.
As long as this disproven theory remains part of American education, many kids will likely struggle to learn how to read.

• The origins

The theory is known as "three cueing."
The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information — or "cues" — to identify words as they are reading...

• graphic cues (what do the letters tell you about what the word might be?)
• syntactic cues (what kind of word could it be, for example, a noun or a verb?)
• semantic cues (what word would make sense here, based on the context?)

...Goodman's proposal became the theoretical basis for a new approach to teaching reading that would soon take hold in American schools.
...But while cueing was taking hold in schools, scientists were busy studying the cognitive processes involved in reading words. 
And they came to different conclusions about how people read.11...Read all.