If you want to know why so many Australian (and English) academics are so strongly opposed to a Phonics Screening Check, which really is a fig leaf for their hostility to phonics teaching itself, it is that, at bottom, they don’t understand the relationship between the sounds of the language and the writing system itself.… Continue reading The know-nothing world of the academic opposition to phonics
How can I tell that we’re back in autumn, which seems to be not so much a season of mellow fruitfulness as a season of a dearth of academic ‘astutefulness’? Well, because Misty Adoniou, a senior lecturer at the University of Canberra, has been at it again! What is the ‘it’ that she’s been ‘at’?… Continue reading Why Misty makes me see magenta
The following post is what I intended to get across at the recent researchEd conference and didn’t have time to finish! The post covers some of the important issues raised by John Sweller, Paul Kirschner, John Hattie, Daniel Willingham, David Geary and others in a number of academic pieces published on human cognitive architecture and… Continue reading What human cognitive architecture has to tell us about instructional design in phonics teaching.
In The World’s Writing Systems, Peter Daniels begins the book with the declaration that ‘[h]umankind is defined by language; but civilization is defined by writing’. Of course, as he makes clear later in the book, ‘civilization’ can mean a number of things. However, in terms of writing systems – ‘and this is the sense taken… Continue reading The World’s Writing Systems
