A question that comes up repeatedly in regard to adult readers’ fluent reading is whether such fluent readers recognise whole words as ‘sight words’ or process through words so fast that it falls below the level of their conscious attention, rendering them unaware of what’s going on. In short, the answer is the latter! Just… Continue reading Do fluent, adult readers read whole words as ‘sight words’? Nooooooooooooo

I know that many teachers will not appreciate me starting this hare, especially when we, at Sounds-Write, have coded lots of words with split spellings and, to boot, we also have a terrific lesson for teaching them, but I wanted to give us something to think about. Having said that, I want to state firmly… Continue reading Why the split spelling cracks me up

This post is a companion piece to the previous one ‘Learning to read made éśé!’   Today I want to deal with the claim that the notion of ‘silent letters’ can in some way assist children in learning to read because the authors of ‘Learning to read made easy’ seem have made this one of… Continue reading Learning to read made éśé II: the nonsense of silent letters

I have just read about and watched the latest in a long line of doomed attempts to solve the problem of the complexities of the English alphabetic code. It’s called ‘Learning To Read Made Easy’ and you can get a flavour of it here. Like its predecessors, it is doomed because the authors don’t understand… Continue reading Learning to read made éśé!

We know from a variety of different studies that the same regions of the brain are activated when we read as are activated in speech comprehension. As we are reading, our brains are hunting for meaning and, as long as a word is in our vocabulary, we understand it as we read. Of course, in… Continue reading Decoding, comprehension and muddled thinking

While in Madrid two weeks ago, I taught my niece (nearly seven years of age) something very interesting. She is being taught whole language at her school in Brussels. [Phonics is to the school as Brussel sprouts are to a seven-year-old.] She is pretty smart and speaks three languages already. Her father is English/Spanish, her… Continue reading Niece in Brussels sprouts

To begin with I need to re-state what is at the heart of Cognitive Load Theory (CLT), according to its proponents John Sweller, Jeroen van Meriënboer, Paul Kirschner, Daniel Willingham and others. What CLT emphasises is that working memory is severely constrained in terms of both capacity and duration. The argument is that we can… Continue reading The Reading Achievement Challenge revisited and Cognitive Load Theory (2 of 3)

A very short message but a no less powerful one for that! Frances Woodward, one of our team of Sounds-Write trainers tells me that yesterday she finished another training at Potton Lower School in Bedfordshire. She was also able to pass on that she has just ‘finished a course in Potton, Beds. The school now has… Continue reading Potton Lower School in Bedfordhsire

The following is a short video of Dr Louisa Moats talking about how “spelling deserves much higher status in the attention of reading educators”. We, at Sounds-Write, have always argued this, which is why we have collected so much data on children’s spelling. Below is a verbatim transcript of why Dr Moats believes spelling is… Continue reading Dr Louisa Moats on spelling