FASCINATING FACTS ABOUT READING

"Reading level in 1st grade... is an astonishingly good predictor of reading achievement into high school." (Louisa Moats, "When Older Students Can't Read")

"...eye movement studies have clearly shown that good readers do not simply sample the text. They look at every letter in every word, and their decoding skills usually provide the meaningof what they see before before prediction strategies can come into play.... Good readers are characterized by rapid, contect-free, automatic decoding skills that enable their higher order attention to be devoted to the task of comprehension... Over-reliance on context strategies for word identification is thus an indicator of inadequate decoding skills and not a cause for celebration." (Dr. Kerry Hempenstall, "Literacy for All is a Noble Goal")

"Even if there are genetic foundations for phonological processing skills, we know that it is quite easy to teach children to be aware of the phonemes in speech regardless of their genetic tendencies. (Sebastien Wren, 12/02, "Ten Myths of Reading Instruction")

"A signature problem for all struggling readers is their poor skill at reading words and pseudowords (nonwords, like mard, that are pronounceable and could be words because they conform to English spelling rules)." (Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky, Seidenberg, November, 2001, "How Psychological Science Informs the Teaching of Reading", Psychological Science in the Public Interest)

"Good readers...read basically every word and they seem to be decoding it to sound even though it may be a sight word.... They can comprehend well because it is quick and effortless.... Guess who uses context to predict an unknown word? Lousy readers." (G. Reid Lyon, Ph.D., "The Science of Learning to Read and the Art of Teaching")

"For the first time, researchers have shown that the brains of dyslexic children can be rewired - after undergoing intensive remediation training - to function more like those found in normal readers." (Trei, L. (2/25/03), "Remediation Training Improves Reading Ability of Dyslexic Children", Stanford Report) This article shows functional MRI brain images before and after intense reading remediation.

"While the ability to read words accurately is a necessary skill in learning to read, the speed at which this is done becomes a critical factor in ensuring that children understand what they read. As on child remarked, 'If you don't ride a bike fast enough, you fall off.' Likewise, if the reader does nor recognize words quickly enough, the meaning will be lost."(G. Reid Lyon, "Overview of Reading and Literacy Initiatives")

"Third graders typically read at more than 100 words per minute; adults typically read at more than 300 words per minute. (Louisa Moats, "When Older Students Can't Read")

"Repeated studies have shown that only poor readers depend upon context to try to "guess" words in text - good readers depend heavily upon the visual information contained in the words themselves (ie.e, the letter, word cues) to quickly and automatically identify the word." (Sebastien Wren, Ph.D. "Ten Myths of Reading Instruction" December, 2002)

PBS Reading Series (View online) including the new "A Chance to Read" and "Reading and the Brain"