1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:08,560 All right, we're back after a brief hiatus with conversations with Dave and Andy. 2 00:00:08,560 --> 00:00:10,560 That's Dave over there. 3 00:00:10,560 --> 00:00:13,320 I'm Andy over here. 4 00:00:13,320 --> 00:00:19,880 So today we are going to just, a lot of the confusion and a lot of the misspeaking and 5 00:00:19,880 --> 00:00:24,600 yelling and back and forth has to do with confusion of terms. 6 00:00:24,600 --> 00:00:30,440 So today we're going to try to define or examine some of these terms and see if we can come 7 00:00:30,440 --> 00:00:33,880 to some common ground on that. 8 00:00:33,880 --> 00:00:38,440 So Mr. David, what term would you like to start with? 9 00:00:38,440 --> 00:00:51,080 Well, we can start with, let's start with phonemic awareness. 10 00:00:51,080 --> 00:00:52,640 Okay. 11 00:00:52,640 --> 00:00:56,200 So give me a cut on what you think phonemic awareness means. 12 00:00:56,200 --> 00:01:00,160 Well, what do you think phonemic awareness means? 13 00:01:00,160 --> 00:01:06,800 For me, I make a, what I think is very important distinction between the kind of attention 14 00:01:06,800 --> 00:01:13,400 that the brain is, the kind of attention that we are giving to differentiating the sound 15 00:01:13,400 --> 00:01:15,960 components in the oral language stream. 16 00:01:15,960 --> 00:01:23,480 So when you say your name or I say my name or we say chair behind you or desk behind 17 00:01:23,480 --> 00:01:25,200 you or whatever it is, right? 18 00:01:25,200 --> 00:01:28,560 There's all kinds of little sound parts in that that our brain's paying attention to 19 00:01:28,560 --> 00:01:37,440 that make the difference between Andrew and David, between bat and cat and between dad 20 00:01:37,440 --> 00:01:40,440 and bat and between ball and call, right? 21 00:01:40,440 --> 00:01:45,960 So for example, between ball and call, there's a very small little window, very small little 22 00:01:45,960 --> 00:01:50,800 slice in the sound stream that makes a difference between ball and call, the B and the C and 23 00:01:50,800 --> 00:01:52,120 the beginning of sound. 24 00:01:52,120 --> 00:01:58,960 So that difference in sound that makes a difference in recognizing a word and all that goes with 25 00:01:58,960 --> 00:02:01,840 it is phonemic awareness. 26 00:02:01,840 --> 00:02:06,920 But the kind of phonemic awareness that's required in order for us to learn to speak 27 00:02:06,920 --> 00:02:12,520 and listen to a language like we're doing now and the kind of phonemic awareness that's 28 00:02:12,520 --> 00:02:15,040 associated with reading are two different things. 29 00:02:15,040 --> 00:02:20,920 The phonemic awareness associated with reading has to do with making distinctions in sound 30 00:02:20,920 --> 00:02:26,360 that correspond or map to the print to the alphabet in a way that we don't have to make 31 00:02:26,360 --> 00:02:27,880 when we're speaking and listening. 32 00:02:27,880 --> 00:02:32,840 So I always make a difference between natural phonemic awareness and artificial phonemic 33 00:02:32,840 --> 00:02:33,840 awareness. 34 00:02:33,840 --> 00:02:40,960 The whole name is sound, awareness is consciousness of so phonemic awareness is consciousness 35 00:02:40,960 --> 00:02:44,040 of sounds within words. 36 00:02:44,040 --> 00:02:48,520 Now I don't think you have to be aware of any mapping in your brain. 37 00:02:48,520 --> 00:02:51,880 You just need to know the basics of sounds. 38 00:02:51,880 --> 00:02:59,880 Phonemic awareness activity is manipulating sounds within words, sounds and parts of words. 39 00:02:59,880 --> 00:03:05,640 Now everyone believes that phonemic awareness should be part of early reading instruction 40 00:03:05,640 --> 00:03:10,880 emergent preschool kindergarten, maybe first grade. 41 00:03:10,880 --> 00:03:15,800 The research on this is correlational, not causal. 42 00:03:15,800 --> 00:03:20,320 So there should not be too much emphasis on phonemic awareness activities. 43 00:03:20,320 --> 00:03:25,760 A lot of things such as rhyming, a lot of incidental difference between this word and 44 00:03:25,760 --> 00:03:26,760 that word. 45 00:03:26,760 --> 00:03:32,520 There is listening activity and technically there should not be any alphabet involved 46 00:03:32,520 --> 00:03:35,600 in it if it's a pure phonemic awareness. 47 00:03:35,600 --> 00:03:39,480 There's phonics phonemic hybrid. 48 00:03:39,480 --> 00:03:41,760 The research is correlational. 49 00:03:41,760 --> 00:03:46,880 They found that students with high scores on phonemic awareness scored better in reading 50 00:03:46,880 --> 00:03:49,920 achievement a couple of years down the line. 51 00:03:49,920 --> 00:03:56,040 But phonemic awareness is a result of being exposed to books, being exposed to language 52 00:03:56,040 --> 00:03:58,280 and having parents talk with you. 53 00:03:58,280 --> 00:04:03,520 So that's why it's correlational, not causal. 54 00:04:03,520 --> 00:04:04,520 Was that more than you wanted? 55 00:04:04,520 --> 00:04:08,760 I don't know about exposed to books except in so far as somebody is reading to you, you're 56 00:04:08,760 --> 00:04:14,000 getting more language exposure and getting more illiterate language exposure, which might 57 00:04:14,000 --> 00:04:16,840 be more exercising of phonemic differentiations. 58 00:04:16,840 --> 00:04:18,400 Yeah, I mean, yeah. 59 00:04:18,400 --> 00:04:27,360 Exposed to books means being read to at a young age where we differ is the idea of mapping 60 00:04:27,360 --> 00:04:29,720 in your head to words. 61 00:04:29,720 --> 00:04:32,080 You know, I think that's a great theory. 62 00:04:32,080 --> 00:04:35,480 I don't think it could be a basic theory. 63 00:04:35,480 --> 00:04:41,120 I don't think it has application in real life because in our head, when we hear the word 64 00:04:41,120 --> 00:04:47,120 cat, we do not associate it with short a words or words that start with C. 65 00:04:47,120 --> 00:04:48,680 Yeah, absolutely. 66 00:04:48,680 --> 00:04:56,040 Yeah, my pushback on that wasn't so much to say that I'm an advocate of I make a distinction 67 00:04:56,040 --> 00:05:02,000 between the phonemic awareness that's discussed in reading circles, which I think is through 68 00:05:02,000 --> 00:05:08,040 the lens of reading and phonemic awareness that an illiterate person or a person never 69 00:05:08,040 --> 00:05:12,480 exposed to literacy still has a certain level of phonemic awareness that's implicit in their 70 00:05:12,480 --> 00:05:14,480 ability to recognize words. 71 00:05:14,480 --> 00:05:21,200 So I'm making a distinction and have made a distinction for decades in that point that 72 00:05:21,200 --> 00:05:27,000 there's a difference between what kind of attention to sound differences are involved 73 00:05:27,000 --> 00:05:32,400 in oral language processing and what kind of a difference to sound differences are involved 74 00:05:32,400 --> 00:05:34,520 in reading. 75 00:05:34,520 --> 00:05:35,840 That's all. 76 00:05:35,840 --> 00:05:42,040 Now from a reading instruction point of view, one misuse of phonemic awareness activities 77 00:05:42,040 --> 00:05:46,360 is in students reading in grades three and above. 78 00:05:46,360 --> 00:05:51,560 There was a high school reading class special ed classroom severely struggling readers 79 00:05:51,560 --> 00:05:56,640 and the high school teacher was doing phonemic awareness activities that is inappropriate 80 00:05:56,640 --> 00:05:58,160 at that age. 81 00:05:58,160 --> 00:06:04,000 They generally should cease when students are reading at the first grade level. 82 00:06:04,000 --> 00:06:11,800 Yeah, I mean, all of those are generalizations, right, about where somebody is developmentally 83 00:06:11,800 --> 00:06:15,440 on the trajectory towards becoming proficient with language and reading. 84 00:06:15,440 --> 00:06:17,880 So they're, you know, they're all arbitrary. 85 00:06:17,880 --> 00:06:24,920 I think the like the heart-risley study would show that kids that are growing up in a really 86 00:06:24,920 --> 00:06:32,160 complexly rich language environment have got the kind of verbal musculature and exercise 87 00:06:32,160 --> 00:06:36,960 in making differentiations in the soundscape that gives them advantages when they take 88 00:06:36,960 --> 00:06:43,080 off in reading and kids that don't have greater trouble because their kind of language infrastructure 89 00:06:43,080 --> 00:06:45,200 isn't as well developed. 90 00:06:45,200 --> 00:06:52,440 But you know, whether that's first grade or third grade or whatever, that's educational, 91 00:06:52,440 --> 00:06:57,600 structural, convenience stuff, not necessarily a comment on somebody developmentally. 92 00:06:57,600 --> 00:07:02,920 I would say it's applied research, meaning that and that's what our good friend, Mr. 93 00:07:02,920 --> 00:07:08,280 Dr. Shanahan, calls the type of research that you do with actual students in a learning 94 00:07:08,280 --> 00:07:09,520 situation. 95 00:07:09,520 --> 00:07:12,880 What is effective and impactful? 96 00:07:12,880 --> 00:07:18,440 Students reading above the first grade level, there's no study showing that phonemic awareness 97 00:07:18,440 --> 00:07:21,480 is effective in enhancing their reading. 98 00:07:21,480 --> 00:07:25,360 Yeah, again, inside an educational institutional structure. 99 00:07:25,360 --> 00:07:29,800 I mean, kids that are going through homeschool, kids that have got, that are off the developmental 100 00:07:29,800 --> 00:07:30,800 track for some other way. 101 00:07:30,800 --> 00:07:34,640 I mean, saying there's a difference between kind of where you put the microscope and trying 102 00:07:34,640 --> 00:07:36,680 to observe this stuff. 103 00:07:36,680 --> 00:07:42,760 Ultimately somebody that was really slow in language development might benefit from phonemic 104 00:07:42,760 --> 00:07:50,280 awareness exercises later in their calendar, in their age progression than others, depending 105 00:07:50,280 --> 00:07:53,000 upon their personal history, right? 106 00:07:53,000 --> 00:07:57,720 So there's a difference between what's convenient and effective in kind of crop yield analysis 107 00:07:57,720 --> 00:08:04,400 in an educational setting and what's right or appropriate developmentally, psychologically 108 00:08:04,400 --> 00:08:07,400 to any one particular individual. 109 00:08:07,400 --> 00:08:08,400 Right. 110 00:08:08,400 --> 00:08:10,360 But I don't think that's a big thing for us to kick around. 111 00:08:10,360 --> 00:08:16,200 I mean, let's go on it because we are existing in a school structure. 112 00:08:16,200 --> 00:08:19,600 So I am talking about school structure and reading instruction. 113 00:08:19,600 --> 00:08:20,600 All right. 114 00:08:20,600 --> 00:08:22,720 What's another word that you want to look at? 115 00:08:22,720 --> 00:08:24,920 Well, no, you pick one. 116 00:08:24,920 --> 00:08:25,920 Okay. 117 00:08:25,920 --> 00:08:26,920 How about all this? 118 00:08:26,920 --> 00:08:28,640 I was going to go reading. 119 00:08:28,640 --> 00:08:31,120 Would that get us too far off defining? 120 00:08:31,120 --> 00:08:32,120 No, it's fine. 121 00:08:32,120 --> 00:08:34,120 I mean, I'm game to do that. 122 00:08:34,120 --> 00:08:35,120 We've done that before. 123 00:08:35,120 --> 00:08:39,640 And let's agree not to go too far with this because we both go crazy. 124 00:08:39,640 --> 00:08:45,320 But reading is creating meaning with print. 125 00:08:45,320 --> 00:08:51,120 We use both a combination of letter clues and context clues and syntax and grammar clues 126 00:08:51,120 --> 00:08:53,920 and even at the youngest age picture clues. 127 00:08:53,920 --> 00:08:58,480 But if you're not creating meaning, technically, you are not reading. 128 00:08:58,480 --> 00:09:00,800 And I know what you're going to say. 129 00:09:00,800 --> 00:09:02,920 You're going to make, well, go ahead and say it. 130 00:09:02,920 --> 00:09:03,920 Yeah, let me say it. 131 00:09:03,920 --> 00:09:04,920 Come on. 132 00:09:04,920 --> 00:09:05,920 I don't know the company. 133 00:09:05,920 --> 00:09:13,040 So in my, in my world, reading is an artificially inseminated language experience. 134 00:09:13,040 --> 00:09:18,680 In other words, it's a virtual language experience, one that's not happening in the real external 135 00:09:18,680 --> 00:09:26,840 world between human beings, and it's a production of the brain, this virtual internal experience, 136 00:09:26,840 --> 00:09:31,680 according to the instructions and information contained in a code, that is to say the writing 137 00:09:31,680 --> 00:09:35,440 system, the code that we're reading while we're reading. 138 00:09:35,440 --> 00:09:42,520 And so it's an artificially inseminated language experience constructed according to the information 139 00:09:42,520 --> 00:09:48,160 and instructions contained in a human artifact, this writing system, this English orthography. 140 00:09:48,160 --> 00:09:51,560 Or orthography of whatever kind. 141 00:09:51,560 --> 00:09:56,920 And my difference is that it's no more artificial than learning tennis or learning anything 142 00:09:56,920 --> 00:09:58,840 or learning to speak. 143 00:09:58,840 --> 00:10:04,120 Learning to speak is an artificial thing if you want to take it to its furthest extreme. 144 00:10:04,120 --> 00:10:13,000 So we learned learning, learning to read requires paying attention to and referencing the disambiguation 145 00:10:13,000 --> 00:10:23,160 of confusion to an external set of technologically invented conventions, codes, and modes of 146 00:10:23,160 --> 00:10:28,440 interpretation that are not natural, they're human invented, whereas the other things that 147 00:10:28,440 --> 00:10:34,640 you mentioned are live on the living learning edge, getting feedback from what you're doing 148 00:10:34,640 --> 00:10:36,440 as a basis for tuning in. 149 00:10:36,440 --> 00:10:40,080 So the reference for learning is different. 150 00:10:40,080 --> 00:10:41,080 And again, disambiguation. 151 00:10:41,080 --> 00:10:42,080 It's artificial. 152 00:10:42,080 --> 00:10:43,080 It's disambiguation. 153 00:10:43,080 --> 00:10:48,000 You know, on a theoretical level, I guess I could understand where you're coming there 154 00:10:48,000 --> 00:10:52,920 from, but on a practical level, humans learn. 155 00:10:52,920 --> 00:10:56,760 Language is a human construct. 156 00:10:56,760 --> 00:10:58,240 Language is a human construct. 157 00:10:58,240 --> 00:11:01,120 Justice reading is a human construct. 158 00:11:01,120 --> 00:11:09,400 So I've actually interviewed the person who wrote the numbers of people who are experts 159 00:11:09,400 --> 00:11:13,680 in the science of how language emerged in humanity. 160 00:11:13,680 --> 00:11:18,360 And the kind of tongue-in-cheek argument is that humans didn't invent language. 161 00:11:18,360 --> 00:11:24,280 Language invented humans in the sense that the kind of consciousness we are is a consciousness 162 00:11:24,280 --> 00:11:28,640 produced on the other side of becoming language users. 163 00:11:28,640 --> 00:11:34,400 So language is deeply fused with becoming human as we understand it today. 164 00:11:34,400 --> 00:11:40,680 It's not something that we invented in some abstract, mechanical way like we did writing. 165 00:11:40,680 --> 00:11:45,760 Oh, I agree with you that language is what makes us human. 166 00:11:45,760 --> 00:11:48,040 It enables us to think. 167 00:11:48,040 --> 00:11:52,320 The ability to communicate is a natural thing. 168 00:11:52,320 --> 00:11:54,160 Language is a human invention. 169 00:11:54,160 --> 00:11:59,920 I don't care how many people write how many books, you know, language, they're all on 170 00:11:59,920 --> 00:12:01,760 the theoretical plane. 171 00:12:01,760 --> 00:12:05,920 I exist in the practical plane of classrooms and observing. 172 00:12:05,920 --> 00:12:06,920 All right. 173 00:12:06,920 --> 00:12:15,000 Go cultural anthropologists or go neuroanthropologists and talk about the Fox gene that says 250,000 174 00:12:15,000 --> 00:12:19,480 years or the anthropological evidence that says 100,000 years with respect to jaws and 175 00:12:19,480 --> 00:12:25,080 tongues and the articulatory physical structures involved in speaking language. 176 00:12:25,080 --> 00:12:29,680 Humans have existed for some 7 million years depending upon your, you know, their particular 177 00:12:29,680 --> 00:12:34,440 anthropological studies that you're talking about humans have only been speaking for 250,000 178 00:12:34,440 --> 00:12:35,640 to 100,000 years. 179 00:12:35,640 --> 00:12:37,960 So it's a relatively new phenomena. 180 00:12:37,960 --> 00:12:41,400 It's changed everything about what it means to be human. 181 00:12:41,400 --> 00:12:44,360 And it was an eco evolution. 182 00:12:44,360 --> 00:12:48,480 In other words, today a human that's born with half a brain will still learn to speak. 183 00:12:48,480 --> 00:12:52,360 It's got such evolutionary importance to us. 184 00:12:52,360 --> 00:12:57,320 But it's not an invention in any way analogous to the invention of a writing system, which 185 00:12:57,320 --> 00:12:59,800 is 3,000, 3,500 years old. 186 00:12:59,800 --> 00:13:05,720 In the case of the English writing system, 500 years old, that is an entirely different 187 00:13:05,720 --> 00:13:11,440 kind of convoluted intentional structural technological invention than language. 188 00:13:11,440 --> 00:13:12,440 They can't be compared. 189 00:13:12,440 --> 00:13:13,440 You know, I disagree. 190 00:13:13,440 --> 00:13:16,120 I agree with you that they are different. 191 00:13:16,120 --> 00:13:17,120 They're not the same. 192 00:13:17,120 --> 00:13:18,840 Absolutely not. 193 00:13:18,840 --> 00:13:22,600 And I agree with you that our brains have evolved. 194 00:13:22,600 --> 00:13:27,240 Language is a tool of thought as by God's key has said, our brains have evolved and probably 195 00:13:27,240 --> 00:13:31,680 our jaws have evolved as a result of this. 196 00:13:31,680 --> 00:13:36,720 But language is a human construct. 197 00:13:36,720 --> 00:13:42,400 We created language, language and created us at the same time. 198 00:13:42,400 --> 00:13:45,560 So language created us as much as we created language. 199 00:13:45,560 --> 00:13:48,280 All right, let's not go down that rabbit hole. 200 00:13:48,280 --> 00:13:53,560 All right, because we would spend 20 minutes and we bore everybody. 201 00:13:53,560 --> 00:13:57,360 So if it is okay with you, should we go to another one? 202 00:13:57,360 --> 00:13:58,360 Sure. 203 00:13:58,360 --> 00:14:02,720 All right, you get to pick the one this term time. 204 00:14:02,720 --> 00:14:04,720 Um, you coding. 205 00:14:04,720 --> 00:14:07,480 Oh, no, no, no, word identification. 206 00:14:07,480 --> 00:14:09,640 Ah, great one. 207 00:14:09,640 --> 00:14:10,640 Go ahead. 208 00:14:10,640 --> 00:14:11,640 Go for it. 209 00:14:11,640 --> 00:14:12,640 No, no, no, I want you to go with this. 210 00:14:12,640 --> 00:14:13,800 This is important to you. 211 00:14:13,800 --> 00:14:18,360 So and if we pick the words, the other guy should start with the definition. 212 00:14:18,360 --> 00:14:23,400 Word identification is different than word recognition. 213 00:14:23,400 --> 00:14:29,520 Word identification, as you see a word in print, it is in your lexicon, which is the 214 00:14:29,520 --> 00:14:31,720 dictionary in your head. 215 00:14:31,720 --> 00:14:33,320 You don't recognize it. 216 00:14:33,320 --> 00:14:35,980 You automatically know what it is. 217 00:14:35,980 --> 00:14:38,560 So you have to use a strategy. 218 00:14:38,560 --> 00:14:41,160 What strategy should I use? 219 00:14:41,160 --> 00:14:52,600 I should use phonics, phonemical or morphemic analysis, semantics or analogy. 220 00:14:52,600 --> 00:14:56,400 Those are the four word identification strategies. 221 00:14:56,400 --> 00:14:59,920 And a strategy word identification is a strategy. 222 00:14:59,920 --> 00:15:07,160 It's something you consciously apply through the use of specific and direct instruction 223 00:15:07,160 --> 00:15:09,040 in the four strategies. 224 00:15:09,040 --> 00:15:16,680 They become automatic, automaticize so that you began to recognize words automatically. 225 00:15:16,680 --> 00:15:17,680 Boom. 226 00:15:17,680 --> 00:15:20,560 Ping pong back to you. 227 00:15:20,560 --> 00:15:24,480 That's how I would define word identification. 228 00:15:24,480 --> 00:15:25,920 Let's slow down and go back into that a little bit. 229 00:15:25,920 --> 00:15:28,480 You said it's in your lexicon. 230 00:15:28,480 --> 00:15:29,480 It's in your lexicon. 231 00:15:29,480 --> 00:15:30,480 Yep. 232 00:15:30,480 --> 00:15:35,880 You identify it because it's in your lexicon, but you don't recognize it. 233 00:15:35,880 --> 00:15:37,680 Yep. 234 00:15:37,680 --> 00:15:46,880 So when you say that, you don't, identification seems to suggest that I've identified it, 235 00:15:46,880 --> 00:15:49,480 but if I don't recognize it, how can I identify it? 236 00:15:49,480 --> 00:15:52,200 It's a confusing way of using those terms. 237 00:15:52,200 --> 00:15:57,200 I mean, it's not the way that identification or recognition are used outside of the specialty 238 00:15:57,200 --> 00:15:59,120 bubble that we're talking about. 239 00:15:59,120 --> 00:16:03,480 So when we talk about identifying something, it usually implies a recognition. 240 00:16:03,480 --> 00:16:08,600 You're suggesting there's an implicit capacity for recognition because it's in your lexicon, 241 00:16:08,600 --> 00:16:11,120 but you haven't recognized it. 242 00:16:11,120 --> 00:16:16,960 In the world of reading, to recognize a word is to perceive it and you automatically know 243 00:16:16,960 --> 00:16:17,960 what it is. 244 00:16:17,960 --> 00:16:20,680 So we're talking not about recognition and identification. 245 00:16:20,680 --> 00:16:25,840 We're talking about word recognition and word identification. 246 00:16:25,840 --> 00:16:31,760 Word recognition, you perceive the word, you automatically know what it is and you keep 247 00:16:31,760 --> 00:16:33,720 moving on. 248 00:16:33,720 --> 00:16:37,600 So how would you define word identification? 249 00:16:37,600 --> 00:16:38,600 I wouldn't. 250 00:16:38,600 --> 00:16:40,120 I don't know that I would use that term. 251 00:16:40,120 --> 00:16:45,640 I mean, even if it's implicit that, I mean, I understand there's a value in making a distinction 252 00:16:45,640 --> 00:16:51,880 between a word that I know, but I can't recognize it in print. 253 00:16:51,880 --> 00:16:52,880 Right? 254 00:16:52,880 --> 00:16:54,000 There's that. 255 00:16:54,000 --> 00:16:56,960 And then there's a word that I recognize in print. 256 00:16:56,960 --> 00:17:07,000 So there's a word that I haven't yet learned that I've recognized in print as a mode of 257 00:17:07,000 --> 00:17:08,000 learning it. 258 00:17:08,000 --> 00:17:12,120 So I've recognized that I've identified this word, I've recognized this word. 259 00:17:12,120 --> 00:17:16,960 And because of the context that's unfloing, I'm now, or that I'm flowing through when 260 00:17:16,960 --> 00:17:19,440 I encounter it, I've now learned that word. 261 00:17:19,440 --> 00:17:25,240 So those are the cases are that I know the word orally. 262 00:17:25,240 --> 00:17:26,240 It's in my oral vocabulary. 263 00:17:26,240 --> 00:17:27,240 I'm familiar with the word. 264 00:17:27,240 --> 00:17:30,120 But when I see it in print, I can't, it doesn't connect. 265 00:17:30,120 --> 00:17:31,120 I can't recognize it. 266 00:17:31,120 --> 00:17:35,720 Then there's the case where I recognize it and I know it. 267 00:17:35,720 --> 00:17:38,960 And there's another case where I recognize it in the sense that I can sound it out and 268 00:17:38,960 --> 00:17:41,360 I know I've heard it before, but I don't know what it means. 269 00:17:41,360 --> 00:17:45,360 So there's all these different classes that could be put together there. 270 00:17:45,360 --> 00:17:47,040 I just don't see the word. 271 00:17:47,040 --> 00:17:56,080 The way that you've used word identification has implied a, it's, it's created the notion 272 00:17:56,080 --> 00:18:01,200 of an implication that I would recognize it, but I haven't yet recognized it. 273 00:18:01,200 --> 00:18:04,360 So I don't know the value of the term that way. 274 00:18:04,360 --> 00:18:05,360 I don't get. 275 00:18:05,360 --> 00:18:06,360 Let's go back. 276 00:18:06,360 --> 00:18:13,240 This distinction is incredibly important when you're teaching reading to recognize a word 277 00:18:13,240 --> 00:18:15,200 means to perceive it. 278 00:18:15,200 --> 00:18:16,600 And what do you do? 279 00:18:16,600 --> 00:18:23,320 What types of activities do you do to help children recognize words automatically? 280 00:18:23,320 --> 00:18:24,880 You use phonics instruction. 281 00:18:24,880 --> 00:18:29,480 Hey, I know that look, that's, that's a whole, that's the big ballgame there is how do you 282 00:18:29,480 --> 00:18:32,960 get to a word recognition of a word you don't recognize? 283 00:18:32,960 --> 00:18:37,520 And I get the distinction between it's a word I could recognize because I know it and it 284 00:18:37,520 --> 00:18:42,080 is a word that I don't yet know that I'm working to learn as I recognize. 285 00:18:42,080 --> 00:18:43,640 I get the distinctions. 286 00:18:43,640 --> 00:18:51,000 I just don't get the word identification value that you're putting as I was about to explain 287 00:18:51,000 --> 00:18:58,640 and knowing a word, I'm a little uncomfortable with your use of that term, knowing the word 288 00:18:58,640 --> 00:19:05,680 to recognize a word the brain uses three interacting systems, interacting interdependently. 289 00:19:05,680 --> 00:19:07,320 They use them together. 290 00:19:07,320 --> 00:19:09,480 They use the phonological system. 291 00:19:09,480 --> 00:19:16,120 They use the syntactic system grammar and word order and they use the semantic system, 292 00:19:16,120 --> 00:19:18,380 which is meaning or context clues. 293 00:19:18,380 --> 00:19:24,440 These three are working together, both as we hear and as we see words in print, we have 294 00:19:24,440 --> 00:19:29,560 activities to develop that so it becomes automatic. 295 00:19:29,560 --> 00:19:35,480 Now to know a word, yes, to know a word is to know the meaning of the word. 296 00:19:35,480 --> 00:19:37,760 I think that's where we're at. 297 00:19:37,760 --> 00:19:40,240 But there are words that are in our lexicon. 298 00:19:40,240 --> 00:19:47,200 If it's in our lexicon, that means we know what that word means, but we don't recognize 299 00:19:47,200 --> 00:19:48,960 it as we're reading. 300 00:19:48,960 --> 00:19:51,160 So we need to use some strategy. 301 00:19:51,160 --> 00:19:56,120 Now, often teachers say, as students is reading, comes to a word, stop. 302 00:19:56,120 --> 00:19:58,680 We say, sound it out. 303 00:19:58,680 --> 00:20:02,360 But if they could do that, they wouldn't have stopped, would they? 304 00:20:02,360 --> 00:20:09,040 That's why we need to have four strategies that you consciously apply as a dog. 305 00:20:09,040 --> 00:20:10,040 Leading now. 306 00:20:10,040 --> 00:20:11,040 Okay. 307 00:20:11,040 --> 00:20:14,000 I get all that. 308 00:20:14,000 --> 00:20:19,640 My only thing was is that the instruction, I'm trying to get you to be more specific 309 00:20:19,640 --> 00:20:28,040 about what you think is the conceptual slash instructional value of the distinction called 310 00:20:28,040 --> 00:20:31,520 word identification. 311 00:20:31,520 --> 00:20:37,160 Because you teach these strategies specifically, you break them down. 312 00:20:37,160 --> 00:20:41,600 But the strategies are all about recognition, not identification. 313 00:20:41,600 --> 00:20:50,280 The strategies are, you use an identification strategy to recognize the word. 314 00:20:50,280 --> 00:20:52,840 There is a difference. 315 00:20:52,840 --> 00:20:57,160 Word identification is a strategy you consciously apply. 316 00:20:57,160 --> 00:21:01,440 The difference between a skill and a strategy in the reading. 317 00:21:01,440 --> 00:21:05,840 The way that you originally started off, you talked about word identification being a word 318 00:21:05,840 --> 00:21:08,560 that I've identified. 319 00:21:08,560 --> 00:21:11,080 Again, I can't even identify it. 320 00:21:11,080 --> 00:21:16,000 If I don't recognize the word, then it's an unrecognized word. 321 00:21:16,000 --> 00:21:21,080 I don't get the value of saying that there's a distinction called word identification that's 322 00:21:21,080 --> 00:21:27,240 different from word recognition at the conceptual level of understanding the challenge of reading. 323 00:21:27,240 --> 00:21:33,560 The identification is the strategy you use to recognize the word. 324 00:21:33,560 --> 00:21:36,360 Sounding out the word is one strategy. 325 00:21:36,360 --> 00:21:39,560 Yeah, I get that. 326 00:21:39,560 --> 00:21:40,560 I get that. 327 00:21:40,560 --> 00:21:43,400 I don't know what we're having trouble with. 328 00:21:43,400 --> 00:21:47,880 If we could rewind the tape and play the part where you just said what word identification 329 00:21:47,880 --> 00:21:54,560 was, that's the part by itself as if it's an isolated phenomena. 330 00:21:54,560 --> 00:22:02,760 Word identification is a subcomponent and one of multiple strategies for getting to recognition. 331 00:22:02,760 --> 00:22:05,240 That's what I'm hearing you now say. 332 00:22:05,240 --> 00:22:13,560 I said all along word identification is a strategy used to recognize a word. 333 00:22:13,560 --> 00:22:19,840 You see a word, you don't automatically know what it is, you don't recognize it, but it's 334 00:22:19,840 --> 00:22:21,640 in your lexicon. 335 00:22:21,640 --> 00:22:26,000 If you could just recognize it, you could connect it to the dictionary page in your 336 00:22:26,000 --> 00:22:27,600 head. 337 00:22:27,600 --> 00:22:30,600 So you need to use a strategy. 338 00:22:30,600 --> 00:22:36,600 So in a way, what you're describing is word identification is that part of word recognition 339 00:22:36,600 --> 00:22:46,200 strategies that have to do with recognizing a word that's in your lexicon. 340 00:22:46,200 --> 00:22:48,640 Recognition is something we do automatically. 341 00:22:48,640 --> 00:22:50,760 So I think you're getting there. 342 00:22:50,760 --> 00:23:01,720 Word identification is a strategy used to recognize a word. 343 00:23:01,720 --> 00:23:05,000 In a teaching environment, you do it differently. 344 00:23:05,000 --> 00:23:12,320 You teach the steps specifically to identify words, step one, step two, step three. 345 00:23:12,320 --> 00:23:19,080 You do different things to develop students' ability to recognize words automatically. 346 00:23:19,080 --> 00:23:20,080 That is differently. 347 00:23:20,080 --> 00:23:21,680 It's a skill. 348 00:23:21,680 --> 00:23:26,200 The thing is strategies become automatic. 349 00:23:26,200 --> 00:23:28,760 Once they become automatic, they are a skill. 350 00:23:28,760 --> 00:23:34,640 So you automatically begin to use context and word parts and morphology. 351 00:23:34,640 --> 00:23:35,640 Yeah. 352 00:23:35,640 --> 00:23:42,240 The conversation about how to recognize, again, when I encounter a word, it's either it's 353 00:23:42,240 --> 00:23:44,520 one of a series of conditions. 354 00:23:44,520 --> 00:23:49,920 One condition is it's a word that I'd know if I could read it, meaning that it's 355 00:23:49,920 --> 00:23:51,200 something I've already heard. 356 00:23:51,200 --> 00:23:52,320 I already know the word. 357 00:23:52,320 --> 00:23:53,840 I know the meaning of the word. 358 00:23:53,840 --> 00:23:55,440 I recognize it if I heard it. 359 00:23:55,440 --> 00:23:57,760 I just don't recognize it when I see it. 360 00:23:57,760 --> 00:23:59,920 So that's one set of conditions. 361 00:23:59,920 --> 00:24:04,000 And another condition is I've never heard this word. 362 00:24:04,000 --> 00:24:05,640 I don't know anything about this word. 363 00:24:05,640 --> 00:24:11,000 So in addition to the recognition issue, I've got the learning what it means issue. 364 00:24:11,000 --> 00:24:15,080 And then there's another one where I've heard the word, but I don't understand what it 365 00:24:15,080 --> 00:24:16,080 means. 366 00:24:16,080 --> 00:24:19,720 So I've heard other people use the word so I could recognize it if I could decode it 367 00:24:19,720 --> 00:24:22,480 so to speak so that I got it sound. 368 00:24:22,480 --> 00:24:23,760 But I still wouldn't know what it means. 369 00:24:23,760 --> 00:24:29,400 So there's these different kinds of uncertainty layers associated with my interaction with 370 00:24:29,400 --> 00:24:30,640 a word. 371 00:24:30,640 --> 00:24:32,640 Right? 372 00:24:32,640 --> 00:24:37,040 And I'm just having difficulty mapping the way that you guys put terminology to that, 373 00:24:37,040 --> 00:24:38,720 to the way that I would put terminology. 374 00:24:38,720 --> 00:24:47,280 You're straining into the world of vocabulary knowledge, the different levels of word knowledge. 375 00:24:47,280 --> 00:24:49,680 You can use a word. 376 00:24:49,680 --> 00:24:54,240 There's different levels of word knowledge and you just kind of alluded to it. 377 00:24:54,240 --> 00:24:56,440 You absolutely don't know that word. 378 00:24:56,440 --> 00:24:58,520 You haven't seen it at all. 379 00:24:58,520 --> 00:24:59,520 You have heard the word. 380 00:24:59,520 --> 00:25:01,560 You kind of know what it means. 381 00:25:01,560 --> 00:25:03,200 You can understand it. 382 00:25:03,200 --> 00:25:07,720 You see the word, but you know what it means, but you couldn't define it. 383 00:25:07,720 --> 00:25:10,840 And the deepest level, you know what it is. 384 00:25:10,840 --> 00:25:11,840 You can define it. 385 00:25:11,840 --> 00:25:13,560 You use it all the time. 386 00:25:13,560 --> 00:25:15,280 These are different levels. 387 00:25:15,280 --> 00:25:22,440 Word identification assumes at some level, you know the word and know what it means. 388 00:25:22,440 --> 00:25:26,280 Doesn't mean you know it at the deepest level, but you know kind of what that word. 389 00:25:26,280 --> 00:25:27,280 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 390 00:25:27,280 --> 00:25:28,280 Yeah. 391 00:25:28,280 --> 00:25:29,280 Yeah. 392 00:25:29,280 --> 00:25:30,680 I wasn't necessarily going to the deepest level either. 393 00:25:30,680 --> 00:25:37,320 I was just talking about grossly different levels of interaction or uncertainty surrounding 394 00:25:37,320 --> 00:25:38,960 an encounter with a word. 395 00:25:38,960 --> 00:25:43,240 And technically to identify a word, it has to be in your lexicon. 396 00:25:43,240 --> 00:25:44,240 Has to be there. 397 00:25:44,240 --> 00:25:48,160 Technically, depending on the way you use the word, recognition, re-cognize. 398 00:25:48,160 --> 00:25:50,600 Identify a word. 399 00:25:50,600 --> 00:25:51,600 Yeah. 400 00:25:51,600 --> 00:25:53,520 It has to be in here to identify. 401 00:25:53,520 --> 00:25:54,520 All right. 402 00:25:54,520 --> 00:25:56,440 Are you ready to go to the next one? 403 00:25:56,440 --> 00:25:57,440 Sure. 404 00:25:57,440 --> 00:25:58,440 All right. 405 00:25:58,440 --> 00:26:04,200 You get to start and then I'll do my shot first. 406 00:26:04,200 --> 00:26:05,200 Decoding. 407 00:26:05,200 --> 00:26:12,880 Decoding is using is one type of word identification strategy. 408 00:26:12,880 --> 00:26:18,880 It is using the code of the letter codes to sound out the word. 409 00:26:18,880 --> 00:26:23,960 Yeah, I agree with that. 410 00:26:23,960 --> 00:26:25,120 Although I do that. 411 00:26:25,120 --> 00:26:29,680 The one thing I would add is that, and I think this is an important distinction for all those 412 00:26:29,680 --> 00:26:35,960 that are attached to the word decoding is that I love that mug is that it's not the 413 00:26:35,960 --> 00:26:42,320 challenge of learning to read in English isn't so much decoding in the sense that it's technically 414 00:26:42,320 --> 00:26:46,800 used as a term and for example, computer science. 415 00:26:46,800 --> 00:26:50,120 It's more a case of disambiguating. 416 00:26:50,120 --> 00:26:55,080 What I mean by that is that our code is not simply decodable. 417 00:26:55,080 --> 00:27:05,000 It's got a very confusing messy correspondence between letters and sounds that can't be completely 418 00:27:05,000 --> 00:27:07,360 determined by the code itself. 419 00:27:07,360 --> 00:27:15,360 It takes an interpretive, a secondary layer of interpretation to map on the letters and 420 00:27:15,360 --> 00:27:19,360 sounds to get to some kind of word recognition through decoding. 421 00:27:19,360 --> 00:27:25,840 Decoding to me has always been a misleading term because you could say that their decoding 422 00:27:25,840 --> 00:27:31,760 existed in the days of the Greeks or the Romans or to some degree in Italian and Spanish today 423 00:27:31,760 --> 00:27:34,840 where there's a really simple correspondence. 424 00:27:34,840 --> 00:27:42,240 But today, for example, when we talk about a decoder in the software world like a way 425 00:27:42,240 --> 00:27:48,520 a modem works, there's a really hard structural correspondence between the decoding system 426 00:27:48,520 --> 00:27:53,760 and the code itself that there's no ambiguity that it's trying to work out. 427 00:27:53,760 --> 00:27:59,000 There's errors that might have error correction software to deal with, but there's nothing 428 00:27:59,000 --> 00:28:04,160 fundamentally confusing in the relationship between the elements and the code that the 429 00:28:04,160 --> 00:28:07,960 decoder has to deal with like there is in our system. 430 00:28:07,960 --> 00:28:15,640 So I think decoding is a loaded term that's got a lot of, it's been made to seem more 431 00:28:15,640 --> 00:28:20,720 simplistic than it is to the disadvantage of the way we think about reading. 432 00:28:20,720 --> 00:28:24,240 I'm playing a drinking game every time you say disambiguate. 433 00:28:24,240 --> 00:28:26,840 Good for you. 434 00:28:26,840 --> 00:28:32,120 It's a very popular and powerful and important term when you're talking about getting through 435 00:28:32,120 --> 00:28:35,360 confusion to a coherent whole meaning. 436 00:28:35,360 --> 00:28:39,880 I love you and I love that definition. 437 00:28:39,880 --> 00:28:45,440 We must disambiguate the difference between word identification, word recognition and 438 00:28:45,440 --> 00:28:46,440 decoding. 439 00:28:46,440 --> 00:28:47,440 Exactly, exactly, exactly. 440 00:28:47,440 --> 00:28:52,840 And they are used synonymously by people who don't understand literacy. 441 00:28:52,840 --> 00:28:56,200 That's why I was pressing the point because I think that there's some confusion in the 442 00:28:56,200 --> 00:28:57,880 way those terms are used. 443 00:28:57,880 --> 00:28:59,280 And that's why we're doing this. 444 00:28:59,280 --> 00:29:00,280 Excellent. 445 00:29:00,280 --> 00:29:02,400 Are we good with that one? 446 00:29:02,400 --> 00:29:03,400 Yep. 447 00:29:03,400 --> 00:29:04,400 Okay. 448 00:29:04,400 --> 00:29:05,800 Here's one for you. 449 00:29:05,800 --> 00:29:09,320 Professional development. 450 00:29:09,320 --> 00:29:11,280 And we'll put it in the context of teaching. 451 00:29:11,280 --> 00:29:12,280 Yeah. 452 00:29:12,280 --> 00:29:15,760 I don't like the term as much as like professional learning. 453 00:29:15,760 --> 00:29:18,360 And we've talked about this before. 454 00:29:18,360 --> 00:29:25,640 In my view, I think the most important part of being a teacher, because we just grounded 455 00:29:25,640 --> 00:29:35,000 it that way, is that they are, before they can be good stewards of the healthy attentional 456 00:29:35,000 --> 00:29:42,960 participation of the learners that they are, quote, teaching, they need to be good stewards 457 00:29:42,960 --> 00:29:44,600 of the health of their own learning. 458 00:29:44,600 --> 00:29:50,480 They need to be having the kind of internal conversations and dialogues and first person 459 00:29:50,480 --> 00:29:56,280 learning, journeying that you and I are doing and trying to explore and understand this rather 460 00:29:56,280 --> 00:30:02,160 than being wrote robotic extensions of protocols of this is what this means and this is what 461 00:30:02,160 --> 00:30:04,400 I'm supposed to do now and so forth and so on. 462 00:30:04,400 --> 00:30:09,000 So for me, professional development is a way of informed or professional learning is a 463 00:30:09,000 --> 00:30:16,000 way of informing teachers about different dimensions that they should be considering while their 464 00:30:16,000 --> 00:30:19,960 first person learning their way into teaching. 465 00:30:19,960 --> 00:30:22,240 I'm okay with the word learning. 466 00:30:22,240 --> 00:30:28,360 I use the word development because it assumes there are stages in a case of teaching, the 467 00:30:28,360 --> 00:30:30,680 development never ends. 468 00:30:30,680 --> 00:30:36,920 Now we've got teachers for three semesters, three semesters in student teaching. 469 00:30:36,920 --> 00:30:41,600 There's no way we can even complete a partial finished product. 470 00:30:41,600 --> 00:30:45,320 We get them ready to begin the journey. 471 00:30:45,320 --> 00:30:50,480 Teachers need continue professional development and this is research based. 472 00:30:50,480 --> 00:30:54,160 Master teachers have knowledge in four areas. 473 00:30:54,160 --> 00:30:57,440 First is content knowledge, knowledge of what they're teaching. 474 00:30:57,440 --> 00:30:58,440 That's kind of tough for an elementary. 475 00:30:58,440 --> 00:31:01,600 They have to know a lot of stuff. 476 00:31:01,600 --> 00:31:02,600 Pedagogical knowledge. 477 00:31:02,600 --> 00:31:06,440 These are general teaching strategies. 478 00:31:06,440 --> 00:31:10,840 Pedagogical content knowledge, how to teach a specific area, how to teach reading, how 479 00:31:10,840 --> 00:31:14,000 to teach writing, how to teach math, how to teach science. 480 00:31:14,000 --> 00:31:20,200 Knowledge of learners and learning, how human beings develop, how human beings best learn. 481 00:31:20,200 --> 00:31:24,080 To create master teachers, it is a simple thing. 482 00:31:24,080 --> 00:31:30,440 We must continue to promote learning, to promote more knowledge, gathering more knowledge in 483 00:31:30,440 --> 00:31:32,880 each of those four areas. 484 00:31:32,880 --> 00:31:37,960 And the master teachers I have encountered are learning up until the day they retire and 485 00:31:37,960 --> 00:31:38,960 beyond. 486 00:31:38,960 --> 00:31:45,320 Don't have any problem with that. 487 00:31:45,320 --> 00:31:56,840 Again, I think there's so much that teachers can benefit from learning and nothing in particular 488 00:31:56,840 --> 00:32:03,520 is more important than them staying on the learning edge of their own practice and of 489 00:32:03,520 --> 00:32:08,880 their meeting the learners in the challenges that they're facilitating. 490 00:32:08,880 --> 00:32:14,160 So important to have a lot of background, but that background should never automate what 491 00:32:14,160 --> 00:32:15,160 they're doing. 492 00:32:15,160 --> 00:32:17,320 And we've had this conversation before. 493 00:32:17,320 --> 00:32:22,040 It's never, and people think if teachers just have these skills, they apply these skills 494 00:32:22,040 --> 00:32:24,000 and teaching is much more complex. 495 00:32:24,000 --> 00:32:28,920 So how should we address professional learning or development in our schools? 496 00:32:28,920 --> 00:32:29,920 Is that going off? 497 00:32:29,920 --> 00:32:34,720 Is that another conversation? 498 00:32:34,720 --> 00:32:38,640 Because teachers are the most important variable. 499 00:32:38,640 --> 00:32:42,080 The most significant variable in determining how much learning goes off. 500 00:32:42,080 --> 00:32:49,240 Yeah, I mean, it brings up some of the interesting thoughts that were triggered by the documents 501 00:32:49,240 --> 00:32:54,400 that you shared with me earlier from the various research on teacher effectiveness and what 502 00:32:54,400 --> 00:32:55,640 happened. 503 00:32:55,640 --> 00:33:06,160 And the tension that exists between a system that this kind of veers off into a tangent. 504 00:33:06,160 --> 00:33:10,080 So I don't know that we want to spend that much time on it, but basically my understanding 505 00:33:10,080 --> 00:33:16,560 is that things like No Child Left Behind and the government kind of generalizing its leadership 506 00:33:16,560 --> 00:33:23,400 of education and how certain things are done are based on decades of research into teaching 507 00:33:23,400 --> 00:33:27,720 practices that suggested they needed to do that. 508 00:33:27,720 --> 00:33:35,400 That teachers weren't capable without some kind of a superstructure guiding them to do 509 00:33:35,400 --> 00:33:36,400 that. 510 00:33:36,400 --> 00:33:41,600 And that's where all kinds of problems have come into the system between what should teachers 511 00:33:41,600 --> 00:33:49,400 know and how much should we press them to know and perform in certain ways in order to be 512 00:33:49,400 --> 00:33:53,320 accountable to some larger system that's assessing them. 513 00:33:53,320 --> 00:33:58,920 And what's the downside of that in terms of disincenting their first person learning and 514 00:33:58,920 --> 00:34:04,560 their first person quality of participation when they feel so roboticized? 515 00:34:04,560 --> 00:34:08,000 And that is probably a subject for another conversation. 516 00:34:08,000 --> 00:34:11,320 Yeah, I think that's a whole big thing in itself. 517 00:34:11,320 --> 00:34:14,720 Because the government has not identified what's most effective. 518 00:34:14,720 --> 00:34:16,400 They've identified what's most profitable. 519 00:34:16,400 --> 00:34:18,200 All right, you get to choose. 520 00:34:18,200 --> 00:34:29,360 Yeah, I don't disagree with that. 521 00:34:29,360 --> 00:34:30,360 Dyslexia. 522 00:34:30,360 --> 00:34:36,520 Ah, an inability to learn to read witches of unknown origin. 523 00:34:36,520 --> 00:34:43,600 It impacts usually, depending on the researcher, three to five percent of the population. 524 00:34:43,600 --> 00:34:48,640 Yeah, I actually like that. 525 00:34:48,640 --> 00:34:53,840 Unfortunately, the general because because it's become such a big thing politically and 526 00:34:53,840 --> 00:35:00,680 profitably, they push that three to five percent, which I kind of agree with, almost 15 to 20 527 00:35:00,680 --> 00:35:06,720 percent, because there's a whole lot more opportunity to intervene at that level. 528 00:35:06,720 --> 00:35:11,960 I've had some pretty deep dive conversations with people like Shewitz and others that are 529 00:35:11,960 --> 00:35:15,520 on the neuroscience side of trying to identify dyslexia. 530 00:35:15,520 --> 00:35:20,840 And they can't point to anything that's higher than the three to five percent that you're 531 00:35:20,840 --> 00:35:27,760 referring to, that they can say for sure is innately neurobiologically structurally 532 00:35:27,760 --> 00:35:35,000 ordained as opposed to or as distinct from a consequence of early learning environment 533 00:35:35,000 --> 00:35:36,440 trajectory differences. 534 00:35:36,440 --> 00:35:41,520 In other words, how much dyslexia, what we call or think of dyslexia is learned and how 535 00:35:41,520 --> 00:35:44,280 much of dyslexia is innate. 536 00:35:44,280 --> 00:35:51,160 The couldn't be otherwise in the bio structural development of a child is a big fuzzy and that 537 00:35:51,160 --> 00:36:00,400 unfortunately, because of our lack of criticality about those distinctions, and because so many 538 00:36:00,400 --> 00:36:05,840 people are having so many kids are having difficulty with learning to read, it's become 539 00:36:05,840 --> 00:36:15,240 this fuzzy deep end of the pool that has become a rallying cry that's been also been fused 540 00:36:15,240 --> 00:36:17,320 with the whole phonics conversation. 541 00:36:17,320 --> 00:36:24,800 So the dyslexia thing is a big, messy, amorphous, multi-ordinal term. 542 00:36:24,800 --> 00:36:30,320 Well, the International Dyslexia Association presses a certain definition and they exist 543 00:36:30,320 --> 00:36:32,840 to sell product to make money. 544 00:36:32,840 --> 00:36:35,920 How much does it cost to get trained in Orton-Gillian? 545 00:36:35,920 --> 00:36:41,960 A program that has no research based and it does not work. 546 00:36:41,960 --> 00:36:43,560 Yet people do it. 547 00:36:43,560 --> 00:36:51,280 Shewitz is not a reading instructor, a reading expert. 548 00:36:51,280 --> 00:36:52,480 She's a neurologist. 549 00:36:52,480 --> 00:36:54,400 She's a medical person. 550 00:36:54,400 --> 00:36:58,520 And she has a research where she takes one or two kids into the laboratory and they look 551 00:36:58,520 --> 00:37:02,280 at parts of their brain that do light up and don't light up. 552 00:37:02,280 --> 00:37:10,600 And Stephen Strauss says, okay, once you give a kid adequate instruction, the dyslexic, 553 00:37:10,600 --> 00:37:15,800 use that term in quote, who's part of the brain didn't light up, does light up. 554 00:37:15,800 --> 00:37:19,360 So it's not a brain-based disorder. 555 00:37:19,360 --> 00:37:26,320 However, students in that three to 5% tend to have trouble processing letter sounds, 556 00:37:26,320 --> 00:37:30,120 tend to have trouble processing phonics, but not always. 557 00:37:30,120 --> 00:37:36,400 Where Shewitz in the International Dyslexia Association gets up to 20%, well, that students 558 00:37:36,400 --> 00:37:41,400 who have trouble with spelling, based on that, I have a mild form of dyslexia. 559 00:37:41,400 --> 00:37:46,080 I was a horrible speller growing up and I use the computer today. 560 00:37:46,080 --> 00:37:53,080 So they have defined dyslexia not in a way that helps kids, but in a way that helps them 561 00:37:53,080 --> 00:37:54,080 make money. 562 00:37:54,080 --> 00:37:57,720 Yeah, I wouldn't quite be so dark about it. 563 00:37:57,720 --> 00:38:02,240 I think there's really generally good intentions, like we've talked about many times before, 564 00:38:02,240 --> 00:38:04,040 in where people are coming from. 565 00:38:04,040 --> 00:38:10,640 But I do agree that it has become financially convenient for both the International Dyslexia 566 00:38:10,640 --> 00:38:16,640 Association and all of the decoding dyslexia groups that have popped up around the country. 567 00:38:16,640 --> 00:38:22,880 But what glues them together is a ferocity of passion about not wanting kids to get harmed 568 00:38:22,880 --> 00:38:28,880 by the sustained lack of success with reading and what it does to their lives. 569 00:38:28,880 --> 00:38:34,240 I think they're coming from a good place and like anything else, it gets all kinds of predatory 570 00:38:34,240 --> 00:38:39,640 hijackers that jump on the bandwagon to try to monetize it. 571 00:38:39,640 --> 00:38:44,880 That said, the other thing I would say is that from talks with people that are on the 572 00:38:44,880 --> 00:38:50,640 phonological, pure oral language side of neuroscience, there's a direct correspondence 573 00:38:50,640 --> 00:38:58,440 from their perspective between what's classically called dyslexia and obviously structural neurological 574 00:38:58,440 --> 00:39:01,960 issues in the brain that have to do with processing oral language. 575 00:39:01,960 --> 00:39:10,200 So that they see dyslexia as primarily an oral language problem that barely shows up 576 00:39:10,200 --> 00:39:15,000 in oral language, but shows up greater in written language because it's a virtual overlay 577 00:39:15,000 --> 00:39:18,160 that depends on the oral language engine. 578 00:39:18,160 --> 00:39:21,080 I think we're fair with where we left it. 579 00:39:21,080 --> 00:39:23,560 I think we are as well. 580 00:39:23,560 --> 00:39:29,280 You know, the idea of good intentions, there's intention and then there's impact. 581 00:39:29,280 --> 00:39:34,160 I agree that some people within the dyslexia movement that I know that's a generalization 582 00:39:34,160 --> 00:39:37,920 have good intent. 583 00:39:37,920 --> 00:39:44,800 But listen, you could download my videos for free or you could pay $4,000 for an Orton 584 00:39:44,800 --> 00:39:52,520 Gillingham training when you're charging that much, you are a money making organization, 585 00:39:52,520 --> 00:39:55,000 not a helping kids organization. 586 00:39:55,000 --> 00:40:00,160 So I just want to vomit in my mouth when I hear these groups saying they're there to 587 00:40:00,160 --> 00:40:08,280 help kids pay me $1,500 letters, pay me $4,000 to $5,000 or Orton Gillingham. 588 00:40:08,280 --> 00:40:09,280 All right. 589 00:40:09,280 --> 00:40:10,280 Yeah. 590 00:40:10,280 --> 00:40:15,560 Look, I've got a few hundred videos that are all free and I've never charged for two. 591 00:40:15,560 --> 00:40:17,360 So, you know, I get that. 592 00:40:17,360 --> 00:40:18,360 All right. 593 00:40:18,360 --> 00:40:20,360 Are you ready for a new word? 594 00:40:20,360 --> 00:40:21,360 Yep. 595 00:40:21,360 --> 00:40:30,440 Balanced literacy. 596 00:40:30,440 --> 00:40:33,880 I'm smiling because I'm watching your eyeballs go back and forth. 597 00:40:33,880 --> 00:40:34,880 Yeah. 598 00:40:34,880 --> 00:40:36,320 I mean, it's one of those terms. 599 00:40:36,320 --> 00:40:37,320 It's multi-ordinal. 600 00:40:37,320 --> 00:40:44,480 I mean, lots of things to me, what it means is that it's an on-ramp to becoming literacy 601 00:40:44,480 --> 00:40:50,680 proficient that it's multi-ordinal, meaning that it's not dependent on any one particular 602 00:40:50,680 --> 00:40:56,760 strategy, but that it's using a balanced, a number of different strategies in concert 603 00:40:56,760 --> 00:41:01,920 to support the process of learning to become, to come up to speed and be proficient in the 604 00:41:01,920 --> 00:41:05,320 flow of literacy. 605 00:41:05,320 --> 00:41:06,320 Balanced literacy. 606 00:41:06,320 --> 00:41:12,400 There's a balance between pure skills and meaning-based experiences and you go back 607 00:41:12,400 --> 00:41:14,320 and forth on the continuum. 608 00:41:14,320 --> 00:41:19,720 Some people need more skills, some people need less, but there's a balance between skills 609 00:41:19,720 --> 00:41:23,880 and authentic reading and writing activities. 610 00:41:23,880 --> 00:41:25,760 Everyone believes in phonics instruction. 611 00:41:25,760 --> 00:41:28,680 It is just how much, when, where. 612 00:41:28,680 --> 00:41:29,880 Yeah. 613 00:41:29,880 --> 00:41:33,960 I think, you know, that also came up in my research, in my reading of some of the things 614 00:41:33,960 --> 00:41:40,560 that you sent me, is that that's a, I would say it's a new phenomena, but in the history 615 00:41:40,560 --> 00:41:51,200 of the conflict between the code-based and whole word or what became whole language-based, 616 00:41:51,200 --> 00:41:57,440 there's been a movement from the whole language folks towards phonics in a way there hasn't 617 00:41:57,440 --> 00:42:02,000 been a movement from the phonics folks towards whole language. 618 00:42:02,000 --> 00:42:07,160 Or putting it another way and more consistent with what you put, the way that you just described. 619 00:42:07,160 --> 00:42:11,360 There's always this tension between, well, in order to get the meaning, I have to recognize 620 00:42:11,360 --> 00:42:15,680 the word and in order to recognize the word, it's really helpful to be tracking in the 621 00:42:15,680 --> 00:42:20,520 flow of a meaning that will help inform the process of recognizing the word. 622 00:42:20,520 --> 00:42:26,600 So there's this back and forth going on between the whole and the part and the part and the 623 00:42:26,600 --> 00:42:28,000 whole. 624 00:42:28,000 --> 00:42:33,440 And the phonics people have been, it's pretty bottoms up only from the phonics side and 625 00:42:33,440 --> 00:42:38,080 the whole language have been, well, you know, like many of the arguments that the papers 626 00:42:38,080 --> 00:42:44,680 you put were pushing back on about as negatives to the whole language movement was this notion 627 00:42:44,680 --> 00:42:51,800 that by just structuring the text around just highly readable words and being really 628 00:42:51,800 --> 00:42:56,160 personally engaging and so forth and so on, that kids would be gravitating to the meaning 629 00:42:56,160 --> 00:43:01,200 and they would somehow imbibe unconsciously pick up all the skills that are necessary 630 00:43:01,200 --> 00:43:03,200 to recognize unfamiliar words. 631 00:43:03,200 --> 00:43:07,960 Like there's this tension between the two and balance literacy, it has become a kind 632 00:43:07,960 --> 00:43:16,000 of phrase for, you know, trying to integrate those two in a way that the two camps in the 633 00:43:16,000 --> 00:43:18,400 past didn't. 634 00:43:18,400 --> 00:43:25,480 And one of the things that the code based or the skills based do is they'll pull a term 635 00:43:25,480 --> 00:43:31,960 like balanced literacy, they'll misidentify it, misuse it, and then they'll demonize the 636 00:43:31,960 --> 00:43:35,300 word and balance literacy is one of those. 637 00:43:35,300 --> 00:43:42,560 Most people that I hear demonizing balanced literacy have no idea what it means. 638 00:43:42,560 --> 00:43:47,720 There's a balance between skills instruction and using those skills in authentic reading 639 00:43:47,720 --> 00:43:50,480 and writing contexts. 640 00:43:50,480 --> 00:43:57,720 So this idea of this camp versus that camp, whole language has always believed, and by 641 00:43:57,720 --> 00:44:01,280 the way, whole language has continued to evolve. 642 00:44:01,280 --> 00:44:02,280 Everything evolves. 643 00:44:02,280 --> 00:44:06,880 But those are kind of a contradictory statement, always believed and continued to evolve. 644 00:44:06,880 --> 00:44:12,720 I mean, that they're continuing to evolve has become more embracing of what's now considered 645 00:44:12,720 --> 00:44:18,840 balanced literacy in terms of being more inclusive of phonics than my understanding. 646 00:44:18,840 --> 00:44:22,440 And from what I read in the things that you sent me, the understanding of people that 647 00:44:22,440 --> 00:44:27,720 study this space has been that they've been more at loggerheads in the past than they 648 00:44:27,720 --> 00:44:29,080 are now. 649 00:44:29,080 --> 00:44:34,560 And that that's largely in part because of the shift from whole word to whole language 650 00:44:34,560 --> 00:44:36,760 to meaning making. 651 00:44:36,760 --> 00:44:40,920 Whole language has always included phonics instruction. 652 00:44:40,920 --> 00:44:44,840 Whole word is that stuff back in the 60s that you and I grew up with. 653 00:44:44,840 --> 00:44:47,720 It's the Dick and Jane that didn't include any phonics. 654 00:44:47,720 --> 00:44:54,960 Whole language is teaching phonics in a meaning based context to the greatest extent. 655 00:44:54,960 --> 00:45:02,520 But is it not an adaptation that grew out of that polarity that was whole word, became 656 00:45:02,520 --> 00:45:06,440 whole language and became inclusive of phonics over time? 657 00:45:06,440 --> 00:45:13,240 No, they both have the word whole in them, but that's where the similarities end. 658 00:45:13,240 --> 00:45:20,360 Hmm, OK, that's that's that's news from what I read that there wasn't more continuity in 659 00:45:20,360 --> 00:45:21,360 that. 660 00:45:21,360 --> 00:45:22,760 But that's not a big deal one way or the other. 661 00:45:22,760 --> 00:45:29,040 In any event, we're talking about in the past 50 or 60 years, this pendulum switch between 662 00:45:29,040 --> 00:45:35,600 being kind of meaning centric and whole centric to being part and, you know, bottoms up with 663 00:45:35,600 --> 00:45:36,600 the code. 664 00:45:36,600 --> 00:45:40,360 That's where the tensions lie, which go all the way back to our beginning conversation 665 00:45:40,360 --> 00:45:45,760 about identification and recognition that, you know, ultimately what we're talking about 666 00:45:45,760 --> 00:45:51,080 is the how those two different. 667 00:45:51,080 --> 00:45:58,360 Tracks relate to informing the process of recognizing words. 668 00:45:58,360 --> 00:46:01,680 There's been three big stepbacks in the last 60 years. 669 00:46:01,680 --> 00:46:05,400 There was the back to the basics movement in the 80s. 670 00:46:05,400 --> 00:46:11,560 There was the no child left behind reading first initiative movement of the early odds. 671 00:46:11,560 --> 00:46:17,400 And now there's the science of reading movement, all that have caused us to move backwards 672 00:46:17,400 --> 00:46:20,640 in our ability to help children learn to read. 673 00:46:20,640 --> 00:46:29,640 Yeah, and because of the way that you guys have failed to learn together. 674 00:46:29,640 --> 00:46:36,120 And I think that's all parties have to be are complicit in that. 675 00:46:36,120 --> 00:46:41,000 You know, their perspective is the exact mirror opposite of what you just described, which 676 00:46:41,000 --> 00:46:45,360 is to say that the only reason that they've become so hard and religious and dogmatic 677 00:46:45,360 --> 00:46:51,800 about pushing the code up, you know, point of view, the decoding centric code centric 678 00:46:51,800 --> 00:46:57,520 view of reading instruction is the failures of all other approaches. 679 00:46:57,520 --> 00:46:58,520 Right. 680 00:46:58,520 --> 00:47:02,080 So you discount their research, they discount your research, you know, and there's this 681 00:47:02,080 --> 00:47:07,760 finger pointing rather than learning together, which presumably balanced literacy is an attempt 682 00:47:07,760 --> 00:47:08,760 to do. 683 00:47:08,760 --> 00:47:09,760 Right. 684 00:47:09,760 --> 00:47:17,520 Balance literacy is pretty much what what whole language is or has evolved to I would 685 00:47:17,520 --> 00:47:18,520 see now. 686 00:47:18,520 --> 00:47:21,880 I know you're going to jump which is why which which is why the decoding folks don't want 687 00:47:21,880 --> 00:47:24,200 anything to do with it. 688 00:47:24,200 --> 00:47:28,480 Because they don't know what it is. 689 00:47:28,480 --> 00:47:32,360 You mentioned something that I thought was good. 690 00:47:32,360 --> 00:47:35,320 You and I having this conversation is really important. 691 00:47:35,320 --> 00:47:44,160 I wish we disagreed on more, but it's the ability, the inability to listen and to hear 692 00:47:44,160 --> 00:47:46,920 where people are coming from. 693 00:47:46,920 --> 00:47:50,880 And I've tried to engage people online and in other places. 694 00:47:50,880 --> 00:47:58,080 I've tried to engage people at my university, but there's this tendency to want to not 695 00:47:58,080 --> 00:48:03,160 communicate with someone who has a different idea than you. 696 00:48:03,160 --> 00:48:07,640 And just in the months that we've been having these conversations, you know, I think differently 697 00:48:07,640 --> 00:48:08,920 about some things. 698 00:48:08,920 --> 00:48:12,160 I've had to strengthen my view on other things. 699 00:48:12,160 --> 00:48:18,640 It's the importance of listening to people who disagree with you without calling them 700 00:48:18,640 --> 00:48:24,920 names or without the straw person argument where you say where you misidentify balanced 701 00:48:24,920 --> 00:48:25,920 literacy. 702 00:48:25,920 --> 00:48:26,920 Right. 703 00:48:26,920 --> 00:48:32,520 Well, that has to do with it to some degree in remembering that we are good. 704 00:48:32,520 --> 00:48:34,520 There are underneath all this. 705 00:48:34,520 --> 00:48:41,920 Yes, there's a predatory overlay to the whole decoding dyslexia and IDA and reading for 706 00:48:41,920 --> 00:48:42,920 all of that stuff. 707 00:48:42,920 --> 00:48:48,440 There's just like there is over anything that becomes instantiated into the infrastructure 708 00:48:48,440 --> 00:48:49,440 of education. 709 00:48:49,440 --> 00:48:54,000 There's a predatory, you know, monetization that's going to swoop in to try to make the 710 00:48:54,000 --> 00:48:55,000 best of it. 711 00:48:55,000 --> 00:48:59,560 There's going to reinforce it in ways that are antithetical to actual learning. 712 00:48:59,560 --> 00:49:02,400 And the same would be true if your side was dominant right now. 713 00:49:02,400 --> 00:49:06,200 There'd be people rushing to make products that do this, that would be kind of insular 714 00:49:06,200 --> 00:49:08,400 and attacking those that didn't. 715 00:49:08,400 --> 00:49:10,400 And that's an unfortunate thing. 716 00:49:10,400 --> 00:49:16,200 But underneath it all, I really believe that all the camps, there's this shared thing that 717 00:49:16,200 --> 00:49:22,400 they love and care for children and the suffering children go through because of their difficulty 718 00:49:22,400 --> 00:49:23,400 with reading. 719 00:49:23,400 --> 00:49:26,000 And that that's what motivates everybody. 720 00:49:26,000 --> 00:49:30,880 And it's a really unfortunate, I think, that we can't use that as a basis for having a 721 00:49:30,880 --> 00:49:31,880 dialogue. 722 00:49:31,880 --> 00:49:34,200 And I agree with you. 723 00:49:34,200 --> 00:49:40,240 Unfortunately, once people for psychological reasons or for income reasons get associated 724 00:49:40,240 --> 00:49:46,080 with a particular way to do something, then it becomes very difficult for them to back 725 00:49:46,080 --> 00:49:52,160 up from it because it implies that they were wrong, which hurts their reputation, potentially 726 00:49:52,160 --> 00:49:53,680 hurts their income. 727 00:49:53,680 --> 00:49:56,600 It's what I call paradigm inertia. 728 00:49:56,600 --> 00:50:03,200 And it's a huge problem all over the world in every dimension and particularly here. 729 00:50:03,200 --> 00:50:10,360 But I think there's a great opportunity that we're just scratching the surface of you and 730 00:50:10,360 --> 00:50:11,360 I, right? 731 00:50:11,360 --> 00:50:16,760 Of getting to, you know, what's the underlying core challenge? 732 00:50:16,760 --> 00:50:20,880 And how can we think differently about that in a way that integrates the best of everybody's 733 00:50:20,880 --> 00:50:29,080 thinking instead of having to stay true to something for ideological or economic or psychological 734 00:50:29,080 --> 00:50:30,080 reasons? 735 00:50:30,080 --> 00:50:32,520 I mean, there's just too much at stake. 736 00:50:32,520 --> 00:50:38,800 And you know, when the various camps as research says this and research says that understanding 737 00:50:38,800 --> 00:50:43,640 what research and educational research is, is important. 738 00:50:43,640 --> 00:50:49,120 There is no single study that proves anything in the social sciences. 739 00:50:49,120 --> 00:50:51,760 That's not how science works. 740 00:50:51,760 --> 00:50:56,520 And when someone says research shows this, I say, well, show me the research so I can 741 00:50:56,520 --> 00:50:57,840 analyze it. 742 00:50:57,840 --> 00:51:04,080 It proves this is effective for this person used in this way for that level. 743 00:51:04,080 --> 00:51:06,840 You know, there's no single study. 744 00:51:06,840 --> 00:51:10,240 You have to look at the wide variety. 745 00:51:10,240 --> 00:51:15,560 Now when I look at the science of reading, there's show the claim is that there's this 746 00:51:15,560 --> 00:51:20,080 reading crisis and we've gone through this before. 747 00:51:20,080 --> 00:51:24,600 And again, we want to say, well, show us some valid data. 748 00:51:24,600 --> 00:51:28,240 Reading scores are about the same as they always have been. 749 00:51:28,240 --> 00:51:32,960 Which, by the way, is what makes it the crisis for me. 750 00:51:32,960 --> 00:51:36,600 It's not that there's some, you know, worsening. 751 00:51:36,600 --> 00:51:39,800 It's that it's always been worse than it should be. 752 00:51:39,800 --> 00:51:40,800 That's the crisis. 753 00:51:40,800 --> 00:51:42,760 That's what we get from the term. 754 00:51:42,760 --> 00:51:48,080 We can always do better, but when you compare us to other countries, we stack up rather 755 00:51:48,080 --> 00:51:49,080 well. 756 00:51:49,080 --> 00:51:53,840 When you compare like populations, which is very hard to do, by the way, it's very hard 757 00:51:53,840 --> 00:51:54,840 to do. 758 00:51:54,840 --> 00:51:57,400 I think that's what else stuff is. 759 00:51:57,400 --> 00:52:00,680 It's very hard to find like populations. 760 00:52:00,680 --> 00:52:07,520 But when you look at people like Emily Hanford, who misidentified the crisis, but even if 761 00:52:07,520 --> 00:52:15,480 there were a crisis, she has identified the problem and the solution. 762 00:52:15,480 --> 00:52:22,000 If there were a crisis, she has said, oh, it's because of phonics. 763 00:52:22,000 --> 00:52:28,680 So that is not scientific thinking to use I thinkisms and anecdotal evidence to identify 764 00:52:28,680 --> 00:52:31,120 a problem and a solution. 765 00:52:31,120 --> 00:52:38,160 But look, like I have pushed back hard on Hanford. 766 00:52:38,160 --> 00:52:44,560 And so I disagree with, again, I appreciate the spirit of what she's trying to do, just 767 00:52:44,560 --> 00:52:50,080 like I do all of the parents and that join up in the Dekoting Dislexia groups or the 768 00:52:50,080 --> 00:52:54,920 various online groups that are out there, trampinning, reading, instructional reform, 769 00:52:54,920 --> 00:52:56,240 et cetera. 770 00:52:56,240 --> 00:52:58,160 I think they're coming from a good place. 771 00:52:58,160 --> 00:53:04,120 But to me, it comes back to the mental models. 772 00:53:04,120 --> 00:53:08,560 The mental model that you all share is the one that ultimately I want to challenge, which 773 00:53:08,560 --> 00:53:15,360 is that at the point of interaction between a reader and a word that they're trying to 774 00:53:15,360 --> 00:53:21,400 recognize, they're trying to identify, to use your term, that the word is static and 775 00:53:21,400 --> 00:53:22,560 can't help them. 776 00:53:22,560 --> 00:53:27,720 And that's what we'll get to when another episode down the road. 777 00:53:27,720 --> 00:53:31,040 We want to help children develop their full literacy potential. 778 00:53:31,040 --> 00:53:35,040 I agree that many, probably most, do have good intent. 779 00:53:35,040 --> 00:53:40,880 But when I look at someone like Emily Hanford, I say, what is her intent? 780 00:53:40,880 --> 00:53:44,240 Is it to make her career and make money? 781 00:53:44,240 --> 00:53:49,000 Why does she not involve real literacy experts? 782 00:53:49,000 --> 00:53:50,960 Why doesn't she read some research? 783 00:53:50,960 --> 00:53:55,680 Because the experts that she does involve are so adamant against including you. 784 00:53:55,680 --> 00:54:00,200 Like I told you, I once had the Secretary of Education tell the Assistant Secretary of 785 00:54:00,200 --> 00:54:04,360 Education to tell me not to talk to people like Allington and otherwise. 786 00:54:04,360 --> 00:54:10,560 Or they would, you know, like, I've been threatened myself by powers that are for crossing the 787 00:54:10,560 --> 00:54:16,880 line from the code-centric part to the whole language part in my own inquiries. 788 00:54:16,880 --> 00:54:20,920 So you know, I get the pressure that somebody like that's under. 789 00:54:20,920 --> 00:54:26,960 And the fact that from their perspective, the preponderance of science says, we've got 790 00:54:26,960 --> 00:54:33,400 to teach, you know, and again, it comes down to that population is not a monolith. 791 00:54:33,400 --> 00:54:37,400 It's not like every kid's got the same brain with the same level of readiness, with the 792 00:54:37,400 --> 00:54:43,000 same vocabulary, with the same, you know, phonemic differentiation skills, implicit 793 00:54:43,000 --> 00:54:50,400 skills, the same word attack or recognition skills, with the same knowledge of the world. 794 00:54:50,400 --> 00:54:53,360 And as a back, all these kids are different. 795 00:54:53,360 --> 00:54:58,280 So it's when you look at the kids that are struggling the most and what is it they're 796 00:54:58,280 --> 00:54:59,480 weak at? 797 00:54:59,480 --> 00:55:06,400 And given the majority of the population that is struggling and inside that population, 798 00:55:06,400 --> 00:55:11,400 the majority of those that have particular kinds of weaknesses, what instructional strategy 799 00:55:11,400 --> 00:55:12,400 will work with that? 800 00:55:12,400 --> 00:55:17,120 And it's big generalizations thrown on big generalizations. 801 00:55:17,120 --> 00:55:20,840 That's exactly what technology can change in the future. 802 00:55:20,840 --> 00:55:27,040 You're starting to sound like a balanced literacy instructor, because one size of instruction 803 00:55:27,040 --> 00:55:29,600 does not fit all. 804 00:55:29,600 --> 00:55:34,640 And that's the problem with the Hanford's of the world that want to have one type of 805 00:55:34,640 --> 00:55:36,400 instruction for all kids. 806 00:55:36,400 --> 00:55:37,400 All right. 807 00:55:37,400 --> 00:55:42,640 Yeah, I think the problem's at a different place, but that's another other day. 808 00:55:42,640 --> 00:55:45,400 I think it's your turn for a word. 809 00:55:45,400 --> 00:55:46,400 Is it? 810 00:55:46,400 --> 00:55:52,600 Yeah, I did balance literacy and that led to... 811 00:55:52,600 --> 00:55:59,040 Well, maybe we should talk a bit about orthography. 812 00:55:59,040 --> 00:56:02,800 What is orthography? 813 00:56:02,800 --> 00:56:08,040 Orthography is using the arrangement of letters to identify a word. 814 00:56:08,040 --> 00:56:13,680 And as you pointed out, and I agree, the English language is not very predictable. 815 00:56:13,680 --> 00:56:16,200 There are more predictable language. 816 00:56:16,200 --> 00:56:19,840 But the human brain is a pattern recognition thing. 817 00:56:19,840 --> 00:56:22,280 It learns to recognize patterns. 818 00:56:22,280 --> 00:56:26,000 That's how it has evolved and survived. 819 00:56:26,000 --> 00:56:30,080 Orthography, how would you define it? 820 00:56:30,080 --> 00:56:35,920 Orthography is a broad umbrella term that talks about the correspondence between letters, 821 00:56:35,920 --> 00:56:44,880 sounds, and spelling patterns, and how they combine to, in this case, in a particular 822 00:56:44,880 --> 00:56:49,600 written language, in our case, the English or orthography, obviously, the English language. 823 00:56:49,600 --> 00:56:59,840 So it's a system of relations between letters, sounds, patterns, and spelling patterns as 824 00:56:59,840 --> 00:57:02,000 a whole. 825 00:57:02,000 --> 00:57:08,680 And whereas I agree that the human brain evolved to become a great pattern recognition system, 826 00:57:08,680 --> 00:57:12,640 and it does that in nature in many different ways. 827 00:57:12,640 --> 00:57:17,600 The kind of patterns that are in this are entirely different than anything that exists 828 00:57:17,600 --> 00:57:18,960 in nature. 829 00:57:18,960 --> 00:57:26,160 So learning to read via our orthography is a kind of challenge that no human being in 830 00:57:26,160 --> 00:57:31,800 the entire history of the planet, in the entire evolutionary history of humanity ever did, 831 00:57:31,800 --> 00:57:38,160 except for a few hundred years ago, began a few hundred years ago. 832 00:57:38,160 --> 00:57:45,760 Okay, don't agree with all of that, but good, I agree with some of that. 833 00:57:45,760 --> 00:57:48,920 All right, you have your choice. 834 00:57:48,920 --> 00:57:56,440 You can do scientifically based reading instruction, or you can do systematic phonics instruction, 835 00:57:56,440 --> 00:58:01,560 scientifically based reading research, I'm sorry, or systematic phonics instruction. 836 00:58:01,560 --> 00:58:03,680 Which one would you like to chew on? 837 00:58:03,680 --> 00:58:05,960 Doesn't matter, you pick one. 838 00:58:05,960 --> 00:58:07,360 It's your turn, isn't it? 839 00:58:07,360 --> 00:58:09,600 All right, I'll go ahead and pick the last piece. 840 00:58:09,600 --> 00:58:13,080 Yeah, yeah, all right, let's do systematic phonics instruction, because that's what we've 841 00:58:13,080 --> 00:58:14,880 been talking about. 842 00:58:14,880 --> 00:58:16,600 Systematic phonics instruction. 843 00:58:16,600 --> 00:58:24,000 Well, I have to start by saying I disagree with that, but it has to do with training 844 00:58:24,000 --> 00:58:34,720 reflexive patterns of response to the recognition of phonical patterns in the code. 845 00:58:34,720 --> 00:58:43,880 So the bizarre rules of phonics, learning to recognize which of the letters are to be 846 00:58:43,880 --> 00:58:48,800 interpreted through these bizarre rules to get to the right sound pattern as a basis 847 00:58:48,800 --> 00:58:51,080 of word recognition. 848 00:58:51,080 --> 00:58:57,120 And I would define it as, and I agree with you, there's no defined scope and sequence 849 00:58:57,120 --> 00:59:02,640 of letters and letter patterns that you build up to get you to a finished reading product. 850 00:59:02,640 --> 00:59:06,760 Like phonics instruction is learning to put letters to sounds. 851 00:59:06,760 --> 00:59:08,600 That's what phonics is. 852 00:59:08,600 --> 00:59:12,960 Systematic means there's some system, some way of organizing. 853 00:59:12,960 --> 00:59:18,880 When you teach and what you teach, and when students master and what they master, there's 854 00:59:18,880 --> 00:59:21,080 a system in place. 855 00:59:21,080 --> 00:59:23,400 That's how I would define systematic phonics instruction. 856 00:59:23,400 --> 00:59:28,560 Which implies that there's a systematic relationship between letters and sounds, and there's not. 857 00:59:28,560 --> 00:59:30,040 There is not. 858 00:59:30,040 --> 00:59:32,400 But there are some basics. 859 00:59:32,400 --> 00:59:39,440 So there are systematic relationships between letters and sounds that can be arrived at 860 00:59:39,440 --> 00:59:46,400 through a highly abstract conceptual intellectual overview. 861 00:59:46,400 --> 00:59:52,480 But there's not one that can be intuitively grasped by a struggling reader or beginning 862 00:59:52,480 --> 00:59:53,720 reader. 863 00:59:53,720 --> 00:59:57,080 So this is what it would look like in kindergarten and first grade. 864 00:59:57,080 --> 00:59:59,960 I would need to teach the letter sounds. 865 00:59:59,960 --> 01:00:07,760 I would use some system to record when I taught the 27 letters and their letter sounds. 866 01:00:07,760 --> 01:00:12,720 And I would use another system to record when students have mastered that systematic. 867 01:00:12,720 --> 01:00:16,560 We need to teach the letter sounds, whether we agree with them or not. 868 01:00:16,560 --> 01:00:19,320 Yeah, but that's where the problem comes in, right? 869 01:00:19,320 --> 01:00:25,320 I mean, when you say teach the letter sounds, it's not, this is one of the things that we 870 01:00:25,320 --> 01:00:28,720 didn't talk about, the alphabetic principle, which would be, let's say that's the next 871 01:00:28,720 --> 01:00:30,320 term, it's okay with you. 872 01:00:30,320 --> 01:00:34,840 Let's bleed right from here into the alphabetic principle, because a lot of phonics instruction 873 01:00:34,840 --> 01:00:39,960 kind of implies the alphabetic principle or that there is such a thing as an alphabetic 874 01:00:39,960 --> 01:00:40,960 principle. 875 01:00:40,960 --> 01:00:45,080 Now, at one level, you could say, yeah, there's a correspondence between letters and sounds, 876 01:00:45,080 --> 01:00:46,880 and that's the principle to get. 877 01:00:46,880 --> 01:00:47,880 That's fine. 878 01:00:47,880 --> 01:00:49,280 I don't have a problem with that. 879 01:00:49,280 --> 01:00:58,680 But the idea that letters have a simple relationship to sounds is itself crazy making to kids. 880 01:00:58,680 --> 01:01:00,440 In my view, right? 881 01:01:00,440 --> 01:01:06,480 Because the majority of times, if you take the alphabet, a letter name sound, you teach 882 01:01:06,480 --> 01:01:12,360 that, or you take the common sound, the most common sounding, you teach that. 883 01:01:12,360 --> 01:01:23,720 In the 500 most commonly used words of kindergarten, those two default strategies, trying to assign 884 01:01:23,720 --> 01:01:31,720 a letter name or common sound to a letter, will be wrong half the time in the most common 885 01:01:31,720 --> 01:01:34,720 words used in kindergarten vocabulary. 886 01:01:34,720 --> 01:01:43,200 So the point is that those 26 letters, 27 letters, if you want to put it that way, correspond 887 01:01:43,200 --> 01:01:50,600 to the 44 sounds of English in 120 ways, even in kindergarten language. 888 01:01:50,600 --> 01:01:57,880 We all agree that it's not logical, but we must teach these basic letter sounds as a 889 01:01:57,880 --> 01:01:59,240 basis. 890 01:01:59,240 --> 01:02:05,160 There's 44 phonemes in the English language, 27 letters, that were 18 short. 891 01:02:05,160 --> 01:02:06,520 Absolutely. 892 01:02:06,520 --> 01:02:08,020 Everyone agrees with that. 893 01:02:08,020 --> 01:02:10,400 Does that mean we don't teach letter sounds? 894 01:02:10,400 --> 01:02:15,800 By the way, we teach sight words as well, a word that you recognize automatically. 895 01:02:15,800 --> 01:02:20,320 Those are the 100 most frequent or dole or zine or whatever. 896 01:02:20,320 --> 01:02:25,280 We use the same thing to document when they're introduced and when they're mastered. 897 01:02:25,280 --> 01:02:33,200 But are you saying then, since they're not 100% reliable that we shouldn't teach letter 898 01:02:33,200 --> 01:02:34,200 sounds? 899 01:02:34,200 --> 01:02:36,240 I don't think you're saying that, or letter patterns? 900 01:02:36,240 --> 01:02:37,560 No, no, no, no, no. 901 01:02:37,560 --> 01:02:44,760 But I would teach, I would help kids understand that there's more to the way a letter can 902 01:02:44,760 --> 01:02:50,200 sound than the simple letter sounds we teach them, because they set them up for being 903 01:02:50,200 --> 01:02:53,920 wrong in ways they can't understand later. 904 01:02:53,920 --> 01:02:59,280 By teaching them a simple set of letter sounds in the hopes that we're going to bootstrap 905 01:02:59,280 --> 01:03:06,240 them, and then they encounter numerous words in which those sounds that they've been taught 906 01:03:06,240 --> 01:03:11,160 to associate with letters no longer work in the words they encounter, it causes them 907 01:03:11,160 --> 01:03:16,480 to be wrong in ways they can't understand why they're wrong, which sabotages the process. 908 01:03:16,480 --> 01:03:20,000 I think the way we teach letter sounds is wrong. 909 01:03:20,000 --> 01:03:23,800 I'm not saying we shouldn't teach letter sounds, I think we should teach them differently. 910 01:03:23,800 --> 01:03:28,840 And that's why we teach students to recognize words using three queuing systems. 911 01:03:28,840 --> 01:03:34,160 So they're not relying just on letter patterns, but syntax and semantics as well. 912 01:03:34,160 --> 01:03:37,840 Which you're doing because they can't rely on letter patterns? 913 01:03:37,840 --> 01:03:41,360 Not 100%, but we must teach letters. 914 01:03:41,360 --> 01:03:46,120 Again, if kids could look at a word in it, it was intuitively decodable, meaning that 915 01:03:46,120 --> 01:03:50,680 they could just look at the letters and boom, word popped into their mind, the sound of 916 01:03:50,680 --> 01:03:55,080 the word was there, it was immediately there, then we wouldn't be trying to teach them all 917 01:03:55,080 --> 01:03:59,480 these extraneous ways to get the word recognition. 918 01:03:59,480 --> 01:04:01,800 Word identification, you mean? 919 01:04:01,800 --> 01:04:03,920 To identify a word. 920 01:04:03,920 --> 01:04:04,920 There's a difference. 921 01:04:04,920 --> 01:04:09,520 All right, you want it to go with the alphabetic principle? 922 01:04:09,520 --> 01:04:12,240 We kind of just talked about that. 923 01:04:12,240 --> 01:04:15,040 I saw that referenced in your documents. 924 01:04:15,040 --> 01:04:20,120 I pushed back on people throughout the Children of the Code days whenever people would use 925 01:04:20,120 --> 01:04:30,640 that in that the alphabetic principle is a kind of no-brainer, necessary but insufficient 926 01:04:30,640 --> 01:04:34,040 baby step along the process. 927 01:04:34,040 --> 01:04:41,400 It gets a lot more attention and suggestion of import than it has. 928 01:04:41,400 --> 01:04:45,160 Because the problem isn't that there's a principle to get the letters correspond to 929 01:04:45,160 --> 01:04:48,440 sound, I think every little kid in the world gets that pretty easily. 930 01:04:48,440 --> 01:04:53,400 It's the complexity of the relationship between letters and sounds where the problem is. 931 01:04:53,400 --> 01:05:00,040 The alphabetic principle is just a misleading term in the sequence of importances on the 932 01:05:00,040 --> 01:05:03,080 learning to read process to me. 933 01:05:03,080 --> 01:05:06,200 I think I'm partway there with you. 934 01:05:06,200 --> 01:05:09,880 As I understand the alphabetic principle as applied to a preschool kindergarten, first 935 01:05:09,880 --> 01:05:11,760 grade, this is the alphabet. 936 01:05:11,760 --> 01:05:13,520 These are symbols. 937 01:05:13,520 --> 01:05:15,520 Symbols have sounds. 938 01:05:15,520 --> 01:05:21,400 Sounds aren't always reliable, but these are sounds. 939 01:05:21,400 --> 01:05:25,800 Some of the research actually suggests that once kids get the alphabetic principle, that's 940 01:05:25,800 --> 01:05:26,800 the ballgame. 941 01:05:26,800 --> 01:05:28,600 That's the big step. 942 01:05:28,600 --> 01:05:38,200 To me, that's a really simple, obvious no-brainer first baby step. 943 01:05:38,200 --> 01:05:43,040 It's the correspondence between letters and sounds where the bog is. 944 01:05:43,040 --> 01:05:47,680 I wonder if we should wrap it up here. 945 01:05:47,680 --> 01:05:48,840 I think we should wrap it up. 946 01:05:48,840 --> 01:05:52,160 I think we've done enough for this reconnect. 947 01:05:52,160 --> 01:05:58,320 We've got a set of terms that we can identify, an index that people can dive into them as 948 01:05:58,320 --> 01:06:00,560 individuals, et cetera. 949 01:06:00,560 --> 01:06:05,800 We can think about this more intentionally between now and the next time and figure out 950 01:06:05,800 --> 01:06:09,880 what are the other terms that we haven't talked about and let's make a list together and 951 01:06:09,880 --> 01:06:13,920 kind of negotiate it and then be systematic. 952 01:06:13,920 --> 01:06:14,920 Very good. 953 01:06:14,920 --> 01:06:15,920 Next time. 954 01:06:15,920 --> 01:06:16,920 All right. 955 01:06:16,920 --> 01:06:22,760 For our listeners out there, this has been another hour and 15 minutes of the Dave and 956 01:06:22,760 --> 01:06:38,840 Andy conversation.