In one part of the article, he references "the need for literate conversations".
Thinking about those "literate conversations": I wonder how much of the difficulty for struggling readers originates in a paucity of oral language prior to ever learning to read, and then throughout the years that they're developing as readers. How much more difficult it must be to make meaning of text (really just oral language committed to a secondary, visual form) when a child hasn't had the opportunity to "decode" anything beyond a trivial level of meaning in the conversations they've heard from birth. This lack of oral fluency, and listening "fluency" (if there is such a thing) must translate into difficulty with the written word, I'd think.
In the latter part of the article, the author advocates for
"turn, pair and share". Okay, fine, if the children are capable
of doing so fluently, intelligently. What if they simply haven't the
facility to do this well? Repetition without a means of development can't
reasonably lead to significant growth. This is where modelling
- students having an opportunity to repeatedly hear two (or more) literate
people have a discussion - might be significant, and damnably difficult to
create in a one teacher environment.
There are 6 identified language arts (here in MB, anyway).
Reading is the one we virtually obsess over; writing the poor sister who
gets attention when we notice that she's being neglected. The other four
starve, really. There may be speaking and listening in school, but I have
no sense that we work very hard at actually improving these skills in
classrooms. Viewing and representing, sure, when we think of them; and at
that, my uninformed observation is that we feel almost "clever" by
including them - "Look how progressive we are by having students draw,
create posters, create other visuals, record their voices, etc." Is
reading really the most central of the visual arts? I don't think so;
that centre, in my view, is the speaking and listening that we evolved to do.
Perhaps that's what we should be focusing on first with our struggling,
nascent readers in K, 1, 2. Help them learn to speak and listen with
verbally rich language first, then indulge them in reading. And maybe
that isn't even an "either-or" proposition, but rather a choice of
emphasis about which needs must come first.
