MGTutoring.com. A Rational Perspective on Education.

Visit FreeClassicAudioBooks.com for some free downloads of audio versions of classic books. HT: A member of a discussion list.

Update (10:10 PM):  More at LibriVox.org.

In Interview with a Children’s Librarian on PBSParents.com, a librarian named Natalie says:

Poetry celebrates the individual word, the sound of language, and the rhythm of language in a way that narrative does not. It is a fun, short, tasty morsel to share with children. I think it’s important to expose very young children to poetry because children build the foundation for learning to read through being exposed to the sounds and rhythms of language. For older children, I think poetry is a great vehicle for learning how complex thoughts, humorous ideas, deep emotions, or entire narratives can be expressed with a few carefully chosen words.

In “Lasting effects of phonics instruction” on the Teaching Effectively! blog, JohnL quotes what appears to be the abstract of a study:

Thompson, G. B., Connelly, Vincent, Fletcher-Flinn, C. M. & Hodson, S. J. (2009). The nature of skilled adult reading varies with type of instruction in childhood. Memory & Cognition, 37, 223-234.

Does the type of reading instruction experienced during the initial years at school have any continuing effect on the ways in which adults read words? The question has arisen in current discussions about computational models of mature word-reading processes. We tested predicted continuing effects by comparing matched samples of skilled adult readers of English who had received explicit phonics instruction in childhood and those who had not. In responding to nonwords that can receive alternative legitimate pronunciations, those adults having childhood phonics instruction used more regular grapheme-phoneme correspondences that were context free and used fewer vocabulary-based contextually dependent correspondences than did adults who had no phonics instruction. These differences in regularization of naming responses also extended to some low-frequency words. This apparent cognitive footprint of childhood phonics instruction is a phenomenon requiring consideration when researchers attempt to model adult word reading and when they select participants to test the models.

I have not looked into the study so I don’t know anything about its methods and validity, but it sounds interesting and worth looking into.

The Pope Center‘s Clarion Call has posted Mr. Bertonneau‘s third and final installment of his series “What, Me Read?” I don’t have time to write about it now; I have not even read it. But here’s an excerpt:

Some writing specialists excuse bad writing on the hopeful supposition that a gap exists between cognition and expression—similar to the way a stroke victim can have a complex thought, but cannot properly verbalize it. That is, students who write badly nevertheless know what they want to say, or what they have read, as well as anyone else. I have concluded that no evidence supports this postulate. Having no other means to discern cognition than through its expression, one must take as a given that expression is cognition.

Defective writing, unlike the stroke victim’s aphasia, reveals more than mere awkwardness of expression; it reveals the confusions that becloud both the act of reading and the subsequent attempt at a mental sorting out of the narrative. The individual who cannot see things clearly cannot think about them clearly. Likewise those who cannot make sense of stories, which represent cause and effect in the human world, will have difficulty making sense of the actual human world, to which stories refer.

That ought to whet your curiosity.

I’d tend to agree with him. Without years of experience teaching, without years of experience teaching myself, and without familiarity with philosophy, I would not have been able to come to this conclusion. I’ll explain in later posts.