1. Learning about Literacy: A 30-Year Journey By P
Learning about Literacy: A 30-Year Journey By P. David Pearson & Diane Stephens Presented by Pat Edwards & Hakim Shahid Edu 707 Dr J. McEneaney

2. Purpose
To journey through the historical facets of various interdisciplinary perspectives in order to better understand their individual impact on reading education

3. Reading Genesis The Way Things Were Mid -1960s
Graphic symbols translated to an oral code
No difference between oral and written language comprehension
Reading considered a perceptual process vs. a language process
Teaching emphasized discrimination among visual symbols and their translation to a verbal code
Teaching approaches reflected this view - Phonics and whole word instruction

4. The Journey Begins Mid – late 1960s
INTERDISCIPLINARY QUEST

5. Major Theoretical Changes
Changes in the theoretical paradigm over past three decades are captured like this:
Anderson, Richard C. & Gaffney, Janet S., (2000) Trends in Reading Research in United States: Changing Intellectual Currents Over Three Decades, Handbook of Reading Research, Vol. III, (Chapter 5 pp )
Behaviorist Cognitive Sociocultural
Trends in reading associated with:
Large scale social, economic, and political developments
Developments in cognate fields
General developments with the work of organizational theorists

6. Linguistic Perspective
Charles Fries “Linguistics and Reading” (1963)
* Societies represent key features of their oral language in written
language (i.e. phonemes, juncture, italics, boldface type, underlining)
* Inferred normal language processes are not represented in the
written language
Noam Chomsky, “Syntactic Structures”, “Aspects of the Theory of Syntax” (1965)
* Language comprehension could not be explained by stringing together
meanings of adjacent words
* Humans are born “wired” to acquire language
* Language acquired easily and normally through exposure to their environment

7. Psycholinguistic Perspective

8. Derivational Theory of Complexity
Grammatical transformations needed to get from the surface structure of a sentence to its underlying deep structure was an index of difficulty we experience to understand the sentence

9. Kenneth S. Goodman “A Linguistic Study of Cues and Miscues in Reading” “A Psycholinguistic Guessing Game”
Reading errors give insight into the inner working of their comprehension processes
Replaced term “oral reading error” with “miscue”
Context aids comprehension
A three cue system to make sense of text
Syntactic – word order
Semantic - meaning cues to predict
Graphophonemic – knowledge of sound symbol relationships
Use of all cueing systems increases word identification and comprehension

10. Frank Smith “Understanding Reading”
Reading not taught; one learned to read from reading
Skilled readers make use of prior knowledge
Readers rely minimally on visual information
Reading is a matter of making informed predictions
Reading is a constructive process; readers make sense of what they read based upon what they already know

11. Influence of the Psycholinguistic Perspective on the field of reading:
Encouraged the value of literacy experiences that focused on meaning
Emergent readers use their knowledge of language to predict words and meanings
Increased appreciation of students’ efforts as readers; errors helped teachers to focus on reading strategies
Linked oral and written language acquisition
Affected views of teaching and learning – not focused on prerequisite skills but on what can be done to help child as a reader

12. Cognitive Psychology Perspective

13. Story Grammar
Structural account of the nature of narratives and how it enhances human story comprehension.

14. Expository Text
Structural account of the nature of informational texts and how it enhances human story comprehension.

15. Schema
The structure of human knowledge as it is represented in memory via informational context.

16. Sociolinguistic Perspective

17. Dialect and Reading
Dialect constituted a well- developed linguistic system complete with rules for variations from standard English.

18. Reading as a Social Process
Community and culture play key roles in shaping the learning processes in children.

19. Reading Revelations

20. a. Advanced cognitive flexibility
b. Reader-document interaction
c. Political-based reading education
d. ?????