I was catching up with a former colleague the other day about early reading and the struggles her district is having. She was tasked with investigating several off-the-shelf plug-and-play programs, both US and foreign. One of the most famous and most successful around the world comes from the UK, Floppy Phonics, of which I had never heard.
I am not sure about the appropriateness or effectiveness of a UK system in a US public school and I look forward to her update on this. But I was interested in one of her throwaway comments.
Her district is in a border town with a large number of US citizens who live across the border and come to school every day in the US. Their mother-tongue is Spanish, their world is Spanish, their family loves in Spanish and in fact, the US town functions largely in Spanish. While my erstwhile colleague's role is teaching her students English, she is fluent in Spanish and uses it in her daily life outside school more than she uses English.
Her throwaway comment was along the lines that any reading program linking reading with speaking, ie pronunciation, provides an additional challenge. Her students do not pronounce English the way we pronounce English. They are learning English and English sounds, at the same time as we are also teaching them reading.
The logical approach is to focus on silent reading initially where sounds do not matter, while focusing on speaking, and then later, perhaps around Grades 3 or 4, to introduce reading and speaking and pronunciation and spelling once they "sound American".
But surprise, surprise. State standards do not allow for educaiton based on a student's true developmental level or real educational needs. One-size-fits-all policies dictate what must be done and when, and increasingly how. So here she is, evaluating what I assume are expensive programs she knows from the outset will not help.
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