he “fourth-grade slump” (Chall et al. 1990) is the phenomenon where some children seem to acquire reading (i.e. pass reading tests) fine in the early grades, but fail to be able to use reading to learn school content in the later grades, when the language demands of that content (e.g. science) get more and more complex

Typically a majority of the trained children narrow the gap between themselves and initially more advanced students in phonological awareness and word reading skills, but few are brought completely up to speed through training, and a few fail to show any gains at all.

The process involves “masters” (adults, more masterful peers) creating an environment rich in support for learners.

Teacher, May We?

Ask the children how they made theirguesses. “Why did you guess wigs/twigs/figs?”

The Hungry Thing

phonemicawareness activities will not be helpful unlessthey can be placed in a context of real readingand writing.

activities that arechild appropriate

manystates in the U.S. are addressing phonemicawareness in standards documents

Such perceptual activities included the identification of visualsignals; the translation of these signals into sounds; and assembly of these soundsinto words, phrases, and sentences

developingand validating diagnostic instruments and remedial techniques

effectiveness of phonics-based techniques over those that relied on a whole-word approach

often linked with theapplication of carefully chosen rewards and punishments,

“learning to read” and “reading to learn” stages (Chall, 1995) is shifting to a moreintegrated and developmental perspective.

teachers played the essential role of facilitator or guide (Rogoff &Gauvain, 1986; Vygotsky, 1934/1986), with the scaffolding provided by theteacher diminishing in proportion to the students’ increasing knowledge, interest,and strategic abilities in a particular area (e.g., Alexander, 1997b; Brown &Palincsar, 1989), so that students could develop self-direction and autonomy(Deci & Ryan, 1991)

schooling, at least, was a social and cultural phenomenon,

multitude of “knowledges.”

Depending on how strictly the behaviorist paradigm was followed, hypotheses andconclusions were more or less restricted to discussion of observable behaviors andthe environmental stimuli that preceded them (Strike, 1974)

Many students failed to benefit from the explicit instruction in strategies or com-ponents of reading that was intended to improve their text-based learning. Forsome students, there were no improvements produced by this instruction, whilefor others, the benefits did not endure or transfer

Rosenblatt contended that, depending on the goal of the learner and theinstructor, an individual’s response to a literary work falls along a continuumfrom an efferent to an aesthetic stance. Those assuming a more efferent stanceseek to uncover the “truths” voiced by some invisible or anonymous author

the focus was more on how those process-es and procedures could be best represented symbolically and transferred intocomputer programs that could approximate human performance (Fodor, 2001).In effect, these individuals were interested in creating “intelligent machines” thatmimicked the problem solving of intelligent humans

did not focus on identifying and eradicating thesource of readers’ errors. Rather, the goal was to ascertain how the unexpected re-sponses readers produced were reflective of their attempts at meaning-making

Language, as with other innatehuman capacities, was to be developed through meaningful use, not practiced tothe point of mindless reaction, as behaviorists proposed.

Knowledge was not a singular construct, but existed in diverse forms and inter-active dimensions

From detection of the universal laws of learning, the goal became the de-scription of the “ways of knowing” unique to particular social, cultural, and ed-ucational groups

One of the qualitative changes was a seeming rise in the number of children expe-riencing difficulties in learning to read. Such reading problems, although nothingnew to teachers, took on particular significance in the age of Sputnik, as America’sability to compete globally became a defining issue

his shift in the view of language acqui-sition from conditioned behavior to natural process inevitably reverberated in thereading research community in the form of psycholinguistics (Goodman, 1965

The top-down perspective of the ho-listic Gestalt modality was evident in the orientation to reading development heldby those Chall (1967) identified as “linguistic” proponents, who emphasizedwhole-word recognition, the importance of context in comprehension and wordidentification, and the consideration of reading as a unique human activity withits own definitive characteristics.

Moreover, de-spite the claims of some within the reading research community that little ofsignificance occurred in reading until the 1960s (Weaver & Kintsch, 1991), the con-tinued influence of behaviorism on educational practice remains evident today

With this analyticview, there was a growing tendency for problems in the reading act to be looked onas deficiencies in need of remediation, just as physical ailments require medicalremedies. Indeed, it was a medical metaphor of reading, with its diagnosis, pre-scription, and remediation, that came to the foreground in the 1950s.

Skinnerian behav-iorism

condition-ality of knowledge

he learner was cast in the role of an active par-ticipant, a constructor of meaning who used many forms of information to arriveat comprehension

learning to read, the written counterpart of acquiring an oral language, came tobe viewed as an inherent ability, rather than a reflective act involving the labori-ous acquisition of a set of skills (Harste, Burke, & Woodward, 1984). Just aschildren came to understand the spoken language of their surrounding communi-ty (Halliday, 1969), they would come to understand its written language givenenough exposure in meaningful situations (Goodman & Goodman, 1980).

humans emerge from the womb with a preexisting template that guides languageuse. “Languaging” was thus perceived to unfold naturally, to follow a develop-mental trajectory, and to involve not just the action of the environment on the in-dividual but also the individual’s contribution in the form of a predisposition orinnate capacity

coherence and sensecould not be achieved by assembly alone

One of the qualitative changes was a seeming rise in the number of children expe-riencing difficulties in learning to read. Such reading problems, although nothingnew to teachers, took on particular significance in the age of Sputnik, as America’sability to compete globally became a defining issue

The efforts of researchers during this periodgave rise to extensive literature on learners and the learning process that re-mains an enduring legacy for the domain of reading.

Children are not encouraged to move their understanding of books into other situational contexts or to apply it in their general knowledge of the world abour them,

in Traekton especially, children have a keen sense thM reading is something one does to learn something one needs to know