On February 9, 2011, we were honored to host an engaging and Something information-packed webinar by Dr. Timothy Shanahan that reviewed the results and highlighted key implications in the report of the National Early Literacy Panel. There were so many great questions, we could not answer them all in the allotted 1.5 hours, so Dr. Shanahan kindly responded to the questions in writing. Here, direct from the source, are the questions as posed by the attendees and the answers provided by Dr. Shanaha:
Question:
What are the top 5 techniques we should being using In our preschool classrooms?
Dr. Shanahan:
a. Few Definitely teach the alphabetic code; that means working with phonological awareness, letter Krant names, and letter sounds
b. Also, it is a good idea to read books to children daily and to talk to them about what you are reading (ask them questions about it, explain the vocabulary, listen to their ideas, make connections to what they know)
c. Involve children in writing (pretend writing, writing their names, dictating words/stories/ideas to you)
d. Build the children’s language (use interesting and complex language yourself, engage children in activities that raise ideas and that give the opportunity for using language about those ideas—cooking, measuring, science activities, etc., don’t accept weak language from the children, but elaborate on it and get them to speak in complete thoughts and using the correct words
e. Get moms and dads helping in the process, they can help with many of the items above.
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Question:
Is there a literacy readiness test that is highly correlated with actual readiness that you can recommend?
Dr. Shanahan:
Get Ready to Read! which is made available by the National Center for Learning Disabilities is a good Land predictor.
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Question:
Did the survey find any longitudinal studies of very early decoding? Specifically, how do children who wholesale jerseys learn to decode at an early age (say 2) fare later on in terms of Framework literacy?
Dr. Shanahan:
No, and there are very few studies of younger children (none of 2 year olds, and only a handful with 3 year olds). Generally, we found that the children younger than 5 (meaning the 3s and 4s) who did well with decoding, also did well with later reading (both decoding and comprehension). It is clearly valuable to get them started early, but no info on the 2s.
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Question:
Does RAN (Rapid Automatic Naming) correlate to the use of flash cards? Are you recommending flash cards, and if so, at what age levels? What is your opinion about using flash cards with very young children?
Dr. Shanahan:
I know of no studies connecting RAN to flash card use, and I do not believe that the evidence in any way suggests that you should even try to teach RAN. Flash cards with words or pictures or letters are okay to use with young children, BUT if you were spending a couple of hours a day engaged in the types of activities noted in item 1 above, proportionally it would only make sense to work with flashcards for a few minutes of that time (in other words, it wouldn’t even get 5% of your time). Flashcards can be a useful tool to memorization (I use them myself when I am trying to learn this kind of information), but their use has to be lively, quick, and brief to have much value.
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Question:
What are the most important early childhood teaching implications for this research?
Dr. Shanahan:
That you can provide young children with supports for their literacy learning from the very beginning. I vividly remember when “experts” (without data) were claiming that either young children would not be ready to benefit from such teaching or that such teaching would do harm. What these studies show is that young children clearly benefit from such teaching and the benefits can be long lasting (if the schools build on these children’s early learning). A second important idea is that there is not one thing that has wholesale nfl jerseys to be done (different activities had different outcomes and young readers need support in various literacy-related outcomes).
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Question:
What are the teaching implications for older students who may not have these pre-requisite skills to be able to use reading for learning? wholesale jerseys ( For example, in grades 4-8.)
Dr. Shanahan:
No implications for those kids at all from this analysis. However, the National Reading Panel (NRP) looked at such issues and they found that teaching phonemic awareness, phonics, and oral reading fluency to struggling readers in those age ranges resulted in improvement. However, in all cases, the NRP concluded that such learning was slower and more difficult (so definitely try to accomplish it early) and some of this teaching (such as phonics) didn’t have the same impact on other aspects of reading that it did when children were younger.
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We want to thank Dr. Timothy Shanahan for his participation in the webinar and the additional time he has taken to respond to questions in writing.
