February 24 2010

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

February 24 2010

Teaching Link of the Day:
Reading without spaces

Using this as an aid for a student reluctant to read out loud with confidence--or at all in some cases--allows for the curiosity of the experience to overshadow the embarrassment of mispronouncing or guessing at a word. It eliminates the student's ability to guess at a word automatically based on its features as its features have not yet been revealed--features being landmark digraphs, ending letters, vowel patterns. Logic starts to creep in to ensure that the flow of language makes sense, where when reading standard print, a student like this can ignore logic and place any word in any location based on their preconceived notion that they're wrong anyway.

So what does the ability to read text without spaces show about a reader?

With mine, it showed her reading level nearly 250% the level she has been pegged at by her intervention teachers. Yes. Two-hundred-fifty percent higher. It's all psychology.

From the link:
"The few who could read text silently without these spaces between the words, like Julius Caesar and St. Ambrose, were viewed as so extraordinary that this ability is specifically recorded in historical records."