Can reading be saved?

[formerlurker]

Very rarely do I find a high school kid who cannot decode. High school kids have phonemic awareness for the most part. Now, if I have a kid in the 9th grade who truly does not have phonemic awareness, that student will be referred into services where he can be taught that. But for the kids that sit in my classroom, the problem is not that they can’t decode words. For these kids, there are generally two main problems. One is that they don’t have enough fluency, so they read very slowly. They can pronounce the words, and they know the words, most of them, but they read incredibly slowly, so that it’s difficult for them to comprehend or mentally analyze a text.

The second issue is, again, just this whole problem of lack of prior knowledge and background information. Kids today are very smart, but they don’t know a whole lot about what’s happening outside their own worlds. So how can you have a kid read an article on, say, what Joe Biden said last night when they don’t even know who Joe Biden is? Seriously, you’d be amazed at what high school kids today don’t know. There’s a book called The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein, an English professor. I don’t agree with his title—I think kids today are really smart. But he’s right on the money when he talks about them existing in a kind of self-referential bubble—of living, as he puts it, for the “thrill of peer attention.” That environment is just not conducive to creating really strong and reflective readers.

http://www.edweek.org/tsb/articles/2011/04/04/02gallagher.h04.html


There are some excellent points made in this article.  I think the biggest point being reading itself -- make sure your children read, and read for entertainment also (it can't be all homework). 

[thundley4]

So how can you have a kid read an article on, say, what Joe Biden said last night when they don’t even know who Joe Biden is? Seriously, you’d be amazed at what high school kids today don’t know.

Can we blame cable TV, computers and video games for the lack of knowledge?  I do , at least in part.  I can remember when there were just the 3 networks and PBS available I would watch the news while doing my homework.  Even before that, I was aware of who was running for president and veep as young as 7 years old*.


* Strange thing, I can remember nothing whatsoever of LBJ's presidency, but remember Nixon running against Humphrey, and even remember George Wallace.  Snoopy also ran for president and there were stickers in loaves of Butternut bread.